National Portrait Gallery | Face to Face blog

December 21, 1970: Elvis Presley Meets President Richard Nixon

As a coda to the sixties and as an introduction to the seventies, the meeting of Elvis Presley and President Richard Nixon was a moment that seems as incongruous as it is resonant. Albeit a more refined and less rebellious Elvis than the young rocker of the 1950s, the Elvis who entered the White House that day still signified a younger and more out-of-control America to the White House occupants; he represented the youthful America with whom the Nixon and Johnson administrations had butted heads over recent years.

Elvis, however, was not perceived as such by the rest of America. Having served in the army for two years in the late 1950s and having made much cinematic bubblegum over the 1960s, Elvis was rejected by the empowered youth of 1970, first for the British wave and then in favor of the newly recharged American rock-and-roll experience symbolized by Jim Morrison and the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, Iron Butterfly, and Jefferson Airplane. By 1970, American youth saw Elvis as mainstream, if not bygone.

The meeting in the Nixon Oval Office that day was a monumental twentieth-century encounter. Jerry Schilling, one of Elvis's closest friends, accompanied him to the White House. Schilling writes:

We were probably the most unusually dressed visitors [the president] had in some time—along with Elvis in his gabardine . . . and I was in a leather jacket. But that didn't seem to faze the president a bit. So, we talked some football with him, handicapping the college season. There was a White House photographer in the room, and we all had our pictures taken with the president. As the photos were snapped, I couldn't stop thinking about just how far Elvis had taken me in all our years and all our travels. . . . Here were two great men, but great men who had found their success to be extremely complicated, and as different as they were, I think there was a mutual understanding between them.

 

Egil “Bud” Krogh was the facilitator of the meeting and an executive in the Nixon administration. When asked last week to comment on the experience, Krogh told NPG, “It's sometimes hard to believe that I had the good fortune to be the White House staff person who got to follow up on Elvis's request for a meeting with the president on December 21, 1970. Of course, without Dwight Chapin, the president's staff secretary who pushed for the meeting, and without Elvis's own dedication to getting a badge from the narcotics bureau from President Nixon, the meeting would never have happened. But the stars were lined up and the rest was history, as proven by one of the most iconic pictures ever taken. It was a fun day!”

 

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

Cited:

Schilling, Jerry (with Chuck Crisafulli).  Me and a Guy Named Elvis: My Lifelong Friendship with Elvis Presley.  New York: Gotham/Penguin Books, 2006.

The author also wishes to thank Egil "Bud" Krogh for his time last week and for sharing his story of his White House experience with Elvis and President Nixon.          

Images: 

Richard Milhaus Nixon, 1913-1994/Norman Rockwell (1894-1978)/Oil on canvas, 1968/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; donated to the people of the United States of America by the Richard M. Nixon Foundation

Elvis Presley, 1935-1977/Ralph Wolfe Cowan (1931- )/ Oil on canvas, 1976-1988/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of R.W. Cowan

President Nixon and Elvis Presley in the Oval Office on December 21, 1970/Photo courtesy United States National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC

The Secession of South Carolina, December 20, 1860

But the means which may be sufficient to prevent diseases are not usually sufficient to remedy them. In slight cases of recent date, they may be; but additional means are necessary to restore health, when the system has been long and deeply disordered. Such, at present, is the condition of our political system. The very causes which have occasioned its disorders have, at the same time, led to consequences not to be removed by the means which would have prevented them. They have destroyed the equilibrium between the two great sections, and alienated the mutual attraction between them, which led to the formation of the Union, and the establishment of a common government for the promotion of the welfare of all.

—John C. Calhoun, A Disquisition on Government and a Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States

The voice of sectionalism had been dead for ten years when South Carolina seceded from the Union on December 20, 1860. John C. Calhoun served his state and country as a representative, secretary of war, vice president, and ultimately, senator. He had been very much a nationalist until he could no longer tolerate the federal threat of increasing the tariff and the abolitionist discourse. Calhoun, however, had spoken loudly enough in his day for the echo yet to be heard in the legislative halls of the state in the weeks after the 1860 presidential election.

The South Carolina Ordinance of Secession—the first signature act that would propel the United States into civil war—was not the first time that the state had reacted against federal sovereignty. In 1832, led by Calhoun, South Carolina approved an Ordinance of Nullification, which was intended to serve notice on the United States government that South Carolina would not tolerate a high tariff. An eventual reduction of the tariff caused the South Carolina state legislature to repeal its act of nullification, but the debate over the rights of the states versus centralized federal control was merely brought down to a simmer from a boil. It would boil again soon, and then catch fire.

South Carolina's secession was the first in a series to occur before Abraham Lincoln's inauguration in March 1861. As if to instruct the rest of the South in the protocol of rebellion, South Carolina not only led the way in secession from the United States, but it would also provide the first battleground for the Civil War when Fort Sumter was fired upon by Confederate troops on April 12, 1861.

 

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

 

Special thanks to James Barber, NPG historian, for discussing sectionalism and secession with me during the preparation of this article.

For an interesting story on the multiple copies of the South Carolina Ordinance of Secession, please visit the South Carolina State Archives link: http://wayback.archive-it.org/1455/20090406143534/http://www.scdah.sc.gov/virtual/ordsec.htm

For a brief account of the Battle of Fort Sumter, please see the National Park Service link: http://www.nps.gov/hps/abpp/battles/sc001.htm

 

Image:  John Caldwell Calhoun, 1782-1850/Unidentified artist/Daguerreotype, 1843/National Portrait gallery, Smithsonian Institution/ NPG.78.64

 

Patti Smith at NPG

Photograph by Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery

On Saturday, December 11, artist, musician, and National Book Award winner Patti Smith visited the National Portrait Gallery and spoke to a capacity crowd in the McEvoy Auditorium. In Washington to sign copies of her award-winning memoir Just Kids, Smith was interviewed by NPG historian David Ward. Smith told stories of her arrival in New York in 1969 and of her relationship with the late artist Robert Mapplethorpe.

Smith spoke of her passion for poetry, music, and the arts and also took time to address the controversy over NPG’s “Hide/Seek” exhibition. Of the removal of David Wojnarowicz's video A Fire in My Belly from the show, she stated, "I think it probably brought more attention to the video than it would have gotten anyway." Smith continued, "This exhibition is so strong and so beautiful and so diverse and so elegant. I was just nearly moved to tears by it. And I don't think it should be clouded by this one issue; that is unfortunate." (view the archived webcast)

Among her concluding remarks, she spoke of her life as an artist and of the concentrated effort it takes to create. As an homage to William Blake and to lives dedicated to art in the face of life's challenges, Smith performed her work “In My Blakean Year.”

Smith noted, "I went to New York City looking for a job [in 1969] and not just to fulfill my dreams as an artist. I went there because there was employment at the time, but really—I would tell anyone, especially a young person—what they should be interested in is the evolution of their work. It doesn't matter where they're working. . . . The really important thing is to focus on your work. . . . It's work—it's hard work. The first thing is developing your work into something worthy."

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

Photograph by Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery

Just Kids: Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe

Patti Smith discusses her National Book Award-winning memoir Just Kids this Saturday, 2pm at the National Portrait Gallery.

In 1967, the twenty-three-year-old Patti Smith left her aimless life in southern New Jersey to try her luck in New York City. Seeking what, exactly? A job? A job in the arts? Something tangible? Perhaps. But more a sense of transcendent liberation and self-expression fueled by her sense that, ultimately, she would make her own way in the world.

It turned out she quickly found a soul mate to help make this journey. Arriving at a friend’s apartment, she viewed a beautiful man with a faun-like head, asleep. She lost track of this youth but then found him again, and he introduced himself. 

“My name is Bob.”
“Bob,” I said, really looking at him for the first time. “Somehow you don’t seem like a Bob to me. Is it okay if I call you Robert?”

It was Robert Mapplethorpe, another artistic scuffler in the city, another visionary convinced of his own ultimate success.

Patti Smith tells the story of her relationship with Mapplethorpe against the backdrop of the 1970s and 1980s in her affecting and lovely memoir, Just Kids. It recently won the National Book Award for nonfiction. During the 1970s Smith established herself as a poet, artist, rocker, and all-around American troubadour in the tradition of Walt Whitman; her career is ongoing today. Mapplethorpe, in his wholehearted belief of Smith, was essential to her career and sense of self. She reciprocated that belief, and they remained close even after Mapplethorpe finished the long process of coming out as a gay man.

Smith writes in a brief afterword to Just Kids that she always intended “one day to write our story,” and this is the fulfillment of that promise. The book begins and ends with his final days, dying of AIDS in 1989. In the first scene, Smith listens to his labored breathing over the phone on the night he passed away. At the end, she tells about the last time they spoke and his falling asleep: “So my last image was as the first. A sleeping youth cloaked in light, who opened his eyes with a smile of recognition for someone had never been a stranger.” When word came of Mapplethorpe’s death, Smith played Puccini’s aria “Vissi d’arte” from Tosca: I have lived for love, I have lived for Art. Just Kids shows how great art comes from great love.

- David C. Ward, National Portrait Gallery