Because it is a slow political news week (and for the salacious nature of it all), the mainstream media is currently digging into every aspect of the "Cocaine Found At White House" story. News articles are being written summarizing all possible past rumors or actual instances of drug use at the White House. My favorite came at the end of a Washington Post article on this theme, under the heading: "Rocker Grace Slick." But I found their rundown of what happened awfully sparse, so as a public service today I am going to run an extended excerpt from Grace Slick's autobiography Somebody To Love, of which (of course) I have my own copy (signed and personalized, even...).

Anyway, this all comes from Chapter 29, and uses the same title as the chapter. Enjoy....

[Context note: "Grace Wing" is Grace Slick's birth name]

-- Chris Weigant

Dosing Tricky Dick

Another grandiose "Get Nixon" idea we came up with was the "Let's Dose Dickie" trick. That one wasn't carried through to conclusion either, which was probably fortunate since the repercussions might have been more than we bargained for. But the planning stages were pretty exciting.

Tricky Dick Nixon, as he was fondly referred to by people not part of his inane circle, had a daughter, Tricia, who had attended Finch College about ten years after my stay at the "bow and curtsey" academy. Which led to Yours Truly, of all people, getting an invitation to tea at the White House.

. . . [cut: an explanation of the details of Grace getting invited -- and approved, by: "One of the other Finchettes, Mrs. David Busby, who'd been a suite mate of mine" -- and then Grace deciding to take Abbie Hoffman as her "escort"] . . .

So when I was deciding on an escort for the White House, I invited Abbie because I couldn't think of anyone who'd be more delighted to visit the seat of Western power. The day of the tea, I tried to flatten Abbie's hair -- he had a big afro and we didn't want to look like a couple of screaming hippies. But when I got through with him and he put on a suit and tie, he looked like a hit man for the Mafia. Really, he looked awful, more intimidating straight than when he wore his American flag shirt.

The Finch alumni lined up in front of the White House in their camel-hair coats, the obligatory round gold pin on the lapel with matching gold earrings, medium-heeled beige shoes, panty hose, and long, camel-hair skirts with beige silk blouses. I stood in line beside Abbie in my black fishnet top with three-by-three-inch patch pockets just covering my nipples, a short black miniskirt that went all the way to the beaver, and long black boots that reached up to my thighs. Looking like a pimp and a go-go girl, the two of us couldn't have been more thrilled to have been invited to Nixon's White House, because unlike the beige crowd surrounding us, we had a personal agenda.

In our pockets was more than enough powdered acid to get a lot of people very high, but we weren't interested in a lot of people. Richard Milhous Nixon was our mark. Having been trained in formal tea etiquette at Finch, I knew this would not be a sit-down affair. There'd probably be two very long tables set up with a large tea urn at one end, maybe a coffee urn beside it, and people would stand around, sipping and conversing with each other. The plan was for me to reach my overly long pinky fingernail, grown especially for easy cocaine snorting, into my pocket, fill it with six hundred mics of pure powdered LSD, and with a large entertainer's gesture, drop the acid into Tricky Dick's teacup. If I missed, Abbie was my backup. We knew we wouldn't have the pleasure of seeing Nixon tripping (LSD takes a while to kick in), but the idea that he might be stumbling through the White House a little later, talking to paintings, watching walls melt, and thinking he was turning into a bulldog, was irresistible.

Although it was raining outside the White House, staining multiple pairs of Gucci shoes, the security boys detained everyone, thoroughly checking their identification and giving them an appraising eye.

"Excuse me, miss, but may I see your invitation?" one of the guards said to me. "And your ID."

He took my invitation with the name Grace Wing on it, and my driver's license, to the security booth and came back. I'm sorry, Miss Wing," he said, "You can't go in."

"But I have an invitation," I argued.

"Look. We know you're Grace Slick and we consider you a security risk. You're on the FBI list." I hadn't done anything subversive that I knew of -- it must have been some of my lyrics. And God only knows what they'd dug up on Abbie.

The guards finally agreed I could come in, but only by myself. Abbie would have to stay out. I told them I never went anywhere without my own security guard, and Abbie added, "I wouldn't let Miss Slick go in there alone, because I understand they lose a president every three years. It's a dangerous place."

Abbie and I left, and Mrs. Busby went to the tea sans revolutionaries. But to everyone's surprise, the social secretary said, "Go back and find them. Mrs. Nixon and Tricia really want to meet her." Unfortunately, we were long gone. I read that Tricia later commented, "If she had to come with a bodyguard, I feel sorry for her. She must be really paranoid."

Not as paranoid as your daddy was when McCord, Liddy, and Dean copped out on his unsuccessful wiretapping trick.

Nixon never got the ride of his life, but Abbie and I had vivid images of reading in the newspaper that he'd suddenly taken ill and was spending a few days at Walter Reed, the army hospital where the CIA would have hidden him away until they figured out what made him crack. Of course, from what we later learned about Nixon, he walked around the White House talking to pictures anyway, so maybe nobody would have noticed much of a change.

I'll concede it now, the LSD thing was an irresponsible and dangerous plot. At the time, though, we were so fired up about Vietnam, so incensed that some pitiful malformation of mental functions was making the old men in power assume we should kill our young, able-bodied boys for no reason, we didn't care what it took to get the president's attention. We'd hoped that after he got through acting crazy, Tricky might contemplate his navel for six hours and decide that government just wasn't the way to go. What if he really saw the truth, shifted gears, and left politics? It was a good thought, but ultimately, we didn't have to dose him. He overdosed himself on love of power, driving himself out of office without any outside help.

-- Grace Slick

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant