Presidential Debates

Fifty Years of High-Risk TV

Alan Schroeder

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780231511780
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Campaigns & Elections
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Alan Schroeder's popular history now covers the 2000 Bush-Gore and 2004 Bush-Kerry debates, including innovations in format and press coverage, and adds new research on televised debates since 1960. Schroeder organizes his book according to a television production timeline, highlighting the importance of pre- and postdebate periods, as well as the live telecasts themselves. He describes production in painstaking detail, from the selection of questioners to camera angles, from makeup to lighting and set design.

Televised debates represent a rare departure from well-choreographed campaigns, and new media such as YouTube continue to reshape form and content. Conducting interviews with journalists and industry insiders, and drawing on his own experience as an award-winning reporter and television producer, Schroeder delivers a fascinating backstage tour of every aspect of debate performance.

PART I / PREPRODUCTION

1 / THE PREDEBATE DEBATE

A few weeks after losing the 1960 election, Richard Nixon went for a sail off the coast of Florida with a group of associates that included a trusted adviser named Leonard Hall. As David Halberstam recounted in a 1976 essay on the Kennedy-Nixon debates,

There were just a few old friends around and they all went out on a boat. Finally, Hall asked the question he had always wanted to ask—Why did you decide to debate? For a long time Nixon simply looked up at the sky, his eyes closed, his face drawn and tense. And Hall waited, but there was never an answer.¹

In retrospect, the participation of Richard Nixon in the 1960 debates qualifies as one of the great political miscalculations in campaign history. Even at the time, the vice president seemed to be acting against his instincts. Early in the race Nixon assured his handlers that debates with Kennedy were out of the question. “In 1946 a damn fool incumbent named Jerry Voorhis debated a young lawyer and it cost him the election,” he reminded staffers, citing his own experience.² Nixon obviously understood what later front-runners and incumbents would come to regard as gospel: TV debates favor the challenger.

In the summer of 1960 John F. Kennedy, by far the lesser-known contender, immediately accepted the invitation of the broadcast networks for a series of televised debates. A few days later, over the objections of President Eisenhower and Republican advisers, Richard Nixon followed suit. Press secretary Herbert G. Klein recalled that his “mouth dropped open” when Nixon announced at a news conference in Chicago that he would debate JFK; senior campaign aides had not been notified. “I could attribute his reversal only to the fact that he did not want his manhood sullied by appearing as if he were afraid to win such an encounter,” Klein wrote.³ According to Nixon biographer Earl Mazo, “The vice president could find no way of rejecting the television network offers.”⁴

By the end of the Kennedy-Nixon series, provocative new lessons about television and politics had come into focus; on the future of presidential debates, however, opinion split down the middle. The more optimistic observers saw debates as inevitable. Walter Lippmann predicted that “from now on it will be impossible for any candidate . . . to avoid this kind of confrontation with his opponent.” Others, like Eisenhower press secretary James Hagerty, reached a different conclusion: “You can bet your bottom dollar that no incumbent president will ever engage in any such debate or joint appearance in the future.”⁵

As it happened, the pessimists came closer to the mark than the optimists, and another sixteen years would pass before candidates for the White House again agreed to debate. It is interesting to note that before his assassination, President Kennedy had verbally committed to a second round of appearances in 1964. Furthermore, according to Republican nominee Barry Goldwater, Kennedy and Goldwater had seriously discussed a plan to barnstorm the country together in a series of matches. “We even talked about using the same airplane and doing it the old-fashioned way—get out on the stump and debate,” Goldwater reported.⁶

But the 1964 election rolled around with an unanticipated Democratic nominee. Lyndon Johnson, nobody’s idea of a glittering television personality, gave campaign debates a wide berth as the incumbent president. In 1968 and 1972, once-burned Richard Nixon likewise refused to meet his opponents for a joint appearance. “The 1960 Great Debates had taught him a bitter lesson,” wrote the authors of a Twentieth Century Fund study of presidential debates. “He would take no more chances with programs that might show him in an unfavorable light, literally or figuratively.”⁷

Both Nixon and Johnson hid behind a legal technicality that blocked the TV networks from airing candidate forums: Section 315 of the Communications Act, which granted all participants in a race, even those on the fringe, “equal opportunities” to television time. Broadcasters had been lobbying against this restriction since the 1950s. Their original hope in sponsoring the Kennedy-Nixon debates was to rid themselves of Section 315, but Congress agreed only to a temporary suspension for the 1960 campaign.

In 1975, in the so-called Aspen ruling, the Federal Communications Commission finally exempted debates from the equal-access requirement. Incumbent president Gerald Ford, badly trailing Jimmy Carter in the polls, departed from his acceptance speech during the 1976 Republican convention and challenged his opponent to a face-to-face TV debate. Using one live media event to advance another, Ford declared, “The American people have the right to know where both of us stand.”⁸ Carter quickly signaled his acceptance, and in each election since, presidential debates have occurred in one form or another.

Gerald Ford resurrected the institution of presidential debates not out of a sense of civic duty but for political advantage. “The Ford campaign needed something dramatic,” said Republican adviser Michael Duval. “We needed something that would cause the country to reserve its judgment. The debates seemed to be the answer.”⁹ As this remark indicates, the decision to meet one’s opponent comes down to self-interest. General-election debates hinge on the assumption that the presidential nominees will see fit to take part, but in fact only tradition and political pressure require them to do so. As veteran CBS news producer Lane Venardos put it, “The candidates have all the high cards, including the ultimate high card—whether to participate.”¹⁰

From Richard Nixon to the two George Bushes, the ambivalence of politicians toward engaging in live debates is not difficult to comprehend. Even for battle-scarred presidential nominees accustomed to the relentless scrutiny of the cameras, the perils can be enormous. “In no other mode of presentation,” wrote communications scholar Walter Fisher, “does the candidate risk or reveal so much of his character.”¹¹ Debaters understand that the lens will magnify their every word, gesture, and facial expression, not just for the duration of the broadcast but for the ages.

Ford and Carter managed to revive the debate tradition because, as competitors, they were fairly evenly matched. In subsequent elections a different dynamic has taken hold: The campaign in the lead, which is to say the one with the most to lose, seeks either to shirk debates or to participate only on highly favorable terms. Candidates thus adopt an attitude of petulance that creates a contentious climate in the weeks leading up to a debate series. Unfortunately for the public, as long as presidential debates are controlled by their stars, the leading players will have license to behave as prima donnas.

DEBATES IN DOUBT

In 1980 disagreement over the inclusion of independent John Anderson gave President Jimmy Carter and challenger Ronald Reagan a pretext for cutting short that year’s debate series. Only two matches would take place: an inconsequential meeting in late September between Reagan and Anderson that Carter boycotted, and a climactic debate with Carter and Reagan one week before the election.

Carter’s refusal to join Reagan and Anderson in a three-way debate irked the sponsoring League of Women Voters, which retaliated by announcing its intention to place an empty chair onstage at the Baltimore Convention Center as a reminder of the candidate’s absence. Editorial cartoonist Pat Oliphant sketched this as a baby’s high chair, while Johnny Carson wondered in his Tonight Show monologue, “Suppose the chair wins?”¹² Under pressure from Democrats and the White House, the league eventually withdrew its threat, and no extraneous furniture materialized on the Reagan-Anderson set.

At least in the short term, Carter sustained little damage by skipping the debate. “Despite some predictions to the contrary,” said the Christian Science Monitor, “no widespread, high-intensity wave of criticism against the president has emerged.”¹³ Instead the media found a new narrative thread: the will-they-or-won’t-they possibility of a two-way Carter-Reagan encounter. Publicly both candidates maintained a posture of favorability, but in private neither side could muster much enthusiasm for a debate.

Although Carter dismissed Reagan as his intellectual inferior, other Democrats were understandably apprehensive about the former California governor’s performing prowess. Carter at first sought a schedule of multiple debates, hoping that “over a more extended period of time, [Reagan] and I would have to get down to specific issues, where my knowledge of foreign and domestic affairs would give me an edge.”¹⁴ Like Nixon before him, Carter mistakenly assumed that substance would prevail over image.

By the time the two campaigns agreed to debate, only a single appearance could be scheduled before election day. “If we’re going to debate him,” said Carter pollster Patrick Caddell, a staunch opponent of any face-to-face meeting with Reagan, “it’s damn important that we get rules that increase the possibility that he’ll say something dumb or screw up.” Caddell drafted a strategy memorandum a week before the debate that warned of the dangers ahead, calling the event “fraught with great risk” and cautioning that “the risks far outweigh the possible advantages.”¹⁵

Reagan handlers had reasons of their own to fear a debate. The Republican candidate had made a number of ill-advised statements during speeches and press conferences. According to Reagan aide Michael Deaver, a debate proponent, “It was particularly the international subjects that we felt we would have a problem with.”¹⁶ Among the strongest dissenters was pollster Richard Wirthlin, whose data indicated that Reagan could be elected without debating. “One of the keys to winning a campaign is that you deal to those things you can control,” Wirthlin said, “and, quite frankly, a debate is a game of roulette. There’s no telling which way that marble will bounce.”¹⁷

What turned the tide for Reagan was the white-tie Alfred E. Smith political banquet in New York City, attended by both presidential candidates in mid-October. Concerned that Carter would use his platform to issue an impromptu debate challenge, Reagan’s people armed their man with a four-hundred-word acceptance speech. When Carter failed to mention the subject, Reagan instead delivered a program of self-deprecating jokes that sharply contrasted with the humorless tone of the incumbent. In the view of columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, “genial Ron” bested “uptight Jimmy” in this, their only joint appearance of the campaign other than the debate.¹⁸ The next morning the die was cast. After listening to his aides weigh the pros and cons, Reagan said, “Well, everything considered, I feel I should debate. If I’m going to fill the shoes of Carter, I should be willing to meet him face-to-face.”¹⁹

In the end, after one of the most successful debate performances in history, Reagan knew he had made the right call. Just as Richard Nixon got scorched by the heat of JFK’s stardom, so did Carter find himself singed by the superior media presence of the former Hollywood actor. Asked afterward if he had been nervous sharing the stage with the president of the United States, Reagan gave a response that put the matter in perspective: “Not at all. I’ve been on the same stage with John Wayne.”²⁰ Beneath the humor lay a simple truth: in TV debates, star power carries the day.

If presidential debates can be said to have a savior, the honor goes to Ronald Reagan. By agreeing to appear with Walter Mondale in 1984, then-president Reagan shored up campaign debates as a permanent institution. The popular incumbent stood so far ahead in the polls that he most likely could have survived the fallout from not participating that year, a course that many advisers recommended. William F. Buckley, Jr., wrote,

I am glad Reagan has scheduled a debate because I like circuses and gladiators and drums and cymbals and roller coasters. But if I were Reagan, I’d say no. I’d say, “Let’s get it straight: Debates between presidential contenders should be restricted to debates between men who have not served as president. Men who have served should be judged by what they have done.”²¹

Why, then, did Reagan debate? According to Deaver, “I think he believed in debates. I think he just decided, in fact I can hear him saying, you have to debate, people expect it now, it’s become part of our system.”²² Furthermore, Reagan had reason to be confident. As the “Great Communicator,” he approached the event with five decades of experience at the microphone and an undefeated track record as a political debater.

At the first 1984 debate in Louisville, Ronald Reagan would turn in the worst performance of his long career, appearing disengaged, disjointed, and discombobulated against Walter Mondale, an opponent whom voters and the press had largely written off. Not since Richard Nixon had a presidential debater stepped off the stage so battered. That such misfortune could befall a speaker of Reagan’s stature proves the riskiness of debate participation. If a star performer like Ronald Reagan can stumble, what tribulations await a candidate of lesser skills?

THE DEBATE INSTITUTION TAKES SHAPE

By 1988 debates had more than ever become a public expectation. That year negotiators for incumbent vice president George H. W. Bush played hardball at the bargaining table, giving the Democratic campaign of Michael Dukakis a take-it-or-leave-it offer: two presidential debates and one vice presidential match in the standard press conference format. Bush, no fan of presidential debates, emerged unscathed; even a maladroit performance by running mate Dan Quayle did not adversely affect Republican prospects.

Four years later, when foot-dragging by the Bush campaign cast doubt on the 1992 debates, the price of nonparticipation had gone up. The case of George Bush offers an object lesson for any candidate seeking to shirk what the press and the public now consider a presidential aspirant’s obligation to debate. In September 1992 the chief executive of...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The First Presidential Debate
• Part I. Preproduction
• Part II. Production
• Part III. Postproduction
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Appendix: Schedule of Televised Presidential and Vice Presidential Debates, 1960-2004
• Index