BEGIN CITATION

… He said they were having trouble getting CIA records on Kennedy’s decisions or actions on Cuba and South Vietnam. Then the President switched the subject to getting the Internal Revenue Service to give them records on political opponents opponents and stop investigations of their friends: “John, we have the power but are we using it to investigate contributors to Hubert Humphrey, contributors to Muskie, the Jews, you know, that are stealing every—You know, they have really tried to crucify Hobart Lewis, Robert Abplanalp, I mean, while we’ve been in office even…. And John Wayne, of course, and Paul Keyes….” Lewis was the editor of Reader’s Digest. “What the hell are we doing?

… He was raging again about the Internal Revenue Service. “Billy Graham tells me an astonishing thing,” he told Haldeman on September 13. “The IRS is battering the shit out of him. Some son-of-a-bitch came to him and gave him a three-hour grilling. Connally took the name of the guy…. Now here’s the point. Bob, please get me the names of the Jews, you know, the big Jewish contributors of the Democrats…. All right. Could we please investigate some of the cocksuckers? That’s all.” There was more of the same the next day: “You see, the IRS is full of Jews, Bob…. That’s the reason they’re after Graham….”

Graham, in the office later to discuss holding his crusades in states critical to Nixon in 1972, had his own ideas about such things, as recorded by Haldeman in his diary: “There was considerable discussion of the terrible problem arising from the total Jewish domination of the media…. Graham has the strong feeling that the Bible says that there are satanic Jews and that’s where our problem arises….”

…Then Nixon called Mitchell, first telling him he wanted the Immigration and Naturalization Service district director in Los Angeles fired or transferred: “The fellow out there in the immigration service is a kike by the name of Rosenberg. He is out. He is to be out….”

… Nixon met with Haldeman, Kissinger, and Ziegler for three hours, going over details, including the list of just over one hundred reporters, news executives, and cameramen and other technicians who had been chosen by the White House for the trip [to China]. “Are there any non-Jews here?” Nixon asked as he read down the list.

… Later, Haldeman came in to tell Nixon that his men had discovered that most of the Watergate leaks were coming from the FBI. “It’s pretty high up,” he said, and named the deputy director. “Mark Felt.” “Now why the hell would he do that?” the President asked. “You can’t say anything about this, because it will screw up our source…. Mitchell is the only one that knows this and he feels very strongly that we better not do anything because … if we move on him, he’ll go out and unload everything. He knows everything that’s to be known in the FBI. He has access to absolutely everything.” “What would you do with Felt?” Nixon said. “Well, I asked Dean…. He says you can’t prosecute him, that he hasn’t committed any crime. Dean’s concerned if you let him know now he’ll go out and go on network television…. I think he wants to be in the top spot.” “That’s a hell of a way for him to get to the top,” Nixon said. “… Is he a Catholic?” “Jewish,” Haldeman answered. “Christ,” said the President. “Put a Jew in there? … What’s the conveyor belt for Felt?” “The Post.” “It could be the Jewish thing,” said Nixon. “I don’t know. It’s always a possibility.”

…Ehrlichman and Haldeman were most faithful scribes, filling hundreds of pages as the meetings in Aspen Lodge went on day after day behind the chain-link fences and spotlights on the perimeter of the two-hundred-acre mountain retreat. Their notes quoting the President and recording his orders included: “Not brains, we want loyalty”; “Foreign Service appointments—based first on loyalty then competence”; “Get good hacks in the departments as Secretaries under this system”; “Fewer people talk to the President—cut the staff”; “Eliminate the politicians, except George Bush. He’d do anything for the cause”; “Do quotas—balance—Too many Jews. Tell Richardson this in spades”; “Italian, Mexican—couldn’t find any. Plenty of blacks—must keep some incompetent blacks”; “Publicize Ash and Shultz as Catholic”; “Genius needs to be recognized—e.g. HAK. Henry is a rag merchant, starts at 50 percent to get 25 percent. That’s why he’s so good with the Russians.”

END CITATION

Source: Richard Nixon: Alone in the White House by Richard Reeves

See Parts 1 and 2.

Watch this documentary about Nixon, which features many recordings of him speaking, often juxtaposed with other footage of what he was speaking about. It is obviously intended to harm his reputation according to conventional standards of public morality, but I imagine most visitors to this blog will view it more sympathetically. Much of it is hilarious.

You can’t help but be struck by the parallels between Nixon and Trump. Nixon also seemed to be engaged in a war against political correctness while pretending to stay within its boundaries. And, like Trump, Nixon sensed that the entire Establishment, including the press and elements of the government apparatus, was working to undermine him. It was largely his feeling of grievance about this that led him to resort to underhand methods. His logic was: they are playing unfair against me, I will play unfair against them. Will Trump make similar choices and will his presidency end the same way?

A few days ago, in another post, I mentioned Richard Reeves’ book “Nixon: Alone in the White House” and how it was full of Nixon’s pungent comments about Jews. I’ve been looking through it again. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in there. I’m going to post some excerpts in a series of posts. We’ll start with one excerpt about the episode I mentioned in the previous article. It seems I misremembered it, in fact. I thought it was about General de Gaulle, whom Nixon really admired. In fact, it involved another French President, Georges Pompidou.

BEGIN CITATION

The President’s good mood ended on February 26. “This is as mad as I’ve ever seen him,” Haldeman told Ehrlichman that day. The President was pacing in the Oval Office cursing Jews because of demonstrations across the country against Georges Pompidou, the president of France.

The French leader was on an eight-day state visit and had spent the first two days at Camp David and in Washington, talking with Nixon before going on to dinners and speeches in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. At every stop, Pompidou and his wife were booed and jeered by angry crowds protesting a French decision to sell 110 Mirage jet fighters to the new revolutionary government of Libya, headed by a twenty-seven-year-old army colonel named Muammar al-Quaddafi, while refusing to sell 50 of the planes to Israel.

In Chicago the demonstrators got close enough to rough up Pompidou and spit on his wife. “This is unconscionable,” raged Nixon. “The fucking Jews think they can run the world. Well…” And on and on.

He decided right there to postpone the sale and delivery of twenty-five U.S. Phantom jets and eighty Skyhawks to Israel—a sale that he had secretly approved only two weeks before in meetings with Prime Minister Golda Meir. Turning to Kissinger, he said, “I don’t want any more Jews in here to talk about the Middle East.”

Then he read that both Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Mayor John Lindsay were boycotting the France-America Society dinner honoring the Pompidous at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. “I’m going then, goddamn them,” he said.

As for the city and its mayor, the President signed off on a long memo to Ehrlichman that began with an order: “Cut all federal projects you can find which provide aid for New York City…. Discontinue or delay programs with discretionary funding which directly aid the City government, concentrating on three departments vital to the City’s needs—HEW, HUD and Transportation.”

The President flew to New York on March 2 for the French-American dinner. Protesters were chanting outside the hotel and Nixon used them to get a couple of laughs. Toasting the French president, Nixon said: “When I learned that President and Madame Pompidou were coming to the United States, I wanted them to see our country, the United States, as a President of the United States saw it….” He paused. The audience of seventeen hundred paused, too, for a second and then broke into laughter and applause. Nixon picked up, “And I must say, we overdid it a bit, as we usually do.” More laughter.

The front page of The New York Times the next morning included four separate stories on the dinner. The headline across the top of page one began: “NIXON OFFERS HIS APOLOGY.” Below that was a story with the headline “JEWS AFFRONTED,” reporting on Pompidou’s canceling a planned meeting with American Jewish leaders.

END CITATION

Here are some extracts from the NYT article

BEGIN CITATION

Even as President Nixon prepared to fly to New York for a dinner in honor of the French President that neither Governor Rockefeller nor Mayor Lindsay, would attend, Mr. Pompidou affronted Jewish leaders by abruptly canceling a morning meeting arranged with them at the Waldorf Astoria.

The Jewish leaders who were to have met with the French head of state issued a statement denouncing President Pompidou’s “rudeness.” They said they were “appalled at this act of discourtesy.”

Later, in response to a reporter’s question about this statement, Mr. Pompidou said in riposte, “Where is courtesy?”

The Jewish leaders said that the conference had been arranged more than a month ago through French officials. It was reconfirmed by the French Embassy last Friday, they said, and the first they knew of any cancellation came about 10 A.M., an hour before the scheduled meeting, when a reporter asked for comment on Mr. Pompidou’s change of plan.

Half an hour later, they said, someone called from the French consulate general to say that President Pompidou probably, would be unable to see them and to suggest that French Foreign Minister Maurice Schumann meet them instead.

Dr. William A. Wexler of Savannah, Ga., president of B’nai B’rith, retorted that the Jewish leaders had come from all over the country to hear President Pompidou’s explanation of the controversial sale of jet fighter planes to Libya, and that they would accept no substitute.

Waited Several Hours

They waited several hours in the hotel, hoping that President Pompidou, who had gone to the United Nations for lunch with Secretary General U Thant, might arrange to see them afterward at the Pompidou suite in the Waldorf Towers.

END CITATION

Source

For over 2000 years, the Jews have been hated and oppressed by every single group of goyim they met.

And somehow, people still defend these goyim.

What defense can be made for a people who spend thousands of years hating a group of innocent victims for no reason?

In his new biography “Being Nixon: A Man Divided,” Evan Thomas concedes a point. Richard Nixon, he writes, “was not paranoid; the press and the ‘Georgetown set’ really were out to get him.”

Carl Bernstein’s review found Thomas’ book deficient in its failure to chronicle the “endemic criminality” of the Nixon presidency.

Yet, recent revelations suggest that “endemic criminality” is a phrase that might well be applied to the newsroom of The Washington Post when Bob Woodward and Bernstein worked there.

Consider. In “All the President’s Men,” Woodward and Bernstein admit that, in collusion with Post editors and with the approval of Post lawyers, they approached half a dozen Watergate grand jurors.

Admitting this was a “seedy venture,” they assured us no grand juror had violated his or her oath, and they got nothing.

Yet, from recent books by Jeff Himmelman about Ben Bradlee, Max Holland about Mark Felt, a.k.a. “Deep Throat,” and Geoff Shepard’s “The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down,” out today, the truth is otherwise.

Woodward and Bernstein deceived us about not breaching the grand jury.

They had. The source identified in their book as “Z,” a “woman … in a position to have considerable knowledge of the secret activities of the White House and CRP [Committee to Re-Elect the President]” was a grand juror.

Notes of Bernstein’s conversation with this woman were found by Himmelman in Bradlee’s files. Post editor Barry Sussman also told
Alan Pakula, who made the movie starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, that Carl had breached the grand jury.

What does this tell us?

Woodward and Bernstein lied for four decades in denying their success in breaching the grand jury. And Bradlee knew they had been lying.

When Post lawyer E. B. Williams had his ex parte contact with old friend Judge John Sirica, to put the fix in and get the judge not to expose or punish Woodward and Bernstein, Williams almost surely knew the reporters were lying.

In his memoir, Judge Sirica reveals what he would have done had Bernstein and Woodward gotten a grand juror to violate his oath:

“Had they actually obtained information from that grand juror, they would have gone to jail.”

Thus, Woodward and Bernstein, with the collusion of Post editors and lawyers, got a grand juror to violate her oath and spill secrets. Then Bradlee got E.B. Williams, godfather to Sirica’s daughter, to put the fix in with that compliant judge, and all of them covered up the conspiracy.

While pursuing Nixon, the “Georgetown set” was hiding the same sort of mendacities and obstruction of justice that got Nixon’s men prison time.

Nor does it stop there.

As we discovered, a decade ago, “Deep Throat,” whose moniker came from a dirty movie, was FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt.

In giving Woodward information from witness testimony to the grand jury, Felt was violating his oath and engaged in criminal misconduct, which, exposed, would have gotten him fired in disgrace and put in prison, and Woodward implicated as the beneficiary of his crimes.

Woodward and Bernstein benefited mightily from the fruits of Felt’s criminality, getting a Pulitzer for the Post, and having their careers made by collusion with this corrupt civil servant and serial lawbreaker.

The subtitle of the new paperback of “All the President’s Men” is, “The Greatest Reporting Story of All Time.”

Excuse me, but how much reporting does it take to scribble down notes from Mark Felt telling you who said what to the grand jury that day?

This is stenography, not reporting.

What was Felt’s motivation in leaking grand jury secrets to Woodward? Max Holland’s book “Leak” tells the story.

Felt sought to cast acting FBI Director Pat Gray, an honorable man, as an incompetent who could not keep secrets. This would result in Gray being passed over for permanent director. With the FBI top job open, President Nixon would likely turn to — Deputy Director Mark Felt.

Lovely fellow, that Felt.

Of all the Watergate offenses of the Nixon White House, the “Huston Plan” is often called the most terrifying. And what was the plan worked up by my old friend Tom Charles Huston in 1970?

After Black Panthers began murdering cops and a Greenwich Village bomb factory — where an anti-personnel bomb was being prepared to massacre noncommissioned officers and their dates at a dance at Fort Dix — blew up, Huston, with CIA, National Security Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency backing, urged the reinstatement of FBI practices used from FDR to LBJ.

These included warrantless wiretaps and surreptitious entries, “black-bag jobs,” to stem the epidemic of terror bombings.

Nixon OK’d the plan, but rescinded his approval five days later after J. Edgar Hoover’s objection.

And who had been in charge of FBI black-bag jobs in the LBJ era?

Mark Felt. Maybe when Woodward met Deep Throat in that garage, Felt was just casing the place.

YouTube description:

John Ehrlichman & Bob Haldeman
May 13, 1971
498-005
Oval Office

In the middle of a discussion on how to fashion their public relations in regard to what the “average man” cares about, President Richard Nixon and his aides White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman and Chief Domestic Advisor John Ehrlichman discuss the new television show, All in the Family. The episode that Nixon watched and described to his aides in detail dealt with homosexuality. This leads Nixon into a larger discussion of homosexuality in history and more generally. This conversation is featured in the documentary, “Our Nixon.”

(PLEASE NOTE: Censors beeped out 14 seconds of this conversation for “privacy” reasons. NARA archivists used this denotation to protect the privacy of other people, not Nixon. It is highly likely that the president named a person or persons that he knew to be homosexual during the excised material.)

(A short portion of this conversation has already been posted on YouTube as “Nixon Tape Discusses Homosexuals at Bohemian Grove.”)

Whatever you think of the guy, Nixon was the last real President who wasn’t a complete shill for the Jews.

This is, of course, why the Jew media is obsessed with attacking him every chance they get – even until now – as the most evil figure in American history.

Richard Nixon is continually attacked by the filthy Jew media as a heretic and villain.

I wonder why?

Consider these quotes from the man.

———

NIXON: Jewish families are close, but there’s this strange malignancy that seems to creep among them.. radicalism. I can imagine how the fact that Ellsberg is in this must really tear a fella like Henry to pieces.. or Garment. Just like the Rosenbergs and all that. It just has to kill them. I feel horrible about it.

ZIEGLER: Could make up an English name.

HALDEMAN: … Rosenstein could change his name. … [general laughter]

ZIEGLER: It is right. It’s always an “Ellsberg.”

NIXON: Every one’s a Jew. Ellsberg’s a Jew. Halperin’s a Jew.

HALDEMAN: Gelb’s a Jew.

NIXON: But there are [unclear].. Hiss was not a Jew. Very interesting thing. So few of those who engage in espionage.. are Negroes. … In fact, very few of them become Communists. If they do, they like, they get into Angela Davis.. they’re more the capitalist type. And they throw bombs and this and that. But the Negroes…have you ever noticed? … Any Negro spies?

HALDEMAN: Not intellectual enough, not smart enough… not smart enough to be spies.

NIXON: The Jews…the Jews are, are born spies. You notice how many of them are just in up to their necks?

HALDEMAN: A basic deviousness.

———

President Richard Nixon: “We’re going to [put] more of these little Negro bastards on the welfare rolls at $2,400 a family..let people like Pat Moynihan … believe in all that crap. But I don’t believe in it. Work, work..throw ’em off the rolls. That’s the key. … I have the greatest affection for them [blacks], but I know they’re not going to make it for 500 years. They aren’t. You know it, too. The Mexicans are a different cup of tea. They have a heritage. At the present time they steal, they’re dishonest, but they do have some concept of family life. They don’t live like a bunch of dogs, which the Negroes do live like.”

———

President Richard Nixon: “You see: homosexuality, dope, immorality in general..these are the enemies of strong societies. That’s why the Communists and the left-wingers are pushing the stuff; they’re trying to destroy us.”

———

President Richard Nixon: “I don’t want to see this country to go that way. You know what happened to the Greeks. Homosexuality destroyed them. Sure, Aristotle was a homo, we all know that, so was Socrates. […] Do you know what happened to the Romans? The last six Roman emperors were fags. […] You know what happened to the popes? It’s all right that popes were laying the nuns. That’s been going on for years.. centuries. But when the popes, when the Catholic Church went to hell in.. I don’t know, three or four centuries ago.. it was homosexual, and it had to be cleaned out. Now, that’s what happened to Britain; it happened earlier to France.”

———

President Richard Nixon observes: “You know, it’s a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them? I suppose it is because most of them are psychiatrists.”

———

President Richard Nixon: “The Bohemian Grove — which I attend, from time to time — it is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine, with that San Francisco crowd. I can’t shake hands with anybody from San Francisco.”

———

President Richard Nixon tells Bob Haldeman: “Now here’s the point, Bob. Please get the names of the Jews. You know, the big Jewish contributors to the Democrats. Could you please investigate some of the cocksuckers? That’s all.”

———

NIXON: What about the rich Jews? The IRS is full of Jews, Bob.

HALDEMAN: What we ought to do is get a zealot who dislikes those people.

NIXON: Go after them like a son of a bitch.

———

On hearing of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s death, President Richard Nixon exclaims: “Jesus Christ! That old cocksucker!”

———

Bill Rogers has got — to his credit it’s a decent feeling — but somewhat sort of a blind spot on the black thing because he’s been in New York,” Nixon said. “He says well, ‘They are coming along, and that after all they are going to strengthen our country in the end because they are strong physically and some of them are smart.’ So forth and so on.

“My own view is I think he’s right if you’re talking in terms of 500 years,” he said. “I think it’s wrong if you’re talking in terms of 50 years. What has to happen is they have be, frankly, inbred. And, you just, that’s the only thing that’s going to do it, Rose.”

———

President Richard Nixon observes: “The Jews are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality.”

———

I don’t want any Jew at that dinner who didn’t support us in that campaign,” he said. “Is that clear? No Jew who did not support us.”

———

The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy,” Mr. Kissinger said. “And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

———

“I know,” Nixon responded. “We can’t blow up the world because of it.”

———

On the tape, Nixon said he wants to fire Garment for what he felt was an undermining comment, yelling, “Goddamn his Jewish soul!”

———

Nixon said black people couldn’t run Jamaica. “Blacks can’t run it. Nowhere, and they won’t be able to for a hundred years, and maybe not for a thousand. … Do you know, maybe one black country that’s well run?” He gave some guidance on what appointees should be like: “No Jews. We are adamant when I say no Jews. … But I mean don’t say anything don’t let anybody know we didn’t

Jewish. But Mexicans are important. Italians, Eastern Europeans. That sort of thing.”

———

“Some of the Jews picket can raise hell, but the American people are not going to let them destroy our foreign policy — never!” This was a subject to which Nixon repeatedly returned.

———

“What it is, is it’s the insecurity,” he said. “It’s the latent insecurity. Most Jewish people are insecure. And that’s why they have to prove things.” Also they desert from wars.

———

In his discussion with Ms. Woods, Nixon laid down clear rules about who would be permitted to attend the state dinner for Meir — he called it “the Jewish dinner” — after learning that the White House was being besieged with requests to attend.

———

Nixon also strongly hinted that his reluctance to even consider amnesty for young Americans who went to Canada to avoid being drafted during the Vietnam War was because, he told Mr. Colson, so many of them were Jewish.

———

“I didn’t notice many Jewish names coming back from Vietnam on any of those lists; I don’t know how the hell they avoid it,” he said, adding: “If you look at the Canadian-Swedish contingent, they were very disproportionately Jewish. The deserters.”

———

It is a shame he didn’t just declare himself King of America and order the military to shut down the Congress.

He wasn’t perfect – he wasn’t even really very good, at all – but he was certainly the last President with anything resembling a spine.

The latest tapes of President Richard M. Nixon’s private conversations reveal a number of anti-Semitic remarks made by the president. This is not particularly surprising, since previously released tapes also contained hostile comments about Jews by Nixon. But one remark in the latest tapes stands out. Discussing potential judicial nominees with an aide, Nixon said, “No Jews. Is that clear? We’ve got enough Jews. Now if you find some Jew that I think is great, put him on there.”

How could the president make disparaging remarks about Jews and instruct that they be excluded as nominees, and then, in the same breath, declare that he would accept a Jew “that I think is great” (presumably one whose political and social views mirrored Nixon’s)? How could he harbor such apparent dislike of Jews in general, yet feel perfectly comfortable embracing a certain kind of Jew?

There were, in fact, a number of Jews in Nixon’s inner circle, from Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to legal counsel Leonard Garment.

One finds a similar phenomenon with regard to several earlier presidents. A previously unknown diary by Harry Truman, discovered in 2003, revealed that he harbored harsh feelings about Jews. Incensed when former Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. called him about the plight of the refugee ship Exodus in 1947, Truman wrote in his diary, “He [had] no business, whatever to call me. The Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgment on world affairs… The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] P[erson]s as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the under dog.”

Yet Truman, like Nixon, also had a number of Jewish friends and aides, such as his lifelong friend and business partner, Eddie Jacobson, and senior White House advisers David Niles and Max Lowenthal.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s privately expressed views on Jews were not all that different from Nixon’s. While Nixon worried about having too many Jews among judicial nominees, Roosevelt once told his cabinet—according to the account of Treasury Secretary Morgenthau—that there were “too many Jews among federal employees in Oregon.”

Read More

Former President Richard Nixon is heard making anti-Semitic statements in discussions with visitors to the Oval Office and by telephone in White House tapes that were released on Thursday.

The 340 hours of tapes, which cover the period from April 9, 1973 to July 12, 1973, were released by the Nixon Presidential Library. They are the last set of tapes that will be released by the library.

In a phone discussion in mid-April with Henry Kissinger, a Jew who at the time was the national security adviser, Nixon expresses concerns that Jews would torpedo an upcoming U.S.-Soviet summit. If that happened, Nixon said, “Let me say, Henry, it’s gonna be the worst thing that happened to Jews in American history.” He added, “If they torpedo this summit — and it might go down for other reasons — I’m gonna put the blame on them, and I’m going to do it publicly at 9 o’clock at night before 80 million people.”

He continued: “They put the Jewish interest above America’s interest, and it’s about goddamn time that the Jew in America realizes he’s an American first and a Jew second.”

In a tape from May 1 that is labeled by the library as “Garment’s Jewish background,” referring to Nixon aide and lawyer Leonard Garment, Nixon is heard shouting “Goddamn his Jewish soul” after saying he wants to fire Garment for an inappropriate comment.

When asked about appointees, Nixon tells presidential counselor Anne Armstrong there should be “No Jews. We are adamant when I say no Jews. … But Mexicans are important. Italians, Eastern Europeans. That sort of thing.”

Nixon accused the Jews of holding American foreign policy “hostage to Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union,” and added that “the American people are not going to let them destroy our foreign policy — never!”

Read More

• In his letter Elvis Presley said he wanted to help Richard Nixon save the U.S
• Letter led to meeting of counter-culture icon and Right-wing bogeyman
• A new book has revisited the letter that brought the two together

The handwriting was barely legible, a spidery scrawl on American Airlines headed notepaper, written 30,000ft up by a man with a prescription drug-addled brain and an extraordinary request.

‘Dear Mr President,’ it began. ‘I would like to introduce myself. I am Elvis Presley and admire you and Have Great Respect for your office.’

With all the touching candour of a young fan writing to Jim’ll Fix It, the King of Rock ’n’ Roll said he wanted to help Richard Nixon save the U.S. from the hippies, the commies and The Beatles.

But he had a small request. Might he, perhaps, be made some sort of undercover federal agent? Perhaps with his very own ID badge?

It was the sort of missive — five pages long, full of underlinings, misplaced capital letters and eccentric political opinions — that one might have expected to have sailed straight in to a Washington waste paper bin.

But instead it led to one of the most bizarre encounters ever to take place in the White House, an unlikely meeting of counter-culture icon and Right-wing bogeyman that both sides understandably did their best to keep secret.

Now, Letters Of Note, a book on illuminating correspondence from the past to be published in October, has revisited the letter that brought Elvis the Pelvis and Tricky Dicky together.

Thanks to this letter, Presley was saddled for ever with a reputation as one of rock music’s great closet Right-wingers — although, as we will see, the truth may be rather different.

Given the outlandish contents of the letter, it shouldn’t be a huge surprise that the circumstances of how Presley came to write it in December 1970 were similarly weird.

Only a few days earlier at his family home in Memphis, Tennessee, Presley, then 35, had been confronted by his father, Vernon, and wife, Priscilla, over his recklessly lavish spending. That year, Elvis has given family and friends Christmas presents including ten Mercedes cars and 32 handguns.

A sulking Presley headed to the nearest airport and, after a series of random flights around the U.S., took off for Washington on a red-eye flight from Los Angeles.

His mission, close friends believed, was to track down a crucial piece that was missing from his treasured collection of law enforcement paraphernalia — an ID badge from the Washington-based Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Elvis had talked about it endlessly, and it had become an obsession.

As luck would have it, a Californian senator, George Murphy, was travelling on the same flight, and when Presley disclosed his burning ambition to get the badge, the senator (surely stifling the urge to choke in shock on his airline cocktail peanuts) suggested the rock star write to the President offering his services in the war on illicit drugs. Elvis, he suggested, could appeal to young Americans the way a Washington senator never could.

Presley — never the world’s neatest scribbler — got straight to work.

Despite already having a serious problem with the prescription drugs, such as barbiturates, which were later to help kill him, Elvis had been expressing public concern about drug abuse by the young.

He and the President were as one on this, as they were on their vision of America. He wrote: ‘The drug culture, the hippie elements, the SDS [the radical organisation Students for a Democratic Society], Black Panthers, etc. do not [underlined] consider me as their enemy or as they call it “the establishment”. I call it American and I love it.’

He was willing, he wrote, to do whatever was necessary to serve his country, although he did want a small something in return.

‘I can and will do more good if I were made a Federal Agent at Large and I will help out by doing it my way through my communications with people of all ages. First and foremost, I am an entertainer, but all I need is the Federal credentials.’

And in case the President dismissed him as just a swivel-hipped crooner, Presley insisted he had the necessary qualifications: ‘I have 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.’

Could Presley — a man who only needed to look in his own bathroom cabinet to know about ‘drug abuse’ — really be serious?

He certainly seemed to be in earnest as he gave Nixon his room number at the Washington Hotel, where he said he was registered under the name Jon Burrows. ‘I will be here for as long as it takes to get the credentials of a Federal agent,’ he said hopefully.

He wrote he would love to talk the matter over with the President, but that he had one other request: that the whole matter be ‘kept very private’.

And in another reinforcement of his credentials, Presley noted he had just been nominated as one of ‘America’s Ten Most Outstanding Young Man (sic)’. Nixon, he added in a sycophantic postscript that must have appealed to the supremely conceited politician, was — he believed — one of the country’s Top 10 Outstanding Men, too.

When Presley touched down in Washington in the early hours of December 21, he took his letter straight round to the White House himself and handed it in at the gate.

Nixon’s advisers were soon discussing what they should do about it.

The President — strait-laced and ever one to smell a rat — was uneasy about meeting the singer.

But one of his top aides, Egil ‘Bud’ Krogh (who was later to be jailed as one of the Watergate conspirators), was a Presley fan who saw the huge PR potential of getting the superstar on board.

In a memo to Nixon he noted how ‘two of youth’s folk heroes, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin’, had recently died of drug-related causes.

If young people were going to emulate rock stars, wouldn’t it be better if those stars championed ‘self-motivation and discipline’ as the key to success and ‘not artificial chemical euphoria’?

He suggested Presley might even be persuaded to record an anti-drugs album — called Get High On Life — at a state-run rehabilitation clinic. Another adviser agreed: the President needed all the help he could get in appealing to younger voters.

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