Video: 'Almanac: When Nixon met Elvis'

(Monday, December 21, 1970, 12:45-1:00 p.m. EST) — Rock music icon Elvis Presley, 35, engineered a meeting with U.S. President Richard Nixon today at the White House, where he expressed his patriotism and explained how he believed he could reach out to hippies to help combat the drug culture that he and the president abhorred.

Presley asked Nixon for a Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs badge, to add to similar items he had begun collecting and to signify official sanction of his patriotic efforts.

Nixon, who apparently found the encounter awkward, expressed a belief that Presley could send a positive message to young people and that it was, therefore, important that he “retain his credibility.”

Video: 'When Elvis Met Nixon'

Presley also told Nixon that The Beatles, the British rock music group he had entertained at his home in Bel Air, California, in August 1965, and whose songs he regularly performed in concert during the era, exemplified what he saw as a trend of anti-Americanism.

Despite the fame of both Nixon and Presley, the meeting was not reported in the media at the time and went unnoticed for more than a year until Jack Anderson’s nationally syndicated newspaper column of Jan. 27, 1972.

On hearing reports of the meeting, former Beatle Paul McCartney later said that he “felt a bit betrayed. … The great joke was that we were taking [illegal] drugs, and look what happened to him,” a reference to Presley’s early death in 1977, linked to prescription drug abuse.