Acid for Tricky Dick: Grace Slick’s Audacious Plan to Spike Nixon’s Tea

During the spring of 1970, the counterculture collided with the White House in one of the most audacious “what if” moments of the era. Jefferson Airplane frontwoman Grace Slick, rock’s reigning psychedelic queen, received an invitation that seemed straight out of a satirical novel. Addressed to her maiden name, Grace Wing, it invited her to a Finch College alumnae tea hosted by Tricia Nixon at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on April 24. Slick had briefly attended the elite women’s school in New York in 1957–58 but never graduated. Still, the invite landed in her mailbox, and her reaction was pure 1960s mischief: “Oh yeah,” she later recalled, “I think Tricky Dick needs a little acid.”

Slick didn’t waste time. She pocketed roughly 600 micrograms of pure LSD powder—quite enough for a powerful, mind-altering trip—and recruited radical activist Abbie Hoffman as her plus-one. Hoffman, fresh from the Chicago Seven trial and a walking symbol of anti-war defiance, showed up conservatively dressed but instantly recognizable. The plan was elegantly simple and wildly illegal. LSD is tasteless and odorless. Slick, who famously kept one long fingernail for scooping cocaine, intended to tuck the powder beneath it, chat politely with President Richard Nixon during the tea, and casually gesture over his cup. One flick, and the commander-in-chief would have been sent “to the moon,” as Slick put it. She wasn’t trying to assassinate him. Here intent was to just give the war-mongering president a taste of the psychedelic revolution he so despised.

They arrived at the gates ready to make history. Security, as you might expect, had other ideas. White House staff immediately spotted Hoffman and flagged Slick as a security risk. The rock star with the anti-establishment anthem “White Rabbit” and the Yippie firebrand never made it past the front door. Escorted out without incident, their plot evaporated before the teacups were even filled. No charges were filed over the LSD, though the FBI later dug into Slick’s background.

The failed stunt became rock lore, emblematic of the era’s giddy clash between the establishment and the counterculture. Jefferson Airplane was at its peak, riding hits that celebrated dropping out and turning on. Nixon, meanwhile, was deepening America’s involvement in Vietnam even as he expanded the war into Cambodia days later. Slick’s scheme captured the frustration and dark humor of a generation that saw the president as the ultimate square who needed loosening up and by any means necessary.

Years afterward, Slick reflected on the episode with characteristic wit and hindsight. She joked that Nixon was already “nuts anyway,” wandering the White House talking to portraits, so an acid trip might have simply looked like business as usual. Yet she also acknowledged the recklessness of the times: “LSD was new then… our advocating for LSD was kind of dangerous.”

In the end, no one got dosed, no scandals erupted, and the tea party proceeded without its most notorious would-be guest. But the story endures as a perfect snapshot of 1970: a rock goddess armed with acid, a radical on her arm, and a president who never knew how close he came to the ultimate bad trip. Tricky Dick dodged more than bullets that day. He dodged the White Rabbit.