March 27, 2019 • 14 mins
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.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
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 uh
we got this information from uh December two thousands ten
(00:27):
article in Smithsonian magazine by Peter Carlson which had some
great details about this very famous meeting on December twenty one. Yes,
which is that you might have thought was photoshopped. Well,
do you remember one of the first photoshops we ever
got from our pal Van Nostrin was of us as
Elvis and Nixon. That's right. And then totally unrelated to it,
(00:50):
our other pale who photoshops as sometimes as Aaron Cooper,
actually he does it all the time, and he um
photoshopped us as Elvis and Nixon too, and I think
they were swapped. Pretty amazing stuff. Well, the wonders of technology.
The thing is, though, right, The thing is is this
is not a photoshop to image. It's a very famous
image that you could get well before photoshop was ever
(01:13):
around back in the eighties. But it is of a
meeting that very few people knew about until a Chicago
newspaper in 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
(01:35):
wasn't like he wore He's like, well, I'm gonna I'm
gonna wear my suit today and just tone it down
like he's fully Elvis purple lure suit with a cape
if I remember correctly. And there's a movie about this too,
by the way. There's two of them, Oh really, there's
one from ninety seven and one from I think like
two thousand something. Well, the one that I saw was
(01:56):
the most recent one with Michael Shannon, Yes, as as Elvis. Yes,
so not about it wasn't great, but Michael Shannon's awesome
and everything, so it was worth it for that. Did
they make like is it a fink feature length movie? Yeah? Weird,
But I followed the story, you know, um, because I
mean this is about like forty eight hours is the
whole story. Yeah, so here's how it goes. Is it's
(02:19):
Christmas time. 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 better than mine. So
it starts on Christmas. There's a fight at the house
between Elvis's dad, Vernon, and Elvis's wife, apparently about just
(02:40):
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 at 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. Uh,
(03:01):
and that happened to be Washington. D C goes to
d Cious, stays there for a little while, and then
decides to fly to l Ah to his house in
Beverly Hills, which, by the way, is an Airbnb now
is it? It is? But it's not. It's it's on airbnb.
But you all the dates were blacked out and it
didn't give a price, because I was like, I'm totally
(03:21):
gonna try and stay there one night at some point
in my life. 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. Uh So,
Elvis's buddy and confidante and assistant, Jerry Shilling, gets a call.
He's like, I'm going to be in l a man,
pick me up. That's the great Jerry Shilling. He died.
He does pick him up. And here's where we should
(03:44):
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 sheriff's and honorary badges,
that kind of thing. And the thing that bound all
of these common or these interests together was drugs. Being
(04:07):
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 right with your guns and your drugs and
get away with it no questions. I asked Wow. So
(04:27):
that is the that is the fantasy of a drug
adult brain, probably yeature 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 d E A. I'll
bet I could just flash one of those, add that
I'm Elvis Pressley and that I got this from Richard Nixon,
(04:50):
and boom right through with all my big garbage bag
full of pills. All right. So he's in l A.
He says to his his uh, Jerry Shilling, He's like,
now I want to go back to d C. He
didn't tell him why. And then on the way on
the flight, Elvis writes a letter to President Nixon, uh
sor if I can be in any service, do you?
(05:11):
I want to help the country out and I would
love to meet you. Stays in d C under a
pseudonym and tells Nixon. His pseudonym said he's gonna be
there in d C. And I want credentials of a
federal agent. Yes, so he writes this letter. They take
the red eye from l A to d c UH.
They drop a letter off at six thirty a m.
(05:33):
They check into a hotel. Personally, Elvis dropped this off
at the gate of the White House, yea. And they
check into a hotel, and Elvis gets restless. He's not
slapped by the way, and he he decides he's going
to 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 Shilling was getting
some rest in a shower at the hotel room, Elvis
(05:56):
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 we'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 six thirty,
within five and a half hours, Elvis was on his
(06:17):
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. Alright,
(06:53):
So the letter is delivered to an aid of Nixon
named Bud. That's his nickname, Bud Crow or Krog. I
I think Crow probably k R O G. H. Kroc. Right,
So he delivers this or he gets this letter to
Bud Croc because the front Gate people are like, Elvis
(07:13):
delivered a letter. Uh, and it's not just like if
any normal American had delivered a letter like this. One
actually got to Nixon's aid pretty quickly. Uh. 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, and um, if he met with Elvis Presley,
like that's really good for his image because Elvis is
(07:36):
the coolest guy on the planet ish well nine seventy
he was, he was up there. Um, so he likes
this idea. He persuades eventually the Chief of Staff, Bob
Haldeman to make this happen. And uh, at noon that day,
Elvis shows up at the White House ready to go
(07:56):
with a gift of a gun. He brought a cult
forty five I've in a display case to give the Nixon,
which he just took from the wall of his house
in l A. He's like, quick and I agree, Oh,
this will this will do, and it is it's 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. I'm not a gun guy, but
(08:19):
I would love Elvis. Sure. So Um, 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? Um? Is
it crow crows? Where do we settle one? Let's just
how about bug Ka? So bug Ka recounted his impressions
(08:42):
of the story because he's in the room. He made
this thing happen, because he's in 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, but he regained his footing pretty quickly. And
it's like, you know, mixing it up with the president
um having a talk with him, a very serious talk
about the problem of counter culture in the United States. Right,
(09:08):
It's very interesting. The whole thing was so odd because
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
uh and and illegal like street drugs, right right, because naively,
(09:31):
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
(09:53):
the idea of drug dealers in Memphis down the street
that his he'd want to go out and shoot him
and his his and he'd be heastit on drugs at
the time, and his entourage would have to like calm
him down and keep him, keep the guns away from
and keep him just in his house to keep him
from going out in exacting vigilante justice of the local
Memphis street drug dealers around town. Yeah, I mean, I
(10:15):
think I said this in the Graceland episode. You know,
my family's from Memphis, and my 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, he didn't
know what was going on. They had him going every
which way but loose because of his their prescriptions. And
I'm like, no, Grandmoma, I mean, tell her on her deathbed. No.
(10:36):
He was like, Elvis was a junkie right now and
whispered into her here. So all right, so Elvis is
all struck. Uh. This guy bud k Is is taking
notes because this is pretty uh Oval office taping by Nixon.
Elvis is all struck. And they're talking about the counterculture.
Elvis is talking about the Beatles, how they're anti Americans
(10:59):
and they're bad for America, and they're talking about drugs,
and Elvis is showing up his collection of badges and
then basically saying he basically asked him flat out, I
would like a narcotics batche Can you make that happen? Yeah?
How you let's coach with the chaise man pretty much? Yeah?
And if Heson says well, I don't know, can we
(11:20):
bud k And bud k 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 um,
probably about an hour, bug K and Elvis went to lunch,
and bug K produced the badge for him, um, like
before the end of lunch or right after lunch ended.
(11:41):
So funny. He also got some other like he had
his bodyguard and chilling with him and Nixon. Nixon gave
them some what do you give him? Cuff links? And
then Elvis's was like, well, Mr presidently have wives too,
you know, so he went and got him White House brooches,
and Elvis just like leaves the White House of all
these gifts basically right, he made a basket out of
(12:02):
his shirt. Uh. But like we said, there was that
one very famous photo. Uh, and no one knew about this.
Elvis wanted to keep it quiet. Um. I imagine Nixon
wasn't uh sadly wasn't able to use it as like
a as a pr move. Yeah, which although I think
also he was probably like what just happened? After Elvis
(12:25):
came and went? He was just available. Yeah, it isn't
little crazy. The whole thing is 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 that that Chicago newspaper reported about
(12:49):
the photos. That that was when it hit just right.
I think in people were like, it didn't there, it
wasn't kitchy yet, but in people were ready to be
blown away by the idea of Nixon and and Elvis together.
That's right, And so it was in the National Archives.
Then all of a sudden, you can make a request
(13:10):
for the copy of that photo, and uh, within one week,
eight thousand 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. Pretty amazing, there you go. Yeah, it was
finally supplanted by Obama meeting with that alien in the
(13:31):
Oval Office, that famous photograph. That's right. No, when Obama
met with the lead singer of corn A right here
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 for more on
(13:51):
this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works?
Dot Com
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 uh
we got this information from uh December two thousands ten
(00:27):
article in Smithsonian magazine by Peter Carlson which had some
great details about this very famous meeting on December twenty one. Yes,
which is that you might have thought was photoshopped. Well,
do you remember one of the first photoshops we ever
got from our pal Van Nostrin was of us as
Elvis and Nixon. That's right. And then totally unrelated to it,
(00:50):
our other pale who photoshops as sometimes as Aaron Cooper,
actually he does it all the time, and he um
photoshopped us as Elvis and Nixon too, and I think
they were swapped. Pretty amazing stuff. Well, the wonders of technology.
The thing is, though, right, The thing is is this
is not a photoshop to image. It's a very famous
image that you could get well before photoshop was ever
(01:13):
around back in the eighties. But it is of a
meeting that very few people knew about until a Chicago
newspaper in 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
(01:35):
wasn't like he wore He's like, well, I'm gonna I'm
gonna wear my suit today and just tone it down
like he's fully Elvis purple lure suit with a cape
if I remember correctly. And there's a movie about this too,
by the way. There's two of them, Oh really, there's
one from ninety seven and one from I think like
two thousand something. Well, the one that I saw was
(01:56):
the most recent one with Michael Shannon, Yes, as as Elvis. Yes,
so not about it wasn't great, but Michael Shannon's awesome
and everything, so it was worth it for that. Did
they make like is it a fink feature length movie? Yeah? Weird,
But I followed the story, you know, um, because I
mean this is about like forty eight hours is the
whole story. Yeah, so here's how it goes. Is it's
(02:19):
Christmas time. 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 better than mine. So
it starts on Christmas. There's a fight at the house
between Elvis's dad, Vernon, and Elvis's wife, apparently about just
(02:40):
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 at 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. Uh,
(03:01):
and that happened to be Washington. D C goes to
d Cious, stays there for a little while, and then
decides to fly to l Ah to his house in
Beverly Hills, which, by the way, is an Airbnb now
is it? It is? But it's not. It's it's on airbnb.
But you all the dates were blacked out and it
didn't give a price, because I was like, I'm totally
(03:21):
gonna try and stay there one night at some point
in my life. 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. Uh So,
Elvis's buddy and confidante and assistant, Jerry Shilling, gets a call.
He's like, I'm going to be in l a man,
pick me up. That's the great Jerry Shilling. He died.
He does pick him up. And here's where we should
(03:44):
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 sheriff's and honorary badges,
that kind of thing. And the thing that bound all
of these common or these interests together was drugs. Being
(04:07):
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 right with your guns and your drugs and
get away with it no questions. I asked Wow. So
(04:27):
that is the that is the fantasy of a drug
adult brain, probably yeature 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 d E A. I'll
bet I could just flash one of those, add that
I'm Elvis Pressley and that I got this from Richard Nixon,
(04:50):
and boom right through with all my big garbage bag
full of pills. All right. So he's in l A.
He says to his his uh, Jerry Shilling, He's like,
now I want to go back to d C. He
didn't tell him why. And then on the way on
the flight, Elvis writes a letter to President Nixon, uh
sor if I can be in any service, do you?
(05:11):
I want to help the country out and I would
love to meet you. Stays in d C under a
pseudonym and tells Nixon. His pseudonym said he's gonna be
there in d C. And I want credentials of a
federal agent. Yes, so he writes this letter. They take
the red eye from l A to d c UH.
They drop a letter off at six thirty a m.
(05:33):
They check into a hotel. Personally, Elvis dropped this off
at the gate of the White House, yea. And they
check into a hotel, and Elvis gets restless. He's not
slapped by the way, and he he decides he's going
to 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 Shilling was getting
some rest in a shower at the hotel room, Elvis
(05:56):
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 we'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 six thirty,
within five and a half hours, Elvis was on his
(06:17):
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. Alright,
(06:53):
So the letter is delivered to an aid of Nixon
named Bud. That's his nickname, Bud Crow or Krog. I
I think Crow probably k R O G. H. Kroc. Right,
So he delivers this or he gets this letter to
Bud Croc because the front Gate people are like, Elvis
(07:13):
delivered a letter. Uh, and it's not just like if
any normal American had delivered a letter like this. One
actually got to Nixon's aid pretty quickly. Uh. 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, and um, if he met with Elvis Presley,
like that's really good for his image because Elvis is
(07:36):
the coolest guy on the planet ish well nine seventy
he was, he was up there. Um, so he likes
this idea. He persuades eventually the Chief of Staff, Bob
Haldeman to make this happen. And uh, at noon that day,
Elvis shows up at the White House ready to go
(07:56):
with a gift of a gun. He brought a cult
forty five I've in a display case to give the Nixon,
which he just took from the wall of his house
in l A. He's like, quick and I agree, Oh,
this will this will do, and it is it's 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. I'm not a gun guy, but
(08:19):
I would love Elvis. Sure. So Um, 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? Um? Is
it crow crows? Where do we settle one? Let's just
how about bug Ka? So bug Ka recounted his impressions
(08:42):
of the story because he's in the room. He made
this thing happen, because he's in 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, but he regained his footing pretty quickly. And
it's like, you know, mixing it up with the president
um having a talk with him, a very serious talk
about the problem of counter culture in the United States. Right,
(09:08):
It's very interesting. The whole thing was so odd because
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
uh and and illegal like street drugs, right right, because naively,
(09:31):
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
(09:53):
the idea of drug dealers in Memphis down the street
that his he'd want to go out and shoot him
and his his and he'd be heastit on drugs at
the time, and his entourage would have to like calm
him down and keep him, keep the guns away from
and keep him just in his house to keep him
from going out in exacting vigilante justice of the local
Memphis street drug dealers around town. Yeah, I mean, I
(10:15):
think I said this in the Graceland episode. You know,
my family's from Memphis, and my 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, he didn't
know what was going on. They had him going every
which way but loose because of his their prescriptions. And
I'm like, no, Grandmoma, I mean, tell her on her deathbed. No.
(10:36):
He was like, Elvis was a junkie right now and
whispered into her here. So all right, so Elvis is
all struck. Uh. This guy bud k Is is taking
notes because this is pretty uh Oval office taping by Nixon.
Elvis is all struck. And they're talking about the counterculture.
Elvis is talking about the Beatles, how they're anti Americans
(10:59):
and they're bad for America, and they're talking about drugs,
and Elvis is showing up his collection of badges and
then basically saying he basically asked him flat out, I
would like a narcotics batche Can you make that happen? Yeah?
How you let's coach with the chaise man pretty much? Yeah?
And if Heson says well, I don't know, can we
(11:20):
bud k And bud k 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 um,
probably about an hour, bug K and Elvis went to lunch,
and bug K produced the badge for him, um, like
before the end of lunch or right after lunch ended.
(11:41):
So funny. He also got some other like he had
his bodyguard and chilling with him and Nixon. Nixon gave
them some what do you give him? Cuff links? And
then Elvis's was like, well, Mr presidently have wives too,
you know, so he went and got him White House brooches,
and Elvis just like leaves the White House of all
these gifts basically right, he made a basket out of
(12:02):
his shirt. Uh. But like we said, there was that
one very famous photo. Uh, and no one knew about this.
Elvis wanted to keep it quiet. Um. I imagine Nixon
wasn't uh sadly wasn't able to use it as like
a as a pr move. Yeah, which although I think
also he was probably like what just happened? After Elvis
(12:25):
came and went? He was just available. Yeah, it isn't
little crazy. The whole thing is 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 that that Chicago newspaper reported about
(12:49):
the photos. That that was when it hit just right.
I think in people were like, it didn't there, it
wasn't kitchy yet, but in people were ready to be
blown away by the idea of Nixon and and Elvis together.
That's right, And so it was in the National Archives.
Then all of a sudden, you can make a request
(13:10):
for the copy of that photo, and uh, within one week,
eight thousand 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. Pretty amazing, there you go. Yeah, it was
finally supplanted by Obama meeting with that alien in the
(13:31):
Oval Office, that famous photograph. That's right. No, when Obama
met with the lead singer of corn A right here
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 for more on
(13:51):
this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works?
Dot Com
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