Kennedy: The Classic Biography (37 page)

But the high cost of radio and television strained party finances—over one million dollars for network time alone. Steve Smith approached Nixon’s campaign manager, Leonard Hall, about an agreement limiting the amount of broadcast time each candidate would purchase, but to no avail. We also tried to utilize every possible offer of free television time. Invitations to appear on news panel shows, at-home-with-the-candidate shows, campaign documentaries and candidate profiles were all promptly accepted. But these, and all other uses of television save possibly the replays of the Houston ministers speech, pale in significance beside the Great Debates of 1960.

The national radio-television networks, at a cost of millions of dollars (and unknown numbers of disgruntled situation-comedy and Western fans), had earlier offered the two major parties free time for joint appearances, if Congress would suspend the rule requiring equal time for all fringe party candidates. The Congress, in what turned out to be the most important action of its postconvention session, passed the law and President Eisenhower signed it on August 24.

Like all leading Republicans, Eisenhower advised Nixon not to debate Kennedy, and he stressed in signing the bill that its use did not require “a debating atmosphere.” Nixon was far better known nationally than his opponent. He was regarded as more mature and experienced. He had no reason to help build an audience for Kennedy, who had scored well debating Lodge in 1952, Humphrey in West Virginia and Johnson at the Los Angeles Convention.

But Nixon also had reason for self-confidence. He had launched his political career in 1946 by outdebating an able Congressman. His “Checkers” speech in 1952, defending his private political fund, was generally regarded as the most skillful use of television in the campaign that sent him to the Vice Presidency. His impromptu “kitchen debate” with Chairman Khrushchev in Moscow had measurably improved his ratings in the polls.

With this reputation to defend, with confidence in his ability to best Kennedy, with a desire to reach through the debates the millions of Democrats and independents whose votes he would need, reportedly with an eye to the financial advantages of free television, and mindful that the two National Chairmen had implicitly committed both candidates to accept in the public interest, Nixon felt unable to back away gracefully. In August, immediately after his nomination at the Republican Convention, the networks made a concrete offer. Kennedy immediately accepted with a blunt challenge to Nixon. Four days later, to the Senator’s surprise and joy, the Vice President also accepted.

There followed a series of negotiations between representatives of the candidates and the networks. Kennedy TV chief Leonard Reinsch and I, representing the Senator, found the Nixon representatives as wary as we. The original network proposal was for four evenings of straight debate, one hour each, and four evenings of joint panel interviews, one hour each. Nixon, confident only that he was a better debater, preferred only three confrontations or less and emphasized no prepared texts. Kennedy, confident only that increased TV exposure was to his benefit, preferred five or more joint appearances. Both men, anxious to avoid the role of prosecutor but anxious to see a sharp division, welcomed the presence of a panel. Both men were also anxious to settle the matter in order to arrange their schedules. Kennedy was opposed to including the Vice Presidential candidates. Nixon wanted the debates out of the way before he began the final three-week drive he thought would decide the election.

Agreement was finally reached on a series of four one-hour appearances to be carried simultaneously by all television and radio networks:

The four debates, and the first in particular, played a decisive role in the election results. Nixon knew it. Kennedy knew it. Their advisers and party leaders knew it. Their crowds reflected it. Their polls showed it. The on-the-spot surveys, the postelection surveys and the surveys of surveys all showed it. Some seventy million adults, nearly two-thirds of the nation’s adult population, watched or listened to the first debate, clearly the largest campaign audience in history. More than four out of five voters saw or heard at least one of the four debates, the average adult saw three, and more than half of all adults watched all four. Those who did not see or hear them soon read or heard about them. They were a primary molder in the public mind of campaign issues and candidate images. They were a primary reason for the increasing interest in the campaign and the record turnout at the polls. And they were a primary factor in Kennedy’s ultimate electoral victory.

One survey showed 25 percent of those who in August had not expected to vote deciding to vote in November, with most of them voting for Kennedy. Most surveys showed the debates enabling Kennedy to solidify his own party, impress Republicans far more favorably than Nixon did Democrats, and win over independents by more than two to one. Whatever may be said about who had the better line or logic, only one conclusion is possible: Kennedy won the debates.

He won in part because he recognized the unprecedented impact certain to be made by the most historic debates since Lincoln and Douglas, and viewed by more than a thousand times as many people. He directed that his schedule be arranged so as to allow him the maximum time for briefing, preparation and rest before each encounter. Reports that he listened to tapes of Nixon’s speeches “to help put him in a properly aggressive mood,” or that he rehearsed at the studio for more than seven hours before two of the debates, are wholly false. His only desire was to be properly prepared and informed. To this end, prior to the first debate, we reduced to cards and reviewed for hours the facts and figures on every domestic issue, every Kennedy charge and every Nixon countercharge. We threw at the Senator all the tough and touchy questions we could devise. One session was held on the sunlit roof of his Chicago hotel, another in his sitting room, the last in his bedroom after he had confidently napped for nearly three hours in the midst of a bed full of file cards. He had, in a sense, been preparing for this moment for years, in hundreds of rapid-fire question-and-answer sessions with newsmen, college audiences, TV panels and others.

As he dressed, he compared his anxiety to that of a prizefighter about to enter the ring in Madison Square Garden. To this Dave Powers replied, “No, Senator, it’s more like the opening-day pitcher in the World Series—because you have to win four of these.” In the car to the studio he was silent and a little tense. Bromidic advice from one aide on how to talk on television was curtly cut off. Traffic lights were regarded with irritation. In the studio he sent Dave Powers back to the hotel for a blue shirt, reviewed and then discarded his notes, and received (though the contrary impression was never corrected) a slight trace of makeup. Because of his continuing tan, reinforced that day on the hotel roof, little makeup was required. He and Nixon exchanged nervous smiles and amenities and waited stiffly for 8:30
P.M.

Kennedy spoke first, quietly and simply, perhaps too rapidly and undramatically, but with strength. His sentences were short and sharp. He drew upon the themes and phrases with which he had become familiar in the first few weeks of campaigning:

I think the question before the American people is: Are we doing as much as we can do…? If we fail, then freedom fails…. I am not satisfied as an American with the progress that we are making…. This is a great country but I think it could be a greater country.

“I’m not satisfied,” he went on to say, with 50 percent of our steel capacity unused, with the lowest rate of economic growth among the industrialized nations, with nine billion dollars’ worth of food rotting in storage while millions are hungry, with the Soviet Union producing twice our number of scientists and engineers, with overcrowded schools and underpaid teachers, with natural resources undeveloped and with racial discrimination wasting the talents of too many Americans. The utter conviction with which he closed his opening remarks could be felt on screens throughout the land:

The reason Franklin Roosevelt was a good neighbor in Latin America was because he was a good neighbor in the United States…. I want people in Latin America and Africa and Asia to start to look to America…what the President of the United States is doing, not…Khrushchev or the Chinese Communists…. Can freedom be maintained under the most severe attack it has ever known? I think it can be and I think in the final analysis it depends upon what we do here. I think it’s time America started moving again.

Then it was Nixon’s turn, and those who expected his aggressive debating experience to destroy Kennedy were disappointed. He was as clever and articulate as ever. But hoping to submerge among Democrats and independents his old image as a “gut-fighter” in exchange for the new image of a statesman, he began by agreeing with Kennedy’s goals:

The things that Senator Kennedy has said, many of us can agree with…. I subscribe completely to the spirit that Senator Kennedy has expressed tonight…. I know Senator Kennedy feels as deeply about these problems as I do, but our disagreement is not about the goals for America but only about the means to reach those goals.

It sounded weak. What was worse, Nixon looked weak. Between the bleak gray walls and the bright floodlights of the television studio, his gray suit and heavily powdered jowls looked flabby and pallid beside Kennedy’s dark suit and healthy tan. The Vice President’s delivery was at times hesitant and uneasy. Both men were tense and unsmiling in their opening remarks, but Nixon looked drawn and tired. The preachy platitudes and dramatic gestures which had scored for him on the public platform seemed too pat and political in the living room next to Kennedy’s fresh and forthright precision.

The contrast continued throughout the question-and-answer period. In all four joint appearances, the press panelists—with some notable exceptions—were to be the least effective performers. Their unimaginative questions were increasingly but ineptly aimed at tripping a candidate or creating a headline instead of eliciting specific issues and information. They rarely had continuity in a single debate but became repetitious in the course of all four. Nor did two-and-a-half-minute answers permit any real debating.

But they did produce different impressions of the candidates. In the question period for the first debate, Kennedy, by then more relaxed, gave informed, incisive, forceful answers. His rapid-style delivery crowded more facts and arguments into each severely limited time period than Nixon could answer. The Vice President appeared equally well prepared and quick-witted but less specific in his facts, less certain of his memory and more defensive and evasive on hard questions. As in his opening statement, he seemed strained and less assured. His eyes shifted and darted. He used none of the aggressive lines or folksy examples he was using for local audiences—except for the one plaintive plea, “I know what it is to be poor.” At one point, intending to say “farm surplus,” he said we “must get rid of the farmer,” then quickly corrected himself. He was irritated by a question referring to Eisenhower’s statement to the press (meant to be facetious, said Nixon) that, if they would give him a week, he might think of an example of a Nixon idea that had been adopted.

On one of Kennedy’s answers, Nixon weakly said “No comment,” while Kennedy carried the fight at all times, correcting a questioner’s assertion, taking time when answering subsequent questions to refute earlier Nixon statements. When Kennedy deplored the Republican frustration of a $1.25 minimum wage, medical care for the aged and aid to education, Nixon said, among other things, that it was because “they were too extreme”—a remark which Kennedy immediately picked up and demolished. Perspiration and lip-licking multiplied the Vice President’s problems with makeup. He projected no warmth and little depth.

In their closing remarks, Senator Kennedy, after first answering briefly a few remaining charges, largely ignored Nixon. He spoke directly to his listeners with more fervor than either participant had shown up to then: “…only you can decide…what you want this country to be, what you want to do with the future. I think we’re ready to move.” Nixon, whose summation had sounded thin and defensive, glowered as Kennedy confidently closed still keeping the initiative.

The television producer in charge of the show later concluded, after rerunning a tape of the first debate a dozen times, that the only thing wrong with Nixon’s appearance was an oversized shirt collar. Others charged sabotage by Nixon’s makeup man. Some said Nixon’s schedule had left him fatigued. Others blamed the television studio for its bright lights and intense heat. Some said it was just Nixon. “Kennedy did not necessarily win the debates,” one survey concluded, “but Nixon lost them.”

The first debate, James Reston wrote the next day, “did not make or break either candidate.” Most of the headlines called it a draw. Very few voters said they had switched their allegiance from one candidate to the other. Many said Kennedy had talked too fast. Teachers of debate said both had scored equally. Many who listened on radio were amazed to hear TV viewers’ reaction to Nixon. (But not all radio listeners had this reaction. When I hailed a cab to return to my hotel, the driver said the debate had stifled his business. Everyone was staying home or in bars to watch. He, like many others, had pulled over to the curb to listen. He didn’t know who I was and he didn’t care whom I supported. “Kennedy,” he said, “clobbered him.”)