Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: When Elvis Met Nixon

Episode Date: March 27, 2019

Elvis really did meet with Richard Nixon. Because Elvis wanted to help fight the drug trade. True story. Hear about it in today's short stuff.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and there's Jerry and Elvis is in the building in spirit at least.

And so is Richard Nixon. Everybody's mad about that. So this is short stuff, like I said. That's right. And this is about the very famous meeting of Elvis Presley and Richard Nixon. And we got this information from a December 2010 article in Smithsonian Magazine by Peter Carlson,

which had some great details about this very famous meeting on December 21st, 1970. Yes. Which is that you might have thought was Photoshopped. Well, do you remember one of the first Photoshoppeds we ever got from our pal, Van Nostrand, was of us as Elvis and Nixon. That's right.

And then totally unrelated to it, our other pal who Photoshopped us sometimes is Aaron Cooper. Actually, he does it all the time. And he Photoshopped us as Elvis and Nixon too. And I think they were swapped. Pretty amazing stuff. Wow. The wonders of technology.

The thing is though, right. The thing is, this is not a Photoshopped image. It's a very famous image that you could get well before Photoshop was ever around back in the 80s. But it is of a meeting that very few people knew about until a Chicago newspaper in 1988 said, hey everybody, the National Archives has a bunch of pictures of Elvis and Nixon together shaking hands

and you can buy them if you want. And it became the most requested picture in National Archives history in like a week. Yeah. And like Elvis as Elvis. It wasn't like he wore, he's like, well, I'm gonna wear my suit today and just tone it down. Like he's fully Elvis. Purple velour suit with a cape if I remember correctly.

Yeah. And there's a movie about this too, by the way. There's two of them. Oh, really? There's one from 97 and one from I think like 2000 something. Well, the one that I saw was the most recent one. With Michael Shannon? Yes. As Elvis.

Yes. So not a bad, it wasn't great, but Michael Shannon's awesome and everything. So it was worth it for that. Did they make like a feature length movie? Yeah. Weird. But it followed this story, you know.

Cause I mean, this is about like 48 hours is the whole story. Yeah. So here's how it goes is it's a Christmas time. Oh wait, I'm sorry. Hold on one more thing, Chuck. I want to interject before you get started. It helps a lot to imagine Elvis totally wasted on speed throughout this entire story.

Okay. Okay. Just bear that in mind. So it starts on Christmas. There's a fight at the house between Elvis's dad Vernon and Elvis's wife apparently about just Christmas spending, which I think is interesting. I got the impression that they were on the same side against Elvis.

Oh, I don't know. I think so. Maybe, but in any regard, Elvis leaves. He's not too happy. So he does that, that movie trope thing where you just go to the airport and say put me on the next flight to anywhere and that happened to be Washington DC.

Goes to DC, stays there for a little while and then decides to fly to LA to his house in Beverly Hills, which by the way is an Airbnb now. Is it? It is, but it's not, it's on Airbnb, but you, all the dates were blacked out and it didn't give a price. Cause I was like, I'm totally going to try

and stay there one night at some point in my life. Right. But yeah, I don't know what the deal is, but you can go look at the house. It's pretty sweet, as you would imagine. Okay. So Elvis's buddy and confidante and assistant Jerry Schilling gets a call.

He's like, I'm going to be in LA, man. Pick me up. That's a great Jerry Schilling. He does pick him up. And here's where we should just say that Elvis at this point in his life was obsessed with martial arts, guns and weirdly law enforcement and collecting law enforcement like honorary sheriffs

and honorary badges, that kind of thing. And the thing that bound all of these common or these interests together was drugs, being on lots and lots of drugs. Yeah. And Priscilla says this in her book. He was obsessed with the narcotics badge, the narc badge. And she said, he felt that if you had that narc badge, then you could fly to any country with your guns

and your drugs and get away with it. No questions asked. Wow. So that is the fantasy of a drug addled brain. Problem. Yeah, sure. And also, but it solves a practical problem too. I love my guns and I love my drugs and I need to get them around.

So I got it. I'll bet a federal narcotics bureau badge, which is the predecessor to the DEA. I'll bet I could just flash one of those, add that I'm Elvis Presley and that I got this from Richard Nixon and boom, right through with all my big garbage bag full of pills. All right, so he's in LA.

He says to his Jerry Schilling, he's like, now I wanna go back to DC. He didn't tell him why. And then on the way, on the flight, Elvis writes a letter to President Nixon. Sir, if I can be in any service to you, I wanna help the country out and I would love to meet you.

Stays in DC under a pseudonym and tells Nixon, his pseudonym, said he's gonna be there in DC and I want credentials of a federal agent. Yes. So he writes this letter. They take the red eye from LA to DC. They drop a letter off at 6.30 AM.

They check into a hotel. Personally, Elvis dropped this off at the gate of the White House. Yeah, and they check into a hotel and Elvis gets restless. He's not slept, by the way. Imagine that. And he decides he's gonna go

to the Bureau of Narcotics himself and just kind of sniff around and see what they've got going on there. So while I'm guessing Jerry Schilling was getting some rest in a shower at the hotel room, Elvis is off at the Federal Narcotics Bureau, hasn't slept, probably out of his mind on drugs, talking to them about badges and stuff

and how he'd like to meet Richard Nixon and get a badge from him. What's amazing, although it's really not amazing if you stop and think about it, is that when they dropped the letter off at 6.30, within five and a half hours, Elvis was on his way to the White House to meet with the president.

All right, let's take a break there. We'll tell you about the further details of the story right after this. Let's get started. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses

and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references

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So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s,

called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so the letter is delivered to an aide of Nixon named Bud, that's his nickname, Bud Crow or Crog. I think Crow probably, right, K-R-O-G-H. Crog, right. So he delivers this, or he gets this letter to Bud Crog

because the front gate people are like, Elvis delivered a letter and it's not just like if any normal American had delivered a letter, like this one actually got to Nixon's aide pretty quickly. Yeah. He was a fan of Elvis and he's like, you know what, this is a great idea. Like Richard Nixon is not cool at all.

No. And if he met with Elvis Presley, like that's really good for his image because Elvis is the coolest guy on the planet. Yes. Well, 1970, he was up there. Okay. So he likes this idea, he persuades

eventually the chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, to make this happen. And at noon that day, Elvis shows up at the White House ready to go with a gift of a gun. He brought a Colt 45 and a display case to give to Nixon. Which he just took from the wall of his house in LA. Sure. He's like, what can I do?

Oh, this'll do. Yeah. And it is, it's a beautifully mounted firearm. If you're into that kind of thing, you would be like, yes, especially if it came directly from Elvis's personal collection. Sure, I'm not a gun guy,

but I would love Elvis's 45. Okay, sure. So the Secret Service of course says, yes, thank you very much. We'll take that before you can go into the Oval Office. And from what, what do we say, Bug Crows? Is it crow, croff? What did we settle on?

Let's just go with croff. How about Bug K? Yeah. So Bug K recounted his impressions of the story. Cause he's in the room. He made this thing happen cause he's an Elvis fan and an aide to Nixon. And he said that when Elvis walked into that Oval Office,

he, it was plain that he was awestruck. Sure. But he regained his footing pretty quickly and it's like, you know, mixing it up with the president, having a talk with him, a very serious talk about the problem of counterculture in the United States. Right. It very interesting.

The whole thing was so odd cause Elvis was a drug addict and he talked about the problems of drugs. And he, from what I understand, had a clearly distinct line between being riddled with prescription drugs and illegal like street drugs. Right, right.

Because naively, if it's a prescription drug and it comes from a doctor, it's legitimized. Like, it's fine. It's legal, you know? Even if you have a totally illegal amount of them on you, it's still legal. It's still a prescription drug, but a street drug I've heard before,

and I don't remember where I read it, may have been the Uncle John's Bathroom Reader that he used to get so worked up about the idea of drug dealers in Memphis down the street that he'd wanna go out and shoot him and he'd be wasted on drugs at the time. And his entourage would have to like calm him down and keep the guns away from him,

keep him just in his house to keep him from going out and exacting vigilante justice of the local Memphis street drug dealers around town. Yeah, I mean, I think I'd said this in the Graceland episode, you know, my family's from Memphis and my dear sweet grandmother passed away, like fully believing and saying out loud,

like, well, you know, Elvis's doctors killed him. He didn't know what was going on. They had him go in every which way, but loose because of their prescriptions. And I'm like, no, grandmother. I mean, I never said that. You didn't tell her no on her deathbed, did you? No, yeah, I was like, Elvis was a junkie.

Right? Now close your eyes. You just ran over and whispered into her ear. So, all right, so Elvis is all struck. This guy, Bud Kay, is taking notes because this is pre-Oval Office taping by Nixon. Elvis is all struck. They're talking about the counterculture.

Elvis is talking about the Beatles, how they're anti-Americans and they're bad for America. And they're talking about drugs and Elvis is showing off his collection of badges. And then basically saying, he basically asked him flat out, I would like a narcotics badge. Can you make that happen? Yeah, how you let's coach the chase, man.

Pretty much. And Nixon says, well, I don't know. Can we, Bud Kay? And Bud Kay was like, yeah, we can probably make that happen. He's like, all right, let's get it done then. So that was it. I mean, within probably about an hour, Bud Kay and Elvis went to lunch

and Bud Kay produced the badge for him before the end of lunch or right after lunch ended. So funny. He also got some other, like he had his bodyguard and chilling with him and Nixon gave them some, what do you give him, cufflinks. Then Elvis was like, well, Mr. President, they have wives too, you know.

So he went and got him White House brooches. And Elvis just like leaves a White House with all these gifts basically. Right, he made a basket out of his shirt. But like we said, there was that one very famous photo. And no one knew about this. Elvis wanted to keep it quiet. I imagine Nixon sadly wasn't able to use it

as like a PR move. Yeah, although I think also he was probably like, what just happened after Elvis came and went. It's crazy that he was just available. Yeah, it is a little crazy. The whole thing's pretty crazy, Chuck. For sure. But the year after a columnist named Jack Anderson

broke the story and apparently nobody really, it didn't go anywhere. No one, it didn't become part of the cultural memory. And it wasn't until 1988 that that Chicago newspaper reported about the photos that that was when it hit, just right. I think in 1971 people were like, it wasn't kitschy yet, but in 1988 people were ready to be blown away

by the idea of Nixon and Elvis together. That's right. And so it was in the National Archives. Then all of a sudden you could make a request for the copy of that photo. And within one week, 8,000 people requested that. And it's still, I'm not sure if it still is, but for a while it was the most requested photograph

in the history of the National Archives. Yep. Pretty amazing. There you go. Yeah, it was finally supplanted by Obama meeting with that alien in the Oval Office, that famous photograph. That's right. No one Obama met with the lead singer of corn.

Right. There you go. Yeah. You got anything else? Nope. Well, good, because we don't have time for it anyway. It's a short stuff. We'll see you guys later.

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