Thread by @Monaheart1229

And the Trump/Nixon parallels continue to mount! #ThursdayThoughts #VoteBlue
washingtonpost.com/history/2018/1…

2/In a letter to Nixon, while sitting on a plane, Elvis wrote: "“I am Elvis Presley and admire you and Have Great Respect for your office,” he wrote in a childish chicken scratch on the first of six sheets of American Airlines stationery. “I talked to Vice President Agnew in

3/"Palm Springs three weeks ago and expressed my concern for our country.” Elvis’s concerns paralleled the president’s (“The Drug Culture, The Hippie Elements, The SDS, Black Panther, etc.”), and the King boasted of his expertise: “I have done an in-depth study of Drug Abuse and

4/"Communist Brainwashing Techniques.” He did not reveal that his “study of Drug Abuse” consisted mainly of engaging in it. Instead, he volunteered his services as an anti-drug ambassador to American youth, a job that he felt required credentials.

5/" “I can and will do more good if I were Made a Federal Agent At Large . .. " He could be reached, he confided, at the Hotel Washington. “I will be here for as long as it takes to get the credentials of a Federal Agent."

6/"At 6:30 that morning, Dec. 21, 1970, Elvis climbed out of his rented limousine at the northwest gate of the White House. With his swollen, reddened face and his black cape, the King looked, Schilling later recalled, like Dracula.

7/"He handed his letter to an astounded guard and departed...Elvis, meanwhile, had limo'd to the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Meeting with Deputy Director John Finlator, he volunteered to fight drugs and offered to donate $5,000 to assist the bureau in that battle.

8/"Then he made his pitch for a badge. Finlator declined the donation and refused to part with a shield. “I can't,” he said. “I absolutely can't let you have one." Near tears, Elvis phoned his hotel to relay the bad news, and Schilling informed him that a White House secretary

9/"had just called to say, “The president will see Mr. Presley." When Elvis arrived at the Oval Office, he was, according to Goldman, the biographer, “high as a kite.” Stoned on speed, scratching at his facial rash and still wearing his purple velvet suit, black cape and dark

9/"shades, Elvis came bearing gifts for the president — a Colt .45 pistol and a supply of silver bullets. “The Secret Service,” recalls former White House aide Steve Bull, “viewed that quite dimly.” The gun was whisked away, as were Elvis’s cronies —

10/"Schilling and bodyguard Sonny West, who had just flown in from Graceland While the Memphis Mafiosi cooled their heels elsewhere, Krogh escorted Elvis into the Oval Office. The King was struck dumb. “For the first 30 seconds, he couldn't say anything,” Krogh recalls.

11/"“Then the president walked over and started a conversation.” Immediately Elvis whipped out his collection of police badges and showed them to Nixon. Then he displayed snapshots of his wife and daughter. “It got to be,” Krogh recalls, “like show and tell."

12/"Unfortunately for the American record industry, Nixon's now-famous taping system had not yet been installed. But Krogh's notes of the meeting, written that day for “the president's file,” capture, in perfectly bland bureaucratic prose, the surrealism of the conversation:

13/"“Presley indicated that he had been playing Las Vegas and the president indicated that he was aware of how difficult it is to perform in Las Vegas." Soon Elvis was regaling Nixon with a speed-fueled monologue on the evils of drugs, communist propaganda and the Beatles, who

14/"were, he said, anti-American. Nixon nodded in agreement and observed that it was young drug users who were in the vanguard of the protest movements. Elvis, a 35-year-old drug user, emotionally assured the president that he was on his side. And so it went.

15/"Elvis kept scratching at his rash and volunteering to fight dope. Nixon kept nodding in agreement and reminding the King of a public figure's need to retain his credibility...As he headed out, Elvis asked if Nixon would shake hands with his buddies. Nixon agreed. While aides

16/"fetched Schilling and West, the president sat down to sign a stack of papers. When he finished, he turned to an aide and asked, “What was this I just signed?” Elvis thought that was hilarious. When the King's cronies arrived, Nixon punched the burly West playfully on the

17/"shoulder. “You've got a couple of big ones here,” he told Elvis. The president gave “the guys” White House cuff links, but that wasn't enough for Elvis: “You know, Mr. President, they've got wives.” So Nixon gave them each a souvenir White House brooch.

18/"And then the four men shook hands and posed for the 28 pictures that are now the most requested photographs in the National Archives. The whole bizarre encounter lasted less than half an hour. At Elvis’s request, it was kept secret, and White House staffers considered the

19/"whole thing so trivial that they didn’t even bother to leak it to the press. Thirteen months later, in January 1972, columnist Jack Anderson, tipped off by Finlator, broke the story: “By presidential dictum, Elvis Presley, the swivel-hipped singer, has been issued a federal

20/"narcotics badge,” he wrote. “The emotional Presley was so overwhelmed at getting his own genuine gold-plated badge that tears sprang from his eyes and he grabbed President Nixon in a Hollywood bear hug."

21/"Coming at the height of the Vietnam War and at the start of the presidential campaign, Anderson’s revelation caused barely a ripple. It was only years later, after Nixon’s resignation and Elvis’s death, that the meeting took on the status of legend. Today, it seems more and

22/"more like a symbol of the absurdity of the era: Here was the most famous entertainer in history, strung out on drugs, coming to the White House to denounce dope and convince the president to give him a narcotics agent’s badge.

23/"And the president, soon to be swept out of power on a sea of lies, keeps reminding him of the need to retain credibility.But neither resignation in disgrace nor a drug-induced death can dim the appeal of these American icons. This spring, Nixon was back yet again, an éminence

24/"grise peddling a new book and appearing on “Today” and “Meet the Press” for the first time in 20 years. Meanwhile, Elvis — who never died, according to one recent book, and whose ghost has appeared to many respectable Americans, according to another —

25/"showed up, balding but still stoned, on Donald Trump’s yacht in “Doonesbury." WaPo, 10/11/18
Fascinating. History is wildly repetitive, and, it would seem especially with respect to the ironies pointed out in this article.