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The 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debate didn't just choose a president—it changed how we see leadership. As Biden and Trump face off today, discover how this historic ...
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- DC Unveiled
Aug 15, 2008 · Clip from the 1st 1960 presidential debate between Senator John F. Kennedy (D-MA) and Vice President Richard Nixon (R-CA). Held on September 26, 1960, it was the first presidential debate...
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- Max Power
On Sept. 26, 1960, 70-million people tuned in as Vice President Richard Nixon and Sen. John F. Kennedy faced off in the first televised presidential debate. ...
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- MCamericanpresident
3 hours ago · John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon debate in September 1960, as seen on a black-and-white TV. Associated Press The debate as a draw. What the public is often told nowadays about that first-of-its ...
- Overview
- Friendly rivals
- Sunshine, Peggy Lee, and a bum knee
- Second debate heats up
- Debatable results
Kennedy was tanned and rested. Nixon wore the wrong color suit. The dos and don’ts of on-camera debates were written during this political face-off in 1960.
It was the first time two presidential candidates had ever squared off on live television, and for the young reporter just breaking into TV news, the two men debating on the flickering screen were a case study in television dos and don’ts.
“I was working at KHOU in Houston, just starting out in my so-called career,” says Dan Rather. “I had always been told, ‘Wear a dark suit on television.’ And there was John F. Kennedy, wearing a dark suit. Richard Nixon, on the other hand, was wearing a light gray suit.”
The two men stood in stark contrast, literally: On black-and-white screens, Kennedy was dominant against a light background, while Nixon seemed to blend into his surroundings.
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. Even before television, candidates’ charisma had always played a role in elections, but it was the 1960 face-off, viewed by nearly 70 million people, that forever elevated style to the level of substance—and sometimes beyond.
On TV, style really mattered. As a correspondent, Rather had been trained “to always look into the camera, into the living room of the viewer,” he recalls. Likewise, “Kennedy kept his gaze straight ahead, engaging his TV audience. But Nixon kept looking from side to side, addressing the reporters in the studio. The effect was Kennedy seemed confident; Nixon seemed like he didn’t want to be there.”
The first 1960 presidential debate, televised on Monday, September 26, from the studios of WBBM in Chicago, was not the first head-to-head encounter between Kennedy and Nixon. That face-off had come 13 years earlier, under much different circumstances, and with a very different outcome.
As rising stars of their respective political parties, Congressmen Kennedy and Nixon had traveled by train from Washington, D.C., to Pittsburgh, where they debated issues of the day at Junto, a civic club in the steel town of McKeesport. The two argued labor legislation, something that was clearly closer to blue-collar Nixon’s heart than to Ivy League Kennedy’s.
“He won that one,” Kennedy admitted to a crowd in McKeesport upon his return there as president, “and we went on to other things.”
In an act of civility perhaps unimaginable today, “Kennedy and Nixon shared a sleeper car on the Capital Limited going back to D.C.,” says longtime MSNBC host Chris Matthews, who wrote about the pair in his book Kennedy & Nixon: The Rivalry That Shaped Postwar America. “They even drew straws to see who’d get the lower berth. Nixon won.”
The two were never close friends, but they were certainly friendly, exchanging notes and messages of congratulations. Kennedy even invited Nixon to his 1953 wedding—an offer Nixon, by then vice president, had to refuse because President Eisenhower had invited him to play golf in California.
A lot had changed by the time 1960 rolled around. Thirteen years earlier, in that backwater Pennsylvania town, the two men had been on equal footing as freshman congressmen. Now Nixon was a national figure. He’d filled in for President Eisenhower when Ike was hospitalized for a heart attack. He’d prevailed in a verbal showdown with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at a Moscow exhibition.
On the day of the first debate, JFK—who’d spent much of the previous week preparing with mock debate opponents—sunned, napped, and listened to records by 1950s songstress Peggy Lee. Nixon—who’d been furiously playing catch-up on the campaign trail after having spent three weeks in the hospital with a badly inflamed knee—spent the hours before the most important appearance of his life speaking at a Chicago Carpenters Union event and making several other campaign stops around town. When his car finally arrived at the TV station, he climbed out of the back seat—and slammed his bad knee against the door frame.
Kennedy was offered TV makeup, and he refused. Overhearing that, Nixon likewise turned it down, forgetting that JFK was tanned and rested, while he was pale and gaunt from his hospital stay.
Tired, hurting, sweating, and sporting his perpetual five o’clock shadow—despite a last-minute application of a beard-covering product called LazyShave—Nixon got a telephone pep talk from Lodge. Fearing that Nixon’s hard-hitting reputation would not play well against Kennedy’s nice-guy demeanor, Lodge advised his running mate to back off.
“Erase the assassin image,” Lodge said.
Meanwhile, JFK was getting coached by his brother Robert. According to Chris Matthews, “Bobby told him, ‘Kick him in the balls.’”
Today, anyone watching that first debate on YouTube can see how each man took those last-minute directions to heart. JFK immediately went on the attack, launching into scathing criticism of the Eisenhower administration’s foreign policy—even though the agreed-upon topic of the first debate was to be domestic issues. JFK was smooth and practiced, so comfortable in front of the camera that he seemed more at ease than even the moderator, CBS’s Howard K. Smith.
History remembers that first 1960 debate as a watershed event, but it was just the first of four debates between the two candidates. More than 60 million viewers tuned in for the second debate, which originated from the studios of WRC-TV in Washington, D.C.
“The Kennedy people came in before the second debate and saw that the room was freezing, like a meat locker,” says Matthews, whose news-talk series Hardball originated from the same studios for more than 20 years. Kennedy’s media advisor ran to the thermostat and discovered that a Nixon aide had turned the heat down because “he didn’t want his boss to sweat the way he had the first time around. So they had a big fight over that and finally the Kennedy guy got the heat turned back up.”
It didn’t really matter. Nixon arrived for the second debate rested, healthy, and wearing a very Kennedyesque black suit. As seen on the YouTube video, this time around he’s very much the old Nixon: feisty, combative, and sure of himself. Kennedy, as well, gives a spirited performance, and each combatant lands a number of solid punches.
There is probably no truly objective way to measure these things, but analysts generally agree that while Kennedy won the first debate through his ability to control the proceedings, Nixon emerged the victor in the second debate and also the third—a remarkably complex event that involved a split screen with Kennedy debating from New York, Nixon debating from California, and CBS moderator Bill Shadel based in Chicago.
By the time of the fourth debate, from ABC Television’s New York Studios barely two weeks before the election, the two candidates had settled into a virtual tie, with Kennedy at 51 percent and Nixon at 49 percent. Likewise, their final debate was considered a draw.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the more Nixon’s TV performances improved, the closer he pulled to JFK.
After one of the longest election nights in history up to that time, Kennedy eked out the win over Nixon. The official count gave JFK a razor-thin popular vote edge of 112,827 votes, with 303 electoral votes compared to Nixon’s 219.
It would be 16 years before presidential candidates again faced each other on live TV. (Test your knowledge with U.S. presidential trivia.)
In 1963, JFK and the presumptive Republican nominee Barry Goldwater had tentatively agreed to barnstorm the country together during the 1964 election. But after Kennedy was assassinated and Lyndon B. Johnson ascended to the presidency, Johnson saw no point in debating Goldwater, who was far behind in the polls. Back on the ticket in 1968, Nixon—still stinging from the reviews of his first JFK encounter—refused a debate challenge from Hubert Humphrey. In 1972 he was running so far ahead of George McGovern that he didn’t think twice about refusing to debate.
Not until President Gerald Ford found himself in a tight race against Governor Jimmy Carter in 1976 did the presidential debates return, and they’ve been a fixture ever since. They are an essential quadrennial civics lesson, says Rather, whose recent book, What Unites Us, will be released as a graphic novel aimed at young readers in February.
For those who dare step into the presidential debate spotlight, Rather, who moderated a Democratic presidential debate in 1984, says there are some timeless lessons that can be gleaned from that first encounter in September 1960.
“First, practice, practice, practice. There’s no substitute for being prepared. President Kennedy practiced quite a bit for the first debate, while President Nixon did not.”
- Bill Newcott
1 day ago · Max Frankel, then the executive editor of The New York Times, wrote several months after Nixon’s death in 1994 that “Nixon lost a TV debate, and the Presidency, to John F. Kennedy in 1960 ...
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22 hours ago · The run-up to the Joe Biden-Donald Trump debate at the end of June 2024 has brought reminders about the first-ever televised presidential debate – and how Vice President Richard Nixon’s sweaty, haggard appearance that autumn night in 1960 opened a pathway to the White House for the tanned and telegenic Sen. John F. Kennedy.
