The Cynical Idealist by Gary Tillery

Author:Gary Tillery [Tillery, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780835608756
Publisher: Quest Books
Published: 2009-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

9

PEACE ADVOCATE

The world’s media had never seen a peace demonstration to compare with the one that awaited them in the Amsterdam Hilton in late March 1969. Witnesses to the most turbulent years of the sixties, hardened journalists had come to expect swarms of people carrying signs, blocking traffic, chanting slogans, sometimes gaining passion from their own numbers and challenging authorities, throwing rocks, and provoking fights that frequently escalated into riots. Instead, in Suite 902, the Presidential Suite, John Lennon and Yoko Ono sat in a king-size bed in their white nightwear and responded to questions, gently making the case for peace.

They characterized the event as a bed-in—the latest in a line of spinoffs from the sit-ins of the early sixties (demonstrations demanding racial equality in the American South), which had led to lie-ins, love-ins, and be-ins, among other incarnations. The provocative label guaranteed the attention of the media, since the event immediately followed the couple’s marriage (on March 20, six weeks after Ono divorced her husband) and marked the beginning of their honeymoon. With the nude album cover still fresh in everyone’s memory, Lennon and Ono were considered capable of anything.

The chief of Amsterdam’s vice squad contributed to the air of salacious expectation: “If people are invited to such a ‘happening,’ the police would certainly act.”

An announcement went out: for the seven days of their honeymoon the newlyweds would permit members of the media to come into their room from ten in the morning until eight in the evening. When ten o’clock arrived on the first day, a crowd of fifty newspeople gathered outside the door, jostling for position. “These guys were sweating to fight to get in first because they thought we were going to be making love in bed,” Lennon said later, amused.1

When the first reporters were ushered inside, they instead discovered they were being used in a brilliant public-relations ploy. They were there to get a story, but the story turned out not to be a voyeuristic look at two crazies in heat but a radically different approach to the promotion of world peace. Lennon told a BBC interviewer, in one of his final interviews: “The point of the Bed-In in a nutshell was a commercial for Peace, as opposed to a commercial for War, which was on the news every day those days in the newspapers. Every day it was dismembered bodies and napalm and we thought, Well, why don’t they have something nice in the newspapers.”2

Amid a setting of flowers, drawings, and hand-painted signs with slogans and catchwords such as “Hair Peace,” “Bed Peace,” “I love John,” and “I love Yoko,” the skeptical reporters dutifully copied down the message Lennon and Ono wanted to disseminate. The revelation they preached was the possibility of alternatives to violent action—as Lennon characterized them, “in the tradition of Gandhi, only with a sense of humor.” He summarized: “Protest for peace in any way, but peacefully, ’cause we think that peace is only got by peaceful methods, and that to

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