The Last Real Presidential Debate (February/March 1986 | Volume: 37, Issue: 2)

The Last Real Presidential Debate

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Authors: Tom Swafford

Historic Era: Era 9: Postwar United States (1945 to early 1970s)

Historic Theme:

Subject:

February/March 1986 | Volume 37, Issue 2

In October 1984, President Ronald Reagan and Senator Walter Mondale came together on the same platform in Louisville, Kentucky, and again in Kansas City, Missouri. Correspondents tossed questions at them; each answered. Then, instant analysts got busy determining a winner and speculating about what effect, if any, the confrontations would have on the November election. And everybody referred to the meetings as “debates.” They weren’t debates.

Barbara Walters and three or four carefully screened correspondents lobbing questions around do not constitute a debate. They were more like news conferences, with pool reporters doing the questioning. Those free-for-alls during the Democratic primaries were not debates either. John Chancellor, Ted Koppel, and Phil Donahue, with a bunch of guys sitting around yelling “Baloney!” and “Where’s the beef?” certainly wasn’t a debate.

Nor did these non-debates start in 1984. Reagan and President Carter didn’t debate in 1980. Carter and President Ford didn’t debate in 1976, nor did Kennedy and Nixon in 1960.

A debate consists of a proposition or resolution before the house; two protagonists, one supporting the affirmative, the other the negative; and then rebuttals. The country hasn’t experienced anything like that between two candidates for the Presidency since 1948, during the Republican primary in Oregon. On that occasion, the proposition was “Resolved: The Communist Party in the United States shall be outlawed.” The candidates were the Honorable Harold E. Stassen, former governor of Minnesota, who took the affirmative, and the Honorable Thomas E. Dewey, governor of New York, who spoke for the negative. Few of those who were part of that confrontation are apt to forget it. And if they were, they’d be reminded of it every four years as Harold Stassen emerges from obscurity to take another run at the White House.

In the winter of 1984, he was again plodding through the snows of New Hampshire, bobbing up on the morning talk shows, patiently describing his foreign policy and exuding confidence as he explained how he detected growing support for his positions. When the votes were counted in New Hampshire, Ronald Reagan had 97 percent of them; “others” had 3 percent. Stassen’s growing support was buried in that 3 percent. It was the tenth time he had run.

In the spring of 1948, Stassen, who had become governor at the age of only 31, was the youngest person elected to that office in Minnesota. He had at that time recently returned from the Pacific, where he’d served with distinction on the staff of Adm. William F. (“Bull”) Halsey during World War II. He was then 41 years old, and he looked unstoppable.

Everyone was convinced that 1948 was a year in which the Republican nomination for president would be a sure ticket to the White House. The respected columnists of the day, such as Walter Lippmann, Roscoe Drummond, and Marquis Childs, assured us that Harry Truman, the former Missouri haberdasher who had been thrust into the presidency with the