FIRST TELEVISED DEBATE
According to the U.S. Senate’s archives, the first televised presidential debate was not the Nixon-Kennedy encounter of 1960 but featured two women, Eleanor Roosevelt and Margaret Chase Smith, on “Face the Nation” in 0ashington, D.C., on Nov. 4, 1956.
This debate did not feature the candidates. The 1956 Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson, challenged incumbent Republican President Dwight Eisenhower — but those two men did not appear in the debate. Instead two surrogates debated the issues on network television: for the Democrats, former first lady and party icon Roosevelt; for the Republicans, the senior senator from Maine, Chase Smith.
The forum was the CBS program “Face the Nation,” in its second season, and this was the first time a woman appeared on the program.
By 1956 Chase Smith was in her second term in the Senate and had known Eleanor Roosevelt for two decades. They both published a daily newspaper column. By 1956 both women routinely appeared on lists of America’s most admired women.
As the 1956 campaign began, Eleanor Roosevelt emerged as Stevenson’s strongest advocate and was known as the “Heroine of the Convention.”
Chase Smith also was a seasoned politician by this time. She gained national attention in 1950 when she took on Joe McCarthy and became the first woman to serve on the Armed Services Committee in 1953.
The event took place two days before the election and focused almost entirely on issues of foreign policy.