Question: What role did the Nixon administration play in the FBI Lennon investigation?
Answer: The move to New York helped fuel the political awareness that had already flowered in John and Yoko in the late Sixties; the two fell in with liberal activists like Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, and Lennon decided to mount his first national tour in 1972 in part as a series of protests against the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. (This would have been the first national tour by any ex-Beatle.) Compounding matters for the Republican Presidential administration was the 26th Amendment to the US Constitution, which was made law on July 1, 1971: it dropped the minimum age for voting from 21 to 18. Lennon planned to organize voter registration at all stops on his tour, and since the vast majority of 18-year-olds were against the war, this could have spelled serious trouble for Richard Nixon's 1972 attempt at re-election.
