When Elvis Presley contacted President Nixon out of his mind: “He was totally stoned”
By now, Elvis Presley is a figure of purest Americana, for good and for ill.
There’s no real way of talking about the man beneath ‘The King’ because, as many people who knew him personally will attest, for the last decade and a half of his life, he was lost in the persona of ‘The King’.
He was a drug-addled, swollen shell of his former self. One who could still absolutely tear it up on stage, but only because that was the only thing he knew how to do. It was the closest thing he had to a livelihood, and so no matter the state he was in, if he was rolled up to the venue and squeezed into one of his signature spangly jumpsuits, he could still knock it out of the park. Singing as well as he ever did and performing with a deathless swagger.
The trouble is, as any rock musician will tell you, that the gig is only two hours of the day. There are 22 hours left of it, and while the amount of barbiturates Elvis was on towards the end of his life probably cut that in half, that still left eleven long hours spent losing himself to paranoia and depression. Presley was a mess, but there was a deeper problem than that. The fact that he was Elvis Presley meant that people took his drug-addled demands more seriously than most.
Case in point, the two interactions that Presley had with sitting Presidents of the United States. The first being his infamous deal with Richard Nixon, where he contacted Tricky Dick and asked to be sworn in as an official narcotics agent. Ostensibly so he could join the fight against the evils of drug addiction, but really so that he could officially traffic his own Herculean supply of drugs across state lines.
However, if you’ve spent much time on parts of the internet like this one, you’ve almost certainly heard that story before. What you might not have heard about are his dealings with Jimmy Carter.
What did Elvis Presley have to do with Jimmy Carter?
There are actually more things connecting Presley and Carter than you’d think.
Not just because both of them are proud Southern boys, Presley hailing from Tupelo, Mississippi and Carter born and raised in Plains, Georgia. They were also, bizarrely, related. Very, very distantly, mind you, sixth cousins once removed, but if you can say you’re related to the most famous person in the world, you dine off that as much as you can.
They met a couple of times, but the one interaction with ‘The King’ that stayed with Carter the most was one that occurred shortly after he was sworn in as president. As a sign of the cultural capital that Elvis carried even at his least relevant, Presley calling people about a sheriff he knew personally who was having legal trouble got him on the phone to The White House on a direct line to the president himself. By the sounds of it, though, Presley himself probably didn’t know much about it.
Of the call, Carter said, “He was totally stoned and didn’t know what he was saying. His sentences were almost incoherent.”
Carter eventually managed to work out what Presley was talking about, and in his words, tried “to ease Presley out of his paranoid delusions; calming his fears that he was being ‘shadowed’ by sinister forces and that his friend was being framed.”
Sometimes, it really isn’t good to be The King.