With the first 2024 general election debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump scheduled for June 27, there’s considerable media attention on lessons learned from previous presidential debates—notably the very first one televised in 1960. The consequences of that matchup are still being discussed.
Decades after my husband, late TIME magazine photojournalist Ben Martin, photographed the first televised presidential election debate between U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy, the Democratic nominee, and Vice President Richard M. Nixon, the Republican nominee, he wrote about the experience—and his surprise at what a fresh look at the contact sheets years later revealed.
Ben and his friend and colleague, LIFE magazine photographer, Paul Schutzer, had been granted backstage access to the candidates prior to the debate held September 26, 1960, in Chicago, Illinois, at the studios of CBS's WBBM-TV. Here’s his recollections from the night, some of which Biden and Trump would be wise to parse themselves.
