[Accounts}
Excerpt from an interview with Allen Ginsberg for Śrīla Prabhupāda Līlāmṛta given around 1979:
Allen Ginsberg: "Swami Bhaktivedanta was having difficulty getting a permanent visa. He had a lawyer whom I met. He seemed like a naive local lawyer. Maybe somebody he'd [Śrīla Prabhupāda] met from Ananda [Ashram]*. I couldn't figure the guy out. I met him in the Jewish vegetarian restaurant a couple of times and talked with him on Second Avenue. At that time I was having problems with the narcotics bureau, which was trying to set me up for a bust, and that year,J. Edgar Hoover put me on the dangerous security list, and the narcs made several attempts to frame me. So I went to Robert Kennedy's office in Washington to put counterpressure and complain, and to warn them that someone might bring marijuana into my apartment, bust the door down, and accuse me of having it. I had a long talk about this with Kennedy. Later, I'd gone back to see his secretary, and he came back into the office in his shirt sleeves to see one of the secretaries. I said, "Oh, there's something I forgot. I was going to sing you a little song." He said, "Okay, I got a minute." So I sang about eight verses of Hare Kṛṣṇa mantra and he said, "What's that?" And I said, "When you hear this, it's supposed to bring immediate liberation." So he said, "Well, the guy up the block needs it more than I do," pointing up to the White House when Johnson was running the Vietnam war. That was Kennedy's introduction to Hare Kṛṣṇa.
"Later on, when the Swami was having trouble, he asked around everybody who could help, and I said, "Well, let's see now. We could write to Kennedy." It's just a normal thing, you know. That's what senators are for. In this case Kennedy knew who I was and I knew Kennedy's people, or I was somewhat a celebrated literary figure, so if I wrote a letter saying this swami was good it would be taken seriously. So I wrote Kennedy a letter saying here was this nice swami who was really doing something interesting, bringing Hare Kṛṣṇa, and his work could only be good; and if he was having trouble, that could only be bad. Is there anything they could do to facilitate and make sure that he didn't have any difficulties? That he really was a legitimate swami, and was doing something great. I don't know if it helped or not.
Note: *