“Within minutes of Elvis arriving in my office the wheels are already turning to get a meeting set up with the President.”
Bud Krogh enjoys the moment as Nixon and Elvis chat. Photo by Oliver F. Atkins
Bud Krogh will never forget the phone call he received the morning of December 21, 1970. On the other line was Dwight Chapin, deputy assistant to President Richard M. Nixon.
“He said, ‘Bud, the king is here.’ And I looked at the White House appointment calendar and said, ‘King? There aren’t any kings on the schedule today.’ He replied, ‘No, no no, the king, Elvis Presley, the king of rock. He’s here in Washington, D.C., and he wants to see the President.’”
Krogh, who served in the Nixon Whitehouse as an advisor and liaison to the FBI and the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, recounts the story today with self-effacing chagrin. What many may view as a harmless oddity of White House history, he remembers as a lesson in how good intentions can turn sour in an instant. Krogh should know; he was later imprisoned for his part in the Watergate scandal.
A lesson in inexperience, decision-making and ethical blunders.
In an ethics presentation at the McCombs School of Business, Egil “Bud” Krogh drew upon the Nixon-Elvis meeting as an amusing morality play in integrity, and how it can be lost through vanity, ambition, incompetence and failure to ask the right questions.
