Kennedy-Nixon at 66: "Radio Picked Nixon" Rested on 178 People
Woody Magazine
We write the things that aren't news
Sept. 26, 2026 (Sat.)
Kennedy-Nixon at 66: "Radio Listeners Picked Nixon" Rested on 178 People
The idea that television chose a president grew larger in the decades after that night than it was on the night itself
In Three Lines
- Sixty-six years ago today, Kennedy and Nixon held the first televised debate between two major-party nominees, and people still say TV viewers picked Kennedy while radio listeners picked Nixon.
- Only one survey counted radio listeners separately, and in it just 178 of them named a winner.
- The point is not that images never sway voters. It is that the evidence from that night is too thin to carry the story told about it.
One photograph settles the argument for most people. One man faces the camera with a tan. The other is pale and shadowed by stubble, dabbing sweat from his face.
Sixty-six years ago today, on Sept. 26, 1960, Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, the Democrat, and Vice President Richard M. Nixon, the Republican, met in the first televised general-election debate in American history. Two Democratic contenders had debated on television during the 1956 primaries, but the nominees of both parties had never faced each other on the air. The debate ran an hour in the Chicago studios of WBBM, a CBS station. Howard K. Smith of CBS moderated, and the subject was domestic policy: schools, health care, farms.
Nixon arrived in poor shape. A month earlier he had banged his left knee on a car door on the campaign trail, and an infection put him in the hospital. At the studio he turned down the network's makeup and covered his five o'clock shadow with a powder called Lazy Shave. Britannica puts the audience at about 70 million.
The story that followed is famous. People who watched on television thought Kennedy won. People who heard the broadcast on radio thought Nixon did. The moral writes itself: substance lost to a face, and television started choosing presidents.
It is easy to see why the story stuck. Television sets were in 11 percent of American homes in 1950 and 88 percent by 1960. In a decade the set went from novelty to fixture. If you wanted a single night when the new machine took over politics, this one fits. We still judge candidates by how they come across on a screen.
Only one survey counted the radio audience
It works like a fish story: the fewer people check it, the bigger the fish. Follow this one back to its source, and the crowd of witnesses thins out fast.
In a 1962 study, the media scholars Elihu Katz and Jacob J. Feldman gathered the polls taken on the debates. Most never separated radio listeners from viewers. One did: Sindlinger & Company, a market research firm in Philadelphia.
Sindlinger's radio listeners picked Nixon by roughly two to one. On its face, that is the whole case. The trouble is how few people stood behind the figure. Of more than 2,100 respondents, 282 said they had heard the debate on radio, and 178 of those named a winner. Spread across 50 states, that is fewer than four people per state.
How many people stood behind "radio picked Nixon"
Bar lengths are shares of 2,100 respondents. Data: Sindlinger & Company survey (1960), as reanalyzed by Vancil and Pendell (1987). Source ↗
In 1987 David L. Vancil and Sue D. Pendell, speech communication scholars at Colorado State University, took the survey apart. The radio group was too small for a national sample, they wrote, and the survey never said where those listeners lived. A rural tilt was quite possible, since rural areas had less access to television in 1960. Such a tilt would have favored Nixon.
Nobody can check now. An analysis published by HuffPost reported that Sindlinger apparently lost the original data. Nothing survives on how the radio and television groups leaned politically.
Even the television side of the ledger is thinner than the legend. The survey results come down to us in two versions, and in both, four or five viewers in ten named no winner at all. That is more than named Kennedy.
In 2017 Jon Bruschke and Laura Divine of California State University, Fullerton, found only three accounts from the period showing a Nixon radio win. Besides Sindlinger, one was a columnist's street interviews in Atlanta, and the other a reporter's account of guests at the Southern Governors' Conference.
Four million voters, 72 percent, two million votes
A thin survey can still pick up a heavy argument. In "The Making of the President 1960," published in 1961, the journalist Theodore H. White did the arithmetic. More than four million voters said the four debates alone decided their vote, and 72 percent of them, close to three million, chose Kennedy.
If his extrapolations held, White reasoned, television accounted for two million votes of Kennedy's margin. By his own count, Kennedy won the popular vote by 112,000, so the figure was nearly 18 times the margin itself.
The math rests on what voters said about themselves. People can say what made up their minds, but no one can know how they would have voted without the debates. Once the figure of two million attached itself, though, the legend carried weight.
The first published experiment came 43 years later
At this point it is tempting to call the whole thing a myth. Vancil and Pendell ran a study of their own in 1990 and could not reproduce Nixon's radio win, though they only presented it at a conference and never published it. Yet there is evidence on the other side.
In 2003 James N. Druckman, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota, put the question to an experiment and published the results. He recruited students who knew nothing about the debate. Half watched the first debate on video, and the other half heard only the audio. He chose that debate partly, he wrote, because despite popular belief there was no evidence that the television images had changed anyone's reaction.
The result sided with the legend. On a seven-point scale where lower numbers favored Kennedy, viewers averaged 2.57 and listeners 3.28. The students who watched leaned further toward Kennedy and judged the candidates more on personality. They were college students in the 2000s, though, not voters in 1960.
Scholars remain split. In 1996 the communication scholar Sidney Kraus interviewed people involved in the Sindlinger survey and concluded that the television-radio split was not a myth. In 2017 Bruschke and Divine pushed back. Reanalyzing the 1960 American National Election Study, they argued that Sindlinger's radio sample most likely held more Republicans.
The first version was about leadership
Whether television moved votes that night is still unsettled. What can be traced is how the story grew.
The communication scholars Sara Mehltretter and Dale A. Herbeck read 567 news articles about the 1960 debates, then more than 100 articles from the 2004 campaign that mentioned them. As they trace it, the standard account of the first debate began with presidential leadership and drifted over time toward appearance. By 2004 it was almost entirely about the visuals.
That is how fish stories grow. The people who tell them best are seldom the ones who were in the boat. Our own picture of that autumn comes mostly secondhand, and Nixon's sweat and stubble grew heavier with every retelling.
April 21, 1947, McKeesport
The two men's first debate did not happen in 1960. On April 21, 1947, two freshman congressmen argued over the Taft-Hartley bill, which aimed to curb the power of labor unions. They met at the Penn-McKee Hotel in McKeesport, Pa., a coal and steel town near Pittsburgh.
Both sat on the House labor committee, and a local civic forum called the Junto had invited them. Few American homes had a television yet, which should have left little room for talk of looks.
The next day The McKeesport Daily News reported what each man argued about the bill. Yet when the same two scholars traced the later accounts in 2022, they found that retellings from the television age had recast even this debate around the two men's looks and delivery.
A debate held with no television camera in the room still became a story about faces. The fish grew in the telling, and the tellers were not in the boat. How many votes the screen moved that night is still unknown. Which way the story grew is not.
Sources
- Source ↗ First Kennedy-Nixon Debate, 26 September 1960, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum
- Source ↗ The Great Debate: First televised presidential debate held at CBS Chicago, CBS Chicago (2024)
- Source ↗ The impact of the 1960 JFK-Nixon debate, CNN (2016)
- Source ↗ "At the First Kennedy-Nixon Debate, Presidential Politics Entered a New Era," History.com
- Source ↗ "1st US presidential debate now online," WCBU/AP (2016), on the 1956 Stevenson-Kefauver ABC primary debate
- Source ↗ Cabinet, Issue 24 (2006–2007), on Lazy Shave powder
- Source ↗ Television in the United States: The Kennedy-Nixon debates, Britannica
- Source ↗ Vancil and Pendell, "The Myth of Viewer-Listener Disagreement in the First Kennedy-Nixon Debate," Central States Speech Journal 38(1), 1987, ERIC record
- Source ↗ Viewer-listener disagreement, Media Myth Alert (sample figures from Vancil and Pendell)
- Source ↗ David Greenberg, "Did JFK really win because he looked better on television?" Slate (2010)
- Source ↗ "Did Nixon Win With Radio Listeners?" HuffPost
- Source ↗ James N. Druckman, "The Power of Television Images: The First Kennedy-Nixon Debate Revisited," Journal of Politics 65(2), 2003
- Source ↗ Bruschke and Divine, "Debunking Nixon's radio victory in the 1960 election," The Social Science Journal 54(1), 2017
- Source ↗ "Remembering and Re-Creating the Great Debates of 1960," Communication Quarterly 64(2)
- Source ↗ Herbeck and Mehltretter Drury, "The first Kennedy-Nixon debate: the McKeesport Junto of 1947," Argumentation and Advocacy 58, 2022
- Source ↗ Kennedy-Nixon Taft-Hartley Debate marker (Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 2012), HMdb
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