Odd this day
A very important day today: the 53rd anniversary of the time Elvis whacked-out-on-anything-he-could-get-his-‘doctor’-to-‘prescribe’ Presley met Richard ‘Honest’ Nixon to help in the latter’s anti-drug war, add to his police badge collection, and have a pop at the Beatles.
It’s a pretty well-known incident, but I decided it was worth writing up, because (a) it is, after all, bloody odd, and (b) there were loads of details I wasn’t aware of when I started reading about it. To begin with, it came about because Elvis was in a bit of a huff.
(Which reminds me: there’s a moment in Ian Penman’s book, It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track, where Elvis puts in in an order to his “personal jeweller” for “two hundred wrist watches that flashed both cross of Jesus and star of David”. I can recommend it highly. But I digress.)
He was travelling with some of his many guns and part of his extensive collection of law enforcement badges, and decided he wanted one from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs — because, Priscilla said
![“The narc badge represented some kind of ultimate power to him,” Priscilla Presley would write in her memoir, Elvis and Me. “With the federal narcotics badge, he [believed he] could legally enter any country both wearing guns and carrying any drugs he wished.”](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*J4Jx3i_G1A4gHbv4CU4d6w.png)
So, after 24 hours in LA, he headed back to DC, wrote Nixon a six-page letter on the plane, dropped it off at the White House gate, went to the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, and secured a meeting with the deputy director, but didn’t come away with a badge.
Nixon aide Egil ‘Bud’ Krogh was, apparently, a fan, and persuaded Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman it was worth doing — even though Elvis didn’t want it publicised. That’s one of the things I didn’t know: I assumed it was a photocall that had made the news at the time.
Another is that it’s a great pity all the photos are b/w, because Elvis’ suit is in purple velvet, and his sunglasses were amber. Also he came with a gift for the President: a Colt 45 pistol in a display case that he’d taken off the wall of his LA mansion.
Anyway, Elvis met Nixon, banged on about Communist brainwashing and drug abuse — which he had, apparently, “done an in-depth study of” — and said The Beatles
had been a real force for anti-American spirit.
Apparently, the following year, Presley told fun-loving J. Edgar Hoover that The Beatles
laid the groundwork for many of the problems we are having with young people by their filthy unkempt appearances and suggestive music.
Anyway, the thrust of what Presley said was that he had influence with the young (which was by then debatable; still famous, of course, but already in his Vegas era) and could persuade them not to take drugs, but quietly, behind the scenes. Oh, and could he have a badge?
Nixon asked Krogh if it was possible, and, told it was, ordered it done. It was an honorary one, although Secret Service agent Clint Hill later wrote that Elvis
believed he had some authority, which he did not have. He had no power of arrest or any legal authority whatsoever. [But] he went away happy.
There isn’t a full transcript of the meeting, because this was in the days before Nixon had every syllable and belch uttered in the Oval Office recorded, but there are memos and transcripts of Elvis’ letter and other documents in the US National Archives.
The meeting was kept secret at Elvis’ request, although the news did break the following year — and it’s a measure of how far his star had fallen by 1971 that it created almost no splash at all. Then, when both protagonists were pretty much out of the picture one way or another…
The National Archives gift shop sells T-shirts, canvas prints, and a pint glass with the image on it now. Apparently, it’s more popular than the Constitution.
