by From Kennedy-Nixon to Obama-McCain Tension City: Inside the Presidential Debates
Mitchell recalled, “It was the women against Bernie. The use of the words ‘rape’ and ‘murder’… it all came together and affected the women differently than it did the one man.”
Compton said she and the two others were clearly concerned, but he wouldn’t talk about it any further.
After the meeting they went to the debate site, Pauley Pavilion, for a technical walk-through. “As we came into the greenroom afterward, Andrea came back at the question again. ‘Bernie, would you at least consider taking her name out of the question, making it less personal—someone you knew?’ And he was adamant. ‘No.’ ”
Compton had one more conversation with Shaw about the Dukakis question while they were standing downstairs at their hotel waiting for the cars to drive them to the debate.
“ ‘I’m sorry you don’t like my question,’ he said. I said to him: ‘Bernie, it’s a showstopper. I think it will just seize the debate right at the beginning.’ ”
That may very well be what Shaw had in mind, she said later. He had left no doubt that he was unhappy about the debate rules that allowed him to ask only one question of each candidate and then become a traffic cop.
“I had the impression that he thought he should be part of a rotation and ask every fourth question. He did not say let’s change it [the rules], but he was clearly chafing when we first got there.”
The plea to change his question was not the only issue still burning with Shaw years later. The other came up when I asked about his reluctance to share his questions with the three panelists.
“My concern was that this would get back to the candidates,” Shaw said. “I suggested that we take a vow that what we discuss in this room does not get out of this room—we do not discuss with editors, producers, or anybody. Everybody agreed. But that was not the case.”
On a flight from Los Angeles to Washington the morning after the Dukakis-Bush debate, he sat next to Hal Bruno, who had been a panelist in the 1976 vice presidential debate when he was with Newsweek. Now he was ABC’s political director and, as such, a colleague of Ann Compton’s.
“Hal tells me that he knew the question I was going to ask Dukakis. When my ears heard those words my stomach just tightened. My stomach did a double fist. He indicated they had discussed it within their political unit.”
Shaw said he seethed throughout the flight and has continued to do so ever since, but he had never raised his suspicions with anyone before now—including with Compton. He said he had remained cordial with her when they saw each other socially in Washington. “I know why I have never asked her about it is because I get angry every time I think about it,” he said.
He thought often about what would have happened if his question had leaked to the Dukakis campaign and how that might have affected the presidential debate.
“From that came a seminal lesson. I will never again, no matter what the circumstances, never again will I ever show anybody, anybody a question I am going to ask in a debate if I’m the moderator,” Shaw said.
Ann Compton just as forcefully denied that she had leaked the question to ABC News or anyone else.
“I can guarantee you, I did not utter a word to anyone—not to my husband, to anyone outside the other panelists and Bernie.” She acknowledged that it was understandable that Shaw might have incorrectly “put the two ABCs together” and jumped to the wrong conclusion. “I can guarantee you I breathed not a syllable, nor would I. It would have been the worst breach of ethics.”
But Hal Bruno, now retired from ABC, told me that Ann Compton had, in fact, talked to him about the Kitty Dukakis question ahead of time—on the afternoon of the debate.
He had gone to Pauley Pavilion in his official ABC News capacity to, among other things, offer his colleague any assistance she might need.
“Ann and Andrea were distraught—really upset. They were all three upset. They told me that Bernie was going to ask, ‘If Kitty Dukakis was raped and killed would you then favor the death penalty?’ I said, ‘Jeez, that’s a terrible question’—something like that. They asked if I could talk him out of it. I said, ‘No, I can’t. I wouldn’t even try.’ It just wasn’t the right thing to do. It would be improper. When I was a panelist I didn’t want anybody telling me what I could or couldn’t ask.”
Margaret Warner insisted she has no recollection of talking to Hal Bruno or anyone else about Shaw’s question ahead of time. “I am shocked that anyone leaked it. I didn’t tell anyone—not Hal Bruno nor anyone else.”
Mitchell said the same thing. “I definitely don’t recall any conversation with Hal Bruno. That would have been odd. He worked for a competing network.”
And we are left with the sticky she said/he said situation of differing recollections from five of the nation’s top journalism professionals.
The take-away lesson, as I see it, is simply that we journalists are no different from the people we interview. We, too, can see, hear, and interpret differently the same exact events. We, too, have Rashomon-like memories that are not always clear—or precise.
Whatever Shaw’s fears, there is not a shred of evidence that anyone from the Dukakis campaign knew the Kitty Dukakis question was coming. The best confirmation, perhaps, is Dukakis’s answer. Had he known, would he really have given such a bland and deadening response?
Hal said, “I did not hear anything that indicated anybody else knew in advance—no, not at all.”
“I know for a fact that it didn’t get to the Dukakis campaign,” Mitchell said, “because they were quite taken aback by it.”
Warner and Compton agreed.
Some final postscripts from my 2009 conversations add to the killer question saga. Bruno and Shaw both grew up in Chicago and have a long professional friendship. Each respected the other as a journalist.
“On that plane the next morning Bernie kept justifying the Dukakis question,” Bruno said. “Finally, I said, ‘Bernie, that was a shitty question.’ ” Bruno believed Shaw stuck with the question for its shock value. “He wanted to toss a hand grenade—and he did. He could have done the same thing [asked about capital punishment] in so many different ways with other wording.”
Shaw later recounted an exchange he had with Margaret Warner a year after the debate. They were both in a press security line in Warsaw, Poland, while covering a 1989 trip by President George H. W. Bush.
“Margaret Warner, to her credit, walked up to me and she said, ‘You know, I’ve been thinking about that question … and I think it was a fair question.’ And I said, ‘I really appreciate that.’ ”
Warner confirmed the substance of the Poland chat but did not recall using the specific word “fair”:
“I had heard through the grapevine that Bernie was really upset at being challenged by us—and he had taken it personally. I particularly wanted him to know that I had real respect for him as a journalist and that, on balance in retrospect, it was the right question to ask. He had elicited with that question exactly what people go to a debate to find out.”
A second “Kodak moment” occurred for Ann Compton as Shaw was cued to start the debate.
“I was sitting right next to him. I didn’t know whether to look up. It would be hard to look at Dukakis. So I looked at my hands—at my notes—not knowing where the camera would be. I really thought right up until that last moment that he will modify the question. But he read it exactly as he had told it that morning.…
“We heard this gasp behind us from the audience.”
Bruno was also looking at his hands.
“Kitty Dukakis was sitting right smack in the front row—in front of the press platforms, where I was,” he said. “I knew that question was coming. I had to look away. I didn’t want to watch her face. And he asked it. I turned around and looked, of course, and … aw, man, she was just anguished so.”
Warner’s recollection of sitting on that debate stage centered on Dukakis’s answer, not Shaw’s question. “It was as if he had just turned into a block of ice,” she said.
/>
Mitchell described Dukakis’s response as “bloodless—flat.”
Did the killer question and answer affect the election result?
“I leave that to other interpreters,” Bernard Shaw answered when asked.
But Washington Post political writer David Broder weighed in with certainty the morning after the debate, according to Ann Compton.
“Ann, the election’s over,” Broder said. “Dukakis’s answer—the election’s over.”
Hal Bruno went even further: Dukakis’s entire performance that night was at fault.
“He had his last chance, and going into that debate we all knew it was going to be his last chance. The way he came across that night—I felt he had not solved his problem. He was somebody who just wasn’t in touch and had no connection to where people were. He had blown his last chance.”
Germond and Witcover, the creators of the “killer question” term, wrote that Shaw’s question—unintentionally—gave Dukakis a chance to neutralize the successful Bush campaign charge that the former Massachusetts governor was “a softheaded, coldhearted bureaucrat who would be more protective of criminals than of their victims.”
Their conclusion: “But because Dukakis failed to take advantage of the dramatic question, a consensus developed almost at once that the second debate, and that first question and answer particularly, had sealed his fate.”
Former president Bush was kinder.
“I shouldn’t be critical of him, ’cause I’m sure I make plenty of mistakes. But I think that particular answer stands out as one—at least in my memory—that might have been a so-called defining moment. I don’t know whether it changed any polling numbers or anything like that.”
Dukakis himself deserves the last word here.
“We all screw up at some time in a campaign. And you know, what really defeated me, in my judgment, was just the fact that I didn’t take those [soft-on-crime] attacks seriously. I wasn’t ready for them. I didn’t have a clear sense of how to deal with them, and I think if I had done so, that question would not have defeated me.”
THE OCTOBER 5, 1988, vice presidential debate between Republican Dan Quayle and Democratic senator Lloyd Bentsen at the Omaha Civic Auditorium produced still another Major Moment that lives on from that election.
Judy Woodruff, both then and now my PBS colleague, moderated the debate. Like Shaw and me before her, she got to ask each candidate one question. She opened with Quayle.
“Senator, you have been criticized, as we all know, for your decision to stay out of the Vietnam War, for your poor academic record. But more troubling to some are some of the comments that have been made by people in your own party. Just last week former secretary of state [Alexander] Haig said that your pick was the dumbest call George Bush could have made. Your leader in the Senate, Bob Dole, said that a better qualified person could have been chosen. Other Republicans have been far more critical in private. Why do you think that you have not made a more substantial impression on some of these people who have been able to observe you up close?”
Next, it was Bentsen’s turn.
“What bothers people is not so much your qualifications but your split on policy with Governor Dukakis. He has said that he does not want a clone of himself, but you disagree with him on some major issues: aid to the Nicaraguan Contras, the death penalty, gun control, among others. If you had to step into the presidency, whose agenda would you pursue, yours or his?”
Woodruff realized, in retrospect, that both of her questions were clearly too long. She said she had tried to cram too much into each—particularly the one to Quayle—in order to back up what she was asking.
“That was a mistake,” she said.
She also caught heat from Republicans, who charged that her question for Quayle was much rougher than Bentsen’s. She does not accept that.
“I asked the candidates about what I thought were the two major challenges for each. Quayle’s was his experience; Bentsen’s was his policy differences with Dukakis.”
Woodruff’s press-panel colleagues followed up her Quayle question—and followed up and followed up—about his readiness, should he have to eventually assume the presidency.
Finally, Quayle reacted.
“Three times that I have had this question and I’ll try to answer it again for you as clearly as I can.… It is not just age, it’s accomplishments, it’s experience. I have far more experience than many others that sought the office of vice president of this country. I have as much experience in the Congress as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency. I will be prepared to deal with the people in the Bush administration if that unfortunate event would ever occur.”
Bentsen saw a perfect opportunity.
“Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”
And there it was—one of the most quoted debate statements in political history.
As the audience—at least the Democrats there—applauded, Quayle said, “That was really uncalled for, Senator.”
That drew Republican applause.
But Bentsen didn’t back off.
“You’re the one that was making the comparison, Senator. And I’m one who knew him well. And frankly I think you’re so far apart in the objectives you choose for your country that I did not think the comparison was well taken.”
Because of Bentsen’s failing health, I was not able to interview him about this exchange. But there was reporting afterward that Bentsen and his staff had noted that Quayle had previously compared himself with Kennedy. According to one of Bentsen’s debate advisers, the “You’re no Jack Kennedy” line had actually been discussed by Bentsen during the pre-debate preparation.
Bentsen himself, in a 1992 CNN interview, characterized his words as spontaneous. “Well, actually, it wasn’t any prepared remark. It was just that, I finally was fed up with this comparison with Jack Kennedy. I just didn’t think it was reality.”
Later that year at a Senate news conference, he added this about his famous one-liner: “I wish now I had copyrighted it and was getting royalty on it.”
In our documentary interview, Quayle said, “We actually had anticipated him using a line like that because during the campaign, if you recall, a lot of people, reporters, probably you, Jim, as well, said well, what kind of experience do you really have, and I would always make the factual reference to the experience that I had in the Congress and the Senate to the experience that Jack Kennedy had before he was elected president—a factual statement.… I was somewhat prepared for his line. It was a good line.”
Did you feel it hurt you in the long run?
“Oh, in the long run, yes, because you guys keep running it over and over again. I’m sure you’re going to run it again on this program, and it’s not a good moment.”
Quayle was right. We did run it on our documentary.
Ronald Reagan hit back at Bentsen on Quayle’s behalf the morning after the debate in remarks to White House reporters.
“I thought that remark was a cheap shot and unbecoming a senator of the United States,” said Reagan. “The only comparison [Quayle] was making was that he is being attacked, and I think unfairly, on the basis of his age and his experience in government, and he was pointing out that John Kennedy, who sought the highest office and won it, had actually less experience in government than he has and they were the same age.”
Ed Fouhy, who had worked as an executive and/or producer at all three of the broadcast networks before joining the debate commission, added a couple of interesting postscripts to the Quayle-Bentsen debate.
Apparently, Bentsen barely knew Kennedy from when they served in the House together for five years in the late 1940s and early ’50s. As Fouhy noted, if Quayle had known that, “he could have probably had a rejoinder: ‘Well, now wait a minute, Senator, you didn’t know [him], you just were in the House together.’ They weren’t close friends at all.”
Fouh
y also remembered what happened during Bentsen’s pre-debate run-through at the hall in Omaha. The only people present that afternoon were a few technicians, a couple of Bentsen aides, and B.A. (for Beryl Ann), Bentsen’s wife of forty-five years.
“When Bentsen finished his run-through, he was so relaxed and so full of himself, and thinking that this was going to be his night, that he picked her up, physically picked her up, and waltzed her around the stage with her feet off of the floor,” Fouhy said. “He was ebullient about what was about to happen.”
And that, remember, was before he’d gotten off his Kennedy line against Quayle.
CHAPTER 3
Apples and Apples
The campaign confrontations four years later in 1992 had a little bit of everything—and they made significant presidential debate history.
The then incumbent Republican president, George H. W. Bush, the Democratic nominee, Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, and Texas businessman Ross Perot, running as an independent, went at it three times within eight days that October.
The show-of-shows fourth act starred their running mates—Republican incumbent Dan Quayle, Democrat Al Gore, and independent James Stockdale.
These four debates marked the debut of the town hall and single-moderator formats, and much looser question and answer rules. They were also the first three-candidate debates ever.
Perot mostly avoided attacking Bush and Clinton directly during the debates, but the billionaire’s folksy, rapid-fire quips added spice for everyone involved—including me and the other moderators.
“Look at all three of us. Decide who you think will do the job, pick that person in November because believe me, as I’ve said before, the party’s over and it’s time for the cleanup crew.”
“I think it’s a good time to face it in November. If they do, then they will have heard the harsh reality of what we have to do. I’m not playing Lawrence Welk music tonight—”
“I don’t have any experience in running up a four-trillion-dollar debt. I don’t have any experience in gridlock government, where nobody takes responsibility for anything and everybody blames everybody else.”