It’s long been an article of campaign lore that Sen. John F. Kennedy demolished Vice President Richard M. Nixon in the first-ever televised debate between the presidential nominees of America’s leading political parties. Kennedy was cool and self-confident before the camera that night, unlike Nixon whose sweaty brow and 5 o’clock shadow turned off television audiences. The consensus has become that the telegenic Kennedy won hands down.
But that’s not how observers tended to see it at the time. The consensus we recognize today did not congeal right away, as contemporaneous accounts of the debate 60 years ago make clear.
Indeed, the near-consensus in the press was that the hour-long encounter on Sept. 26, 1960, had been a standoff — “A slow fight to a draw,” as the Los Angeles Times declared in its headline over a post-debate editorial. “Who won?” the Boston Globe asked in its report about the encounter. “You can toss a coin.”
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