by Jim Lehrer
“No! He’ll be after me.”
Otis couldn’t see her very well in the rearview mirror. But he didn’t have to see or hear to know what the answer to his question would be.
“What if/ tried to sing something?” he asked. As if to audition, he softly sang in a radio jingles tune:
“If I loved Jill in Jeff City,
And her life made her hurt and sad,
I’d help her out of her Missouri.”
“That good. Yeah, yeh. Pease. He used to hearing my voice, but maybe anybody’s work. His daddy never sing.”
Otis Rolodexed mentally through the Johnny Mercer songs he knew. It didn’t take long to get to the one he thought might do the trick. It was a later song than those he sang in high school, but he had paid attention when it became popular in the 1960s. He knew the words that Mercer had written for Henry Mancini’s music and for Audrey Hepburn. He had never sung them out loud before.
Now he sang them softly, Mercerly, for the first time to the crying baby boy in the backseat:
“Moon River,
Wider than a mile,
I’m crossin’ you in style
Someday.”
The baby was still crying, but it seemed to Otis that the ferocity had diminished. The kid was listening. Listen to this, little boy blue:
“Old dream maker,
You heartbreaker,Wherever you’re goin’
I’m goin’ your way.”
The baby was only whimpering now. Otis wished the kid could understand the words. Maybe he could.
“Two drifters,
Off to see the world,
There’s such a lot of world
To see.”
Listen, kid. Listen to this:
“We’re after the same
Rainbow’s end
Waitin’ ‘round the bend,
My huckleberry friend,
Moon River And me.”
There was silence in the backseat. The only sounds now were the purring of the Jeep’s motor and the whining of its tires on the smooth roadway of the interstate.
“He sleep,” said the young woman in a whisper. “I lay him on seat.” She had moved her head up to Otis’s right ear. “You sing great, mis-tah. My baby love it, I could tell. You should make CD.”
“Thank you,” Otis said.
“Where we go?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Otis replied.
“Okay for me,” said the woman. “You seem like good and nice man. Bad man no sing like you. I so tired.”
She sat back down against the seat, and soon, in the occasional flashes of car lights through the rearview mirror, Otis saw that she, like her little boy blue, was sound asleep.
After a while he pulled in to a Holiday Inn Express and used his MasterCard to buy two nights for the girl and her baby. He escorted them to their room, handed the little mother a fistful of cash—all but a few hundred of his four-plus thousand dollars.
“You really are good and nice man, mistah,” said the girl.
Otis hoped she had it right.
Soon he was back out on the interstate, heading west.
He thought about finding a store where he could buy another BB gun. And hey, there had to be a sporting goods store up the road that sold football helmets. One of the antiques stores in Lehigh City, fifty miles or so ahead, might even have a cast-iron fire engine. What about another Cushman?
Or maybe not.
Otis wondered if Archimedes felt as good as this when he shouted “Eureka!”
Or on the night before his sixtieth birthday.
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
ALFRED PUBLISHING CO., INC.: Excerpt from “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe,” lyrics by Johnny Mercer, music by Harry Warren, copyright © 1945 (renewed) by EMI Feist Catalog, Inc. All rights controlled by EMI Feist Catalog, Inc. (publishing) and Alfred Publishing Co., Inc. (print); excerpt from “Hooray for Spinach” (from Naughty But Nice), lyrics by Johnny Mercer, music by Harry Warren, copyright © 1939 (renewed) by Warner Bros., Inc.; excerpt from “Jeepers Creepers,” lyrics by Johnny Mercer, music by Harry Warren, copyright © 1938 (renewed) by Warner Bros., Inc.; excerpt from “And the Angels Sing,” lyrics by Johnny Mercer, music by Ziggy Elman, copyright © 1939 (renewed) by WB Music Corp. and The Johnny Mercer Foundation. All rights on behalf of The Johnny Mercer Foundation administered by WB Music Corp.; excerpt from “Blues in the Night,” lyrics by Johnny Mercer, music by Harold Arlen, copyright © 1941 by WB Music Corp. (renewed). All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.
HAL LEONARD CORPORATION: Excerpt from “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive” (from the motion picture Here Come the Waves), lyrics by Johnny Mercer, music by Harold Arlen, copyright © 1944 (renewed) by Harwin Music Co.; excerpt from “That Old Black Magic” (from the Paramount picture Star Spangled Rhythm), lyrics by Johnny Mercer, music by Harold Arlen, copyright © 1942 (renewed 1969) by Famous Music LLC; excerpt from “Hit the Road to Dreamland” (from the Paramount picture Star Spangled Rhythm), lyrics by Johnny Mercer, music by Harold Arlen, copyright © 1942 (renewed 1969) by Famous Music LLC; excerpt from “Moon River” (from the Paramount picture Breakfast at Tiffany’s), lyrics by Johnny Mercer, music by Henry Mancini, copyright © 1961 (renewed 1989) by Famous Music LLC. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.
Read on for an excerpt from Jim Lehrer’s
Tension City
CHAPTER 1
Good Evenings
“Good evening. The television and radio stations of the United States and their affiliated stations are proud to provide facilities for a discussion of issues in the current political campaign by the two major candidates for the presidency. The candidates need no introduction. The Republican candidate, Vice President Richard M. Nixon, and the Democratic candidate, Senator John F. Kennedy.”
That was how the moderator, Howard K. Smith of CBS, opened the first televised presidential debate from the studios of WBBM-TV, Chicago, on September 26, 1960.
“Good evening from the Ford Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. I’m Jim Lehrer of The NewsHour on PBS, and I welcome you to the first of the 2008 presidential debates between the Republican nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, and the Democratic nominee, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois.”
That was how I began the first McCain-Obama debate on September 26, 2008—nearly fifty years later.
There have been thirty-five nationally televised presidential and vice presidential debates, counting that first in 1960 and the last four in 2008.
All the moderators have been broadcast journalists except one—Chicago Sun-Times editor James Hoge in 1976. There have been several repeaters: Howard K. Smith of CBS and ABC, Edwin Newman of NBC, Barbara Walters of ABC, Bernard Shaw of CNN, Bob Schieffer of CBS, my PBS colleague Gwen Ifill, and I account for twenty-one of the thirty-five moderating assignments.
Our “Good evenings” have remained roughly the same—except for the top billing going to the geography.
“Good evening from the Wait Chapel at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.”
“Good evening from the Bushnell Theater in Hartford, Connecticut.”
“Good evening from the University of Miami Convocation Center in Coral Gables, Florida.”
The first of my greetings was for a 1988 debate between Vice President George H. W. Bush and Governor Michael Dukakis in Winston-Salem.
That was when I got my introduction to the terrors and triumphs of moderating presidential debates, an experience I have sometimes compared to walking down the blade of a knife.
At Winston-Salem, it actually started before the debate itself.
I was closeted behind a closely guarded conference room door with my three debate colleagues—Peter Jennings of ABC, Annie Groer of the Orlando Sentinel, an
d John Mashek of The Atlanta Constitution—to discuss our questions for Bush and Dukakis. This was before the coming of the single-moderator format; the standard arrangement was a moderator plus panelists.
Jennings, anchor of ABC’s World News Tonight, had an act of provocation on his mind.
He urged the four of us to forget the rules that had been agreed upon between the candidates and the Commission on Presidential Debates. We should publicly—in front of the whole world—invite Bush and Dukakis to take on each other directly with no time limits on questions, answers, or anything else.
I said we couldn’t do that. We had given our word to follow the rules of the debate. Not to do so, I insisted in my most righteous tone, would be dishonorable, among other things.
Annie Groer and John Mashek agreed. Jennings quickly went along, with grace and professionalism.
Also in Winston-Salem, my wife, Kate, helped with some much needed pre-debate personal perspective that remains with me to this day.
In the hotel, as we were leaving for the debate, I came down with a bad case of nerves. I whined to Kate about how terrible the pressure was on me.
She said, quite calmly, “If it’s bad for you, think what it must be like for those two candidates—one bad move and they lose the presidency of the United States.”
True.
But I was still left with the pre-debate anxieties that have been with me in every one of the ten presidential and vice presidential debates I have moderated since. I soon learned that dealing with nerves is the key to being able to function effectively as a moderator. My guess is that there are surgeons, classroom teachers, and short-order cooks among the huge crowds of other people who know exactly what I’m talking about. Possibilities of pleasure and satisfaction, horror and failure, await everyone who performs.
The incredibly high stakes are what magnify it all in presidential debates. Candidates and their attendants have only one overriding purpose—to win the election to be the most powerful person in the world. But others, including most in the serious press and political science worlds, see debates as decisive opportunities to inform and educate the voters about whom to grant such power.
The critical space between those two very different purposes is the battleground on which all combat occurs.
“UGLY, I DON’T like ’em.”
That’s how George H. W. Bush categorizes his debate experience.
“Why not?”
“Well, partially I wasn’t too good at ’em. Secondly, there’s some of it’s contrived. Show business. You prompt to get the answers ahead of time. Now this guy, you got Bernie Shaw on the panel and here’s what he’s probably gonna ask you. You got Leslie Stahl over here and she’s known to go for this and that, I want to be sure I remember what Leslie’s going to ask and get this answer…. There’s a certain artificiality to it, lack of spontaneity to it. And, I don’t know, I just felt uncomfortable about it.”
That exchange was one of the many I have had with the candidates after their presidential and vice presidential debates. The interviews, done over a period of twenty years, began as an oral history project with the Commission on Presidential Debates. Portions were later used in Debating Our Destiny, a two-hour PBS documentary that was first broadcast in 2000.
George W. Bush’s view differed from his father’s.
“I think it’s useful for people [to] watch and see how a person they don’t know stands up and answers questions and deals with the thrusts and parries of the debate. I actually also think you can learn what the person really believes. I think they are very useful.”
Ronald Reagan was also positive. “The people have a right to know all they can in comparison to make a decision,” he said. “If the debate is concentrated on the major issues and the views of the two individuals on those issues, then it is of service to the people.”
Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, in their separate interviews, said debates help make for better candidates.
“I think they force us to prepare,” said Dole. “They force us to think about issues we maybe hadn’t focused on—they force us to think ahead.”
Clinton went even further: “Even if these debates don’t change many votes and, you know, normally both sides do well enough so they can avoid any lasting damage, but having to do them and knowing that if you blow it, they will change a lot of votes, forces people who wish to be president to do things that they should do. And I am convinced that the debates I went through, especially those three in 1992, actually helped me to be a better president.”
George H. W. Bush, after further thought, favorably compared debates to competitive athletics, which he said he always loved. There was an adrenaline flow during debates similar to that triggered by sports—particularly tennis.
Jimmy Carter also offered a sports comparison: “I think I did go in as though it was an athletic competition, or a very highly charged competitive arrangement.”
So did Gerald Ford, who said, “I had that experience many times playing football for the University of Michigan, and that was my attitude before that first debate. I felt comfortable with the positions I would take, and I was anxious to get into the ball game.”
Al Gore, Ross Perot, and Lloyd Bentsen were the only candidates missing from our postmortem debate interviews.
Bentsen, the 1988 Democratic nominee for vice president, very much wanted to talk to us but was by then too ill from a stroke to do so. With former vice president Gore, we tried every ploy we could think of and went through every channel we could find, but he declined to discuss his several debate experiences as a vice presidential and presidential candidate. So did Ross Perot, who as an independent made it to the presidential debates against President George H. W. Bush and Governor Bill Clinton in 1992.
In addition to Bob Dole and former presidents Reagan, Ford, Carter, Clinton, and both Bushes, I also questioned former vice presidents Mondale, Quayle, and Cheney, plus John Kerry, John Anderson, Geraldine Ferraro, Jack Kemp, Joe Lieberman, John Edwards, and James Stockdale.
Most of the conversations concentrated on Major Moments, as they’ve come to be called—happenings during specific debates that drew the most attention and seemed destined to find their way into political histories.
Presidential debates are the ultimate Rashomon exercises, of course. Each participant remembers a debate performance through the prism, emotional as well as political, of his or her own place at the podium—or table, chair, camera, or microphone.
That goes for those who ask the questions as well as those who answer them.
The first ever nationally televised debate moderator, Howard K. Smith, spoke mostly as an observer/reporter when recalling his 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debate experience. In a 1996 memoir, Events Leading Up to My Death, he wrote, “Having the two appear live, side by side, answering the same questions, was a welcome innovation. But it was not much of a debate. Because the reporters on the panel were not allowed to pose follow-up questions, both candidates shamelessly slid by questions rather than answering them.”
Smith said it was obvious from the moment the two entered the Chicago studio that Nixon realized he should never have agreed to the confrontation. He was the incumbent vice president and much better known than Kennedy. Appearing together would only elevate Kennedy’s status.
Also, Nixon had been in the hospital and was pale, Smith said. “I offered a makeup expert, but he refused and allowed an aide merely to dust a little powder on his face, which made him paler. He was downcast; he knew it was a mistake.”
Kennedy, meanwhile, “entered the studio looking like a young athlete come to receive his wreath of laurel.” Addison’s disease had added a tan tint to his skin, and the steroids he took for back pain had caused him to fill out.
Smith said of Kennedy, “He later told me he won the election that night.”
That is also the conventional wisdom among many political historians, keyed to the fact it had more to do with looks than words. Neither Kennedy nor Nixon opened up any
major differences over policy that dominated their campaign before or during the debate. Politically, both were running—and mostly seen—as no-boat-rattling centrists.
More than one hundred million Americans followed the debate, and those who listened to it on the radio thought Nixon had won.
Nixon didn’t go so far as to say that the perception of the first debate cost him the election, but he hinted at it. He wrote of the 1960 campaign in his 1962 memoir, Six Crises:
“I paid too much attention to what I was going to say and too little to how I would look.”
Those are words to live by that a few post-1960 candidates have ignored at their peril.
THE NEGOTIATED AGREEMENT for the four Kennedy-Nixon events set future patterns for formats and almost everything else about the debates until 1992—including the negotiations themselves.
As a matter of history, even Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas tangled over the specifics of the subject, the number, and some of the details of their seven famous Illinois debates on slavery in 1858. They did their pre-debate negotiating through the mail and surrogates—not that much differently than the way it still happens.
In 1960, surrogates for Nixon and Kennedy wrestled with the debate sponsors—the commercial television networks—over the room temperature, the use of notes, and the lighting, among other things. The biggest hurdles were over the number of debates and the selection of the journalist moderators and panelists. Kennedy wanted more debates than Nixon; the networks wanted only TV/radio questioners, while the candidates insisted on bringing print people into the mix, as well.
Kennedy and Nixon stood behind podiums, made opening and closing statements, and, in between, answered questions that were solely the work of the individual panelists. No questions or specific topics were cleared ahead of time with anyone—most particularly the candidates.
Debate formats differed little through the years between 1960 and 1992, the major variables confined to answer time limits and the addition of a live audience. The four Kennedy-Nixon exchanges were all in silent television studios.
