by Jim Lehrer
In 1988, moderators were allowed to move beyond traffic-cop and follow-up duties to ask their own opening questions of each candidate. I was the first moderator to do so.
The October 15, 1992, debate among President George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot changed everything. For the first time, candidates would answer questions created and asked by would-be voters, not professional journalists, in a town hall–type format. Carole Simpson of ABC News moderated that event at the University of Richmond, Virginia.
The opening half of the October 19, 1992, ninety-minute Bush-Clinton-Perot event at East Lansing, Michigan, which I moderated, was the first presidential debate with no major time restraints—no two-minute answers and one-minute responses. That followed a week after the raucous vice presidential debate among Dan Quayle, Al Gore, and James Stockdale, which featured a five-minute discussion period about each issue. Hal Bruno of ABC moderated that one.
Those debates also marked the end of the journalist-panel format. Simpson, Bruno, and I all sat alone at the moderator’s table at our respective events. Every debate since—in 1996, 2000, 2004, and 2008—has had either a sole moderator or a participatory “town hall” audience.
The only other new wrinkle has been to have the candidates do at least one of their debates seated at a table rather than standing at podiums. During the George W. Bush years, all vice presidential debates were seated, a pattern that began at the insistence of Dick Cheney, as the Republican candidate for vice president in 2000 and again as the incumbent four years later.
While the 1992 wide-open “experiment”—a podium debate—appeared to work at the time, it has yet to return in any future debate. According to those involved in negotiations since, most candidates, each in their own way, choose not to take what is considered “the risk” of an open format.
There were no presidential debates for sixteen years after the Kennedy-Nixon four. Their return almost immediately proved that some risks cannot be negotiated away.
THERE STOOD JIMMY Carter and Gerald Ford at their podiums on September 23, 1976, at the Walnut Theater in Philadelphia.
And the audio failed.
Carter and Ford remained standing onstage for twenty-seven minutes without exchanging a word or much more than an occasional glance the whole time.
I asked both men—in separate 1989 interviews—what that had been like.
“I watched that tape afterward,” Carter remembered, “and it was embarrassing to me that both President Ford and I stood there almost like robots. We didn’t move around, we didn’t walk over and shake hands with each other. We just stood there.”
Said Ford, “I suspect both of us would have liked to sit down and relax while the technicians were fixing the [sound] system, but I think both of us were hesitant to make any gesture that might look like we weren’t physically or mentally able to handle a problem like this.”
Carter added, “So I don’t know who was more ill at ease, me or President Ford.”
I said it looked like a tie to me.
“It was a tie,” Carter agreed. “Neither one of us was at ease, there’s no doubt about that. Those events, I think, to some degree let the American public size up the candidates, and I don’t think either one of us made any points on that deal.”
Edwin Newman of NBC News moderated that debate. He said afterward that he had never been in such a tricky situation. He did, in fact, ask Carter and Ford if they wanted to sit down in chairs on the stage while they waited for the sound to return.
“Not only did they not sit down, they did not acknowledge that I had suggested it,” Newman said.
CARTER AND FORD each went on to produce his very own Major Moment in the two following debates that 1976 fall. Both were about substance—not style.
Ford’s was clearly the more major of the two. It was in the second debate in San Francisco. One of the press panelists, Max Frankel of The New York Times, asked Ford about the recently signed Helsinki agreement that seemed to acknowledge “the Russians have dominance in Eastern Europe.”
Ford answered that the thirty-five-nation pact did not mean any such thing.
“It just isn’t true…. There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.”
Frankel questioned if he really did hear Ford say that Eastern Europe was not under Russia’s sphere of influence.
Ford replied, “I don’t believe, Mr. Frankel, that the Yugoslavians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don’t believe that the Romanians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don’t believe that the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union.”
The press and most everyone else in the world of politics clobbered Ford.
Later he tried to clarify what he meant: “There is no question I did not adequately explain what I was thinking. I felt very strongly that regardless of the number of Soviet armored divisions in Poland, the Russians would never dominate the Polish spirit. That’s what I should have said. I simply left out the fact that at that time in 1976, the Russians had about ten to fifteen divisions in Poland.”
Did Carter realize there on the stage that night what President Ford had done?
“Yes, I did. And I was prepared to jump in, you know, and take advantage of it. But just on the spur of the moment, I realized that it would serve me better to let the news reporters question President Ford’s analysis and judgment.”
I asked Ford, “Did you have any idea that you had said something wrong?”
“Not at the time. Not at the time. In retrospect, obviously, the inclusion of a sentence or maybe a phrase would have made all the difference in the world.”
Carter recognized it was a serious mistake, but did the election turn on it?
“I don’t know if it did or not, because there are so many factors that can enter a campaign, but certainly it cost him some votes, and, as you know, the election was quite close.”
“We ended up losing by only a point and a half, or maybe two points,” Ford added. “So any one of a number of problems in the campaign could have made the difference.”
Carter’s own Major Moment occurred during the third 1976 debate in Williamsburg, Virginia.
Playboy magazine had just published an interview in which Carter said, “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God recognizes I will do—and I have done it—and God forgives me for it.”
Carter, in his interview with me, said he knew that could cost him the election. He realized—as he said in the debate itself when asked by Robert Maynard of The Washington Post—that it was a mistake to have given the interview in the first place.
“I thought the best way to handle it was to say, well, I’m sorry that the interview came out, but I couldn’t deny that the answers in Playboy were my own answers.”
The consensus was that, in the end, Carter’s admission pretty much blunted the damage from the Playboy interview.
Barbara Walters moderated that third 1976 Carter-Ford debate at Williamsburg.
In her 2008 memoir, Audition, she put that debate into a fascinating personal workplace context.
She recounted how she was living a nightmare then as the first woman nightly news anchor. Her ABC coanchor was Harry Reasoner, whose hostility toward Walters had become a public story and was obvious to anyone who even glanced at the screen when they appeared together.
“I don’t know whether the League [of Women Voters] chose me out of pity or because they thought I would do a good job, but, boy, did I need that vote of confidence,” she wrote. “The debate went smoothly. I did not make a flub or a misstep. I slept soundly that night for the first time in a long time and flew back to New York refreshed and ready for new battles.”
Whatever else, the debates of 1976 were important just because they happened.
They began the move toward the political imperative that there must be presidential debates. The
sixteen-year debate hiatus was mostly the result of front-runner incumbents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon deciding they only had something to lose by sharing a stage with Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee against Johnson in 1964, or Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic challenger to Nixon in 1968.
Ford, in 1976, was an incumbent, having been the appointed vice president who become president upon Nixon’s resignation. But because of the Watergate scandal and Ford’s pardon of Nixon, incumbency was no asset for Ford. He was the one who challenged Carter to debate.
“I had to do something to overcome the thirty-some points I was behind,” Ford said in our interview.
Carter said he was reluctant to accept. “It was a very disturbing concept for me to be onstage with the president of the United States. I’ve never even met a Democratic president in my life, so there was an aura about the presidency that was quite overwhelming.”
MEANWHILE, THE RUNNING mates of Ford and Carter made their own history in 1976 by becoming the first vice presidential candidates to debate on national television.
Walter Mondale, the Democrat, and Bob Dole, the Republican, faced each other on the stage of the Alley Theater in Houston. There were Major Moments—mostly Dole’s.
The Kansas senator joked that while he was chairman of the Republican Party during Watergate, the event happened on his night off. He also used humor to take an indirect hit on Carter for the Playboy interview:
“I couldn’t quite understand what Governor Carter meant in Playboy magazine. I couldn’t understand frankly why he was in Playboy magazine. But he was and we’ll give him the bunny vote.”
The largest Dole Moment, however, was no joke. He proclaimed Vietnam, Korea, World War II, and World War I were “all Democrat wars” that resulted in 1.6 million killed and wounded, “enough to fill the city of Detroit.”
Mondale said that he had actually anticipated such a charge from Dole. “Unbelievable. I had to try to keep a straight face. I think they blew the election right there. One of my advisers—I’ll never forget this—we were just closing down the last [predebate] discussion, and he said, ‘I’ll bet that Senator Dole will accuse the Democrats of causing World War II,’ and I said, ‘You are crazy.’ He said, ‘No, I’ve got a feeling he’ll do it.’ So I said, ‘Well, how shall we handle it?’ “
He handled it that night by saying Dole had just showed why his reputation for being a hatchet man was richly earned and that the American people clearly did not believe there was a partisan difference “over involvement in the war to fight Nazi Germany.”
I asked Dole how he happened to say “Democrat wars.”
“It was boilerplate,” Dole replied. “I mean, in those days, you know, I had a stack of briefing notes about two feet high, which … I received from the Ford people, the national committee, and I guess I should have exercised my own judgment. But, in any event, I probably wish I hadn’t said it.”
“You do wish you hadn’t said it?”
“Yeah. One of my heroes was FDR and I’m a World War II veteran, so I didn’t want… to run around and say, well, the Democrats started all the wars in the world.”
Dole acknowledged that he was known as Ford’s hatchet man and maybe he deserved such a label. “But Ford had sort of the Rose Garden strategy and I was out in the briar patch. I used to tell him, you know, please call me home.”
Because of the “Democrat wars” exchange, Mondale left the Houston stage certain that the Carter-Mondale ticket had won the election right then and there. It was over.
Dole didn’t feel that strongly about it. He did review a tape of the Houston debate but concluded that he really didn’t go over the line. “But I must say it made me more cautious in future debates.”
That vice presidential debate charted some new ground for the questioners. Hal Bruno, then of Newsweek, Walter Mears of the Associated Press, and Marilyn Berger, then of NBC News, were the panelists. James Hoge, the editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, was the moderator.
Bruno said they met the day before the debate to compose questions, but they did not know in advance what order they would each be asking.
“So we put them on index cards, and when we got to the hall we dished them out once we knew the order,” Bruno said. “I ended up asking the first question, but Walter had written it. It worked pretty good—the debate followed a logical sequence.”
That set a pattern of cooperation on questions among debate panelists that held—mostly—from then on.
JIMMY CARTER WAS the incumbent in 1980, and he was faced with two challengers who wanted to debate him—Republican Ronald Reagan and John Anderson, a moderate Republican congressman from Illinois running as an independent.
Carter was willing to debate Reagan but not Anderson.
As he explained to me, “President Reagan only wanted one debate, and he wanted it as late as possible. And whenever we pursued the subject of a debate, he said, well, we can’t have a two-person debate since John Anderson is running as an independent. We’ve got to have him on as an equal candidate. And obviously, Reagan knew that every time the independent candidate got a vote, it was a vote taken away from me.”
As a result, on September 21, 1980, only Reagan and Anderson stood on the debate stage in Baltimore.
I asked Reagan why he went ahead with the Anderson debate. “They wanted a three-way debate, and Carter refused to do that one, and I didn’t see any reason why Anderson should be excommunicated,” he said. “So I said no, I would go forward with it. It became just a two-way debate.”
Anderson maintained later that he understood what Reagan was up to. “Well, I think that he felt that perhaps it made him look as the person to be admired for being forthright and open and willing to take on all comers. And in contrast to that, Carter was being very defensive, felt beleaguered, and was unwilling to expose himself to a three-person debate.”
Reagan conceded that Carter, the man who wasn’t there, had to endure unanswered criticism from both him and Anderson at the Baltimore debate—particularly about the failing economy. “There might be some feeling of unfairness about this, because he was not here to respond. But I believe it would have been much more unfair to have had John Anderson denied the right to participate in this debate.”
Meanwhile, Carter’s campaign people insisted on one-on-one debates with Reagan.
“I wanted a lot of debates,” Carter said. “I wanted three or four debates at least.”
Why?
“Because I thought that I was much more a master of the subject matter. I knew that he was a master of the medium, perfectly at ease before the television cameras. I knew that I was not a master of the medium, and I thought that if we’d get past the one hour and go to maybe four, five, six hours on television, that substance rather than style would be more prevalent.”
In the end, there was just one Carter-Reagan debate at Public Music Hall in Cleveland one week before Election Day. The moderator was the same Howard K. Smith who had moderated the first Kennedy-Nixon event in 1960. The only thing that had changed in twenty years was the network. Smith had moved from CBS to ABC.
Smith, in his memoir, said, “The actor had it all the way,” adding, “That night Reagan won the debate and, as they say, put the election on ice.”
John Anderson was struck immediately with the certainty that the Reagan-Carter debate had devastated his campaign. “The only thing that I could think of was that on the television sets as people across the country watched that debate, it was a two-man race. If I had been important, if I had really been other than simply tangential to the whole process, I would have been there. They didn’t know about all of the back-and-forth and the efforts that we had made to get into the debate. They couldn’t possibly know the disappointment that that was. No, it was absolutely crushing.”
Two Major Moments came from that one debate.
Carter’s came when he said, “I had a discussion with my daughter, Amy, the other day, before I came here, to ask her what the most i
mportant issue was. She said she thought nuclear weaponry—and the control of nuclear arms.”
That was a blunder that Carter himself later acknowledged.
“It was an honest statement that made a point that still is remembered. I got a flood of letters afterward, you know, congratulations, you did the right thing. Your daughter, Amy, had more judgment about nuclear weaponry than Reagan did and so forth. But I think in the contest there just a few days before the election, he came out ahead on that deal.”
Reagan knew it the moment Carter said it.
“It seemed to me he had [made a terrible mistake], because the whole thing sounded—and I think you could almost feel an attitude from the audience on it—that the president was going to make a major policy based on what a child told him. And I’m sure he didn’t have that in mind, but that’s the way it came out. And I was prepared to say to the people, I promise them I wouldn’t ask my kids what I should do.”
That was also the night of Reagan’s most famous debate line, “There you go again.”
The subject at that moment was a proposal concerning Medicare and Carter’s repeated charge that Reagan had opposed even its original creation on the grounds that it was socialized medicine.
CARTER: Governor Reagan again, typically, is against such a proposal.
MODERATOR SMITH: Governor?
REAGAN: There you go again. When I opposed Medicare, there was another piece of legislation meeting the same problem before the Congress. I happened to favor the other piece of legislation and thought that it would be better for the senior citizens and provide better care than the one that was finally passed.
But for the two men, in their separate interviews with me, there was no agreement on that telling line.
“Well, I’m sure that was a well-rehearsed line that President Reagan had prepared carefully,” Carter said, citing “the style of delivery when he would bring it in… it was an inevitable statement that he would make.”