Jimmy Carter just confirmed that Willie Nelson smoked pot at the White House and not with a staff member – it was Carter’s son.
In Willie Nelson’s 1998 memoir, he wrote about smoking a “fat Austin torpedo” at the White House after being invited there by president Jimmy Carter.
Well, that age old myth about smoking pot at the White House with the president’s son has been confirmed in the documentary Jimmy Carter: Rock and Roll President.
Jimmy, in the documentary directed by Mary Wharton, revealed that “when Willie Nelson wrote his autobiography, he confessed that he smoked pot in the White House, one night, when he was spending the night with me” but even though “he said that his companion, that shared the pot with him, was one of the servants at the White House.”
“That was not exactly true. It actually was one of my sons, which he didn’t want to categorise as a pot-smoker like him.”
Responding to possible criticism, he remarked “There were some people who didn’t like my being deeply involved with Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan and disreputable rock ‘n’ rollers. I didn’t care about that because I was doing what I really believed and the response from the followers of those musicians was much more influential than a few people who thought that being associated with rock ‘n’ roll and radical people was inappropriate in a president.”
There was speculation about which of Carter’s sons it was, but Chip already seemed to confirm it by saying “if you’re talking about me and Willie, he was my friend” and when Nelson visited the White house, “I said, ‘Let’s go upstairs’…We just kept going up ’til we got to the roof, where we leaned against the flagpole at the top of the place and lit one up.”
Well, there you have it folks – Willie Nelson really did smoke pot at the White House with Jimmy Carter’s son. Some legends do come true.