Bob Harris Claims Richard Nixon Asked Elvis Presley To Spy On John Lennon

It Was “Hate At First Sight” When Presley and Lennon Met

Music presenter and DJ ‘Whispering’ Bob Harris claimed that then-US president Richard Nixon tasked Elvis Presley to spy on John Lennon. In a new interview on the Rockonteurs podcast, Harris shared how Nixon “loathed” the iconic Beatles musician and that Presley and Lennon were both “resentful” of each other.

“It sounded like it was almost a figment of [Lennon’s] imagination when he was saying, ‘My phone was tapped, I get followed everywhere’ — but it was true; he really did,” Harris revealed. “Nixon was out to get him and that’s why John was stuck in New York, or stuck in the States: he knew, were he to come back to the UK, he’d never get back into America again. Not while Nixon was in the White House.”

“Nixon was a great friend of Elvis and vice versa,” Harris explained, “Nixon had [instructed] Elvis to gather as much information about John Lennon as he possibly could.”

“For John it was a very disillusioning moment because he loved Elvis’s records, so… to discover he was a right-wing southern bigot was a big shock,” he continued. “Equally, Elvis saw Lennon as being this upstart Liverpudlian know-it-all who’d taken his crown. He usurped Elvis and he was resentful as hell.”

Listen to the podcast below.