TOM PUTNAM: Good evening. I‘m Tom Putnam, Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, and on behalf of David McKean, CEO of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, and all of my Library and Foundation colleagues, I thank you for coming, and acknowledge the generous underwriters of the Kennedy Library Forums, including lead sponsor Bank of America, Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute, The Boston Foundation, and our media partners The Boston Globe and WBUR and NECN.
Programs like tonight would not be possible without the continued support of our members. If you would like to become a member or receive e-alerts about our exhibits and programs and discounts in our store, please visit the Library‘s web site at www.jfklibrary.com.
On September 26, 1960 Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard M. Nixon stood before an audience of 70 million Americans, two-thirds of the nation‘s adult population, in the first nationally televised presidential debate, which ushered in a new age of presidential politics. Compared to the exhaustive negotiations that precede our presidential debates today, the showdowns in 1960 were organized with relative informality and ease. As one commentator recently noted, this was after all before anyone knew of the political disadvantage of a badly- masked, five o‘clock shadow. [Laughter]
It is ironic to remember that Richard Nixon entered the debates as a beneficiary of television, having salvaged his career and vice presidential nomination eight years earlier with a nationally televised speech in which he commented on his wife‘s Republican cloth coat and the Nixon family dog, Checkers. Yet, when his campaign came up short on Election Day in 1960, many agreed with then President-elect Kennedy‘s statement, ―It was TV more than anything else that turned the tide.‖
We are honored this evening to have an especially distinguished panel to share their recollections about this turning point in our nation‘s history. Theodore C. Sorensen served as President Kennedy‘s Special Counsel and was one of his most trusted colleagues. Each time he graces us with his presence, we are reminded by his recall and quick wit of why JFK kept him so close to his side. When he spoke here last, for example, at a forum on the 50th anniversary of JFK‘s victory in the 1960 West Virginia primary, fellow panelist David Broder explained that Kennedy‘s primary victory in a state electorate dominated by Protestant voters was crucial and that it allowed his campaign supporters to then strong arm the party bosses in other pivotal states to back JFK at the convention. Mr. Sorensen, with his signature repartee, quickly replied, ―David. We never strong armed anyone. I prefer to use the word ‗persuaded.‘ And if they chose to support JFK at the convention, they were not party bosses but distinguished leaders of the Democratic establishment.‖ Fifty years ago, Mr. Sorensen spent the day of the debate helping JFK prepare, lunching with him, Robert Kennedy and the campaign‘s pollster, Lou Harris, waking him from his afternoon nap in a hotel room awash in index cards and, finally, giving him the change he needed to call his father from a pay phone immediately after the debate was over. [Laughter] We could have no better eye witness to this pivotal moment in our nation‘s history, and we are honored as always, Mr. Sorensen, to have you here with us this evening. [Applause]
Sander Vanocur is one of the nation‘s pre-eminent broadcast journalists, having worked for ABC and NBC News, The New York Times and The Washington Post. It was while working for NBC News that he served as a panelist during the first debate. He pressed both candidates forcefully, questioning JFK about whether he could get his ambitious domestic agenda through Congress and challenging Vice President Nixon concerning his campaign slogan, ―It‘s experience that counts,‖ with a skewering question that we will replay for you along with the Vice President‘s response in just a few moments.
Journalist, humorist, essayist and biographer Russell Baker is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, the first for his distinguished commentary as a nationally syndicated columnist for The New York Times and the second for his autobiography Growing Up. Known for his subtlety, understatement and self-effacing manner, he writes in his memoir that as a young man he believed, ―The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work and that writing didn‘t require any.‖ [Applause] Yet it was his very work ethic that almost interfered with the accuracy of his initial analysis of that first debate, which he covered as a young reporter. ―I thought Nixon had a slight edge in what little argument there had been,‖ he recounted. ―But I spent the whole debate with my head down, listening, taking notes and typing.‖ In doing so, he wrote later, he almost missed that transformative nature of that debate. ―That night,‖ he concluded, ―image replaced the printed word as the natural language of politics.‖
Like John F. Kennedy, William Wilson understood, before many others, the dramatic role television would play in modern presidential campaigns. A pioneer in political broadcasting, he was the first person hired as a television advisor for a presidential campaign, serving Adlai Stevenson in 1956. He went on to spearhead the media teams for JFK, RFK, Hubert Humphrey, Sergeant Shriver and Ted Kennedy in their respective national and presidential campaigns. In 1960, he negotiated the terms for the debate for JFK, including advocating for cutaway shots of the candidate while the other was speaking and a simple, single pole lectern, which he surmised would be complementary to JFK‘s graceful body language.
This institution owes so much of who we are today to Senator Edward M. Kennedy, whose body lay in repose in this very room just over a year ago, and I should note that few did more to support Senator Kennedy throughout his career than Mr. Wilson‘s wife, Melanie Miller, who is here with us this evening. [Applause]
Marty Nolan is a veteran journalist who became a reporter for The Boston Globe in 1961. In 1966, he won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism and went on to become The Globe’s Washington bureau chief and the editor of its editorial page. In addition to those illustrious titles, or perhaps because of them, he earned a spot on President Nixon‘s enemies list. [Laughter] As this season‘s post season baseball hopes fade with each passing day, I‘m reminded of my favorite Marty Nolan quip, ―The Red Sox killed my father and now they are coming after me.‖ [Laughter]
Whether it be baseball or political trivia, no one is quicker with his recall of historical anecdotes and their larger meaning than our moderator, who proves time and time again that an Oliphant never forgets. In a 40-year career with The Globe as correspondent and Washington columnist, Tom Oliphant earned a Pulitzer Prize as one of three editors on special assignment who managed the paper‘s coverage of the efforts to desegregate the city‘s schools. He is the moderator we turn to most often for his command of the facts and for the impish pleasure he takes in engaging all of you and our panelists.
So please join me in welcoming him along with Ted Sorensen, Sandy Vanocur, Russell Baker, Bill Wilson and Mary Nolan to mark the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy / Nixon debates.
TOM OLIPHANT: Thank you very much, Tom Putnam, for all you do here, by the way. You know, if some of you would like a special treat after this babbling is over this evening, you might want to go downstairs here to the exhibits area where, with regard to the event we are discussing tonight, among other things, you can see this little primitive desk, the kind of thing that would have been in your room in high school, maybe. And it was the desk from which Howard K. Smith, then at CBS, moderated that first debate. And I always love to look at it because it reminds me how primitive that beginning was.
Yet, Tom used the number 70 million, which you sometimes here was the size of that audience. There are studies that were done by the networks themselves, and they do know how to do this, that put the number of Americans who watched one or all of these debates at over 100 million, maybe as high as 125 million, which makes that series of events weekly, beginning September 26th, the event up to that time in the entire history of the world, no event had been seen by as many people, to give you an idea of what it was.
And so to introduce this enormously important historic sequence of evenings, I was going to ask each of my learned friends to tell me precisely where they were when Howard K. Smith opened the first debate in Chicago in the studios of WBBM, the CBS affiliate. Ted, where precisely in the building were you?
TED SORENSEN: Tom, let me first say that conscious as I am that this is a tax-supported, non- partisan institution, I feel I should make it clear that tonight I intend to be totally objective about the debate between the sainted John F. Kennedy and the scoundrel Richard Nixon, [laughter] on whose enemies list I had the honor to be. I was in the studio -- not on the sound stage where the debate took place -- but in the studio watching on a monitor.
TOM OLIPHANT: Did they have a little room where you and other senior assistants to the President watched the debate?
TED SORENSEN: Who is this, Bill?
WILLIAM WILSON: Yes. They had a room. You were in it, I thought.
TED SORENSEN: Yes. I was in it.
TOM OLIPHANT: Indeed. After having spent the entire day virtually, with the candidate …
TED SORENSEN: I did.
TOM OLIPHANT: … going over last minute things. So there was a little room which there is to this day, still, Bill?
WILLIAM WILSON: Which any good advance man would see to.
TOM OLIPHANT: Indeed. And the Kennedy campaign, even in 1960, and I shouldn‘t say—I should say especially in 1960, was famous for the quality of its advance work. Bill, if 1960 were 2010 and you had the kind of media culture then that you have today, there would be people who would be surmising that it‘s because of Bill Wilson that Senator Kennedy was elected president. You worked with him.
WILLIAM WILSON: That‘s a real reach.
TOM OLIPHANT: But that‘s the nature of the modern media, Bill. [Laughter] It was a little more factual in those days. But you spent a lot of time with him, personally, in the hours leading up to the beginning of that first debate. Tell us what you did and where you were.
WILLIAM WILSON: Well, there was a moment that I think had a lot to do with the success of the debate. But my job, basically, was in all the pre-production activity with each of the networks that were running the debate. Richard Nixon had his man, who was Ted Rogers, and JFK had me, and we would sit with the director, the stage manager and the set designer and design each of these panels.
But the moment that is most important, I think, to the debate was … We were in the room with Ted, Bob Kennedy and JFK, and they were still grilling him a little bit, getting him up to speed. There was a sense that this was a very big moment because the problems in ‘60 were inexperience and name recognition and Catholicism. Those were the issues. There weren‘t really any others in terms of the voters. There were in terms of the media.
But at a particular point in the Green Room where we were holding, I said to Kennedy that we had to go down and get make-up. He said, ―Well, find out if Nixon is going to get make up.‖ So I went down and there was Ted Rogers saying, ―Is your guy going to get made up?‖ [Laughter] And I said, ―Not until your guy gets made up.‖ [Laughter] So it was a Mexican stand-off. I reported back to Kennedy, and he said, ―Well, then, I‘m not going to get made up.‖ I said, ―You‘ve got to have something. You have a good tan but you have to close the pores in that face.‖ Because those lights in 1960 were huge, broad lights and he was going to be there for an hour, as Nixon found out. [Laughter]
So I had started my career at that television station ten years before, less than ten, and I knew that there was a place around the corner. I ran across the street and got some pancake make-up, came back and put it on him, which he didn‘t like at all. But I said, ―The pores. The pores. You‘ve got to close the pores.‖
Now here was the significant moment in the debate as far as I was concerned. We made our way to the stage. We were outside the opening to the studio stage, and I had a checklist of all the things that should be done until he entered and sat in that chair, but I blew the checklist because I went out for that pancake make-up. And so, as we hit the stage, he said, ―I have to go to the bathroom.‖ It was on my checklist and I forgot it, and I took him to where he was supposed to go.
I heard the stage manager saying ―10, 9, 8.‖ He made that stage on ―1.‖ What it did was freeze the room because everybody there thought we were without one of the contestants, and two, it psyched Nixon out. Because JFK walked in, sat down, crossed his legs like this and didn‘t look at anybody.
TOM OLIPHANT: Now, part of the lore, Bill, is that when you came over to the studio, what, the Ambassador East in Chicago?
WILLIAM WILSON: The Drake.
TOM OLIPHANT: The Drake. Okay. That you took a look at him in the studio and he had a white shirt on. And you thought, ―Uh-uh. Not for television.‖ And he wore a blue shirt, somehow.
WILLIAM WILSON: And a dark suit. That was very important.
TOM OLIPHANT: Against a light background.
WILLIAM WILSON: Because in those meetings I had him do a light beige background. If you have a dark suit on, you pop right out. And, of course, Nixon had a gray suit on and he just melted back into the background. [Laughter] The most important thing I was able to do, I‘ve always believed, in terms of dealing with the look of the debate was the single pole and just the shelf on top for the notes. Because JFK was an elegant man, and I‘ve always said that you perceive by 50% body language, 25% attitude, and 25% what they say.
TOM OLIPHANT: Uh-oh.
WILLIAM WILSON: That‘s from my perception.
TED SORENSEN: Thanks a lot.
WILLIAM WILSON: Ted said, ―Thanks a lot.‖ [Laughter]
TOM OLIPHANT: So what this means is that thanks to this guy, 50 years later we have these ridiculous looking podiums.
WILLIAM WILSON: They were boxes from then on.
TOM OLIPHANT: That‘s right. Thanks to you. Sandy, depending on one‘s perspective you either had the worse seat in the house or the best seat in the house. How did you come to occupy it, and what‘s the difference between being in a press room somewhere and having to be part of the event?
SANDY VANOCUR: I was in the fourth seat on the orders of our producer-director, Don Hewitt. And I didn‘t see the debate. People say, ―You didn‘t see it?‖ And I think about the Groucho Marx‘ line, ―Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?‖ [Laughter] Those of us who were the panelists did not see what the nation saw on television.
The next morning I located Governor Abe Ribicoff of Connecticut, the first governor to declare for Kennedy, and he had been driving the night before from Sacramento to San Francisco. I said, ―What do you think?‖ He heard it on the radio, and he said, ―I think that Nixon won.‖ My next call, Kenny O‘Donnell who was in Zanesville, Ohio with the Senator. I said, ―What do you
think?‖ And he said, ―Well, at 7:00 Frank Lauschi, who was the Senator, a Democrat who voted with Republicans, knocked on the door to congratulate Kennedy. I thought then Kennedy probably had carried the way. But the key thing is people say, ―What did you see?‖ And I said, ―We saw with our naked eyes.‖ And that is different than what the nation saw or on radio what the nation heard. But at the end of the debate the room cleared out almost automatically. There were no handlers there on either side to tell you what you had seen or heard.
TOM OLIPHANT: Russ, that makes me observe that for a poor slob who has to actually cover this story -- and the three of us, we‘ve all been in that position on presidential debate night.
Today there are 750 television monitors surrounding you in a cavernous, well-lubricated press room. There are people bombarding you with opinions from one side or the other, either through your computer or in your ear or in person. What were the circumstances like of your coverage that night? Where were you?
RUSSELL BAKER: I was in the building. I was in the private room across the corridor from where the show was going on. We had set up a monitor so I could watch and listen, and I was typing simultaneously. I was on deadline, and I would type a couple of lines and give it to the Western Union in those days. I was busy, of course. You know, I was a one-armed … It was a fierce job, physically. I‘m watching and I‘m listening and I‘m typing and I‘m calling Western Union. And I don't know what‘s going on. [Laughter] And the copy is flowing. And I managed to get it all out by the time the debate was over, but it was not much of a story, actually, that I had.
TOM OLIPHANT: How many editions, excuse me, did you have to file for that night? Do you remember?
RUSSELL BAKER: I have no idea of editions.
TOM OLIPHANT: Three or four?
RUSSELL BAKER: It didn‘t make any difference. You know, one story held through the night. And listening to what‘s been said so far I‘m struck by how primitive it was. We‘re talking about who won and who lost. These things aren‘t won or lost anymore. It‘s just what figure you cut on television. That‘s all that matters. Nobody was listening. I listened and my memory of it was that they talked about Kimoi and Matsu, two islands off the coast of Formosa, Taiwan. And I listened and they were arguing about the diplomacy of it. I couldn‘t believe anybody cared in the country. [Laughter] And it made, I thought, a very thin story.
Kennedy was impressive because he came out, I guess well equipped by Ted, with statistics. I was really impressed by Kennedy‘s spew of statistics that came out. I thought, ―This guy really knows a lot.‖ He cut that figure. But I didn‘t see what the nation was seeing while not listening, which was this figure, this dynamic, elegant, young figure.
TOM OLIPHANT: If I could gently contradict you just a touch from your own story that night, which I studied a couple of times. Further down in it, after the basics of the story have been reported, you made an observation that I think was extraordinarily prescient -- and I want to get Marty to talk about this in a second -- that the differences between Kennedy and Nixon that night were, on the one hand, not particularly sharp in your observation; and secondly, you wrote that they were not particularly sharply expressed.
RUSSELL BAKER: That‘s true.
TOM OLIPHANT: And as a result, you said, it appeared that the event was most important to them in terms of how it influenced public perceptions of them as potential presidents, as opposed to what they said.
RUSSELL BAKER: I wrote that?
TOM OLIPHANT: You did. [Laughter] And the desk didn‘t change it and it appears to have been printed. [Laughter] In other words, in 1960 there is evidence that at least some people in the press, particularly editors, were very interested in having you tell the country what these people said. A strange notion.
RUSSELL BAKER: That‘s why I said it seems primitive to me. Somebody was interested in content.
TOM OLIPHANT: That‘s right.
RUSSELL BAKER: Nowadays you don‘t listen. People don‘t listen to television. They look at television, and they were looking, and I was listening. And the Kennedy people, I think, were very shrewd. They knew that all along. Kennedy was really up for that. He came in looking tanned, rested, firm, everything. It was a great performance, and you were aware of that.
Somebody was aware of it deep down. But this old-fashioned notion that we were debating -- I‘ve watched a lot of presidential debates; nobody even pretends to debate any more.
TOM OLIPHANT: Marty, first of all, tell us where you were. So what if you were younger. [Laughter]
MARTY NOLAN: I was younger.
RUSSELL BAKER: Don‘t hold it against him.
TOM OLIPHANT: He was pretty good looking in his day, too.
MARTY NOLAN: I was in the newsroom of the great student newspaper at Boston College, The Heights, and it was closing night for a weekly. I said, ―Lads, let‘s get this hockey team story. We didn‘t have a television set but we knew pubs that had them, and so we did the American thing and went to a pub. Of course, everything is black and white television there.
I remember my first impression. I was a fairly precocious political television watcher. I can recall watching the Kefauver Crime Commission hearings, and certainly the fun speech -- which is what Richard Nixon called the Checker speech -- and the McCarthy hearings with the Boston attorney Joseph N. Wells, a very famous guy. I knew it was historic because it had never happened in presidential politics before. I mean Lincoln and Douglas debated for the Senate in 1858. I remember looking at Nixon and feeling automatically sorry for him because he looked so ghastly. He had a gray suit on against a gray background, and he looked sallow. I guess Kennedy looked great. Of course, we were all for Kennedy, but—first notion of Nixon—and then, of course, I was so entranced that years later when the GPO, the Government Printing Office, actually printed the transcript of all the speeches of each candidate in 1960 and then, also the joint appearances … I still have that book, green, the cover on it … And a good intellectual exercise someday would be to go through it and in certain paragraphs say, ―Which candidate said this?‖ I just looked at it recently and I said, ―Oh. I see. Well, Kennedy was for single payer because that is what Walter Reuther and all the union guys wanted on healthcare. And, guess what? Nixon was advocating what we now call Obama-care. Nixon would not pass muster at a Tea Party rally today.
So the substance of it, which was in the newspapers, certainly The New York Times and its ace correspondent there., but everybody thought, ―Did you see the debate?‖ Very few people said, ―Did you hear the debate?‖ Because, you know, it was an event, and, of course, it profoundly changed the politics.
TOM OLIPHANT: I can do this briefly because it introduces one more element in the narrative. I was about to graduate from high school in Southern California, and my best friend and I constituted the entire field organization for the Kennedy – Johnson ticket in northern San Diego country, where it was, which was so right wing that the John Birch Society were the moderates. [Laughter] We had orders from headquarters to go up to a little town just south of Oceanside where we were going to canvass a democratic neighborhood after the debate. My friend‘s father drove us up, and we heard the debate on the radio, nervous, not knowing what to think and then saw it, and we were thrilled. We went out and canvassed in Encinitas, California until 11 p.m. and raised $200 dollars, which was a lot of money in those days.
Ted, I wanted to ask. There‘s been a lot of anti-substance rhetoric here on the panel so far, and I wanted to ask you about your work with Senator Kennedy on the opening statement. Some of you may know, but all of you should be reminded, this is the beginning of the use of the word ―debate‖ to describe something that doesn‘t quite fit the definition of what you think of as a debate. In this first one in Chicago, both the Senator and the Vice President made opening statements that lasted almost nine minutes apiece. They were also each given closing statements that exceeded four minutes apiece. Now, do the math. It‘s an hour of television. There were ten questions asked and answered during that first exchange, which meant that in terms of political impact, not only how they looked but what they said in those first nine minutes of exposure was critical.
I remember at the time, and ever since, being stunned at the way Senator Kennedy began. It was a debate about domestic issues, and the first words out of his mouth were about the Cold War and how we couldn‘t win if we didn‘t move forward at home, and all the things Russ was talking about -- that he was dissatisfied with the pace of progress. What were you trying to achieve in that opening statement, because it set the tone for that evening?
TED SORENSEN: Kennedy‘s theme from the very beginning was he was not satisfied. We‘ve got to do better. We‘ve got to get this country moving again because the Soviet Union is surpassing us, and we have to be strong and that means a strong economy. He segued from strength to overtake the Soviet Union into building our economic strength at home where too much was going wrong.
Yes, it‘s true that agreement had been reached, and Bill and I were part of the Kennedy team that met with the Nixon team and the network representatives. We agreed on the eight-minute openings. We agreed on the four-minute closing. We agreed there would only be four debates and, interestingly enough, the Nixon people -- do you remember this, Bill? -- the Nixon people did not want their candidate sitting near Kennedy, on the claim that that would make them seem equal and Kennedy would win just by showing up. They wanted the candidates sitting further apart. That‘s why debate number three, after the first two had gone so badly …
TOM OLIPHANT: Three thousand miles apart.
TED SORENSEN: Exactly. He was in LA for the New York debate. Anyway, I think there was plenty of substance in that opening about getting this country going and deploring what was happening, particularly at the bottom of the economic ladder. He even mentioned civil rights, to his credit, in that opening statement and the discrimination against black Americans.
He had some pretty good statistics, as Marty pointed out. Nixon was full of statistics. But in typical debate fashion, he was answering Kennedy while Kennedy was addressing the nation. His statistics were all boring statistics on how Eisenhower had done better than Truman.
Nobody was debating that as far as I know, but that‘s what Nixon focused on.
And my I say one word about the myth, which others repeated here, that Nixon won on radio? All due respect to Abe Ribicoff, there is no such thing as Nixon winning on radio. Sure, he sounded more like a debate, and it‘s true they couldn‘t see that ghastly look that was mentioned of the make-up …
TOM OLIPHANT: … water running down his face.
TED SORENSEN: … perspiration and his very nervous, shifty eyes [Laughter] back and forth. But the people on radio could still hear Nixon‘s weak answers. At the very beginning, Kennedy answered the first question with why we had to stay ahead. Nixon, who had received a phone call at the last minute from his running mate, a Massachusetts man known as Henry Cabot Lodge, saying, ―Don‘t be the assassin. Get over that old Nixon image. Be a nice guy.‖ So when Howard K. Smith said, ―Mr. Vice President, what is your comment on Senator Kennedy‘s statement,‖ he said, ―I have no comment.‖ He had no comment? Later on he would say, ―I agree with Senator Kennedy on this,‖ and, ―I agree on this.‖ The right-wing Republicans were furious with him. But the people on radio heard that and they also heard Nixon go back to form, and the Tea Party today would agree when Nixon said, ―What Senator Kennedy is proposing -- $1.25 an hour minimum wage -- is too extreme.‖
TOM OLIPHANT: I want to ask help from Russ and Sandy to understand what Nixon was trying to do on that stage. Ted has mentioned, when they got to the Q&A, it really is true that after Senator Kennedy took the question and Howard K. Smith turned to Nixon to ask for a comment, Nixon really did say, ―I have no comment.‖ But I‘m also interested in the beginning of Nixon‘s prepared statement, which followed Senator Kennedy‘s. Here is the catchy opening line: ―The things that Senator Kennedy has said, many of us can agree with us. The disagreement that we have is over the means to reach the goals that we share.‖ Now, that thought and that phrase just almost literally by count repeated six different times during the debate. Can you help me understand, from your knowledge of the state of the campaign as of that night, what was Nixon trying to accomplish with his demeanor? Forget his appearance for a second because we will get back to Bill in a minute.
RUSSELL BAKER: I think Nixon was trying to minimize the combative aspect of the campaign. He is coming out of the great triumph, the glory days of the Eisenhower administration and all he had to do was ride Eisenhower‘s coattails. They had been victorious at everything they did. The country was a peace. Things were going well. There was no need to argue about the point. I was covering Nixon on a daily basis at that time and that was the speech he gave five or six times a day. Everything was fine. Why should we disagree? Vote me along with it.
TOM OLIPHANT: Sandy, to get you in here, at that moment, as of that night, to the extent that there were polls in those days, had Nixon slightly ahead but certainly not by anything approaching a comfortable margin. Did you have the sense sitting there that the Vice President was trying to play it safe and sit on a lead or what did you think he was up to?
SANDY VANOCUR: I think you are exactly right. But what Kennedy was capitalizing on was, I think, Sputnik in 1958. I remember flying into National Airport on the Caroline after the primaries, and he threw something over and he said, ―This is unacceptable.‖ It was The Wall Street Journal article and it said it was the first time the Soviet Union had exceeded the United States in the production of machine tools, which was the gauge of a country‘s prowess. Kennedy said, ―This is unacceptable.‖
I think Kennedy was on the attack and Nixon was on the defense, and I don‘t think he was helped very much by Eisenhower. I think that is very important to the proceedings.
TOM OLIPHANT: We‘re going to get to that one because we have video on that. But Marty, who probably knows more about Nixon than anybody alive or dead [Laughter] or both, here is this dichotomy again, isn‘t it? Boss, nice guy, awful guy, like me, I don‘t like you. Is this familiar even 50 years ago?
MARTY NOLAN: Don‘t forget, for Richard Nixon to get to this point, to get the nomination, he had to take on the Rockefeller fortune. I always see him as a Dickensian waif -- his nose, his significant nose, pressed against the glass looking at all the sugar plums inside that he can‘t get. And he had said as much. He was a very good writer; I commend his writing. His Six Crises has, for Nixon, the ring of honesty. A lot of his gripes filter through there.
H.L. Mencken once reviewed Calvin Coolidge‘s autobiography and said, ―Well, whatever it is, it‘s accurate. Even if it is not true, it‘s accurate.‖ [Laughter] Nixon just nourished his resentments. His resentments were a flowering garden of envy and distain for those rich people, the Rockefellers and the Kennedys, and I‘m not one of them. I had to work on my dad‘s farm, and all that. He was born in a log cabin, like anyone else. He was born in a house his father built from the Sears Roebuck Catalogue, and it is still there in Yorba Linda, right there.
So he did have the terrible burden, and to go against Nelson Rockefeller, who was a pretty glamorous fellow, an intelligent fellow, and then to survive that and then to go up … He much would have preferred Lyndon Johnson or Stuart Symington, I think.
TOM OLIPHANT: Russ, did you have any sense that night, or covering him on a daily basis, of what kind of national leader he wanted to be, in a 1960 context, again, to help us understand his demeanor that night?
RUSSELL BAKER: No. I don‘t think he had any idea. I think Nixon was one of those politicians who loved the game. It was victory or it was defeat; he just loved the game. I don‘t think he really had much vision. I would like to make a point that hasn‘t been touched on yet and that is Nixon was sick that night. I started with him in the campaign. At the opening of the campaign, he decided he was going to fly across the country on one day and make four stops.
But before we took off, he did something extraordinary.
He had a reception for the press, just the press that was going with him. We were invited down to the Mayflower, or wherever, and bring your wife along. I took my wife. This is a chance to meet this man. Nixon came in and you could see he looked ghastly, physically. He had lost weight. He had been in the hospital for a long period with an infection. He had banged his knees somehow, and he still hadn‘t recovered. I was shocked to see him. I hadn‘t seen him for several weeks. He had been in the hospital and came out, and there he was that night. He looked sick, you know, frail. He hadn‘t gotten over that. I think the debate came two weeks after that.
TOM OLIPHANT: That‘s right.
RUSSELL BAKER: In Chicago.
TOM OLIPHANT: Bill, you know something about this because you were right at the place where the cars came in at the studio. And he did it again, didn‘t he?
WILLIAM WILSON: I happened to go out when the limousine came in to the studio. He got out and he hit his knee again and everybody grabbed for him. That was the knee that he was in the hospital for. No, he did look just right. [Laughter]
TOM OLIPHANT: Now, on the other hand, at the time the lore was that Nixon had not worn any make-up that night. And as near as I can tell, that‘s not true, right Bill? There was a product in those days -- really test your memory -- for people who develop what became known as five o‘clock shadow. I think Mennen made it, and it was called Lazy Shave.
WILLIAM WILSON: That‘s right.
TOM OLIPHANT: Right?
WILLIAM WILSON: Right.
TOM OLIPHANT: And you put it on and it sort of lightened up.
WILLIAM WILSON: Because Ted Rogers couldn‘t run to the corner and get pancake make- up …
TOM OLIPHANT: … the way you could.
WILLIAM WILSON: He used it, which just intensified any kind of sweat that would come down his face.
TOM OLIPHANT: And it also intensified the absence of contrast between the way he presented and this very light background behind him. Now, also, Ted Rogers, who was Nixon‘s
…
WILLIAM WILSON: Wonderful guy, by the way.
TOM OLIPHANT: Yes, and he had produced the Checkers speech in 1952, so very experienced in this new media. I think he was the guy who rode with Nixon or talked with him just before the debate. We‘ve heard a little bit about the advice from, of all people, that experienced national politician Henry Cabot Lodge, to be a nice guy and get rid of the assassin image. But what I‘ve always been told is the media people said, ―Don‘t let him get away with anything. Reply to every charge. Be vigorous and aggressive.‖ And something went wrong. He is a guy he trusted, obviously, and didn‘t listen to.
WILLIAM WILSON: Exactly. When a candidate becomes the presidential candidate, a very tight group gets around him. And even if you have had a long-term relationship with him, as Ted did having done the Checkers speech, he had a lot of trouble being where he should be.
TOM OLIPHANT: Sandy, we have a little video that‘s illustrative of several things, actually. If you think about modern debates and the questions that get asked in them, you can see an early example of it.
SANDY VANOCUR: I hope that stops.
TOM OLIPHANT: I do, too, or I‘m dead. I‘m dead. But let‘s, for a second, look at a rather good looking network correspondent asking a perfectly understandable but, actually, unusual question of Nixon and one that had come up a couple of times before that night. And you will tell us the story after we see, I hope, the clip.
[VIDEO CLIP]
TOM OLIPHANT: I apologize for the back view of Sandy, which, if Bill Wilson has been in charge of his image that night, never would have happened. [Laughter] Sandy, as you know better than I, Nixon hated that question, so much so that he even wrote about it in the book he wrote the following year, partially dissecting his defeat. Why did you ask it?
SANDY VANOCUR: I asked it because it was standing out there waiting to be asked. It grew out of a question put to him by a very able reporter for The New York Times, Charles Mohr -- M- O-H-R -- who along with David Halberstam had just given The New York Times wonderful coverage from Vietnam.
Because the Republicans had been making that an issue in the campaign, ―It‘s experience that counts.‖ I think President Eisenhower never liked Richard Nixon very much, and I think he was dismissive of him in that answer. It was careless and reckless. Stuart Novins, whom you just saw asked part of the question before and it never got finished, so it was hanging there waiting to be finished.
TOM OLIPHANT: Russ, in the part of Nixon‘s answer that wasn‘t shown on the screen, he first tried to smile and suggest that President Eisenhower was joking, that he wasn‘t serious. Again, as somebody who had to deal with him every day, what do you remember about the exchange?
RUSSELL BAKER: About the exchange?
TOM OLIPHANT: In the debate.
RUSSELL BAKER: Oh, I thought you were talking about Eisenhower saying he might think of it in a week.
TOM OLIPHANT: Well, that, too.
RUSSELL BAKER: That was an extraordinary moment in that campaign. Well, as I say, Nixon liked the fight. He liked the game. He treated government as a game. He was always bent on winning, and when the game went against him he took it very hard. He‘d weep and cry and make a scene. In his whole campaign that‘s all he said, that they had done a wonderful job and he was going to continue it. There was not much to argue about there.
TOM OLIPHANT: Did he ever come to grips with how he felt about Eisenhower or about how Eisenhower felt about him?
RUSSELL BAKER: Well, as he would say, I‘m glad you asked that question. I mean Nixon had been Vice President for eight years, but he had been Vice President for a Commander-in- Chief who looked upon the Vice Presidency as a job for a young staff guy. If you looked at the list of Eisenhower‘s possible nominees, they were all young, and the vice presidency is not a job for a young man. The last happy Vice President we had was Alvin Barkley from Kentucky, who was older than Harry Truman. Maybe Joe Biden who was older than … I think Joe Biden should read Alvin Barkley‘s memoirs.
December of 1968, I‘m covering the Johnson White House and it is the event. You would think it is a big event. The President-elect and Mrs. Nixon show up at the White House, and the President and Lady Byrd both come out onto the driveway, which is a nice touch of protocol.
The White House press corps is about a dozen people at this time. You know, it is not a big story, so we wait around, and Nixon comes out.
I had covered his whole campaign and his Congressional campaigns, and he had gone through the humiliation of losing the California governorship and of being Eisenhower‘s Vice President and he looked absolutely seraphic, beatific. He never looked happier. He said, ―Oh, I want to thank President and Mrs. Johnson so much. Pat and I have seen parts of the White House we have never seen before.‖ [Laughter]
TOM OLIPHANT: Ouch!
RUSSELL BAKER: And I‘m looking over at Bryce Harlow, who had worked for Ike, and he is like, ―Don‘t look at me.‖ [Laughter] It was just a telling, touching, more monuments to his piles of resentment.
WILLIAM WILSON: I had a sense of Eisenhower. They had asked me to cover Eisenhower‘s final speech so I could observe when President-elect Kennedy gave his …
TOM OLIPHANT: That was the industrial complex speech.
WILLIAM WILSON: That was. And I hung out with Haggerty and Robert Montgomery who was …
TOM OLIPHANT: Eisenhower‘s press secretary, James Haggerty.
WILLIAM WILSON: Yes, and Robert Montgomery who was a movie star and advisor to the President. I walked into their office that evening, and I looked very young. Both their mouths just dropped to the floor. Then I went into the studio and observed the speech that he gave.
There was only one other civilian in there, and when he came to the industrial, military complex point we both looked at each other, just like that. It was a startling moment.
After the speech, Jim Haggerty said, ―Bill, would you like to meet the President?‖ and I said, ―Certainly.‖ He introduced me to Eisenhower, who looked at me and then looked over his shoulder at Robert Montgomery and said, ―Bob, have you met your replacement?‖ [Laughter]
TOM OLIPHANT: There it is. I‘m going to ask Ted‘s help on an aspect of this in a second, but first I wanted to tell you all that we are getting close to the moment in a Kennedy Library evening when you get to go to the microphones and, with some allowance for brevity, ask anything you want. If there is something on your mind, you might want to think about slowly going toward the microphones.
We are going to talk about one other aspect of the debates, and that is the sharpest conflict that was raised during them. But in about ten minutes we will start taking questions. Ted, the experience question had loomed so large up until that night in Chicago. Do you think the issue changed after that night or after the debates?
TED SORENSEN: Yes.
TOM OLIPHANT: And did it change Senator Kennedy?
TED SORENSEN: The next day in Ohio, as one of the other panelists mentions, not only did Frank Lausche join the motorcade but the turnout for the motorcade was larger than it had ever been before, including -- do you remember? -- the leapers, the young women, who somehow levitated themselves to see over the people standing in front of them. We had never seen them but they were in great numbers the next day in Ohio and that was only one sign of what was to come.
Because there was much made earlier about Nixon‘s hospitalization, and it reminds me of one of JFK‘s greatest, or two of his great lines combined in one. He said, ―When Mr. Nixon was in the hospital, I said as a matter of fairness, equity, I would not mention him unless I could speak of him favorably, and you notice, I haven‘t spoken of him.‖ [Laughter]
TOM OLIPHANT: There it is. Thank you. Now, we have highlighted Sandy‘s question and Nixon‘s answer because it seemed to go to the heart of what was before the country that year.
But there was one other thing in these four debates that really did rise to the level of a campaign issue. It popped up in a question almost at the end of the second debate. It was present in the third and the fourth, and you can always tell in a presidential campaign when something important has happened in a debate if both sides talk about it for several days thereafter. It involved two tiny little islands barely off the coast of what was then called Communist China. The issue was whether the United States either was obligated to go to war to defend them if attacked by the Chinese Communists, or ChiComs if you were in the CIA, or not. The issue came up in a question by one of the panelists that night. We all remember Edward P. Morgan of ABC.
―Senator Kennedy, Saturday on television you said you had always thought that Kimoi and Matsu were unwise places to draw our defense line in the Far East. Would you comment further on that and also comment on whether a pullback would constitutes appeasement?‖ A very dirty word in 1960. The result was a back and forth on this question of these two tiny little islands.
Sandy, was it an argument about nothing? What were the stakes for each campaign in this argument?
SANDY VANOCUR: I think most people in the country thought it was a Chinese song and dance act. Nobody knew where the hell these islands were. Nobody cared where they were. And I don‘t think it was an issue except if it reminded people of the phrase, ―Who lost China?‖ But I don‘t think that resonated.
I swear I think it was, ―I want to get the country moving again,‖ and it was the Catholic issue, which I think was very, very tough with Kennedy. He didn‘t win by much, you know, and I think the Catholic issue resonated throughout the whole campaign.
TOM OLIPHANT: Russ, when you first heard it, how did Kimoi and Matsu strike you? Did it bring the story alive a little bit?
RUSSELL BAKER: Well, I was writing for The Times. That‘s an audience that might be interested in Kimoi and Matsu. If I had been writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, I might not have got to it.
TOM OLIPHANT: Is that another way of saying in your judgment you agree with Sandy, that for all of the sharpness of the exchanges that went on for two weeks, that this was something that just didn‘t interest the country very much?
RUSSELL BAKER: I think Sandy put his finger on it. It raised the old question. The Republicans for years had feasted off the Democrats with ―who lost China.‖ They thought this might work once more; we might run it around the middle once more. But it didn‘t work.
Nobody cared. Kimoi and Matsu, they were two tiny islands within ten miles of the mainland or whatever. We were committed to defending Taiwan with the 7th Fleet. I believe there was a firm commitment on that.
TOM OLIPHANT: We called it Formosa at that time.
RUSSELL BAKER: Yes. Should these two tiny islands be brought into that defense?
TOM OLIPHANT: And yet, Marty, 12 years later, this guy goes to China. Did he lack the conviction of those nights in 1960?
MARTY NOLAN: This is why getting into Nixon‘s head is a labyrinthine journey from which no traveler returns. [Laughter] In his written notes, which are totally different from his speeches, his press conferences, and especially the tapes, it was the good Nixon, the things he wanted to do. Kissinger fed that ambition, megalomania, whatever you want to call it, and détente was a great idea. You know, let us do something about this situation.
He knew that it was a brilliant election ploy. Oh-ho! I think we were in the New Hampshire covering the Ed Muskie – George McGovern show down, and it couldn‘t get on page 17. I mean, Nixon is in China, and every major newspaper in the country, except The Boston Globe, if you remember, Tom.
TOM OLIPHANT: Ted, did Senator Kennedy worry about Kimoi or Matsu? When this happened and when it kept happening day in and day out on the campaign trail and in two more of the debates, how did you see it as a potential threat? Or did you?
TED SORENSEN: I think we saw it more as a potential opportunity instead of a threat. Richard Nixon, consistent with his life-long anti-Communism, wanted to show that he was ready to go to war even against Communist China. Senator Kennedy wanted to show that he was not. I still remember. I was in my hotel room in New York before the third debate, and I received, over the transom, some unknown supporter, but he documented it, a quotation from a very distinguished general, ―Those two islands are not worth the blood of a single American.‖ That is striking gold for a speech writer.
TOM OLIPHANT: You know, a propos Marty‘s comment earlier, you sometimes can‘t tell in 1960 terms which candidate is saying what. One of the things that Senator Kennedy did as Kimoi and Matsu was festering was turn Cuba around on Nixon. Here is Kennedy advocating and getting in tight with the exiles. You can almost guess at what‘s coming in not very many months in the future, and Nixon is arguing, in public, against doing precisely that. Do you think Nixon already knew about the Bay of Pigs, Russ?
RUSSELL BAKER: He did, because Ken Keating …
SANDY VANOCUR: I think he knew and …
TOM OLIPHANT: Did Senator Kennedy know?
SANDY VANOCUR: Definitely not. He hadn‘t even been briefed on that, nor had his foreign policy representative. But Nixon‘s attack on Kennedy was more attacking him for releasing secret information.
TOM OLIPHANT: Right. That‘s right. There it is. Give me one second and I‘ll tell a final story about this, suggesting that Sandy may be right. Every politician in America during this period was being asked what he thought about Kimoi and Matsu, and one of them was Ross Barnett, the governor of Mississippi, who gave off only about 15 watts of intellectual firepower. He was asked one day at a news conference, ―What‘s your position on Kimoi and Matsu, Governor?‖
He looked helplessly at an assistant and said, ―Jim, them those two fellows I put on the Fishing and Game Commission?‖ [Laughter] And there it went.
RUSSELL BAKER: Remember this, though, the two leading publications in this country, Time and Readers’ Digest were both run by sons of Chinese missionaries, the Wallace‘s Readers’ Digest and Henry Luce. It is not possible to underestimate the torture we suffered from the question, ―Who lost China?‖
TOM OLIPHANT: Good point. You have been very, very patient. Please feel free to go to the microphones. What I‘m going to do, as best I can, is to try to direct the question to one person up here in the interests of time and allowing as many as possible. Please go right ahead.
QUESTION: I have two, but you can choose. First, it seems unfortunate -- and it‘s fun to talk about the debate -- but it seems unfortunate that so much would turn on whether Nixon was sweating or had the right color suit on. It sounds very contemporary and I‘d be interested in a comment on that. The other question was does anyone want to venture what they think would have happened if Nixon would have won the election?
TOM OLIPHANT: We‘ll discard the latter. Go with the former, and it really goes to the heart of what Bill Wilson does. You don‘t think it‘s about nothing, do you Bill?
WILLIAM WILSON: Oh, boy. You had two people to compare for the first time. Ted Rogers and I went out for a drink after the debate and toasted to the fact we helped produce a television program that reached 90 million people. But that comparison of whom do you like and whom don‘t you like that comes in that format.
I think Hemingway answered the question -- I don't know who asked it -- ―The rich are different from you and me.‖ Hemingway said, ―Yes. They have more money.‖ Kennedy had more money than Nixon did.
TOM OLIPHANT: A lot of people are murmuring it‘s Fitzgerald and Gatsby, but we don‘t care. It‘s true but it‘s not accurate. [Laughter] You have also been very patient. Thank you very much.
QUESTION: I could listen all night. You have to forgive me. I have a couple of comments, not a question. First of all, I remember the debate, the first one. I was 20 or 21 at the time. I don‘t think I was a college student. I had just graduated. Kimoi and Matsu, I don‘t think I knew what those were. The next day people were saying -- I‘m not sure it was so much in the papers -- but people that had listened to it on the radio were saying that Nixon did better. Because I was so biased, I only heard what Kennedy said anyway.
But I want to say first of all I came here tonight not only for the subject but the distinguished panel, but specifically to see Sandy Vanocur who was a star at the time. He was witty, handsome.
SANDY VANOCUR: Whatever happened to me? [Laughter]
QUESTION: He still is. [Laughter] That whole drama and glamour and also Mr. Baker, because I brought his book to my book club to read and I love the autobiography, and I loved you on Masterpiece Theater, and I don't know why you aren‘t still there.
But the other comment was I was 21 during the election and it was my first vote ever and as an Irish Catholic Democrat from Boston, I thought I was created to cast this first vote. So it was wonderful to see everybody here. Mr. Sorensen, of course, I‘ve seen here before and very proud and read his book. [Applause] Thank you.
TOM OLIPHANT: And thank you. Go right ahead.
QUESTION: Several of you have commented on the fact that over these last 50 years there‘s been a definite trend to having more style than substance in debates. My question is sort of three-fold. Have we made progress? Is this good for democracy? Does this make the electorate more easily to be manipulated?
TOM OLIPHANT: Marty is going to take that, and I hope Ted will comment on his answer.
MARTY NOLAN: Well, consider the alternative. We went from 1960 to 1976 with no debates because Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon said, ―No way.‖ Lyndon Johnson saw what happened to Nixon. Nixon saw what happened to Nixon. [Laughter], and they gave him the old Heisman Trophy to that. I thought one gift Nixon gave the Republic was to resign so that Gerald Ford could not afford not to debate. He could have been ahead in the polls and all of that, but he had to debate because he was not an elected president. So that was Nixon‘s gift. The first Carter/Ford debate was in Philadelphia and that was when the famous 17…
TOM OLIPHANT: 19
MARTY NOLAN: 19, thank you, Tom. I‘m thinking of the 18.5 minute gap. And they stood there like toy soldiers, you know, and this is the beginning of Spin Alley, which is a wretched institution -- 600 out-of-work political consultants trying to get air time. [Laughter] But in the crowd in Philadelphia at that time was Eugene McCarthy, who had run for president and who had kept on running all the time, and one of reporters asked him, ―What did you think of the 19- minute gap?‖ He said, ―Gap? I really didn‘t notice.‖ [Laughter]
TOM OLIPHANT: Ted, I‘m interested in your comments but I also wanted to ask you whether that night, or in that period, you and/or the Senator had any sense that national politics was never going to be the same because of what was happening?
TED SORENSEN: Well, there are so many things I want to say, and I‘ll try to say them very quickly. I want to answer the second question that didn‘t get answered from the first questioner. If Nixon had won the election and was President, October 1962 when the Soviet Union put nuclear missiles in Cuba, he would have accepted the advice of the Joint Chiefs and none of us would be here right now.
Number two, style? No. It‘s true that presidents as a rule don‘t make decisions sitting by themselves without advisors, without being allowed notes, and they have two and a half minutes to decide and a four-minute closing. No, that‘s not really a great test. The real debate between Lincoln and Douglas, I think, tested the judgment of the two candidates a lot more.
Nevertheless, style is what Kennedy used to rally the country and to rally the world behind us, even get some Congressional support for his programs then dominated by the GOP – Dixiecrat coalition. So let‘s not rule out style.
TOM OLIPHANT: Thank you, and thank you.
QUESTION: I guess this would be for Tom and Marty. In 1958, then Senator Kennedy came through Holbrook, which is a small town right next to Brockton, also Andy Cards town, too. My father was one of President Kennedy‘s campaign secretaries when he was running for re-election to the Senate. I remember meeting the President that day, and then, two years later, I sat with my family and I watched the convention and then the debate. After the debate, my father was really excited. I guess I was more excited because I saw someone on television I had met in my town.
I was just wondering if both of you, if you felt energized even more after that, because I‘m wondering if they sent you, maybe a couple of more people in California, to help you out there.
TOM OLIPHANT: The perk that we got -- maybe Ted would remember this, maybe Russ and Sandy do -- but the democratic system in those days was actually dependent on ordinary citizens for money. In the Democratic Party there was a program that lasted through 1960 that was called Dollars for Democrats, and if you went canvassing, you went with a bucket, in addition to writing down who was a strong supporter or needed help getting to the polls or whatever. The perk from that work in northern San Diego County, at the time of the Los Angeles debate -- which was the third, if I‘m not mistaken -- was to go down to San Diego and meet Bob Kennedy.
That made it all worthwhile, 17 years old. And no, it wouldn‘t have made any difference; Nixon was going to win California, not by much.
But I think I got a chance to see the energy that Ted was talking about that was released because of his performance. I‘ll give you some numbers on this in a little bit, but the impact on people as measured after the election was actually very substantial and very much like what you‘re talking about.
TED SORENSEN: I was just saying that in California on election night or the next day, we thought Kennedy had won and, thereby, had won the election. But the write-in vote, the people who were rich enough to be away on vacation, changed it to Nixon.
TOM OLIPHANT: Almost. Sir, and then we will try to discuss the impact of all of this and put it to bed as best we can. Please go ahead.
QUESTION: Ted, I loved your book on your counseling to President Kennedy. I wish we could see more of your writing, more on the current state of this crazy world of ours and political situation we are living with today. I would like you to put on your hat in the future, the presidential debate of 2012. We have President Obama and Tea Party Governor Palin debating. What advice would you give Obama for that particular debate?
TED SORENSEN: Well, first of all, I have to comment in terms of those who say, ―Well, Kennedy must have been nervous because Nixon had pointed out how he debated Khrushchev in the Kremlin, the so-called kitchen debate. Nixon had more experience. But the best comment was the one Kennedy made in the fall campaign after the debates were finally over when he said in Minnesota, ―Of course, it‘s easier to play Harvard after you have played Ohio State.‖ And Nixon, he just debated Khrushchev. I had to debate Hubert Humphrey in Wisconsin.‖
As far as Palin, bear in mind what Gail Collins wrote in The New York Times not long ago: if you are out there in public life, try to remember that 5% of the population is certifiably insane. [Laughter].
TOM OLIPHANT: Sandy, you‘re up.
SANDY VANOCUR: Or, as H.L. Mencken said, ―Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.‖
TOM OLIPHANT: Russ, because of your unique perspective, somebody who became a wry observer of the human scene after having had to cover it, I wanted to get you on the record tonight, in terms of whether those evenings in the fall of 1960 you sensed that the game was changing forever, and whether on balance it occurred to you that this was a good thing or not?
RUSSELL BAKER: At that age I didn‘t even make judgments like that. In 1961, I was 35 years old, 36. I was a kid having a ball. Nixon was having a ball. I‘m sorry to keep stressing about Nixon that what he liked was the game. A friend of mine working for Governor Rockefeller tells of Rockefeller taking Nixon around in his helicopter one day to show him the scene on Long Island, the growth of population, and he said, ―Nixon was absolutely bored. He had no interest at all in seeing that. He‘s worried about what he can do to get a headline again.‖ Why did he go to China? It makes no sense at all, Nixon in China. Somebody wrote an opera about it. It‘s that absurd.
TOM OLIPHANT: A pretty good one, I hear. Marty, and then I‘m going to have the last question at Bill before I wrap up. Go back to that night in The Heights at BC. You hadn‘t even started yet, but did you see this game as being different than the one that you had gone to high school and college studying?
MARTY NOLAN: Oh, I think so because we were coming out of the very boring Eisenhower eight years. It was a sleepy time, a silent generation, as college students were called then. Even if there weren‘t a debate, this was a momentous occasion. What Senator Kennedy said in the very first words of the debate was, ―This is going to decide whether the world is going to be half slave and half free. I think I believed, and I think everybody did. You know, Nixon didn‘t do badly, but he did not have what it took. He did not know how to get the country moving again. So I think we knew it was going to be a momentous election and it was the momentous debate that started it.
TOM OLIPHANT: If I could have the moderator‘s prerogative and take us back to Bill. What hath you wrought? In other words, you had this night or this back campaign, but what changed because of what you saw?
WILLIAM WILSON: Oh, boy! Oh, boy! The media strategy for that campaign was that I had two video trucks, one in the west and one in the east. We covered countless rallies, and would buy time in regional television. It was the basis of our television advertising campaign. We didn‘t make commercials because the cost was too much to put on the networks. We were getting a bigger bang for our buck if he spoke in Illinois buying television stations in Michigan and Pennsylvania and Indiana. We did, I would say, five of these a month. We had okay crowds, just okay. After the debates those crowds went crazy. The numbers were nuts. Then we really had a television show in terms of what we were doing, which was doing three or four rallies on regional television all over the United States.
TOM OLIPHANT: Believe it or not as we conclude, there are some numbers based on research done after the election that support what‘s been said up here. One of them, believe it or not, in 1960. If you‘ve been watching Mad Men you know this. There were focus groups back then, and there was an outfit in New York I believe called Schwerin -- right? -- who used to gather people from the New York metropolitan area in groups, sometimes as large as 300. They had people together for all four of the presidential debates.
It turns out that the Kennedy/Nixon margin -- in terms of the perceptions of those people -- was approximately two to one for the whole series of four debates. Even more interestingly, perhaps,
Elmo Roper, a giant in the polling industry, did the research for CBS after the election was over. He found almost half his very large sample saying that the debates had played a role in their decision about who to vote for, and of that half there was a noticeable plurality for Senator Kennedy.
But there is one little sliver of his sample -- 6%, roughly four million people -- who said the debates were everything. This is what they based their vote on, and in that group, Kennedy was ahead by four to one. If you do the math, he won by 112,000 popular votes. There‘s the margin.
?: I‘ve always said that the debates and the Houston Ministers‘ Conference were the two giant pillars that allowed the election …
WILLIAM WILSON: Can I just tell you a story about the Houston Ministerial Association? It was September 12th. We had to face the Catholic issue. Kennedy goes to Houston. He is getting dressed. Puts on his blue suit, can‘t find his black shoes. He says to Dave Powers, his aide,
―Where are my black shoes?‖ He said, ―Senator, I think I forgot them.‖ We were at the Cuyahoga County Ox Roast yesterday. So Kennedy puts on his brown shoes, goes down, berates Dave Powers. The thing is over. He comes out. Great performance. Gets by the elevator, goes after Dave Powers. Dave, finally exasperated says, ―Senator, I‘m sorry. It will never happen again. But I got to tell you, that was a brown shoe crowd if ever I saw one.‖ [Laughter]
TOM OLIPHANT: And I guess part of the lesson tonight is that Bill Wilson also knew that, and it had something to do with the event. One of the things I hate about this job is that it comes on me to call it quits. Tonight, I just wanted to try to be like four old heroes of mine, Howard K. Smith, Frank McGee, Quincy Howe and Bill Shadel, the moderators of the four debates and just say, thank you very much for watching and good night. [Applause]
END OF FORUM