“I didn’t want to bug him”: when George Harrison became the first Beatle to visit the White House
At the peak of their power, it seemed as though The Beatles had more global power than a small nation; at the very least, they had enough power to threaten the ego of President Marcos of the Philippines, who sent his military police after the Fab Four back in 1966. Nevertheless, the band never managed to make it into the hallowed halls of the White House.
The Beatles first touched down on American soil back in 1964, immediately spurring on waves of emphatic Beatlemania across the entirety of the States in the process. While the band were, in essence, cultural dignitaries on a mission of transatlantic importance, President Lyndon B Johnson wasn’t in any hurry to meet the band at that time.
Although LBJ’s daughter, the 16-year-old Lucy Baines Johnson, invited the group to the White House, that landmark moment was quickly shut down by the Democratic president, who reportedly declared, “That this was the time for our family to be about getting to work. We couldn’t be all about ‘yeah, yeah, yeah.’”
If President Johnson wasn’t receptive to the idea of meeting The Beatles, then his successor, Richard Nixon, certainly wasn’t going to be any more hip. After all, by the time that Nixon was elected in 1969, The Beatles were the kind of counterculture figures that were the scourge of his administration; so much so that he tried his darndest to deport John Lennon from the US in the years that followed.
During their actual tenure, then, The Beatles never managed to enter the house of American democracy or shake hands with any leaders of the free world. It wasn’t until a full decade had passed since the band started on that first US tour that one of the band members finally crossed paths with the US president, when George Harrison was invited to the White House to rub shoulders with President Gerald Ford.
On the surface, Harrison’s Hare Krishna spiritualism might have seemed at odds with the Republican conservatism of Ford, but the meeting was actually arranged at the behest of one of Ford’s sons, John Ford, which goes someway to explaining such a collision of worlds – though, it must be said, not as strange as when Ford’s other son, Steven, blasted Led Zeppelin from the White House roof that same year.
Along with former Beatles collaborator Billy Preston, as well as Ravi Shankar and a gaggle of other people, including Harrison’s father, John Ford wined and dined the Beatle in the historic surroundings of the White House in December 1974.
Although Ford himself wasn’t present at the dinner, the president did make an appearance later on, spending roughly 15 minutes with the songwriter and his entourage. Later, Harrison noted, “I didn’t ask him [Ford] about Bangladesh or anything else political,” explaining, “I didn’t want to bug him.”
In the decades that have followed Ford’s presidency, Beatles members have crossed paths with the presidency on a variety of occasions. Paul McCartney, for instance, met with both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, while John Lennon was present at the inaugural gala of Gerald Ford’s successor, Jimmy Carter, who often cited ‘Imagine’ as his all-time favourite song.
Nevertheless, it was George Harrison who earned the accolade of being the first Beatle to meet with a US president.
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