Today in History—September 26: TV Transformed Presidential Campaigns

On this day in 1960, two U.S. presidential candidates debated each other. It was a landmark event: Never before had the major-party nominees for president faced each other in a nationally televised debate. One candidate looked tired and ill and gray and sweaty, while the other was (comparatively) energetic and neat and clean, with a fresh tan too.

Any guess who won?

Afterward, most voters who listened on the radio thought there’d been no clear victor—or that Richard Nixon had won. In contrast, a large majority of the 70 million people who watched the debate on television were impressed by John F. Kennedy’s performance and called him the winner.

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That split was surprising, given that the two candidates expressed similar views on the same issues. In fact, following Kennedy’s opening statement, Nixon began his own by announcing, “I subscribe completely to the spirit that Senator Kennedy has expressed tonight.”

But for TV viewers, it was simple: Kennedy looked better than Nixon did. Several weeks earlier, Nixon had injured his knee on a car door and had to be hospitalized for two weeks. And when he stepped out of his car at the Chicago studio for the debate, he injured the same knee again. Nixon had also been campaigning that day, while Kennedy had been practicing for the debate. And just before the debate Nixon allowed his assistant to cover his five-o’clock shadow with makeup, which then melted under the hot studio lights. Kennedy, meanwhile, looked sharp and rested.

Before the debate Nixon, the Republican candidate, was favored to win the election, though not by a large margin (only 1 percent in a Gallup poll). The next day, however, the candidates switched places: Kennedy, the Democrat, was now likely to win by a slim margin. He and Nixon held three more debates before election day, and Nixon was thought to have won two of them, though the television audience by then had decreased by 20 million people. And then Kennedy won by one of the narrowest margins in the history of U.S. presidential elections.

The long-term consequence of the first televised debate between presidential candidates was that their appearance mattered as much as, if not more than, their political arguments. That much is still the case.