The Road To The ’60 Debates

As today’s fiftieth anniversary of the first debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon concludes, it’s worth thinking about the long, long process that led to it. The series of debates across between Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln became part...

Video: Meet the Press Commemorates 50 Years

In a special edition of Meet the Press co-sponsored with the University of Virginia, UVA’s Larry Sabato, former RN aide Patrick Buchanan, former JFK aide Ted Sorensen and journalist Sander Van Oker remember the first RN-JFK debate: Visit msnbc.com for breaking...

We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Program…

On a late September Monday evening fifty years ago today, 80 million Americans (a number approaching half the population of the United States at the time) sat before their flickering black and white television sets to watch the first televised presidential debate in...

Fifty Years After: 1960’s Kennedy-Nixon Debates

On September 26, 1960 cathode rays changed presidential politics forever. For on that Monday evening Richard Nixon and Jack Kennedy faced off on the first televised presidential debate in American campaign history. Neither Nixon nor Kennedy was a stranger to debates....

Checkers — The Moment Politics Met Television

One day in 1974, as Spring began to give way to Summer, Frank Gannon—wordsmith and White House Fellow—took a walk in Washington, largely to get away from the stress induced by the Nixon White House’s ever-increasing Watergate milieu. He found his way to an old...