Bob Dylan stands in the role of rock’s resident philosopher – or he did, back in the Sixties. No surprise, then, that both John and Paul – two young men with strong appetites for fresh cultural inputs – took him as seriously as they did. They each had a natural inclination for the philosophical turn of mind themselves.
But it was Paul who reached out to an actual philosopher – Bertrand Russell, who had been the rock star of British philosophers in his day. And the impact of that new connection would reverberate through the Beatle’s music into the rock gestalt.
With the social status that accrued to the Beatles as their fame eclipsed all others, McCartney indulged his cultural jones by simply calling on people he greatly admired, hoping to get to know them. He’d seen Russell in the media, heard what he had to say, and decided he was such a person.
“Somehow I got his number and called him up,” he told biographer Barry Miles. “I figured him as a good speaker, I’d seen him on television, I’d read various bits and pieces and was very impressed by his dignity and the clarity of his thinking, so when I got a chance I went down and met him.
“Bertrand Russell lived in Chelsea in one of those little terrace houses, I think it was Flood Street. He had the archetypal American assistant who seemed always to be at everyone’s door that you wanted to meet. I sat round waiting, then went in and had a great little talk with him. Nothing earth-shattering. He just clued me in to the fact that Vietnam was a very bad war, it was an imperialist war and American vested interests were really all it was all about. It was a bad war and we should be against it. That was all. It was pretty good from the mouth of the great philosopher. ‘Slip it to me, Bert.’”
Russell had a decades-long history as an anti-war activist in his homeland. During World War I, his anti-war views were so strong that they inhibited his ability to move freely around his own country. His fellowship at Trinity College was revoked. He went to jail for six months for allegedly disrupting British foreign policy. After World War II, he very publicly denounced the atomic bomb, co-founding the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
No surprise, then, that he was not a fan of the Vietnam War.
“[He was] the first person to tell me about what was going on in Vietnam,” Paul recalled. “He explained that it was an Imperialist war supported by vested interests.
“A lot of us had friends who were going to Vietnam – or were trying to avoid going to Vietnam,” he added. “It was our age group, our peer group; the fact that Americans of our age group were going there brought it home to us.”
Paul’s fiancée Jane Asher had gone along with him to meet Russell – who was, at the time, 92 years old – on a Saturday in June 1966, Paul’s 24th birthday. Following their discussion of Vietnam and other serious matters, he offered the young, hip couple some heartfelt advice: “They should enjoy every minute to the full for as long as they could,” according to Paul’s biographer Philip Norman.
“I think that made us more determined to enjoy ourselves,” Jane remembered.
Paul was quick to share his experience.
“I reported back to John,” he recalled, “‘I met this Bertrand Russell guy, John,’ and I did all the big rap about the Vietnam and stuff, and John really came in on it all.”
John is often seen as the peace activist among the Beatles. He would stage peace events with Yoko a couple of years on, but it was after hearing Russell’s anti-war rationale from Paul that he first got the peace bug. He took Richard Lester up on his invitation to co-star in How I Won the War almost immediately thereafter.
John’s openness to taking up Lester’s film was more than a response to Russell’s anti-war philosophy; the old intellectual had actually shared with Paul in their meeting that Len Deighton, a celebrated spy novelist in Britain, had purchased the film rights to the theatrical satire Oh! What a Lovely War. Paul proceeded to have dinner with Deighton to discuss making that film a Beatles vehicle.
In a bittersweet postscript, Russell wrote a letter to John and Yoko just days before his death in early 1970, to thank them for a Christmas gift they’d sent him. He had strongly encouraged the anti-war activism they’d undertaken in 1969, and an affection between them had emerged, as with Paul over three years earlier.
The gift had included a handwritten note from John saying, “Thank you for your good wishes – it helped a lot! Love, John Lennon + Yoko Ono Lennon.” He drew a cartoon of the two of them on the note, which today can be found in the Bertrand Russell Archives.
Russell died a few days later.
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