Often cited in support of the claim that radio listeners felt Nixon won the encounter is a post-debate survey by Sindlinger & Company, which reported that radio listeners, by a margin of 2-to-1, thought Nixon had prevailed.

Vancil and Pendell pointed out that Sindlinger’s survey included more than 2,100 respondents — of whom only 282 said they had listened on radio. Of that number, 178 (or fewer than four people per state) “expressed an opinion on the debate winner,” they wrote. The sub-sample was too small and unstable to support sweeping judgments about reactions of television and radio audiences nationwide, Vancil and Pendell noted.

Not only that, but the sub-sample failed to identify from where the radio listeners were drawn. “A location bias in the radio sample,” Vancil and Pendell wrote, “could have caused dramatic effects on the selection of a debate winner. A rural bias, quite possible because of the relatively limited access of rural areas to television in 1960, would have favored Nixon.”

The Sindlinger data were flawed, and essentially useless in assessing how radio listeners reacted to the debate.

I took up the myth of viewer-listener disagreement in the second edition of  Getting It Wrong: Debunking The Greatest Myths of American Journalism, describing it as “a dubious bit of political lore” that’s often invoked as “conclusive evidence of the power of television images and the triumph of image over substance.”

And as I point out in the book, “the notion of viewer-listener disagreement rests more on assertion than persuasive evidence.”

If television and radio audiences had differed sharply about the debate’s outcome, journalists in 1960 were well-positioned to have detected and reported on such clashing perceptions — especially so in the days immediately after the Kennedy-Nixon encounter when curiosity about the debate and its novelty ran high.

But none of the scores of newspaper articles, editorials, and commentaries I examined in my research made specific reference to the presumptive effect: Leading U.S. newspapers published nothing in the debate’s immediate aftermath to suggest that pervasive differences characterized the reactions of viewers and listeners.

Moreover, I write, “there was no unanimity among newspaper columnists and editorial writers about Nixon’s appearance. Not all analysts in late September 1960 thought Nixon’s performance was dreadful — or that Kennedy was necessarily all that appealing and rested.”

An after-debate editorial in the Washington Post declared, for example:

“Of the two performances, Mr. Nixon’s was probably the smoother. He is an accomplished debater with a professional polish, and he managed to convey a slightly patronizing air of a master instructing a pupil.”

Saul Pett, then a prominent feature writer for the Associated Press, gave Nixon high marks for cordiality. “On general folksiness both before and during the debate,” Pett wrote, “my scorecard showed Nixon ahead at least 8 to 1. … He smiled more often and more broadly, especially at the start and close of a remark. Kennedy only allowed himself the luxury of a quarter-smile now and then.”

Other analysts detected flaws in how both men looked on television.

Syndicated columnist Harriett Van Horne wrote that both were “visibly anxious, watching as a tiger while his opponent was speaking. … Mr. Nixon looked made up. Obviously somebody had de-fluffed his shaggy brows. Sen. Kennedy’s hair no longer falls in his eyes … but he looked as if he’d not slept well recently.”

An editorial in the Chicago Daily News said Kennedy projected “more than a trace of arrogance” during the debate by implying “that he could conduct an administration that would please everybody.”

Other commentators noted that Nixon looked poorly on television; but they did not necessarily assign great significance to his appearance.

Walter Lippmann, perhaps the leading newspaper columnist of the time, mentioned Nixon’s appearance deep in his column the day after the debate, observing that the television cameras “were very hard on Mr. Nixon. … They made him look sick, which he is not, and they made him look older and more worn than he is.”

The effect, Lippmann wrote, “was a misrepresentation and we must make sure for the future that the cameras are in fact impartial.”

Agreeing with Kennedy not an inspired tactic for Nixon

Probably more damaging to Nixon than what Politico called his “sickly image” were his tactics at the outset of the debate.

I note in Getting It Wrong that he “committed then the elementary mistake of arguing on his opponent’s terms — of seeming to concur rather than seeking the initiative. Nixon projected a ‘me-too’ sentiment from the start, in answering Kennedy who had spoken first.”

Surprisingly, Nixon in his opening statement declared that he agreed with much of what Kennedy had just said. Whether Nixon was trying to be gracious, or seeking to appeal to wavering Democrats, or trying to stifle his combative instincts, his remarks came across as diffident, uninspired, and strangely deferential.

Columnist Joseph Alsop observed, sarcastically, that “Nixon insisted so strongly that he shared all Senator Kennedy’s worthy goals that one expected a Nixonian endorsement of the Democratic platform at any moment.”

For Nixon, agreeing with his foe was no winning tactic.

WJC

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