Johnny Cash sits with Nixon in the Oval Office in front of a few cameras after submitting testimony to a Senate subcommittee on prison reform – one of Johnny Cash’s advocacy issues. This time, Nixon personally requests, in front of the cameras, that Cash play Guy Drake’s “Welfare Cadillac” or Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee.” Cash replies “I don’t know those songs, but I got a few of my own I can play for you.” Cash reached for his guitar, held by a White House staffer, and played three songs, all of them decidedly to the left of “Okie From Muskogee.” Nixon listened with a frozen smile to the singer’s rendition of the explicitly antiwar “What Is Truth?” and “Man in Black” (“Each week we lose a hundred fine young men”) and to a folk protest song about the plight of Native Americans called “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” It was a daring confrontation. Nixon was furious.