Seventeen days out of Walter Reed Hospital, Richard Nixon refused stage makeup under the lights of a Chicago studio on September 26, 1960; the pale, sweating vice president lost the room to a tanned John F. Kennedy, at least according to legend.

Richard Nixon had spent twelve days at Walter Reed Army Medical Center that August, treated for a staph infection after banging his knee on a car door in North Carolina. He left the hospital twenty pounds lighter, still recovering, and went straight back to a fifty-state campaign schedule. What he did not get, before he stood under studio lights in Chicago seventeen days later, was a night of decent sleep.

What actually happened on September 26, 1960

That evening, Nixon and Senator John F. Kennedy met at CBS's Studio 1, in the network's Chicago broadcast center at 630 North McClurg Court, the first of four meetings between them before Election Day. It was the first debate between major-party presidential candidates ever carried on live television, and Howard K. Smith moderated. Four correspondents split the questioning: Sander Vanocur of NBC, Charles Warren of Mutual News, Stuart Novins of CBS, and Bob Fleming of ABC. The topic, by agreement, was domestic policy: schools, farm prices, labor, the economy, with each man given an eight-minute opening statement and a three-minute close.

Presidential candidates had appeared on television before that night, in campaign ads and convention coverage, but no nominee had ever stood across a studio floor from his opponent and answered live questions in front of a national audience. That part of the evening is not in dispute. What happened to the two men's faces on camera is where the history gets interesting.

Why did Nixon look so bad?

The knee had not fully healed. Arriving at the studio, Nixon hit it again on a car door, and by his own aides' account he had run a fever the night before. He had also lost weight he hadn't yet put back on, so his shirt collar sat loose around his neck. Producer-director Don Hewitt (who would later invent "60 Minutes") offered both candidates professional stage makeup before air. Kennedy, tanned from weeks of outdoor campaigning in California, waved it off; he barely needed it. Nixon waved it off too, then had an aide dab on a drugstore concealer called Lazy Shave to hide his five-o'clock shadow.

It did not hold. Under the studio lights, Nixon sweated it through, and his gray suit blended into the gray set behind him while Kennedy's dark one held its edges.

The camera work made the contrast worse before it made it better: CBS gave Kennedy eleven reaction shots totaling 118 seconds of screen time to Nixon's nine shots and 85 seconds, according to the network's own retrospective account. Whether that was strategy or just how the cutting fell, it meant more of the broadcast lingered on the candidate who photographed well.

Did radio listeners really pick Nixon?

Here the record gets thinner than the legend suggests, and it's worth saying so plainly. The claim that radio audiences scored Nixon the winner while television audiences gave it to Kennedy comes down almost entirely to one poll: a survey by Albert Sindlinger's market-research firm, which found Nixon leading 43 percent to 20 percent among the radio listeners it reached, against a narrower Kennedy lead among TV viewers.

The trouble, as the writer David Greenberg laid out in Slate in 2010, is that Sindlinger's radio sample held just 282 people, with no attempt made to check whether it skewed rural, or Republican, or both, either of which would tilt toward Nixon on its own, television aside. Communication scholars David Vancil and Sue Pendell reviewed the same evidence decades later and reached a similar verdict: not enough there to carry the story that has been told about it. Some of that story's staying power traces to Theodore H. White's bestselling account of the 1960 campaign, which repeated the radio-television split without citing a source stronger than the poll itself, and to a few newspaper columnists of the day who reported anecdotes as findings.

None of that means the split is pure invention. It means the version usually told — clean, decisive, backed by data — outran the one poll actually behind it.

What actually holds up?

The turnout figure is on firmer ground: about 70 million Americans watched, a record for a single political broadcast at the time. So is the reaction-shot count, which is not a survey of anyone's opinion but a fact sitting in the footage itself. So is the plain, photographable difference between a rested man in a dark suit and a sick one in a loose gray one.

That part isn't folklore. It's on the tape.

Why it still shapes how candidates are watched

What the 1960 debate proved, reliably, is that a camera does not treat two candidates equally just because it gives them equal time. That lesson outlasted the shaky poll that supposedly demonstrated it. Within a few election cycles, campaigns were hiring people whose whole job was lighting, suit color, podium height and camera-friendly gesture. By the time the Commission on Presidential Debates took over the format in 1987, walk-in shots and reaction-shot rules were negotiated in advance like any other term of the contract.

The candidates today rehearse in mock studios built to match the real one, down to the podium height and the color of the backdrop. The fight over what an audience saw hasn't gone away, either. Campaigns now dial-test live audience reaction and dispute the fact-checking crawl in real time, arguing over the picture the same way Sindlinger's poll argued over the sound. Nobody has settled that argument yet. The next debate stage, whatever screen it plays on, will just be where they have it again.

Sources

• David Greenberg, "Did JFK Really Win Because He Looked Better on Television?" Slate, September 24, 2010
• CBS Chicago, "The Great Debate: First televised presidential debate held at CBS Chicago," cbsnews.com
• Commission on Presidential Debates, transcript of the September 26, 1960 debate, debates.org
• The Philadelphia Inquirer, "Medical Mystery: In TV debate, Nixon looked nervous," inquirer.com
• History.com, "Kennedy and Nixon square off in first televised presidential debate"