A look back at another historic presidential debate
Dick very quietly gathered the pad and swiftly took his leave to get ready for one final session, after which Kennedy would have a light meal, put on his dark suit, and head to the CBS studio in Chicago. Kennedy’s composed posture, hands quietly folded in
When my husband, Richard Goodwin, turned 80, he finally decided to survey some 300 boxes of letters, diaries, documents, and memorabilia that he had carted around, largely unexamined, for 50 years. These boxes proved to be a remarkable time capsule of the 1960s, since Dick had witnessed and helped shape decisive moments of the decade with John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Robert Kennedy. Dick was one of a small team on the “Caroline” plane with Senator John Kennedy during his 1960 campaign for the presidency and one of three aides who prepared the senator for the first presidential debate on television.
The following excerpt provides a front-row seat to that historic debate between Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon, which revealed the enormous impact of television and created the first political celebrity. This week we witnessed another historic debate, the earliest in our presidential cycle, with new rules, and the first time two men who have been president have stood side by side on live television.
SEPT. 26, 1960
On the morning of the debate, chief speechwriter and adviser Ted Sorensen, director of research Mike Feldman, and my husband, Dick Goodwin, approached Senator John Kennedy’s suite to begin the final day of debate preparation. Dick, who had hardly slept the night before, was apprehensive — as if the most important exam of his life loomed ahead. Had they done everything they could to prepare Kennedy for what they all knew could well be the hinge of the entire presidential campaign?
“How did Kennedy strike you that morning?” I asked Dick.
“Calm, almost eerily so,” Dick said, recalling him propped up in bed in a T-shirt and khakis, barefoot, his breakfast tray still beside him. To conserve his voice, Kennedy spoke as little as possible, writing out questions on a yellow pad, things he wanted checked or confirmed. Sorensen showed him the draft of the opening statement he had prepared, but it was not to Kennedy’s liking; he felt it was too ornate for television and wanted the sentences short, crisp, and straightforward.
Then Kennedy began to review a stack of index cards that summarized both candidates’ positions on every issue and suggested retorts for what Nixon might say. One after another, he would flip through the cards and once committed to memory, he would flip it away, until the carpet beside the bed was strewn with cards.
In the early afternoon, when the team had taken a break to gather more supporting data, Dick realized that he’d left his yellow pad full of questions in the room adjoining Kennedy’s bedroom. When he returned to retrieve it, he saw — to his amazement — that on this day of all pressurized days, the candidate had retired for a nap! Unlike the candidate’s aides, who had reached the point of near total exhaustion, Kennedy understood the importance of pacing himself.
Dick very quietly gathered the pad and swiftly took his leave to get ready for one final session, after which Kennedy would have a light meal, put on his dark suit, and head to the CBS studio in Chicago.
Reportedly, Richard Nixon spent most of the day in seclusion, accompanied only by his wife, Pat. A seeming contrast might be drawn between the two candidates in the degree of preparation, organization, and forethought they invested in an event that would forever alter the course of modern presidential politics. Seventy million people would be watching the debate, two-thirds of all the adults in the United States.
‘Are you nervous?” Dick asked, smiling and patting the back of my hand as we were about to start watching the debate on Youtube more than a half century later during what we decided would be a “debate date” complete with a bottle of wine. “Who do you think will win?”
After CBS anchor Howard K. Smith introduced the candidates, I immediately noticed Kennedy’s dark suit, sharply defined against the gray backdrop, in contrast with Nixon’s gray suit, indistinct against the background. Kennedy’s composed posture, hands quietly folded in his lap, one leg crossing the other, similarly contrasted with Nixon’s body language, painfully ill at ease, lips pursed, eyes shifting, legs splayed awkwardly beneath his chair.
“It’s not fair!” I blurted. “It’s a debate, not a beauty contest.”
“What does fair have to do with it?” Dick retorted. Unable to watch with an impartial eye even after more than five decades, Dick relished the contrast.
Kennedy’s eight-minute opening statement, reshaped from Sorensen’s draft, declared his resolve that we must do better at home in order to strengthen our leadership abroad. With statistics absorbed from the campaign and sharpened during the days of rehearsal, he presented a quick comparison between the productivity of scientists and engineers in the Soviet Union and the United States. He suggested that we had become stagnant and were in danger of falling behind. With his staccato delivery punctuating a drumbeat of facts and figures, he unfolded a narrative of dissatisfaction with our domestic policy that, if we did not get moving, boded ill for our stature in the world at large.
For me, the most persuasive moment occurred when Kennedy deployed statistics to illustrate how the lack of equal opportunity affects the trajectory of Black lives from the moment they are born: “I’m not satisfied until every American enjoys his full constitutional rights. If a Negro baby is born — and this is true also of Puerto Ricans and Mexicans in some of our cities — he has about one-half as much chance to get through high school as a white baby. He has one-third as much chance to get through college as a white student. He has about a third as much chance to be a professional man, about half as much chance to own a house. He has about four times as much chance that he’ll be out of work in his life as the white baby. I think we can do better.” To this narrative Nixon made no comment.
From the start of his own opening statement, the vice president was on the defensive, eager, as his running mate Henry Cabot Lodge had cautioned him during the one phone call he had taken that afternoon, to avoid “an assassin image.” Again and again, he agreed with Kennedy’s ultimate goals; their differences, the conciliatory “new Nixon” said, were not in the destination but in the means to get there.
Long before our bottle of wine was gone, I began to feel a slight sympathy for Nixon, his effort to gamely smile while sweat glistened on his chin in the harsh television light.
“Close your eyes,” Dick chuckled. “Don’t watch. Make believe it’s radio. He’ll improve.”
And it was true — as commentators had noted. If one listened on the radio, the debaters seemed more or less equal. Nixon had counterpunched, making his debating points and arguments capably to answer Kennedy’s assertions.
The more striking impression on television, however, belonged to Kennedy. He seemed to make his case directly to the people on the other side of the camera. Watching the two men side by side, the contention that Nixon was the more seasoned candidate had vanished before the first debate was over.
Dick loved to tell the story of his ebullience following that first debate. As they settled on the “Caroline” that night, bound for a day of campaigning in northern Ohio, Kennedy relaxed with his favorite meal: a bowl of tomato soup and a beer. He then proceeded to evaluate the debate, reviewing where he might improve. Dick, unable to restrain his enthusiasm, exclaimed, “We’ve got it won now! Not just the debate but the election!” Kennedy smiled and said, “Next week, Cold War and foreign policy. Better get some sleep and get ready.” Dick told me he learned something important that night. Kennedy was a veteran sailor, a professional. Regardless of circumstances, he kept steady and stable, on an even keel.
Yet without question, something decisive and positive had happened for Kennedy during the debate, something that could be felt in Ohio the next morning. The crowds hadn’t merely doubled, they had quadrupled, as had the intensity, excitement, energy, and high-pitched screams. Those millions of television sets that had been tuned in to the debate the night before had given birth to a political celebrity of the first order.