Spike the President!

24 April 1970

It’s the 56th anniversary of Jefferson Airplane singer Grace Slick being denied entry to the White House, despite being invited. Admittedly, she was invited by Richard Nixon’s daughter Tricia, brought activist Abbie Hoffman, and said she planned to spike the President’s tea with LSD...

This happened because in the late 1950s, when she was Grace Wing, the woman who wrote White Rabbit after an acid trip had been a student at Finch College in New York with the daughter of the then Vice President. Come 1970, that upright defender of democracy and the rule of law had become the occupant of the White House, and his elder daughter thought it would be nice to invite all her college alumni to a tea party at this prestigious address, and Slick said:

I was invited. Patricia Nixon got a list of all the alumni of Finch College, or anybody that had ever gone there. I’m not really an alumni, because I didn’t graduate. I went to Miami the next year. But she got a list of all the girls. The school was small enough where they could do that, and she invited them to a tea. I got the invitation in the mail. “Grace Wing, we cordially invite you to a tea…Tricia Nixon at the White House.

So far, so innocent, but the very next sentence in that interview makes it clear why things might have gone awry:

And I thought, “Oh, yeah, I think Tricky Dick needs a little acid.” So I took Abbie with me, because they said you could come with your husband, or whatever.

Abbie Hoffman was a Yippie (a co-founder of the Youth International Party) and one of the Chicago Seven – counterculture activists tried the previous year for conspiracy and crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot, and generally protesting against the Vietnam War. Slick says

We tried to straighten Abbie out, so he’d look kind of normal and stuff ... he had a Jew fro, and we tried to flatten that out. That didn’t work.

Given that he usually looked like this…

…and went to the White House looking like he did at the top of the thread, they didn’t do badly, but it was to no avail – although not getting in wasn’t his fault. Slick told Counterpunch:

we were standing in line in front of the White House ... Security came up to me and said, “You can’t go in,” and I said, “But I’ve got an invitation.” They said, “Yes, but you’re a security risk.”

The interviewer says it’s “amazing, though, that they thought you were more dangerous than Abbie”, to which Slick responds: “Well, on that day, they were right.” Because she had a plan...

They didn’t know why, but they were right, because I had six hundred micrograms of powdered acid in my pocket. And I also had a very long little fingernail, for snorting coke. And what I was going to do, because of Finch College, I know what formal tea is. You stand at a formal tea, you don’t sit at a formal tea. There’s a very long table, with probably tea at one end, in a long silver urn, and coffee at the other, and there’s somebody who’s serving. Entertainers gesture a lot, we’re flamboyant, and I could just gesture over Richard Nixon’s teacup, and drop the acid in. It (L.S.D.) is tasteless. And forty-five minutes later, he would have been wandering around being crazy.

One flaw in this (apart from getting in) was that Nixon himself didn’t attend. Busy being a model of probity elsewhere in the building, presumably. The event itself looked like this:

…so it’s questionable whether Slick and Hoffman would have been able to do anything without a lot of eyes on them.

Paul Kanter of Jefferson Airplane later told ABC that Slick “could have changed the history of the United States had Richard walked in and had some tea”, but alas the FBI had her down as “an impulsive, thoughtless, rather wild, irresponsible young lady ... inclined to make a spectacle of herself”, so: no. Mind you, as Slick observed:

What I didn’t know is that he was nuts anyway. He’d wander around and talk to the pictures and shit. So they would have thought, “Okay, he’s really gone over the edge now,” and they’d have had to take him to Langley, and all that kind of stuff. But the idea of it amused us anyway, even if we didn’t get in. It didn’t matter. He got himself out, because he was, you know, not right in the head.

Which is a terrible thing to say about the noble occupant of the highest office. I mean, it was a very principled stance not to let drug-addled rock stars into one of the world’s most secure buildings.

Anyway, please feel free to make your own observations here about people in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue who may not be 100% honest or fully connected to reality.