The summary is: 1) In 1971, E. Howard Hunt organized a break-in of psychiatrist Lewis Fielding's office to steal records of Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers. Mae Brussell later wrote an article connecting this break-in to the Watergate scandal and implicating high-level government officials. 2) In 1973, Paul Krassner needed $5,000 to publish Mae Brussell's article but was unexpectedly given the money by John Lennon and Yoko Ono during their visit to San Francisco while evading deportation attempts. 3) Krassner, Lennon, and Ono spent a weekend together discussing conspiracy theories around

1. An excerpt of the book Confessions of a raving unconfined nut: misadventures in
the counter-culture by Paul Krassner
Simon and Schuster, 1993
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------from pages 212 - 215
A year before the Watergate break-in, E. Howard Hunt, who had worked for the
CIA for twenty-one years, proposed a "bag-job"—a surreptitious entry—into the
office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, a Beverly Hills psychiatrist who had refused to
cooperate with FBI agents investigating one of his patients, Daniel Ellsberg,
leaker of the Pentagon Papers. It was the function of the White House "plumbers"
to plug such leaks. The burglars, led by G. Gordon Liddy, scattered pills around
the office to make it look like a junkie had been responsible. The police
assured Dr. Fielding that the break-in was made in search of drugs, even though
he found Ellsberg's records removed from their folder. An innocent black man,
Elmer Davis, was arrested, convicted, and sent to prison, while Liddy remained
silent. Mae Brussell corresponded with Davis, and after he finished serving
Liddy's time behind bars, he ended up living with Mae. It was a romance made in
Conspiracy Heaven.
Hunt also masterminded the Watergate break-in. Three weeks later—while
Richard Nixon was pressing for the postponement of an investigation until after
the election, and the mainstream press was still referring to the incident as a
"caper" and a "third-rate burglary"—Mae Brussell completed a lengthy article for
The Realist, documenting the conspiracy and delineating the players, from the
burglars all the way up to FBI Director Gray, Attorney General John Mitchell,
and President Nixon. "The significance of the Watergate affair," she wrote, "is
that every element essential for a political coup d'état in the United States
was assembled at the time of their arrest." Mae proceeded to delineate the
details of a plot so insidious and yet so logical that the typesetter wrote
Bravo! at the end of her manuscript. However, instead of my usual credit
arrangement, the printer insisted on $5,000 cash in advance before this issue
could go to press. I didn't have the money, and I had no idea how I would get
it, but as I left the printing plant, I was filled with an inexplicable sense of
confidence. When I got home, the phone rang. It was Yoko Ono.
I had known her in the sixties as an avant-garde conceptual artist. She had
one project which took place on a wooden platform in the Paradox, a macrobiotic
restaurant. People would climb inside these huge black burlap bags, singly, or
with a partner, and then do whatever they wanted, providing a floor show for
patrons while they ate their brown rice and sprout salad. I had helped support
the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Free Southern Theater, but Yoko's project
was so absurd that I gave her some money too. As a token of appreciation, she
presented me with a personally revised alarm clock. On the face of the clock,
there was a blue sky with white clouds, but there were no hands. I wound that
clock every day, leaving the alarm knob up, blindly changing the time it would
go off so that I would have no way of telling when it would, but trying always
to be psychically prepared. It was just a Zen bastard's way of learning to pay
attention to the moment. I planned to do this for a whole year, but I decided to
stop several months into it, on the day that I was in the middle of giving head
to a temporary soul mate on my vibrating chair when the alarm clock went off and
we both screamed out loud in unison. I took that as an omen.
Yoko had since married John Lennon. Now they had arrived in San Francisco
and invited me to lunch. At the time, the administration was trying to deport
Lennon, ostensibly for an old marijuana bust, but actually because they were
afraid he was planning to perform for protesters at the Republican convention
that summer. I brought the galleys of Mae Brussell's article, which provided a
context for John and Yoko's current harassment. I mentioned my printer's
ultimatum, and they immediately took me to a local branch of the Bank of Tokyo
and withdrew $5,000 cash. I had never intended for the money I once gave to Yoko

2. in New York to serve as bread cast upon the water, but now it had come back all
nice and soggy, so precisely when I needed it that my personal boundaries of
Coincidence were stretched to infinity. I could rationalize my ass off—after
all, Yoko and Lennon had been driving across the country, and they just happened
to arrive in San Francisco at that particular moment—but the timing was so
exquisite that Coincidence and Mysticism became the same process for me. John
Lilly even told me about the Earth Coincidence Control Office—extraterrestrial
guardians who protected him by manipulating human events so that he could carry
out their higher purpose. At first I thought he intended this as a clever
metaphor. Then I realized he meant it literally. And if they were doing it for
him, maybe they were doing it for me.
Actually, that melding of Coincidence and Mysticism had begun when I wrote a
comic strip, drawn by Richard Guindon. It was about political witchcraft, a
takeoff on Rosemary's Baby. A key scene in that film showed Rosemary moving
around the letters from a Scrabble game so that instead of spelling out the name
of her neighbor the letters spelled out the name of a warlock in a book she had
been reading about witchcraft. And now, scrambling the letters of the vice
president's name—SPIRO AGNEW—it became GROW A PENIS. Coincidence had been my
religion, but this was so appropriate that it challenged my theology. After all,
when Senator Charles Goodell came out against the war in Vietnam, it was Agnew
who called him "the Christine Jorgensen of the Republican party"—thereby
equating military might with the mere presence of a penis. Around that time,
Mike Wallace interviewed me for "60 Minutes." He asked me what the difference
was between the underground press and the mainstream media, and I told him about
the GROW A PENIS anagram, adding, "The difference is that I could print that in
The Realist, but it'll be edited out of this program." My prediction was
accurate.
Yoko Ono and John Lennon spent a weekend at my house in Watsonville. They
loved being so close to the ocean. In the afternoon I asked them to smoke their
cigarettes outside, but in the evening we smoked a combination of marijuana and
opium, sitting on pillows in front of the fireplace, sipping tea munching
cookies. We talked about Mae Brussell's theory that the deaths of musicians like
Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison had actually been political
assassinations because they were role models on the crest of the youth
rebellion. "No, no," Lennon argued, "they were already headed in a selfdestructive direction." A few months later, he would remind me of that
conversation and add, "Listen, if anything happens to Yoko and me, it was not an
accident." For now, though, we were simply stoned in Watsonville, discussing
conspiracy, safe at my oasis in a desert of paranoia. At one point, I referred
to Mae Brussell as a saint. "She's not a saint," Lennon said. "You're not a
saint. I'm not a saint. Yoko's not a saint. Nobody's a saint."
We discussed the Charles Manson case. Lennon was bemused by the way Manson
had associated himself with Beatles music.
"Look," he said, "would you kindly inform him that it was Paul McCartney who
wrote 'Helter Skelter,' not me."
Yoko said, "No, please don't tell him. We don't want to have any
communication with Manson."
"It's all right," Lennon said, "he doesn't have to know the message came
from us."
"It's getting chilly," Yoko said. "Would you put another cookie in the
fireplace?"
Lennon was absentmindedly holding on to the joint. I asked him, "Do the
British use that expression, 'to bogart a joint,' or is that only an American
term—you know, derived from the image of a cigarette dangling from Humphrey
Bogart's lips?"
"In England, if you remind somebody else to pass a joint, you lose your own
turn."
Mae Brussell believed that her article could literally prevent the re-election
of President Nixon. We held a press conference—but there was a lot of
skepticism. It had been five years since I published "The Parts Left Out of the
Kennedy Book," and I began to feel like the little boy who cried "Wolf!" Only
now there really was a wolf at the door, and I started running around like a
graduate fresh out of Zealot School, getting copies of The Realist to the media

3. and individual journalists.
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