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Sep 21, 2010 · This first of four debates held before the end of October gave a vast national audience the opportunity to see and compare the two candidates, and ushered in a new age of Presidential politics ...
- 59 min
- 5.3M
- JFK Library
The 1960 presidential cycle featured former Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, the Democratic nominee, and Vice President Richard Nixon, a Republican. The first debate, and the first one...
- 58 min
- 4.7M
- PBS NewsHour
September 26, 1960: Vice President Richard Nixon and Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy square off for the first televised presidential debate.
- 58 min
- 132.5K
- Richard Nixon Foundation
- Background to The Kennedy-Nixon Debates
- The Candidates Face Off
- Maybe It’S Lazy Shave
- Legacy of The Kennedy-Nixon Debates
The U.S. presidential election of 1960 came at a decisive time in American history. The country was engaged in a heated Cold War with the Soviet Union, which had just taken the lead in the space race by launching the Sputnik satellite. The rise of Fidel Castro’s revolutionary regime in Cuba had heightened fears about the spread of communism in the ...
On the evening of September 26, when the two candidates arrived at the CBS broadcast facility in downtown Chicago for the first televised presidential debate in American history, Nixon’s streak of bad luck continued. Stepping out of the car, he banged his bad knee and exacerbated his earlier injury. The vice president had recently suffered a bout o...
What accounted for this discrepancy? For one thing, television was a relatively recent addition to America’s living rooms, and politicians were still seeking the right formula for interacting with the public in this new, more intimate way. Kennedy nailed it during their debates, staring directly into the camera as he answered each question. Nixon, ...
A month and a half later, Americans turned out to vote in record numbers. As predicted, it was a close election, with Kennedy winningthe popular vote 49.7 percent to 49.5 percent. Polls revealed that more than half of all voters had been influenced by the Great Debates, while 6 percent claimed that the debates alone had decided their choice. Whethe...
- Missy Sullivan
Sep 25, 2020 · The 2020 presidential election marks the 60th anniversary of the landmark televised Kennedy-Nixon debates, a series of events that have shaped national politics ever since.
- Bill Newcott
Sep 26, 2022 · The first presidential debate on TV not only played to Kennedy's charisma, it also merged politics with popular culture — and paved the way for today's image-obsessed electoral landscape.
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Nov 24, 2009 · For the first time in U.S. history, a debate between major party presidential candidates—John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon—is shown on television.
