Elvis Presley left Memphis without any money and got on a series of planes between Memphis, Washington and LA.
He went to Washington most likely to see Joyce Bova, who was a Federal Government employee – and during the flights and meeting various people, the gift he intended to give to Bova was instead given to then President Nixon.
Elvis arrived in Washington and was picked up at the airport. He dropped off a letter addressed to President Nixon requesting a meeting to discuss how the King of Rock and Roll could help Nixon fight drugs – including getting credentials as a “federal agent at large.” to the president at 6.30 a.m.
Then he checked into the Hotel Washington again. Elvis tried to get in touch with the BNDD’s director John Ingersoll. This failed, but there was a call from President Nixon’s deputy counsel, asking Elvis to meet him in 45 minutes at the Old Executive Office Building on the White House grounds.
Elvis Presley was almost at the Oval Office when he remembered he still had a gun and he turned over an ankle holstered pistol to the astonished security team.
He gives Nixon a chrome-plated Colt .45 while the President agreed to give him a Narcotics Bureau badge – but only after learning that the chief of the narcotics bureau had turned down the same request earlier that day and told Presley the only person who could overrule his decision was the President.
There Elvis, Sonny and Jerry met with President Nixon. To everyone’s surprise, except for Elvis’ , they really hit it off, and Elvis left the following day with that what he came for: the BNDD badge.
At Elvis’ request, the meeting remained secret for more than a year until The Washington Post broke the story on January 27th, 1972.
In the internet era: The documents about the Presley-Nixon summit consumed so much of the administration time of the Nixon Presidential Library that when the internet happened in the 1990s for the public – they were some of the first documents made available for download, just to reduce the government cost of processing copy requests.
So in that sense, that meeting did help to improve Nixon’s image and legacy.
https://npg.si.edu/blog/december-21-197 ... hard-nixon
photos of this do not really capture how intense and even glowing Elvis' eyes are
when I stood in front of this in 1987, all I could think was how stoned Elvis was in the photo