Screen Test for the White House.

• Author: KELLEY, TIMOTHY
• Position: Presidential debates, history - Brief Article

When Kennedy and Nixon sparred on TV in 1960, politics changed forever

You want reality television? What if two contestants battled with words before a national audience, and then the country voted on which one got the world's most powerful job?

It's been done. On September 26, 1960, viewers tuned in to watch the first debates between major-party nominees for the presidency. Republican Vice President Richard M. Nixon, 47, met Senator John F. Kennedy (D-Mass.), 43, in a Chicago TV studio for an hourlong, informal debate. Their encounter will be on the minds of Vice President Al Gore and Texas Governor George W. Bush when they meet to debate this fall, because it changed the face of politics.

Political debates weren't new in 1960. In 1858, Republican Abraham Lincoln and Democrat Stephen A. Douglas had made dueling speeches all over Illinois, the state they were wing to represent in the U.S. Senate. (Lincoln lost.) And politicians had often had debates on issues. In fact, in 1947, a Pennsylvania Congressman had invited the two freshman Representatives he saw as having the brightest futures to McKeesport, Pa., to debate before a public-affairs group on a bill in Congress about labor. Their names were Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy.

But in 1960, for the first time, the presidency was at stake in a debate. And the nation was watching. By then, 88 percent of American households had television sets, up from 11 percent just 10 years before. Though it was still mostly black-and-white, TV had revolutionized entertainment and the merchandising of everything from cars to candy bars. Intellectuals were hoping TV would also become a serious instrument of democracy. They didn't foresee that its pictures might overwhelm its words.

Before the debates, the better-known Nixon looked like the favorite. He had done well on TV before, and in 1959 had shone in a "kitchen debate" with Nikita S. Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Union, America's Cold War foe, in a model kitchen at a U.S. exhibition in Moscow.

But Kennedy spoke forcefully as the debate began:

The kind of strength we build in the United States will be the defense of freedom, if we do well here, if we meet our obligations, if we're moving ahead, then I think freedom will be secure around the world, if we fail, then freedom fails. Therefore, I think the question before the American people is, are we doing as much as we can do, are we as strong as we should be ...? I should make it very clear that I...