Why JFK Loved Television (and Hated It)

Television had been lingering around the political scene for a few years before the first televised presidential candidate debate, on September 26, 1960. It was between Vice President Richard Nixon and the relatively unknown Irish-American senator John F. Kennedy. But it wasn't until that night that the tube, millions of them, burned a mark on the face of American politics.

Those who listened to the debate on the radio labeled Nixon the winner. But those who watched on TV saw Kennedy as the victor. Next to Nixon, who appeared sweaty, pale, and underweight from a recent hospitalization, Kennedy was a handsome portrait of calm and confidence. Nixon improved for subsequent debates but the damage had already been done.

On November 12, four days after winning the presidency by a narrow margin, Kennedy acknowledged the role the tube had played: "It was the TV more than anything else that turned the tide," he said. A 1979 report on presidential debates noted that the Nixon-Kennedy debates "made televised encounters between candidates the hottest thing in electioneering since the campaign button." The television was so intimidating to future candidates that they generally avoided them: the next televised presidential debate wouldn't take place for another 16 years. But they've have been with us ever since.

But Kennedy was thinking hard about the power of television well before that night. An essay he wrote a year earlier, for TV Guide's November 14, 1959 issue, took on the question of what kind of impact mass media held over politics, and vice versa. Whereas President Wilson, presenting the League of Nations to America during a three week tour, earned himself a stroke after the grueling trip, Kennedy notes that "President Dwight Eisenhower, taking his case to the people on the labor situation, is able to reach several million in one 15-minute period without ever leaving his office."

The effect was to tie politicians to a new identity: "the image." While "they may in fact be based only on a candidate's TV impression, ignoring his record, views and other appearances," he wrote, "my own conviction is that these images or impressions are likely to be uncannily correct."

That view carried serious risks; historians Walter Lippmann and Daniel Boorstin, among others, would question the role of the televised image in politics. But Kennedy was onto something. As he writes, referring to the Gore report, the Republican National Committee spent over $3,000,000 for television and the Democratic National Committee just under $2,800,000 on television broadcasting in 1956. But the growth of television and the rise of Super PACs in recent years have turned TV stations in battleground states into brutal war zones. In the 2010 midterm elections, campaign receipts totaled something closer to $4 billion. According to Wells Fargo's political ad analyst, by the end of this election cycle, total ad spending — including congressional and ballot proposition buys — will have topped a stunning $5.2 billion.

But the power of the boob tube to bring that image to the people didn't mean intimacy and honesty, Kennedy acknowledged. Political campaigns, he warned, "could be taken over by public relations experts, who tell the candidate not only how to use TV but what to say, what to stand for and what kind of person to be." The best defense against televised lies, he says, somewhat simplistically in retrospect, are the growing masses of TV viewers themselves. Like game shows, he wrote, political campaigns "can be fixed…It is in your power to perceive deception, to shut off gimmickry, to reward honesty, to demand legislation where needed."

Fifty-two years after it was first published, in the midst of our mad, viral, tea-partying, Facebook-lined, 30-second-spotted, billion-dollar campaign era, the essay wears its age like a grey 60s suit: it's classy, it still works, but it feels tepid next to the loud outfits of a Glenn Beck or outlets like Youtube. It's not hard to imagine those innovations would have had Kennedy sweating like Nixon.

Below you can read the essay in full.

Television wasn't Kennedy's only favorite gadget: he was also known to occasionally rock the vocoder too.

Watch VICE's documentary about Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's Rally to Restore Sanity in Washington, D.C.: