THE NATION: Milestone of Democracy

At the halfway mark, with the second of four rounds completed, the Kennedy-Nixon TV debate had already carved its place in the annals of U.S. politics. On the same date 102 years before, a crowd of 20,000 witnessed the historic Lincoln-Douglas debate in Galesburg, Ill. Some 64 million people witnessed Round No. 2 of the Kennedy-Nixon debate—more than the number of citizens who voted in the presidential election of 1956.

The continuing TV debate adds a new-sophistication to the concept of government by the people. The ingenuity of the TV industry in fitting the campaign to TV’s dimensions and the sharpness of journalists who asked last week’s questions provided a genuine public service. Whatever the outcome in November, the election will be decided by an electorate that, to an extent unique in history, were able to look at the candidates and their programs in a cool, objective light, free of the usual hoopla, pennants and brass bands. The electronic eyes that scan the men in the TV studio are devoid both of prejudice and of any softening human kindness. For the candidates there is no place to hide, no way of ducking behind a “no comment” or a sonorous platitude. Every quaver of voice, every fleeting grimace, is subject to merciless scrutiny.

Under this ordeal by camera and microphone, Jack Kennedy and Richard Nixon showed some striking similarities. Both proved themselves to be quick-thinking, tough-fibered fighters, charged with youthful intensity and energy (Nixon is 47, Kennedy 43). Only men still young could have hammered away at each other so hard for a steady hour, their heads so full of facts and figures. They showed the aggressiveness and alertness that makes them formidable campaigners, the drive that enables them relentlessly to crisscross the country all day, all week, to keep up the most exhausting schedules in the history of U.S. presidential campaigns.

Kennedy was the unexpected winner of Round 1 because he took a tense and soft-hitting Nixon down a me-too path on domestic issues. In Round 2 Kennedy came through on foreign affairs with considerable strength, faulting the Administration for an inadequate performance in the 1950s and demanding better for the ’60s in broad terms of mission and purpose. (“That.” said he. “is the big issue.”) But Nixon topped him with a sureness on cold war specifics. Most notable: Kennedy plumped for U.S. withdrawal from the offshore Nationalist Chinese islands of Quemoy and Matsu to facilitate an orderly defense of Formosa; Nixon warned quickly that withdrawal would start a “chain reaction”: “The Communists.” said he, “aren’t after Quemoy and Matsu. They are after Formosa.” He snapped at “the same kind of woolly thinking that led to disaster for America in Korea.”

Since Nixon’s comment came after Kennedy’s, he had, for the moment at least, an important last word. But between sign-off of the last debate and curtain time for this week’s, both candidates would think hard on what they had said and what they should say in the remaining two rounds. So would the U.S., and from the final judgment should come the best-informed marking of millions of ballots ever.