Music and Politics Wednesday 30 December 2020, by Jon Wiener When John Lennon was murdered forty years ago, on December 8, 1980, we believed Richard Nixon had been the worst president ever — because of the war in Vietnam, because of the repression that he called “law and order” and the racism of the Southern Strategy, and also because of his treatment of Lennon. Nixon had tried to deport Lennon in 1972 when the former Beatle made plans to lead an election-year effort to challenge the Republican president’s reelection with a campaign to register young people to vote. In the end, of course, Lennon stayed in the United States and Nixon left the White House in disgrace. But the seemingly endless battle in the immigration courts ruined his life for the next few years. To recover, in 1975 he left Los Angeles, where he’d been living apart from Yoko Ono in a kind of exile, and returned to New York and the Dakota.