From the archive, 3 December 1986: How Elvis won his anti-drugs badge from Nixon

Elvis Presley bitterly denounced the Beatles for their anti-Americanism during a White House meeting with President Nixon in December, 1970.

The rock and roll star, who died of longterm drug abuse in 1977, also told the President that he could influence the hippie movement against the use of drugs and asked to be made a federal drug enforcement agent. Eventually he was given a specially-made Bureau of Narcotics badge.

A note of the encounter is one of 1.5 million documents from Mr Nixon's Presidential papers, finally made public by the National Archivist in Washington. The former President has fought tenaciously for the past 12 years to prevent their appearance, citing everything from executive privilege to personal privacy. Now he has been overruled by the combined judgments of Congress, the Supreme -read more