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 Morley Safer, who's looking rakish and devilish across from her on the couch.

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