♪♪ [Narrator] It's a long way to come for 8 electoral votes.

Of course, they'll drop in for a day around election time.

But on March 1, 1971 it was different.

Richard M. Nixon went out of his way to come to Iowa.

He hadn't been here since the election, but it was worth waiting for.

In his executive wake came staff members, cabinet members, governors, three airplanes, two cars, a brood of Secret Service men, the Eastern Press and Mrs. Nixon.

Now, that sort of thing hadn't happened since Franklin Roosevelt participated in a farm conference at the capital in 1936.

Furthermore, it was announced that the President would address the legislature, which as far as anyone could tell had never been done by any president.

♪♪ (roosters crowing) Chicago meat trade yesterday, beef trade was slow, choice steer and heifer and utility cow beef all were steady.

[Narrator] This is Leonard Doolin and he's a farmer.

He farms about 700 acres just outside Nevada in Story County.

On March 1st, while Richard Nixon was preparing for his trip to Des Moines, Leonard Doolin was doing his chores.

[Leonard Doolin] I think that a person should look up to the President regardless of what he's done because he's bound to have been a pretty fair sort of a man in order to be President.

I've always felt a person should look up just a little bit or people should respect him enough not to even hold any demonstration against him.

The family farmer is going to be out of existence.

Private enterprise are going down the drain.

[Narrator] Nixon carried the state comfortably in 1960 and '68 and whenever he came the nation's breadbasket more closely resembled a May basket.

Of course, that was before Laos, before the lowest parity since the Depression and before suspension of the law requiring union wages on federal construction projects.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [Richard Nixon] If the lessons of the past decades mean anything to us, they mean that as power has been concentrated more and more in Washington, D.C., as decisions have been increasingly made by a remote control, the special needs of our rural communities and of the great Heartland of America, more and more have either been neglected or even gone unrecognized.

I want those decisions that affect rural America made by people who know rural America.

And the people who know a place best are the people who live here.

The best fed country in the world pays less of her budget for food than in any country of the world.

This is an indication of what the farmer has done for America.

And when the farmer and American agriculture has done that, when it is the most productive of all of the various phases of our economy, certainly American agriculture and the American farmer deserves a fair share of America's increasing prosperity.

(applause) [Leonard Doolin] In Des Moines, I think you'd have more or could do more good if he'd have stayed in his office I think because from what I've read and seen on television I really can't see that he's accomplished too much by coming out.

And I realize it must have cost quite a bundle for him to come out here and visit the Midwest.

And I think this is maybe a vote getting thing for the next election.

Again, this is just one man's opinion.

I really can't see what good he's done.

♪♪ (tractor engine) Steers and heifers were fully steady.

Demand only fair for clean hided cattle as they say it.

Slaughtered steers, choice -- ♪♪