Photograph by AP.

Snoop Dogg has something he wants to brag about:

During an installment of his YouTube web series “Double G News Network” featuring an appearance by Jimmy Kimmel, the late night talk show host asked the rapper, “Have you ever smoked (weed) in the White House?” Snoop Dogg replied, “In the bathroom . . . not in the White House, but in the bathroom. Cos (sic) I said, ‘May I use the bathroom for a second?’ and they (the security team) said, ‘What do you want to do a number one or number two?’ And I said ‘number two’ . . . So I said when I do a number two I usually have a cigarette or I light something to get the aroma right and they said, ‘You know what, you can light a piece of napkin’ and I said ‘I’ll do that’ and the napkin was this.”

His anecdote concluded, Snoop flashed a self-satisfied smile, held up “this”—“this” being his ever-present (on YouTube, if not on network TV or basic cable) spliff—and rewarded himself with a generous lungful.

Good for him. And yet there was something claustrophobic—stuffy, airless, excessively furtive—about Snoop’s White House marijuana adventure. What the rapper did wasn’t quite as unprecedentedly daring as he seems to suggest. Let me explain.

On June 18, 1978, the South Lawn was the scene of an all-day jazz festival—the first event of its kind and, notwithstanding the manifest jazz-lovingness of the White House’s current occupants (especially Michelle O), still the only one to have occurred on such a grand scale. I’ll get to the pot part in a moment. But first, have a look at the lineup:

Having been there (I was a junior White House staffer at the time), I can attest to the splendor and delight of that afternoon of music and jambalaya. President Carter welcomed his six hundred guests with off-the-cuff remarks, reminiscing about the Greenwich Village jazz clubs he frequented during his Navy days. “It’s long past time that a real tribute was paid to jazz musicians here at the White House,” he said, as the jazz critic Nat Hentoff remembered it. “Jazz has never received the full recognition it deserves in America—because of the racism in this country.” It was an obvious point, but to hear it spoken by a President of the United States was, for the musicians present, thrilling.

The music, considerably more than an hour’s worth, spanned time and styles. The first act was Eubie Blake, the great ragtime pianist and composer, born in 1887, during the first Cleveland Administration. The last—and for some the most memorable—was an impromptu trio consisting of Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet, Max Roach on hi-hat, and, on what it would be charitable to call vocals, the once and future peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter. The tune, written thirty-five years earlier by Diz, with the encouragement and assistance of Charlie Parker and Kenny Clarke, was, of course, “Salt Peanuts.”

And the weed? Well, I was too insignificant to rate a folding chair, so at one point I found myself wandering near the copse of trees and shrubs that conceal the Presidential tennis court, west of the main expanse of the South Lawn. A faint wisp of smoke, barely visible, came wafting through the foliage. Sniffing the air, I detected what the newspapers of the day used to call, invariably, “the sweet smell of marijuana.” (Or “marihuana,” as the federal drug bureaucracy still insisted on spelling it.) Moments later, a quartet of sidemen sauntered from the bushes, looking mellow. They had chosen a far pleasanter setting than a toilet stall, and they hadn’t been obliged to answer any questions about number one or number two.

Perhaps they were counting on the forbearance of their host, who, as a candidate, had advocated the decriminalization of cannabis. (Sadly, as with labor-law reform and universal health care, President Carter was unable to bring Congress along.)

Come to think of it, maybe Snoop Dogg was counting on the forbearance of his host. Barack Obama, onetime stalwart of the Choom Gang and inventor of the “roof hits” method, has made no secret of his belief that marijuana is less harmful than alcohol and that, as he told David Remnick last fall, “we should not be locking up kids or individual users for long stretches of jail time when some of the folks who are writing those laws have probably done the same thing.”