When Elvis Presley Went to the White House

The photo is famous: Las Vegas Elvis, complete with over-sized open collar and ornate belt buckle, slightly slack-jawed and shaking hands with Richard Nixon in the Oval Office.

Now, in a nod to another America, President Trump will award Elvis Presley the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Friday in what could be called a MAGA-ified redo of Trump’s awkward Oval Office confab with Kanye West.

It’s a reasonable comparison: From his penchant for self-destruction to his fixation on a particular accessory, the Elvis-Nixon meet has more in common with Trump’s Kanye than you might think.

Like Kanye in a creative lull, the King found himself in a pre-Christmas funk in December of 1970, according to Priscilla Presley’s memoir Elvis and Me. He’d spent six figures on guns and luxury cars—Christmas presents!—and his hardscrabble father disapproved of the lavish expense. So he sulked his way out to Los Angeles and, before heading back to Memphis, resolved to check an item off his to-do list, one that required a stop-over in the nation’s capital.

He wanted to meet the president.

Pre-Twitter, the best he could do was drop off a note at the White House gate. Staffer Bud Krogh, an Elvis fan, intercepted the letter and talked Nixon into taking the meeting. After a brief visit and the standard gift of White House swag (some cufflinks, a brooch), came the cheerful photo-op with Nixon.

Then, they talked policy. “Elvis truly wanted to help kids get off drugs,” Priscilla wrote, and he’d indicated as much in his note. “I’m on your side,” Krogh recalls Elvis telling Nixon. Staffers had a list of proposed “Presley activities” ready, to make the most of the new alliance.

Among their dream projects was “an hour Television Special in which Presley narrates as stars such as himself sing popular songs and interpret them for parents in order to show drug and other anti-establishment themes in rock music.” Or the King could “record an album with the theme ‘Get High on Life’.” Because, as the Elvis memo put it, “If our youth are going to emulate the rock music stars, from now on let those stars affirm their conviction that true and lasting talent is the result of self motivation and discipline and not artificial chemical euphoria.”

Elvis had his own agenda, too, Priscilla adds, and his underlying reason for requesting the meeting was more sinister than Nixon might have suspected. “Another purpose of Elvis’s trip was to try to acquire a Federal Narcotics Badge for himself,” she wrote: “He had detective, police, and sheriff badges from all over the nation.” More than just a quirky collector, what he needed next was a narc badge, which “represented some kind of ultimate power to him.” Because, “In Elvis’s mind that badge would give him the right to carry any prescribed drug he had on his person.” By late 1970, his dependence on prescription pills—uppers, downers, and an array of narcotics—was in full bloom. With the badge, he thought he could draw a hard line between his own drug use and the kind he joined Nixon in condemning.

Nixon overruled a Narcotics Bureau official who’d previously denied Elvis’s request for the badge, and had it sent to the Oval Office. (In his letter, he asked to be made “a federal agent at large”—one wish the White House wouldn’t grant.)

Not quite the Presidential Medal of Freedom, but when Nixon presented the badge at the end of their visit, Bud Krogh recalls, Elvis was overjoyed.

And, much like Kanye, he moved in for a spontaneous hug.

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