Hello and welcome to Whistle Stop a podcast of campaign curiosities.

I'm John Dickerson, host of Face the Nation. As Donald Trump flirts with exploiting the marital habits of a former president at the second

presidential debate in order to harm the presidential candidacy of that

former president's wife a former first lady Hillary Clinton we can be assured that one of the things that we are smelling

is freshly plowed territory. But in the history of the White House spousal mixing,

where the presidential, the personal, and the political,

all jumble in the dryer with the softener sheet, there is another instance, I was reminded of,

which is not analogous at all, but which does come to mind, a situation in which a presidential

spouse for a moment became the political flashpoint of Washington politics

because of what she said about the personal lives of the first

couple and their family.

It was a spouse who talked openly about her children trying drugs, how she might have tried marijuana, how she would

counsel her teenage daughter 18 years old if she were to have an affair, and how as a

spouse and first lady she defended her husband's wandering eye by explaining

that it never wandered too far off the beam because she was able to keep him happy and busy at home.

Now that's not a compilation of provocative statements made over the course of a tenure of

a first lady.

All of that was said in a tidy package in a single 60 minutes interview that Betty Ford

did in the summer of 1975.

Our whistle stop today is August 10th, 1975 and First Lady Betty Ford is seated on a couch in the west sitting hall of the White House across

from 60 minutes newsman morally safer.

He's looking rakish and devilish across from her on the couch.

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