Moments in Time

It was 1974 and the Watergate scandal had just broken. President Nixon was addressing a crowd and railing against The Washington Post.

Behind the crowd, one man climbed to the top of a ladder and positioned himself next to the flagpole. From there, he got the shots every other photographer craved.

Dirk Halstead, renowned photographer for Time magazine and the first speaker in this year's Lecture-Concert series, knows how to get photographs of presidents that stand out from the norm.

"I made it my job to study the presidents I covered," he told the audience Monday night in the Student Union Auditorium.

That devotion to studying his subjects is what made Halstead, a 29-year veteran in covering the White House, aware that the best shots of Nixon would be captured up high, behind the crowd.

"I knew that he didn't like to look at people," Halstead said. "In a crowd he would never make eye-contact… instead he would always look [far off] to the back, and if there was a flag, he would look at the flag."

Halstead explained that every second Nixon was railing against The Washington Post and his other enemies, he was looking right into Halstead's lens under the flagpole.

As a result, Halstead got a historic photo, which Time put on its front cover.

It's because of photos like this one Halstead became a legend in the field of photojournalism.

Halstead's career began at just 17 years old when he covered the Guatemalan Civil War for Life magazine.

He also worked for United Press International for more than 15 years before going on to Time.

Throughout his career, he's photographed a plethora of movie stars as well as Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton.

Hastead went on to tell about his experiences photographing President Clinton.

"Of all the presidents I've covered," he said, "photographing Bill Clinton was the hardest."

Halstead said that during the first weeks of Clinton's administration, he, as a long-time presidential photographer, was completely mesmerized.

"I never heard or saw a smarter, more reasonable, more human person in my life," he said.

Halstead tells how President Clinton would get teary-eyed when talking to people with a sad story, how he would look them straight in the eye, and how he would walk through crowds shaking every single person's hand.

"The trouble is," Halstead said, "that after a few months of this, I realized that what I was seeing was an act."

Halstead explained that President Clinton was a master of controlling his persona in front of the people and the press and that he wouldn't come out in public until he had his act together.

Halstead said he spent the next six years trying to crack the persona President Clinton wore.

"Where is the real Bill Clinton?" he said he asked himself.

Finally, in 1998, the week after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, Halstead got the photograph he'd been longing for.

President Clinton and his wife, Hillary, were at an education event in Maryland, and they were sitting side by side.

"There was a chill that you could feel coming from the stage," Halstead said.

He told that he began to see President Clinton's jaw muscles tighten over and over again.

"I said to myself, 'I gotcha!'" Halstead said, finally capturing a photograph of President Clinton, in which he showed raw emotion.

Again, this photo appeared on the cover of Time, one of 54 cover shots Halstead took for the renowned magazine.

One of Halstead's most famous photographs, though, was of President Clinton hugging Monica Lewinsky in a crowd of people. He took this photograph before the news of the affair ever broke.

When the news surfaced, Halstead recruited a friend to begin looking through his old photo files. He had a hunch that he had taken a photo of President Clinton and this young woman with dark hair and red lips.

After two days of vigorous searching, the friend found the picture Halstead remembered-a perfect shot of President Clinton hugging his mistress.

This photo also ended up on the cover of Time and became the staple of Halstead's collection.

It also taught photographers everywhere to never throw away a single photo.

Now retired from Time, Halstead operates The Digital Journalist, a monthly online magazine he founded for visual journalists. More than 15 million people read The Digital Journalist worldwide.

Halstead is also a senior fellow in photojournalism at the Center For American History at the University of Texas in Austin.