November/December 2000 | Contents

HIGH NOON IN PRIME TIME

PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES: FORTY YEARS OF HIGH-RISK TV
By Alan Schroeder

REVIEWED BY EVAN CORNOG  

The first presidential debate between Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy in Chicago on the evening of September 26, 1960, has been rightly hailed as a political turning point: the pale Nixon -- underweight, still recovering from a knee operation, and unwilling to submit to a professional makeup job -- was outshone by the tanned and telegenic Kennedy, whose victory in that debate prepared the way for his triumph in November. The Kingdom of the Image had come and, with it, what Daniel Boorstin dubbed the "pseudo-event."

Except, as Alan Schroeder points out in his thorough account of all the televised presidential debates, the "low-key media atmosphere of the time" was far different from that of recent years. On the day of the first debate, The New York Times ran only a short piece on the subject, and it was on page 22. The Washington Post had nothing, and neither did that week's Time magazine. History, as is its habit, had sneaked up on journalism. The broadcast of the event was different, too. When the program ended, there was no post-debate analysis, no pundits pronouncing, no spin-doctors spinning, no pollsters polling. Those watching ABC were presented with the Original Amateur Hour, CBS's viewers were shown a taped interview with Lyndon Johnson that was part of its Presidential Countdown series, and NBC's patrons were given a bowling show hosted by Milton Berle. It is a set of choices that checks one's initial impulse to pine for the good old days.

At the same time, the event was not quite the innocent relic it seems. As with every debate since, the guidelines were established by the campaigns, although the negotiations were not as extensive and sophisticated as they have become. Kennedy's greatest advantage was not his tan but the fact that he understood, as Schroeder puts it, that the debate was a "TV show," whereas Nixon saw it as a "rhetorical exercise." Kennedy's adviser Clark Clifford told the candidate to add "greater warmth to [his] image," and representatives of both campaigns harangued CBS's Don Hewitt, the producer for the first debate, to be balanced in his camera shots.

Journalism, as is its habit, was quick to sense that the rules had changed. Although coverage at first dwelled on the issues discussed, it soon turned to the aspects of performance. Newsweek reported that the biggest question that arose after the debate was "Why did Nixon look so haggard, so worn, and so grim?" This concern with appearances, which has remained central to the process, took hold that first year. In the third Kennedy-Nixon debate, the candidates debated from separate studios -- Nixon in California, Kennedy in New York. To insure equal conditions, ABC dressed the sets in identical cloth backdrops, and the "same can of paint used on the New York set was hand-carried on a plane to Los Angeles so the colors would precisely match." Such lunatic precision would become the standard for future contests.

It was sixteen years before presidential debates resumed, with the contest between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. The legacy of the Kennedy-Nixon debates guaranteed that there would be much more pre-debate coverage, and Schroeder argues that the twenty-seven-minute failure of the sound system in the studio near the end of the first debate opened the door for punditry and spin, as TV anchors scrambled to fill the dead airtime. Ford's statement in the second debate that there was no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, which, inexplicably, he failed to recant effectively, established a second rule of debates -- that nothing was more vital than avoiding a gaffe.

A third rule soon became apparent: each debater is judged not against some absolute standard of astuteness or accuracy but against the expectations the audience (i.e., the press) has of him or her. These expectations are all-important and can be very long-lived. Consider the case of Bob Dole. As Gerald Ford's running mate in 1976, he had participated in the first vice presidential debate, against Walter Mondale. Dole treated the debate process with contempt, scarcely studying for the encounter in advance and then making acerbic comments about how boring the debates were. When he tried to link Mondale with the deaths of soldiers killed in what he called "Democrat wars," he cemented a reputation for nasty partisanship that he was never able to shake. Running against Bill Clinton twenty years later, Dole turned in a somnolent performance in the debates, fearing that the result of attacking Clinton's character would be not to sully the image of Bill Clinton but to revive the image of nasty Bob Dole.

Schroeder's chronicle of the debates serves as a mini-history of the transformation of American journalism over the past few decades, as news outlets multiplied, the news cycle accelerated, and deference to political leaders was replaced by aggressive, sometimes contemptuous, treatment (which was reciprocated). Throughout his book, Schroeder cites scholarly studies of the changes in news coverage of the debates -- the way, for example, interpretive stories have grown in importance and descriptive stories have receded, and the shift in coverage from a focus on the issues debated to obsessive interest in the forms and nuances of the confrontation itself. Yet the rise of the image was already being lamented in 1960, when Don Hewitt worried that the impact of TV debates would be to elect a "matinee idol," and the historian Henry Steele Commager feared that televised debates would elevate "the glib, the evasive, the dogmatic, the melodramatic" over more sober virtues.

Jimmy Carter said in the wake of Watergate that he wanted to give the nation "a government as good and honest and truthful . . . as are the American people." (It has also been said that nations get the governments they deserve, which seems, after all, to carry the same message.) And the truth about the debate process, and of presidential campaigning in general, is that it is a rational and sensible test for the nation's chief executive. One of the many critics quoted by Schroeder complains that debates are a poor test for a potential president, because leading a government depends on the ability to build a team, to work with opponents, to compromise, while debates are a solo endeavor, the candidate alone on stage. And yet one thing this book makes clear is the collective nature of debates -- briefing teams, squads of aides and lawyers to negotiate the terms of the encounter, makeup artists and spin doctors and even, in the case of Ronald Reagan, the first lady's astrologer (to vet the proposed dates).

In the media-saturated world of today, the candidate who can marshal the forces necessary to prevail is probably well suited to the demands of the job. That these are dispiriting conditions for the emergence of real leadership may be true, but is irrelevant to the matter at hand. The problem lies much deeper, and, as Schroeder points out in his conclusion, the debates succeed (and draw huge audiences) because "they speak to the nation in a language that is every American's second tongue: the language of television."

Evan Cornog is an associate dean at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and co-author, with Richard Whelan, of the recently published Hats in the Ring: An Illustrated History of American Presidential Campaigns.