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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Louis Menand discusses the larger issues of Presidential stagecraft
"It was TV more than anything else that turned the tide," John F. Kennedy said on November 12, 1960, four days after his election to the presidency. He was referring to the four televised debates between him and Richard Nixon, broadcast earlier that fall. Television debates are now nearly an official rite of passage in a politician's progress to the presidency. Holding a presidential election today without a television debate would seem almost undemocratic, as though voters were being cheated by the omission of some relevant test, some necessary submission to mass scrutiny.
That's not what many people thought at the time of the first debates. Theodore H. White, who subscribed fully to Kennedy's view that the debates had made the difference in the election, complained, in "The Making of the President 1960," that television had dumbed down the issues by forcing the candidates to respond to questions instantaneously. "Neither man could pause to indulge in the slow reflection and rumination, the slow questioning of alternatives before decision, that is the inner quality of leadership," White said. He also believed that Kennedy's "victory" in the debates was largely a triumph of image over content. People who listened to the debates on the radio, White pointed out, scored it a draw; people who watched it thought that, except in the third debate, Kennedy had crushed Nixon. (This little statistic has been repeated many times as proof of the distorting effects of television. Why not the distorting effects of radio? It also may be that people whose medium of choice or opportunity in 1960 was radio tended to fit a Nixon rather than a Kennedy demographic.) White thought that Kennedy benefitted because his image on television was "crisp"; Nixon's--light-colored suit, wrong makeup, bad posture--was "fuzzed." "In 1960 television had won the nation away from sound to images," he concluded, "and that was that."
Daniel Boorstin, the University of Chicago historian, who was later the Librarian of Congress, agreed, except that he didn't date the triumph of the image from 1960; he dated it from the start of what he called "the Graphic Revolution," back in the nineteenth century. Boorstin's "The Image," published in 1961, the same year as White's book on the Kennedy-Nixon race, is the work in which Boorstin introduced his (well-known) definition of a celebrity as a person well known for being well known. His argument was that the rise of mechanical means of communication and reproduction--the telegraph, photography, the high-speed printing press, radio, television--and the subsequent emergence of media "sciences," such as advertising and public relations, had produced a culture of what he called "pseudo-events," events that are neither real nor illusory, neither genuine nor fake, like, he said, the Kennedy-Nixon...
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