Presley became concerned with the state of the country in 1970 as anti-war protests and what he viewed as a lack of respect for the country became the norm. He wrote a letter to then President Richard Nixon in which he stated that he had spoken to former vice-president Spiro Agnew and "expressed my concern for our country.... Sir I can and will be of any service that I can to help the country out." Presley asked to be made a federal agent by the president and said that he had made "an in depth study of Drug Abuse and Communist brainwashing techniques.... I would love to meet you just to say hello if you're not too busy." Nixon's staff decided that a meeting between the president and Presley could only help Nixon's standing with younger Americans, so the same morning that he delivered the letter, Presley received a call from White House staff suggesting a meeting later day. When they met, Presley asked Nixon for a Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs special agent badge. Nixon agreed, then looked at Presley. "You dress kind of strange, don't you?" (The singer had arrived in a velvet purple tunic and pants with a large gold belt and jacket with big buttons.) "You have your show and I have mine," Presley replied.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
