The National Archives in Washington holds the Constitution. It holds the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Every year, people write in asking for copies of the country’s most treasured documents. And out of every single item in that building, do you know which one gets requested the most? Not one of those.
It’s a photograph of Elvis Presley shaking hands with President Richard Nixon. And the story behind how that picture came to exist is even stranger than the picture itself.
It started with a family argument. In December 1970, Elvis’s father, Vernon, and his wife, Priscilla, confronted him about his Christmas spending. He’d blown through more than $100,000 on gifts — including 32 handguns and ten Mercedes-Benzes. Elvis did not take the criticism well. He walked out of Graceland, drove to the airport, and got on the very next plane leaving Memphis. He didn’t check where it was going. It happened to be going to Washington, D.C.
Being in the capital gave him an idea. Elvis collected police badges — he had dozens from departments all over America. But the one he wanted most, and couldn’t get, was a federal narcotics badge. So he decided he’d ask the President for one. He grabbed a Colt .45 pistol off his wall at home as a gift, boarded another plane back to Washington, and wrote his request by hand, six pages long, on the plane.
What Really Happened When Elvis Met Richard Nixon
The letter is real, and you can still see it today. It opens with one of the funniest sentences ever written to a sitting President: “First, I would like to introduce myself. I am Elvis Presley.” In it, he offered to work undercover, claiming his fame would let him infiltrate the drug culture, and asked to be made a “Federal Agent at Large.” Then he did something nobody does. He drove to the White House gate at around 6:30 in the morning and handed his letter to a guard.
Unbelievably, it worked. Within hours he was standing in the Oval Office — dressed in a velvet suit, a huge gold belt, chains hanging down his chest, holding a pistol in a display case as a present for the President. He told Nixon plainly: “I’m on your side.” Nixon handed over the badge. Elvis was so thrilled that he hugged the President of the United States, which absolutely nobody did.
Nixon, thoroughly thrown, punched Elvis’s bodyguard on the arm.
Then came the strangest twist of all. Elvis asked for the whole thing to be kept secret. A reporter finally broke the story a year later — and hardly anyone cared. It sat forgotten for years.
Then in 1988, a newspaper mentioned that the National Archives would sell you a print of the photo. Within a single week, 8,000 people wrote in asking for one. The requests have never stopped since. Today that photo outranks the Constitution itself, and the Archives gift shop sells it on T-shirts, coffee mugs, fridge magnets and snow globes.