He steamed up a car with George, Barbara and Millie Bush.

He watched Richard Nixon sample sushi with the premier of China.

And he stood in the Oval Office as Ronald Reagan left for the last time.

For nearly 50 years now, photographer Dirck Halstead’s lens may have captured history one frame at a time. But it would be his stories from behind the camera — through assignments in two war zones and nearly 30 years of covering presidents, from Nixon to Clinton — that had a crowd of 200 people hanging on his every word Wednesday night.

Like the time his friend — who, at the time, was the official White House photographer — weaseled a new deck from his landlord, because it nearly collapsed under the weight of a rather important man: President Gerald Ford, who had stopped by for a martini the night before.

Halstead still considers Ford “one of the sweetest, nicest men ever to occupy the White House,” but he can’t shake the effect Ford’s shaky stand must have had on his friend’s landlord.

“Can you imagine? ‘We’ll get you a new deck, immediately!’ ” Halstead said during a presentation at the Dole Institute of Politics.

Or the time George Herbert Walker Bush loaned Halstead a pair of shorts so that the two could run in Houston, in the summer, when it was 100 degrees outside, with stifling humidity and, ultimately, a five-mile car ride back to the Bush compound after the family dog, Millie, had jumped into a creek.

A standing-room-only crowd listens as photographer Dirck Halstead, right, discusses a photograph he shot of former President Richard Nixon. Halstead, who has taken pictures of world events and leaders for nearly 50 years, spoke Wednesday at the Dole Institute of Politics at Kansas University.

And, at Bush’s insistence, all that came with the windows shut and the air conditioning off, just to astonish the teenagers pulling up in the car in the next lane.

“‘This is the best part,'” Halstead recalls the future president laughing back in 1978 — and recalling the stench like it was yesterday. “I mean, it’s a moving sauna. Steam is rising, and the smell of Millie the dog. …”

Or the time he talked his way back into the White House on the last day of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and spent the last hour with Ron and Nancy.

“He joked with me the whole time,” Halstead said. “I had a hard time getting away from him to take his picture.”

But beyond the stories, Halstead’s work stands alone. His photos have graced the cover of Time magazine a record 54 times. And today his “Digital Journalist” (www.digitaljournalist.org) chronicles history through the World Wide Web, offering the equivalent of 250 magazine pages with each virtual issue.

6News video: Dirk Halstead gives the stories behind his photos