Elvis wanted a badge. The reason for it, as stated by his ex-wife Priscilla, was because Elvis “(believed that) with the federal narcotics badge, he (believed he) could legally enter any country both wearing guns and carrying any drugs he wished.”
I can’t vouch for the source, but I’ve seen the theory that Elvis was just playing Nixon bounce around for a while.
In 1970, I seriously doubt hanging out with Elvis would help with “the young people”!
There was a decent movie not too long ago that takes that view… I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the case, too.
How much of that was under duress, I wonder.
I’m shocked that the guy behind the Cadillac Queen myth, who crowed about States’ Rights while standing a few miles from the site of one of the best known murders of the Civil Rights movement, might have been racist. Who could have ever foreseen this shocking turn of events?
maybe not much… it was the liberal consensus era, of course, and he both had to embrace the mainstream and possibly believed it was the right thing to do. We can’t really speak to his innermost views, but we can only go by what he did and said in public and then in private (after tapes have been released into the public domain). Nixon was a complicated guy, and his actions as president reflect that, I think.
Yeah. I keep forgetting there was once a point in time when republicans had the ability to be swayed by things like evidence and some even had respect for law.
The GOP in the 50s-60s were still pretty much like today’s Democratic mainstream… They were already starting to pick up racist elements fleeing from the changing democratic party, but it wasn’t a done deal yet. They also hadn’t gone full on Christian dominionist or full on Ayn Randian…
Well perhaps he was angling for the 40ish Southern white women vote.
edited to add: /s
But the article @DarkFrog linked to noted that Nixon believed it would help him with the youths (which he was regularly failing to connect with outside of the young republican crowd). He felt he already had the 40s southern white women locked down as a voting bloc.
OH! Derp! Carry on!
My mom and sister used to love watching gymnastics competitions. I hope they tune into Fox News tonight to see some Olympic-level mental gymnastics as Sean Hannity explains how this isn’t really racist.
Ronald Reagan had a plan for putting black people into concentration camps in case of “National Emergency”
Every “Reagan wasn’t racist” rube needs to change their Twitter avatar to the surprised Pikachu meme.
I do understand that he may have moderated his opinion later in life, but this is still a thing in right wing circles.
Crumbs after the harm was done. He started the GOP on the road to right wind extremism. Any late-in-life reservations are less than irrelevant.
I never liked nor trusted Reagan. (Not sure what his policy on Ángel Fernández was, though.)
Reagan ran on racism. His campaign platform was full of blatant dog-whistles about welfare and urban neighborhoods. Nixon was just as racist – possibly more, since unlike Reagan he didn’t think in cartoons – but he knew enough to keep it under a layer of alcohol wraps.
Nixon also was not responsible for (and didn’t believe) the “Government is the problem” philosophy that Reagan articulated and that has plagued the country ever since.
Last one to refer this to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library is a rotten egg!
Gore Vidal knew how to bait Buckley to the point that he’d let that mask of oh-so-rational conservatism slip and everyone could see the bigoted thug underneath.
He learned to hide it better but – like Reagan – I doubt his underlying views changed much.
I didn’t appreciate him until I was older. Because when I was a kid and he was still alive, I associated him as music for older people. It seemed that he was an old, washed up, overweight guy on perpetual comeback tours. It wasn’t until well after he was dead that I discovered the young, talented iconoclast. He was one of the first white guys to rock.
And if it had been a less racist and sexist culture, there would have been three or four other equally talented people we would now fondly remember as superstar rock gods, rather than as “foundational pioneers”.
He had talent, but the reason people remember him as an icon is because he got the boost culturally from a whole bunch of everyday prejudices. If it was just musical talent, we’d have a lot more Gracelands, and a lot less “died in poverty”.
