How Bob Dylan Became an FBI Target: It All Started With the Kennedy Assasination
Award recipients deliver extemporaneous speeches at their peril.
When the speaker appears inebriated, the hazards multiply.
At an awards ceremony in New York City in December 1963 — three weeks after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy — 22-year-old folk singer-songwriter Bob Dylan delivered a strange, impromptu acceptance speech that caught the attention of the FBI.
An account of the incident appears in Aaron J. Leonard’s new book, “Whole World in an Uproar: Music, Rebellion and Repression — 1955-1972.”
George Washington University’s History News Network posted an excerpt from the book.
On December 13, 1963, Dylan received the Emergency Civil Rights Committee’s Thomas Paine Award.
Then, the drunken Dylan began to speak.
“So I accept this reward — not reward [laughter], award on behalf of Phillip Luce who led the group to Cuba which all people should go down to Cuba. I don’t see why anybody can’t go to Cuba,” he said.
These opening lines alone might have rankled the strident anti-Communists who prowled the hallways at FBI headquarters in the early 1960s.
Leftist author Phillip Luce had taken a group of 84 American students to Fidel Castro’s Cuba to meet with Castro and the Argentine Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara.
In April 1961, U.S.-backed Cuban exiles had launched the Bay of Pigs Invasion in a failed attempt to overthrow the Castro regime.
Then, in October 1962, intelligence reports of Soviet missile sites in Cuba prompted the Cuban Missile Crisis, which had brought the U.S. and the Soviet Union to the brink of war.
U.S. government officials, therefore, did not look kindly on pro-Castro leftists such as Phillip Luce.
Dylan could not have cared less because, as he said in his speech, “Phillip is a friend of mine who went to Cuba.”
Even the FBI might have overlooked Dylan’s personal friendship with Luce had the singer-songwriter simply stopped talking at that point.
Alas, he did not.
“I’ll stand up and to get uncompromisable about it, which I have to be to be honest, I just got to be, as I got to admit that the man who shot President Kennedy, Lee Oswald, I don’t know exactly where — what he thought he was doing, but I got to admit honestly that I too — I saw some of myself in him,” Dylan confessed.
If the audience sat in anything other than stunned silence, the account does not say so.
Dylan continued, softening his confession only slightly: “I don’t think it would have gone — I don’t think it could go that far. But I got to stand up and say I saw things that he felt, in me — not to go that far and shoot [Boos and hisses].”
At that point, as the boos and hisses indicate, the audience had heard enough.
Lee Harvey Oswald had Communist sympathies. He lived in the Soviet Union before 1961 and later tried to defect to Cuba.
Still, even a group of social elites gathered to bestow an award named for one of history’s most fervent revolutionaries could not abide Dylan’s sympathy with the late president’s murderer.
The FBI had a more ominous reaction.
According to Leonard, an FBI report dated January 1964 refers to a bureau file on “Bobby Dyllon.”
Those familiar with the FBI under longtime director J. Edgar Hoover will not be surprised by the Dylan file.
In addition to keeping personal files on all major public figures, the paranoid Hoover targeted anyone he suspected of Communist sympathies.
One day soon, he probably would have turned the bureau’s attention to Dylan.
Dylan’s public expression of sympathy for Lee Harvey Oswald certainly hastened that day.
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