The run-up to the Joe Biden-Donald Trump debate at the end of June 2024 has brought reminders about the first-ever televised presidential debate – and how Vice President Richard Nixon’s sweaty, haggard appearance that autumn night in 1960 opened a pathway to the White House for the tanned and telegenic Sen. John F. Kennedy.

That, at least, is conventional wisdom about the Kennedy-Nixon debate of Sept. 26, 1960: Image prevailed, rewarding Kennedy and punishing Nixon.

“Kennedy went on to narrowly win the election that most say he never would have had a shot at without that first debate,” Time magazine declared in 2016, in recounting the greatest missteps in political debates. “It seems Nixon’s fatal flub was in failing to recognize the power of the visual image.”

Or as Max Frankel, then the executive editor of The New York Times, wrote sardonically several months after Nixon’s death in 1994, “Nixon lost a TV debate, and the Presidency, to John F. Kennedy in 1960 because of a sweaty upper lip.”

Nixon did perspire under the hot studio lights, but few pundits and analysts at the time focused their commentaries on the vice president’s appearance. In a revealing example of the impermanence of in-the-moment judgments, many pundits and analysts thought both candidates appeared nervous and tentative. Some of them said Nixon, who was still recovering from the effects of an infected knee that had sent him to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in late August 1960, had the better of the confrontation.

The prevailing view at the time was that the debate settled nothing about the 1960 race for the presidency.

What the public is often told nowadays about that first-of-its-kind debate, which took place without........

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