THE KING & THE PRESIDENT

THE STRAIGHT DOPE

Part 1

After his landslide reelection in 1968, President Richard Nixon decided to extend an olive branch to America’s disaffected youth, hoping to show them he wasn’t quite as unhip and belligerent as thought. Having identified youth drug abuse as America’s “Number 1 Problem," he hoped to thaw the generational cold war by rapping with a rock star.

In April, 1969, his press secretary, Ron Zeigler, invited Jimi Hendrix to the White House for a Fireside Chat. The guitarist’s manager, Mike Jeffery, formerly a British MI6 spy/assassin, turned the offer down without informing Jimi who, at the time was finishing his last tour with the Experience. Weeks later, Hendrix was busted for heroin possession in Toronto. By the end of the year – due to the bust and his association with the Black Panthers -- the star earned himself a place on the Nixon’s “Security Index,” a list of celebrity "subversives" to be rounded up and placed in detainment camps in the event of a national emergency.

The two prime candidates for the Voodoo Child’s replacement were now James  Douglas Morrison and Janis Lyn Joplin. The son of the Navy’s youngest admiral, Jim --named after General Douglas MacArthur himself -- seemed a likely candidate in spite of the being a draft dogger, a cop baiter, and a loose canon. But that spring of 1969 the "Erotic Politician" scandalized all decent Americans by allegedly exposing himself at a Miami concert. Supporting the guardians of national decency --Jackie Gleason, Pat Boone, and Anita Bryant, the orange juice queen -- Nixon condemned the singer.  

So that just left Janis. Coincidentally, the Queen of the Blues was to grace the cover of that April 7 Newsweek. But bad luck struck again. Nixon’s predecessor, President Eisenhower, suffered a fatal heart attack days before and bumped her from the cover. “Motherfucker!” exclaimed Janis publicly. “Fourteen heart attacks and the son of a bitch has to croak in my week. MY week!”

Discouraged, Nixon backburnered the idea of a détente summit with a rock idol. Then, at last, a stroke of luck: at Christmastime, 1970, he received a handwritten note from the King of Rock and Roll himself. In it, Elvis denounced the Beatles and Jane Fonda, and offered his services as “ambassador to America’s troubled youth.” Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin had both fatally OD’d only months before. 

So the President was only too happy to invite the King to the Oval Office for an impromptu summit....