Dearie by Bob Spitz

Author:Bob Spitz [Spitz, Bob]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-96112-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-08-06T16:00:00+00:00

Seventeen

A Monstrously Busy Life

Americans who tuned in to their local CBS-TV affiliate on the evening of September 26, 1960, got a bracing glimpse of the future, what Marshall McLuhan labeled the Electronic Age. On screen, two men sat facing each other, each vying to become the next president of the United States. They were eager to debate—the first televised debate between two candidates for the office. The issues were incontrovertible—the Cold War, civil rights, Quemoy and Matsu, the economy. But issues weren’t the issue as the encounter unfolded.

Richard Nixon, the current vice president, was the known quantity. For eight years, he’d been a fixture across front pages and on the nightly news as a stand-in for the oft-indisposed President Eisenhower, who had suffered several strokes. His challenger, John F. Kennedy, though a senator since 1946, was new to the national scene. For most Americans, he was an unfamiliar face, a glaring disadvantage in a contest that equated intimacy with confidence. Yet polls had the men neck-and-neck as they prepared to face off in a Chicago studio.

The outcome of the evening is one of those great American allegories—how JFK, who had worked on his tan on a hotel rooftop and patted on stage makeup to soften his image, charmed the discerning TV audience, while Nixon wilted sorrily under the hot lights, sweat beading up through the Lazy Shave powder that had been slapped on haphazardly to cover his beard stubble. How, before the camera’s eye, Nixon morphed from a cool head of state into “an Armenian rug peddler.” How the polls reflected that perception by the overnights that boosted Kennedy’s numbers. How the balance of power shifted in the camera’s telltale lens, which portrayed Kennedy as “boyish” and Nixon as “shifty,” Kennedy as “a star,” Nixon as an “assassin.” In an eventual wrap‑up of the debate it was noted: “The winner that night was not just Kennedy but the television image itself, which had, in a single stroke, demonstrated its new kingmaking power.”

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