Elvis Presley and Richard Nixon in the Oval Office, December 1970

By Andrew M Brown

Monday, December 21, 1970 saw what must count as the most bizarre meeting ever to have taken place in the Oval Office of the President of the United States.

That morning, Elvis Presley – in full Captain Marvel garb of crushed velvet, flapping lapels and aviator dark glasses – turned up at the North West gate and presented himself to the security guard with a letter written on the plane, on American Airlines stationery. In it, he offered to help with the drug problem, “the hippie elements” and the Black Panthers.

He also brought a gun to give to President Nixon – a Second World War Colt 45 in a commemorative wooden chest. The official photographs, showing Elvis with the suited and square-looking Richard Nixon plus his aide, Bud Krogh, are extraordinary.

All the documents relating to this meeting – the memoranda, the letter itself, briefing papers – are available to view on the American National Security Agency website, including a facsimile of the letter itself, with Elvis’s leaning-over scrawl. They make for riveting reading – so it is no wonder there is now a Hollywood film about it: Elvis and Nixon, starring Michael Shannon as Elvis and Kevin Spacey as Nixon.

But will either actor be able to capture such unusual, idiosyncratic figures as Nixon and Elvis? After all, what really happened is more bizarre than any fiction. In his memo written immediately after the event, the White House staffer Bud Krogh described how “Presley indicated to the President in a very emotional manner that he was ‘on your side’”.

He wanted “to restore some respect for the flag” and had been “studying Communist brainwashing”. Most hilariously, Elvis “in a surprising, spontaneous gesture, put his left arm around the President and hugged him”. I think it’s fair to say that Richard Nixon was not a man who went in for hugs.

There is of course a deep irony about this surreal encounter. Its central purpose was to secure Elvis a proper Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs agent’s badge, and arrangements were made to provide one. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone close to Elvis at the time that there was a contradiction here, given the singer’s (now well-documented) appetite for Quaaludes, Dexedrine, Tuinal, Demerol, Diluadid and the like - or in other words uppers, downers and in-betweeners.

A suggestion for “Presley activities” that emerged from the meeting was that Elvis should record an anti-drugs album with the theme “Get High on Life”, because “true and lasting talent is the result of self-motivation and discipline and not artificial chemical euphoria.” How sad that, as the world would discover barely six years later, when he died at the pathetically young age of 42, the one person who most needed to grasp this message of prudence and continence was Elvis Presley himself.