How The First Televised Presidential Debate Changed History Forever

In today's cutthroat political era, Americans are used to hearing a lot about elections, and if there's a presidential one coming up in the not-so-distant future? Forget about it — that's all you hear. (By comparison, France's campaign season is generally about two weeks, says NPR, and in Argentina, advertisements kick off 60 days before the election, with actual campaigning starting 25 days after that.)

American politics weren't always like today, and according to CNN, it was the first televised presidential debate that changed a lot about how the public expects a campaign to go. On September 26, 1960, John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon went head-to-head in a medium that had never been used before, and here's the thing: Radio pundits thought the two were pretty evenly matched, but for those who watched it on television, there was no question of who wiped the floor with the other. 

We're used to the idea of a televised debate today, but at the time, it was a huge deal — and not everyone thought it was for the best. When the Nixon-Kennedy debate aired, it bumped a beloved sitcom about a small-town sheriff, his struggles to raise his son, and American innocence. And that was significant. Bruce DuMont, president of the Museum of Broadcast Communications, put it this way: "The innocence of the 1950s ended with [the bumping of] The Andy Griffith Show, and the seriousness of the 1960s began with the first Kennedy-Nixon debate."

It's time to get technical! The first televised presidential debate didn't involve the candidates at all, and it happened before 1960. The United States Senate says that the very first televised presidential debate was on November 4, 1956. The candidates were Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, but both had surrogates taking their place for the debate.

The actual people doing the debating were former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (left) for the Democrats and Maine's Senator Margaret Chase Smith (right) for the Republicans. 

They very appropriately faced off on the then-new show Face the Nation, and they did it during election crunch time. It was just two days before votes were going to be cast, and most of what they talked about was the ever-confusing subject of foreign policy. Even then, they knew that it wasn't always about what was said — it was about appearance. Smith later wrote in her autobiography (via the New England Historical Society) that she specifically chose things like her hairstyle, lack of a hat, and simple, dark outfit to contrast what she knew Roosevelt would be wearing. By the time the debate was over, no one could say for sure who won, but hers were the footsteps that JFK would walk in just a few years later.

The infamous Nixon-Kennedy debate it was also broadcast on the radio — and History says there were a lot of people who tuned in that way, too. And that gives us an interesting perspective. Those who were listening to it on the radio, they say, called the whole thing a draw. Both candidates emphasized the same things: national security, building up the military, and taking a firm stand against Communism. Both seemed equally prepared, and both said things that people wanted to hear from their next president.

Looking at them, though, it was a different story. Around 70 million people watched the television broadcast, and among them, they declared Kennedy had won, hands down. What did that mean for the polls? 

The National Constitution Center says that before the debate, Nixon was up by six percent. (National Geographic says that Nixon's pick for VP, Henry Cabot Lodge, had told him not to debate because he was so far ahead that his only real option was to lose — there just wasn't a potential benefit.) But this was the first time that many voters were seeing the candidates live, and Nixon — who was already called "Tricky Dick" — came off as so shady that on the day after the debate, Nixon had lost his six-point lead and Kennedy had become the narrow leader. And when he won the election, it was by a similarly narrow margin.

Quick, which can you describe better, your presidential candidate of choice's policies or personality?

Let's take the party prep that was going on before the 2020 election. Jessica Flanigan, an assistant professor at the University of Richmond, says (via The Conversation) that the Democrats had a big problem: They needed to consider what candidate had the "charisma" to beat sitting president Donald Trump. The problem? She wrote: "[...] focusing on charisma is a terrible idea." Why? For the simple fact that likeability has nothing to do with a person's ability to lead and govern.

Just how focused on personality have we become? Vox reported on a study done on the ads that both Trump and Hilary Clinton ran in 2016. They found that only 25 percent of Clinton's ads went after Trump based on policy, not personality. Previous presidential candidates tended to devote at least 40 percent of their advertising to going after policy. 

CNN calls it "cosmetic politics," and the idea that television would turn a presidential election into a different kind of popularity contest was recognized immediately. At the time of the 1960 debate, historian Henry Steele Commager summed it up best and wrote that he hoped TV debates would never be used because, "The present formula of TV debate is designed to corrupt the public judgement and eventually, the whole political process. The American presidency is too great an office to be subjected to the indignity of this technique."

Kennedy's presidency ended up being very short, but he packed a lot into those few years in office. You could argue that without that first televised presidential debate, he might not have taken office, and if that had happened? Things may have turned out pretty differently, starting with the space race.

It was Kennedy, after all, who made the promise that NASA was going to put a man on the Moon by the end of the decade, and they did. And while it's true that Nixon was president by then and supported the Moon landing program throughout his term, CNN notes that he ultimately backed budgets that canceled the last of the scheduled Apollo missions.

They also argue that there would have been no Watergate. When Nixon lost to JFK, he was convinced they were playing dirty. Whether or not that's true, experts — like historian and author Evan Thomas — suggest that if he had won in 1960, he wouldn't have been so paranoid that he took the chances that ultimately led to Watergate, his disgrace, and a sharp decline in America's trust in their leadership.

And finally, it's also argued that if JFK hadn't won the presidency, it's likely he wouldn't have become a target for assassination. While it's impossible to tell what he would have achieved if he had survived, experts do speculate that there would have been some serious scandals hitting the headlines.

Since Carter and Ford faced off in 1976, presidential debates are pretty much standard operating procedure for US elections, but how much of an impact do they really have in helping people decide who they're going to vote for?

It's ... debated. In 1996, The New York Times ran a piece that said a decades-old survey done by the University of Michigan Survey Research Center found that in the 1960s, about 60 percent of voters got the majority of their information regarding elections from the television. They also found that a one-sided campaign invariably turned people away from that one side: They wanted the back-and-forth.

But the numbers suggest otherwise. According to The Economist, an academic study that looked at elections between 1960 and 2008 found that polls taken a week before presidential debates were suspiciously similar to those taken a week after. 

Then, take some of the numbers that come from Pew Research. They found that in some years — like 1992, when voters had to choose between George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot — 70 percent of voters said the debates helped them make a choice. But then, look at 2016. That year, only ten percent of voters made up their minds in the weeks around the debates, and 42 percent knew who they were voting for before the conventions. Bottom line? The debates are sometimes helpful but not always definitive ... and in the world of politics, who the heck really knows?