That picture of President Richard M. Nixon shaking hands with Elvis in the Oval Office is the perfect embodiment of our most cherished values: the obsession with celebrity, disdain for politicians, and love of the absurd. By all rights it should be on the cover of every U.S. history textbook.
You know this picture: Elvis. Former President Richard Nixon. The White House Oval Office. Dec. 21, 1970. Shaking hands. Rock & roll meets Watergate.
Nixon and Elvis: suspicious minds
It's the photo that spawned a book and a movie, and is the most-requested photograph from the National Archives. A portrait the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace—keeper of the guttering Nixon flame—has used again and again over the years. It makes Nixon hip, humanizes the frequently demonized Yorba Lindan. And it brings in the dough: the Library sells the image on coffee cups, key chains, T-shirts, watches, mouse pads, stationery, playing cards. Even a tiny reproduction floating inside the body of a pen.
And now comes the official museum exhibit. On Monday, the Nixon Library welcomed news cameras, reporters and some 200 seniors to a display case of items recalling the Nixon-Presley summit. It's bare bones—the suits Nixon and Presley wore that day, letters between Presley and Nixon, a flatscreen television that flashes the sequence of photos leading up to the iconic shot, and a World War II-era Colt .45 Presley presented Nixon. There's little in the way of commentary, as if Library officials feel the artifacts speak for themselves.
But they don't.
Thank God, then, for the presence Monday of Bud Krogh, Nixon's former deputy assistant for domestic affairs, author of The Day Elvis Met Nixon and a man who served four months in prison for his part in the Watergate scandal.
"The two of them together somehow is almost incomprehensible," Krogh told the audience. "The king of rock and the president of the United States shaking hands in the Oval Office doesn't compute for a lot of people."
Krogh recounted how he set up the meeting after receiving Presley's six-page letter to Nixon. In it, Presley asked Nixon if he could become a "Federal Agent at Large" to help combat the nation's drug problem. It's a bizarre letter, written as it was by a man already chewing up pharmaceuticals like a fat lady at an all-you-can-eat buffet. And it reveals that the King of Rock & Roll was searching outside himself for an explanation of his declining star power.
"The drug culture, the hippie elements, the SDS, Black Panthers, etc. do NOT consider me as their enemy or as they call it The Establishment," Presley wrote. "I call it America and I love it." In one telling passage, Presley tells Nixon he'd already "done an in-depth study of drug abuse and Communist brainwashing techniques and I am right in the middle of the whole thing where I can and will do the most good."
In Yorba Linda, Krogh openly mocked Presley's letter, describing it as "fifth- or sixth-grade quality writing." But back then, he nevertheless set up a meeting with Nixon. Krogh told the audience it consisted mostly of Presley showing Nixon pictures of his daughter Lisa Marie and bashing the Beatles—according to a Dec. 21, 1970, memo by Krogh, Presley thought the Fab Four "had been a real force for anti-American spirit," a point on which Nixon "nodded in agreement."
The meeting ended, but not Presley's trip with the nation's leaders. Neither the Nixon Library nor Krogh mention that Presley tried to schedule a meeting with then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover later that day, but was rebuffed. An FBI memo in the National Archives states, "Presley's sincerity and good intentions notwithstanding he is certainly not the type of individual whom the Director would wish to meet. It is noted at the present time he is wearing his hair down to his shoulders and indulges in the wearing of all sorts of exotic dress."
Presley did score a tour of FBI headquarters. A report describing that visit notes Presley repeated his contention that the Beatles (as well as such entertainers as the Smothers Brothers and Jane Fonda) "have a lot to answer for in the hereafter for the way they have poisoned young minds by disparaging the United States in their public statements and unsavory activities."
And so we return to the picture. Nixon grinning grimly. Elvis slightly smiling. Men at ease. Equals. Two men on the cusp of decline. Two paranoid, conspiratorial, sweaty men.
GARELLANO@OCWEEKLY.COM
