The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello and welcome to Whistle Stop, season two, a podcast on the presidency.

I'm John Dickerson of Face the Nation.

On the wall of a former advertising executive in California, an executive whose penchant for order

extended all the way to the ends of the hairs aligned in his brush haircut, stiff enough to clean the grill, hung a quotation from a former president.

The quotation read, until he has been a part of a cause larger than himself, no man is truly whole.

The line is from Richard M. Nixon, his inaugural address in January of

1969. The copy on the wall is written in President Nixon's own hand, and it was given to its

owner, H.R. Haldeman, at the request of Haldeman's wife, Joe, who asked of it from the president.

Though Haldeman would go to jail for his boss, his wife nevertheless wrote in the preface of

Haldeman's diary, which was later published, without question, she wrote, serving as

assistant to the president, and White House Chief of Staff gave Bob the

opportunity to participate in, quote, a cause larger than himself, unquote.

In February of 1971, President Nixon posed a question to his chief of staff, H.R. Bob

Haldeman. How could he record conversations in the Oval Office for posterity?

Two years earlier, Nixon had asked Haldeman that the taping system be removed.

There was one in the White House from its predecessor, LBJ, and President Johnson had told Nixon about the taping device on the way to their inauguration.

Nixon wanted it out.

But now, two years later, the president wanted his own recording device. Why the change?

By that time Nixon had learned that the true story of the White House was impossible to get out when faced with a hostile press. All presidents learned this, but he felt he was particularly aggrieved at the hands of an adversarial press.

So in the future, either the press would mangle or misreport what had happened,

or administration leakers would tell a different story.

...