Egil “Bud” Krogh, former Deputy Assistant to the President who helped arrange the famous meeting between President Nixon and Elvis Presley, died on January 18, 2020. He was 80.
Krogh joined the White House staff in 1969 as Deputy Counsel and then Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs. He also served as Assistant Director of the Domestic Council Staff, as Executive Director of the Cabinet Committee on International Narcotics Control, and as liaison officer for the White House to the District of Columbia.
Four days before Christmas, in December of 1970, Krogh played a key role in one of the most memorable meetings that the White House has ever seen.
Elvis Presley arrived unannounced at the White House with the request of an impromptu meeting with President Nixon.
The request made it to Krogh’s desk and he and Special Assistant to the President, Dwight Chapin, encouraged the President and Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman to take the meeting with Presley.
Haldeman approved the meeting and hours later Bud Krogh ushered Elvis Presley into the Oval Office. Bud then witnessed a meeting that would result in one of the 20th century’s most iconic photographs – the King of Rock and Roll meets the President of the United States.
Krogh penned his eyewitness account in the book “The Day Elvis Met Nixon,” and visited the Nixon Library many times over the years to speak to audiences and autograph copies. It was first published in 1994 and has been a top seller in the Nixon Library’s gift shop ever since.
President Nixon meets with Elvis Presley in the White House Oval Office while Egil Krogh watches the meeting.
In February of 1973, he was named by President Nixon as Undersecretary of Transportation. He resigned from the administration in May of that year after claiming full responsibility for the break-in to the offices of Dr. Lewis J. Fielding, the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg.
Following his service in the White House, he returned to practicing law and in his later years spoke to groups and gave many interviews about his role in the extraordinary meeting between President Nixon and Elvis Presley.
Many of his old friends from the Nixon era saw him for the last time at the annual reunion of the Nixon White House Domestic Council in Washington, D.C. in December 2019.
Egil Krogh was born on August 4, 1939, in Chicago, Illinois. He graduated from Principia College in Elsa, Illinois in 1961 with Highest Honors and served in the Navy from 1962-1966 during the early years of the Vietnam War.
He worked at the law firm of Hullin, Ehrlichman, Roberts and Hodge in Seattle, Washington while a law student and received a law degree from the University of Washington in 1968.