by Jim Lehrer
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.
In 1988, moderators were allowed to move beyond traffic-cop and follow-up duties to ask their own opening questions of each candidate. I was the first moderator to do so.
The October 15, 1992, debate among President George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot changed everything. For the first time, candidates would answer questions created and asked by would-be voters, not professional journalists, in a town hall–type format. Carole Simpson of ABC News moderated that event at the University of Richmond, Virginia.
The opening half of the October 19, 1992, ninety-minute Bush-Clinton-Perot event at East Lansing, Michigan, which I moderated, was the first presidential debate with no major time restraints—no two-minute answers and one-minute responses. That followed a week after the raucous vice presidential debate among Dan Quayle, Al Gore, and James Stockdale, which featured a five-minute discussion period about each issue. Hal Bruno of ABC moderated that one.
Those debates also marked the end of the journalist-panel format. Simpson, Bruno, and I all sat alone at the moderator’s table at our respective events. Every debate since—in 1996, 2000, 2004, and 2008—has had either a sole moderator or a participatory “town hall” audience.
The only other new wrinkle has been to have the candidates do at least one of their debates seated at a table rather than standing at podiums. During the George W. Bush years, all vice presidential debates were seated, a pattern that began at the insistence of Dick Cheney, as the Republican candidate for vice president in 2000 and again as the incumbent four years later.
While the 1992 wide-open “experiment”—a podium debate—appeared to work at the time, it has yet to return in any future debate. According to those involved in negotiations since, most candidates, each in their own way, choose not
to take what is considered “the risk” of an open format.
There were no presidential debates for sixteen years after the Kennedy-Nixon four. Their return almost immediately proved that some risks cannot be negotiated away.
THERE STOOD JIMMY Carter and Gerald Ford at their podiums on September 23, 1976, at the Walnut Theater in Philadelphia.
And the audio failed.
Carter and Ford remained standing onstage for twenty-seven minutes without exchanging a word or much more than an occasional glance the whole time.
I asked both men—in separate 1989 interviews—what that had been like.
“I watched that tape afterward,” Carter remembered, “and it was embarrassing to me that both President Ford and I stood there almost like robots. We didn’t move around, we didn’t walk over and shake hands with each other. We just stood there.”
Said Ford, “I suspect both of us would have liked to sit down and relax while the technicians were fixing the [sound] system, but I think both of us were hesitant to make any gesture that might look like we weren’t physically or mentally able to handle a problem like this.”
Carter added, “So I don’t know who was more ill at ease, me or President Ford.”
I said it looked like a tie to me.
“It was a tie,” Carter agreed. “Neither one of us was at ease, there’s no doubt about that. Those events, I think, to some degree let the American public size up the candidates, and I don’t think either one of us made any points on that deal.”
Edwin Newman of NBC News moderated that debate. He said afterward that he had never been in such a tricky situation. He did, in fact, ask Carter and Ford if they wanted to sit down in chairs on the stage while they waited for the sound to return.
“Not only did they not sit down, they did not acknowledge that I had suggested it,” Newman said.
CARTER AND FORD each went on to produce his very own Major Moment in the two following debates that 1976 fall. Both were about substance—not style.
Ford’s was clearly the more major of the two. It was in the second debate in San Francisco. One of the press panelists, Max Frankel of The New York Times, asked Ford about the recently signed Helsinki agreement that seemed to acknowledge “the Russians have dominance in Eastern Europe.”
Ford answered that the thirty-five-nation pact did not mean any such thing.
“It just isn’t true…. There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.”
Frankel questioned if he really did hear Ford say that Eastern Europe was not under Russia’s sphere of influence.
Ford replied, “I don’t believe, Mr. Frankel, that the Yugoslavians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don’t believe that the Romanians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don’t believe that the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union.”
The press and most everyone else in the world of politics clobbered Ford.
Later he tried to clarify what he meant: “There is no question I did not adequately explain what I was thinking. I felt very strongly that regardless of the number of Soviet armored divisions in Poland, the Russians would never dominate the Polish spirit. That’s what I should have said. I simply left out the fact that at that time in 1976, the Russians had about ten to fifteen divisions in Poland.”
Did Carter realize there on the stage that night what President Ford had done?
“Yes, I did. And I was prepared to jump in, you know, and take advantage of it. But just on the spur of the moment, I realized that it would serve me better to let the news reporters question President Ford’s analysis and judgment.”
I asked Ford, “Did you have any idea that you had said something wrong?”
“Not at the time. Not at the time. In retrospect, obviously, the inclusion of a sentence or maybe a phrase would have made all the difference in the world.”
Carter recognized it was a serious mistake, but did the election turn on it?
“I don’t know if it did or not, because there are so many factors that can enter a campaign, but certainly it cost him some votes, and, as you know, the election was quite close.”
“We ended up losing by only a point and a half, or maybe two points,” Ford added. “So any one of a number of problems in the campaign could have made the difference.”
Carter’s own Major Moment occurred during the third 1976 debate in Williamsburg, Virginia.
Playboy magazine had just published an interview in which Carter said, “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God recognizes I will do—and I have done it—and God forgives me for it.”
Carter, in his interview with me, said he knew that could cost him the election. He realized—as he said in the debate itself when asked by Robert Maynard of The Washington Post—that it was a mistake to have given the interview in the first place.
“I thought the best way to handle it was to say, well, I’m sorry that the interview came out, but I couldn’t deny that the answers in Playboy were my own answers.”
The consensus was that, in the end, Carter’s admission pretty much blunted the damage from the Playboy interview.
Barbara Walters moderated that third 1976 Carter-Ford debate at Williamsburg.
In her 2008 memoir, Audition, she put that debate into a fascinating personal workplace context.
She recounted how she was living a nightmare then as the first woman nightly news anchor. Her ABC coanchor was Harry Reasoner, whose hostility toward Walters had become a public story and was obvious to anyone who even glanced at the screen when they appeared together.
“I don’t know whether the League [of Women Voters] chose me out of pity or because they thought I would do a good job, but, boy, did I need that vote of confidence,” she wrote. “The debate went smoothly. I did not make a flub or a misstep. I slept soundly that night for the first time in a long time and flew back to New York refreshed and ready for new battles.”
Whatever else, the debates of 1976 were important just because they happened.
They began the move toward the political imperative that there must be presidential debates. The sixteen-year debate hiatus was mostly the result of front-runner incumbents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon deciding they only had something to lose by sharing a stage with Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee against Johnson in 1964, or Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic challenger to Nixon in 1968.
Ford, in 1976, was an incumbent, having been the appointed vice president who become president upon Nixon’s resignation. But because of the Watergate scandal and Ford’s pardon of Nixon, incumbency was no asset for Ford. He was the one who challenged Carter to debate.
“I had to do something to overcome the thirty-some points I was behind,” Ford said in our interview.
Carter said he was reluctant to accept. “It was a very disturbing concept for me to be onstage with the president of the United States. I’ve never even met a Democratic president in my life, so there was an aura about the presidency that was quite overwhelming.”
MEANWHILE, THE RUNNING mates of Ford and Carter made their own history in 1976 by becoming the first vice presidential candidates to debate on national television.
Walter Mondale, the Democrat, and Bob Dole, the Republican, faced each other on the stage of the Alley Theater in Houston. There were Major Moments—mostly Dole’s.
The Kansas senator joked that while he was chairman of the Republican Party during Watergate, the event happened on his night off. He also used humor to take an indirect hit on Carter for the Playboy interview:
“I couldn’t quite understand what Governor Carter meant in Playboy magazine. I couldn’t understand frankly why he was in Playboy magazine. But he was and we’ll give him the bunny vote.”
The largest Dole Moment, however, was no joke. He proclaimed Vietnam, Korea, World War II, and World War I were “all Democrat wars” that resulted i
n 1.6 million killed and wounded, “enough to fill the city of Detroit.”
Mondale said that he had actually anticipated such a charge from Dole. “Unbelievable. I had to try to keep a straight face. I think they blew the election right there. One of my advisers—I’ll never forget this—we were just closing down the last [predebate] discussion, and he said, ‘I’ll bet that Senator Dole will accuse the Democrats of causing World War II,’ and I said, ‘You are crazy.’ He said, ‘No, I’ve got a feeling he’ll do it.’ So I said, ‘Well, how shall we handle it?’ “
He handled it that night by saying Dole had just showed why his reputation for being a hatchet man was richly earned and that the American people clearly did not believe there was a partisan difference “over involvement in the war to fight Nazi Germany.”
I asked Dole how he happened to say “Democrat wars.”
“It was boilerplate,” Dole replied. “I mean, in those days, you know, I had a stack of briefing notes about two feet high, which… I received from the Ford people, the national committee, and I guess I should have exercised my own judgment. But, in any event, I probably wish I hadn’t said it.”
“You do wish you hadn’t said it?”
“Yeah. One of my heroes was FDR and I’m a World War II veteran, so I didn’t want… to run around and say, well, the Democrats started all the wars in the world.”
Dole acknowledged that he was known as Ford’s hatchet man and maybe he deserved such a label. “But Ford had sort of the Rose Garden strategy and I was out in the briar patch. I used to tell him, you know, please call me home.”
Because of the “Democrat wars” exchange, Mondale left the Houston stage certain that the Carter-Mondale ticket had won the election right then and there. It was over.
Dole didn’t feel that strongly about it. He did review a tape of the Houston debate but concluded that he really didn’t go over the line. “But I must say it made me more cautious in future debates.”
