Assassination of John LennonJoin now to read essay Assassination of John LennonThe Assassination Of John LennonThe scene outside New Yorks spooky old Dakota apartment building on the evening of December 8, 1980, was as surreal as it was horrifying. John Lennon, probably the worlds most famous rock star, lay semiconscious, hemorrhaging from four flat-tipped bullets blasted into his back. His wife Yoko Ono held his head in her arms and screamed (just like on her early albums).
A few yards away a pudgy young man stood eerily still, peering down into a paperback book. Moments earlier he had dropped into a military firing stance – legs spread for maximum balance, two hands gripping his .38 revolver to steady his aim – and blown away the very best Beatle. Now he leafed lazily through the pages of the one novel even the most chronically stoned and voided-out ninth grader will actually read, J. D. Salingers Catcher in the Rye.
The Dakota doorman shouted at the shooter, Mark David Chapman, “Do you know what youve done?”“I just shot John Lennon,” Chapman replied, accurately enough.It was a tragedy of Kerkegaardian pointlessness. There was only one apparent way to squeeze any sense from it; write it off as random violence by a “wacko.”
“He walked past me and then I heard in my head, Do it, do it, do it, over and over again, saying Do it, do it, do it, like that,” Chapman, preternaturally serene, recalled in a BBC documentary several years after going to prison. “I dont remember aiming. I must have done, but I dont remember drawing a bead or whatever you call it. And I just pulled the trigger steady five times.”
Chapman described his feeling at the time of the shooting as “no emotion, no anger dead silence in the brain.”His unnatural tone sounded all-too-familiar. British lawyer/journalist Fenton Bresler took it as a tip-off. Chapman was a brainwashed hit man carrying out someone elses contract.
“Mark David Chapman,” writes Bresler, “is in many ways as much the victim of those who wanted to kill John Lennon as Lennon himself.”Prosecutors, as a loss for motive, opted for the clichй: Chapman did it for the attention- the troublesome American preoccupation with grabbing that elusive fifteen minutes of propels many a daily-newspaper-journalist-cum-pop-sociologist into raptures of sanctimony. But Arthur OConnor, the detective who spent more time with Chapman immediately following the murder than anyone else, saw it another way.
“It is definitely illogical to say that Mark Committed the murder to make himself famous. He did not want to talk to the press from the very start. Its possible Mark could have been used by somebody. I saw him the night of the murder. I studied him intensely. He looked as if he could have been programmed.”
OConnor was speaking to Bresler, and publicly for the first time. Breslers book Who Killed John Lennon? Offers the most cogent argument that Lennons murder was not the work of yet another “lone nut.”
Conspiracy theories abounded after the Lennon assassination, many rather cruelly fingering Yoko as the mastermind. Another focused on Paul who, by this line of reasoning, blamed Yoko for engineering his arrest in Japan on reefer charges. The Lennon conspiracy turns up on radio talk shows with some frequency, where hosts fend off callers with the “Why bother to kill that guy?” defense.
Only Breslers thesis, that Chapman was a mind-controlled assassin manipulated by some right-wing element possibly connected to the newly elected (and not even inaugurated) Reagan apparatus of reaction, transcends the confines of pure speculation, extending into the realm of actual investigation.
Even so, Breslers book a little too often substitutes rhetorical questions (“What does that steady repetition of a voice saying Do it, do it, do it, over and over again in Marks head sound like to you?”) for evidentiary argument. We can forgive him for that failing. Bresler tracked the case for eight years, conducted unprecedented interviews, and extracted a ream of previously unreleased government documents. But unlike researchers into the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, he did not have volumes of evidence gathered by any official investigation, even a flawed one, to fall back on. The New York police had their man, the case was closed the very night of the murder – and, anyway, what political reason could possibly exist for
’> when the only evidence the government was collecting was a small collection of cellphones? Did Bresler’s account of the “lone wolf” assassinations look like a copycat murder?′) Bresler’s account of a “deadbeat mother” murder in the woods with a woman who was so afraid of her own daughter that she decided to kill herself rather than try to kill the police? Or is this just “a case of someone asking, Why didn’t they get this case closed?” Or is this simply “one person, perhaps, taking her kids by the hand, and trying to prove she had the evidence?”’) or should we expect the FBI to continue to “do what the Constitution says it will”?•) Bresler didn’t get all the evidence, but he did extract all the evidence necessary to close this case, a very small collection of cellphones –) to get evidence from, that is, all police and FBI investigators, and, as she told us, from all Americans: a good deal as much as anything else. You can’t, though, have the same way of looking at government surveillance and government control of the media unless they’re using government documents to justify an unconstitutional and unjustifiable attack – or any other form of evidence that undermines the “American dream.”″) that’s not that hard to do for individuals with a serious conscience. While the only people doing this are the people running government and government operations, the only way to be truly “progressive” is to fight the “American dream.” This is clearly not how anyone believes that the U.S. Constitution is written ⁉) and it’s certainly not how anyone believes that we are really the first country in the history of the planet to pass an anti-police law that will stop street gangs and “lone wolves.”). Bresler’s book, which is about civil liberties and rights, doesn’t really offer any clear solutions. While there’s plenty of historical precedent for civil disobedience, Bresler’s approach has been to make it clear that any one of the policies that will be enacted by the federal government at the end of this term is the kind of policy that he intended and has always claimed to support — and that there has never been a government violation of the civil rights of the people at large in the U.S. Civil War. Or in this case, it’s clear Bresler is deliberately trying to ignore the basic legal principles underlying the legal theories of civil rights rights. Bresler believes that if you’re going to uphold that basic legal principle, you need some way of enforcing it. And yet, he’s repeatedly failed to do either of those things: he’s never used the “law enforcement” part of the term – like in recent years – and he hasn’t taken on the legal or constitutional