When Joe Biden repeatedly stammered, slurred, babbled and stared off into space during the first 2024 presidential debate, America’s 46th president made history in a way he never intended. Because of his abysmal performance, June 27, 2024 will be remembered as the date when a failed debate set in motion a chain of events culminating in a sitting president withdrawing his reelection campaign.
The task of understanding why Biden fell apart in that debate will fall to future biographers, presumably those with direct access to Biden and the other principals. Comprehending its long-term ramifications for American politics, by contrast, is a much simpler matter: It demonstrated that presidential debates can single-handedly and massively alter the course of human history. To best understand why debates remain so potent in 2024, one need only look to the first presidential debates ever televised — an appropriate parallel, given that Biden’s collapse would not have had its massive impact if not for the medium of television. Sixty-four years before America’s second Catholic president destroyed his presidential campaign with a bad debate showing, the first Catholic president made history by appearing to be more physically and intellectually vibrant during an opening debate against his sallow and sickly opponent.
The 1960 presidential debates series was held between two men who would both eventually be elected president: John F. Kennedy (JFK), that election’s ultimate winner and at the time a Massachusetts senator beloved by liberals but maligned by conservatives; and Richard M. Nixon, the incumbent vice president who had a long-established reputation as a smart and vicious debater fiercely loyal to the Republican Party. Indeed, Nixon had famously triumphed in debates at crucial points during his career: Effectively smearing his opponent as a supposed Communist sympathizer during his first congressional campaign in 1946, then holding his own against the world’s most powerful Communist, Soviet Premiere Nikita Khrushchev, during a so-called “kitchen debate” in 1959.
Unfortunately for Nixon, immediately prior to the first debate (held on Sept. 26, 1960) he suffered from a series of health issues — a knee injury, an infection, a fever — and the viewing public was subsequently taken aback by his gaunt and clammy appearance. Kennedy drew a favorable contrast against Nixon with his characteristic handsomeness and eloquence. According to former Trump adviser Roger Stone, whose political career started with work for Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign, “Nixon learned that how you looked and acted in the debate was as important as what you said.”
The aesthetics were not Nixon’s only shortcoming on debate night.
“It wasn’t just about the visuals,” Fredrik Logevall, a JFK biographer and the Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, told Salon. “More important for [Kennedy], he showed a general command of the issues, came across as poised and articulate, and demonstrated to Americans that he was a plausible alternative to the older, more experienced, more well-known Nixon. He introduced himself to a great many voters who knew little about him prior to that night, and he acquitted himself well. Harris has the same opportunity here. And as in 1960, the candidate who will profit most will be the one who presents better—visually and substantively.”
He added, “One other thing: Kennedy spoke to the camera and through it to the nation; Nixon spoke more to the room.”
Nixon himself later admitted that he looked more at Kennedy than the nation because he was behaving as a traditional debater, who advocates for their argument and capitalizes on their opponent’s weaknesses through direct confrontation. Indeed, according to Chapman University political historian Luke Nichter (who among other things helped edit versions of Nixon’s White House tapes), the debates between Kennedy and Nixon would hardly be defined as proper “debates” when compared to the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858 or the discussions that regularly occur today in the United States Senate or the Oxford Union.
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“Kennedy spoke to the camera and through it to the nation; Nixon spoke more to the room.”
“What we have today is more like a competitive press conference,” Nichter said. “Even in 1960, Nixon came ready to debate whereas JFK knew the real audience was the one watching at home. He looked directly into the camera and spoke to them, whereas Nixon was often caught looking at Kennedy – which made him appear deferential. Debates of that era focused more on issues, whereas today they seem more about differences over personality and style – which is what I expect Harris and Trump will focus on, too.”
Nixon was astute enough to realize he needed to make these kinds of changes after his sub-par debate performance in 1960. He described the consequences of that first debate for his campaign in his memoir “Six Crises.”
The tension before the first round had been very great, but now it was greater. I knew that Kennedy had made a better impression first time out. While the immediate press reaction had been to call it a draw, or to give a very slight edge to Kennedy, as the days had gone by it was more and more referred to as a “decisive” Kennedy victory. I was thus increasingly in the position of having to make a decided comeback, or of being placed at an almost hopeless disadvantage for the balance of the campaign.
Perhaps benefiting from his newfound underdog status, Nixon was widely perceived as successful in his three remaining debates against Kennedy, although the “loser” stigma left over from his initial bad debate followed him politically (and psychologically) for years thereafter. Logevall told Salon “there’s not any doubt that Kennedy profited more from [the debates] than Nixon did,” adding that “the debates served Kennedy’s needs more. Nixon should have refused them. And small wonder that he said no to debating in 1968 and 1972” (during his last two presidential campaigns; there were also no debates during the 1964 election, although Nixon was not a candidate that year).
Yet whereas only Nixon had to engage in damage control in the second 1960 presidential debate, both participants in the second 2024 presidential debate — former president Donald Trump and Biden’s replacement, Vice President Kamala Harris — are in a position where they must make a “decided comeback” or else be “placed at an almost hopeless disadvantage for the balance of the campaign.” Once again, examining the circumstances of 1960 illuminates the situation in 2024.
“I think an important similarity between the 1960 race between Kennedy and Nixon and today’s standoff is the razor-thin margin of the contest,” Cold War historian Zachary Jacobson, who authored “On Nixon’s Madness,” told Salon. In the 1960 election, Kennedy and Nixon ultimately came within less than 0.2 percent of each other in the national popular vote (Kennedy had a slight edge). More importantly, slight shifts of a few thousand voters in a handful of swing states would have led to Nixon winning the Electoral College (and thus the presidency) instead of Kennedy. Nixon’s campaign manager Len Hall admitted as much to the candidate afterward when he admitted, “A shift of only fourteen thousand votes, and we would have been the heroes, and they would have been the bums.” Virtually all of the reliable pollsters expect the 2024 election to be similarly close — and that makes the debates more potentially consequential. Any random moment in a debate can unexpectedly be the one that sticks in voters’ minds not only through Election Day, but decades later when regarding an election’s overall legacy.
“Because so few voters differentiated between who lost and who won, who will lose and who will win, a single debate performance can take on outsized importance,” Jacobson explained. “I would further point you in the direction of the centrality of personality politics in both elections in which the overlapping stances that the candidates were taking made their images all the more important. The image of the dapper Kennedy and Nixon the persnickety grump weighed all the more because both were staunch cold warriors and both tacked to relatively moderate proposals on the economy and civil rights.”
If there is any comfort for hapless or gaffe-prone candidates, it is that early voting has somewhat blunted the impact of truly terrible debate performances that occur later in election season.
“Before the month of September ends, many Americans will have already voted,” Nichter said. “Until we develop the opportunity to vote early and change our mind later, which is something probably coming in the near future once we figure out how to do so securely, most of the fall campaign will occur after people have made their selection. Early voting has also led to the demise of the October Surprise, a feature of many past elections designed to suddenly change voters’ minds on the eve of Election Day.”
The most salient legacy of the 1960 debates — not just in 2024, but likely for any year — is that they showed American voters do want to be directly engaged in discussing their nation’s political future, even if their methods of drawing conclusions may be less intellectual than visceral.
“They showed the deep interest in the country for events of this kind,” Logevall said. “As network executives understood, technology made it possible to reach tens of millions of Americans at once, and in a format that contained immense inherent drama. A precedent was set, even if it took until 1976 for candidates to again go toe to toe.”
Logevall also holds out hope that someday the debates will be more like the legendary face-to-face exhibitions that occurred in 1858 between Republican and future president Abraham Lincoln and his Democratic opponent, Senator Stephen Douglas. Even though each candidate did his fair share of partisan grandstanding, those contests involved actual exchanges of ideas directly between the two principals. That debate format, which still prevails in many other contexts, is still not used in American presidential debates. The heavily-moderated approach first used in 1960 remains the status quo.
“It’s interesting that the networks wanted the candidates to question each other directly, and that the campaigns refused; they insisted that the questions come from a panel of journalists,” Logevall said. “Thus was established the format that persists to this day: a joint press appearance more than an actual debate.”
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