It sounds like stoner fan fiction: the singer of Jefferson Airplane and the most notorious Yippie in America strolling into the White House with a plan to dose the President of the United States with LSD.
But in April 1970, Grace Slick and Abbie Hoffman really did show up at the gates of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, pockets full of acid and mischief, hoping to send Richard Nixon on a psychedelic trip he would never forget.
The scheme collapsed before they even cleared security. What survives is one of rock history’s wildest almost – stories, a perfect collision of music, drugs and late 60s political rage.
Nixon vs the freaks: why this prank even made sense
By 1970, the fault line between Nixon’s America and the counterculture was a canyon. Nixon ran as the law and order President, promising to crush dissent, clamp down on drugs and silence what he called the “silent majority’s” enemies.
On the other side stood bands like Jefferson Airplane, whose songs “White Rabbit” and “Mexico” openly celebrated altered states and attacked Nixon’s drug policies. Grace Slick became a symbol of the freak left: sharp, articulate and utterly unconcerned with respectability.
Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies went even further. They treated politics as guerrilla theater, floating ideas like dumping LSD into Washington’s water supply just to freak out the straights and grab headlines. Dosing Nixon was not just a prank – it was the ultimate fantasy of flipping the establishment’s mind from the inside.
How Grace Slick scored a White House invitation
The opening came from an unlikely place: finishing school. Before she was the Acid Queen, Grace Slick was Grace Wing, a student at Finch College, an upscale women’s college whose alumnae included Tricia Nixon.
In 1970, Tricia hosted a White House tea for fellow Finch women. An invitation went out to “Grace Wing“, and nobody in the East Wing apparently realized that this polite alumna was now the frontwoman of one of the loudest anti – Nixon bands in America.
Slick later recalled seeing the invite and thinking that “Tricky Dick needs a little acid.” In her mind, the tea party became less about cucumber sandwiches and more about chemical revolution.
The plot: 600 micrograms and a long fingernail
Slick did not intend to arrive empty handed. She has consistently said she had about 600 micrograms of LSD with her – a strong dose for one person, certainly enough to rattle even a battle hardened politician.
Her delivery system was pure 60s decadence. She kept one fingernail unusually long for scooping cocaine. The plan, as she told interviewers, was to tuck the LSD under that nail, chat with Nixon at the tea, and casually gesture her hand over his cup so the powder slipped in. LSD is tasteless, so he would never know until it hit. In later interviews she described this method with a mix of pride and disbelief.
On paper it sounded like a perfect counterculture caper. In reality, it depended on a long chain of unlikely events: Nixon appearing at a Finch alumnae tea, approaching Grace for small talk and letting her hands near his drink. Even the Nixon Foundation later dryly noted that the idea seemed more imaginative than practical.
| Step | What Grace imagined |
|---|---|
| 1 | Show up at Tricia Nixon’s Finch College tea as Grace Wing. |
| 2 | Get close enough to Richard Nixon for polite conversation. |
| 3 | Hide LSD under a long nail and casually flick it into his tea. |
| 4 | Watch the architect of law and order ride the white rabbit. |
Enter Abbie Hoffman: Yippies at the White House gate
Grace decided she needed a co conspirator and called Abbie Hoffman from a “safe phone”, according to his own memoir. She pitched it as the wildest date of his life: escorting her to the White House so they could try to flip the President’s brain chemistry. Hoffman’s account relishes the absurdity of the setup.
Hoffman was already a wanted symbol of radical chaos, fresh off the Chicago 8 trial and famous for stunts like throwing money onto the New York Stock Exchange floor. Still, they tried to dress him up in a suit and neat hair to pass him off as a respectable escort.
Security was not fooled. The tea was billed as an all female event, and the presence of a notorious male radical in line drew instant suspicion. Guards told Hoffman he was not getting past the gate. At that point, the plan was already dead.
Flag on the fence, acid in the pocket
Denied entry, Hoffman snapped back into Yippie mode. Accounts agree that he pulled out a black flag emblazoned with a marijuana leaf and hung it on the White House fence before guards rushed to remove it. Grace, still carrying undetected LSD, chose to leave rather than walk in alone. Her own retellings emphasize that moment at the gate.
She later learned that Jefferson Airplane members were on an FBI list of security risks, thanks to songs that railed against the state. A guard reportedly told her she was a security threat without knowing she actually had illegal drugs poised for a presidential cup of tea. As she dryly noted years later, their paranoia happened to be correct. Even official records hinted at those fears.
The incident sparked further FBI interest in her past, including her private school days. Internal memos painted her as impulsive, wild and prone to making a spectacle of herself – descriptions that, frankly, matched the persona she projected on stage. Later reporting noted how closely the files tracked her public image.
Two versions of the same almost – crime
One reason this story refuses to die is that we have both sides of the myth. Grace has retold the tale in interviews, relishing the absurdity of standing at the White House gates with a pocket of acid and a head full of bad intentions. In music press conversations she often circles back to that day.
Abbie Hoffman’s version, printed in his autobiography, leans into the dark comedy of the setup: a psychedelic singer and an anarchist trying to infiltrate a tea party full of rich alumnae while plotting a chemical coup. For him, it was part political statement, part chance to turn the imperial palace into a stage. His Yippie perspective frames it as guerrilla theater.
Modern profiles of Grace still bring the story up, usually alongside her car crashes, onstage meltdowns and other high risk behavior. She tends to describe the scheme not as harmless mischief, but as something flat out illegal that she is lucky never resulted in charges. Recent interviews underline how close it came to real trouble.
LSD, “White Rabbit” and the dream of flipping power
The idea of spiking Nixon’s tea was more than a juvenile prank. It distilled a key fantasy of the psychedelic era: that if the right people “expanded their consciousness”, war and repression might simply melt away.
Grace had already encoded that dream in “White Rabbit”, which urged listeners to “feed your head” over a march that sounded like Ravel rewritten for Haight Ashbury. Fans understood it as a call to use psychedelics to blow past the small minded thinking of their parents’ generation. Later coverage of her art and career still links her to that psychedelic anthem.
Dosing Nixon would have been the ultimate act of forced enlightenment, a way of dragging the architect of Cambodia bombings and the war on drugs into the trip whether he wanted it or not. The fact that the plan was reckless, unethical and physically risky was part of its shock value.
Would acid have changed Nixon?
It is tempting to imagine an alternate history where Nixon drops into a twelve hour mystical experience, renounces war and retires to Big Sur to paint. More likely, a sitting President secretly drugged on LSD would have triggered a constitutional crisis, a medical emergency and a brutal crackdown.
Nixon was already deeply paranoid, obsessed with enemies lists and leaks. Amplifying that mind with a massive psychedelic dose in the middle of the Vietnam quagmire could easily have made everything more dangerous, not less.
But the power of the story is not in what might have happened in the Oval Office. It lies in the fact that serious musicians and activists were willing to contemplate an act that extreme just to jolt America awake. The line between art, protest and crime got very blurry in 1970.
Why this near – miss still fascinates
Grace Slick did not get close enough to Nixon’s tea to do anything but daydream, yet the image of her at the White House gates with LSD under a fingernail has become one of the defining anecdotes of the era. That White House near miss now sits alongside other legends of the counterculture.
It captures a moment when rock singers were considered genuine threats to national security, not nostalgia acts. It shows how seriously the establishment took long haired freaks, and how far some of those freaks were willing to go to hit back.
For fans of 60s and 70s music, the story is a reminder that the people behind those records were not just playing with psychedelic imagery. Some of them were quite literally prepared to put acid in the punch bowl of American power – and in Grace Slick’s case, she almost made it inside the party.
