Elvis/Nixon

This is a fact.

Now here’s a shot at the cynical political truth: every American president* in the history of forever has been desperate to seem hipper, cooler, younger, fresher and more “in touch” with the popular culture than they usually are**.  They make (ultimately lame) jokes; they misappropriate pop songs for rallies; they hold photo ops with icons. 

And no photo opportunity has ever seemed stranger — to me, at least, looking in from the outside — than when, on December 20th, 1970, Elvis Presley met Richard Nixon, a meeting wherein Nixon gave Elvis a Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs badge and Elvis denounced hippies and gave Nixon a pistol. 

Then they took this photograph:

I can’t imagine Elvis seemed very cool to the youth of America at the moment; he’d already made his best pictures and had his “comeback” special. But Nixon thought he might boost his image with the youth and we wound up with the above photograph: Elvis Presley meeting Richard Nixon (!!!) denouncing hippies and drugs and being about as square as you’d never expect. 

Writing in The Village Voice on the death of Elvis, Lester Bangs described Elvis as something to

…be seen not only as a phenomenon that exploded in the fifties to help shape the psychic jailbreak of the sixties but ultimately as a perfect cultural expression of what the Nixon years were all about. 

That’s right: Elvis, uncool. Less than seven years after this photo, he was dead.

Yet, look again at the photo. Elvis is just oozing cool. In front of one of the stodgiest, most universally despised and ridiculed presidents in history, Elvis, as bigger than life icon, was still cool. 

Recalling seeing an older, fatter, dopier Elvis in concert, Bangs wrote:

…he had but to ever so slightly move one shoulder muscle, not even a shrug, and the girls in the gallery hit by its ray screamed, fainted, howled in heat. Literally, every time this man moved any part of his body the slightest centimeter, tens or tens of thousands of people went berserk. Not Sinatra, not Jagger, not the Beatles, nobody you can come up with ever elicited such hysteria among so many. 

And this after a decade and a half of crappy records, of making a point of not trying. 

So maybe Nixon had a point. I can’t say because I wasn’t there. 

All I can say is: watch Allan Arkush’s Elvis Meets Nixon, screening this month on Showtime.

Notes