A debate? Definitely not, says TV pioneer

By David Postman
Seattle Times chief political reporter

PHOTO COURTESY OF BILL SHADEL Bill Shadel, center, gets a tongue-lashing from Richard Nixon after the third debate. He said Nixon believed Kennedy used notes.

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He doesn't expect much.

"There is so seldom anything that comes out of these anymore, except for the critics," he said.

Shadel turned 96 in July. He's seen a lot of presidential debates since the night in October 1960 when he was in Los Angeles to moderate the third meeting of Vice President Nixon, a Republican, and his Democratic opponent, Sen. Kennedy of Massachusetts.

He says presidential debates today are too closely regulated to allow for real news to seep out. He knows he won't see true face-to-face debating with the candidates grilling each other or tough follow-up questions.

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"The two major parties have never wanted these guys to cut loose at each other. And it's understandable," he said. That would just lead to missteps and flubs that critics would pounce on.

He derided the extensive rules that govern the debate and the bipartisan commission that drafts them.

Amazing career

Shadel is a broadcasting pioneer with an amazing on-air career that came and went largely before most American homes had television sets. He was a musician on radio stations in 1926. He was with Edward R. Murrow in London; met Walter Cronkite at the Battle of the Bulge. On D-Day, he was on a ship alongside "Wild Bill" Donovan, America's top spy.

He and Murrow rode into the Buchenwald concentration camp in Weimar, Germany, where the memory of the barely living haunts today more than the dead stacked in piles and filling conveyor belts.

Shadel got into television early, but a bit reluctantly. Radio was seen as the plum assignment.

Former UW professor

	Renton's Bill Shadel, 96, recalls early debates.

He stayed in the business until 1963, "when my ulcers were getting ulcers," then taught journalism at the University of Washington until he retired 12 years later.

It's Shadel's role in the 1960 debates that has put him on a regular news cycle of sorts.

"Every four years, I get my chance to say this isn't really a debate," Shadel said in an interview Tuesday afternoon.

He was in a room at an upscale rest home where he lives with his wife, Julie. A battle with prostate cancer — the same disease that killed his father, a brother and a son — has left him largely bedridden.

"Damn near two years in this damn old bed," he said.

He was dressed in a suit. In his closet still hang the pressed and starched dress shirts that once were his regular uniform.

"Two years ago, Bill was here dancing," said Tom Wall, administrator of the Renton retirement home, who stayed to listen to Shadel's stories.

"I was a hotshot," Shadel said. There's been no loss of curiosity, appetite for the news or ability to critique the 21st century's political-media machine.

Shadel had several copies of The Economist in his room. He uses the computer to e-mail old CBS buddies. The TV sits at the foot of his bed and is turned on for an hour of news each night.

	AP Moderator Howard K. Smith, center, leads the debate between presidential candidates Sen. John Kennedy, left, and Vice President Richard Nixon in this television monitor view on Sept. 26,1960. Bill Shadel moderated another debate between the two in October.

By Tuesday, he had had his fill of pre-debate frenzy. And it's not that Shadel thinks he was behind the anchor desk for the glory days of presidential debates.

The 1960 debates are best-known today for the oft-told tale of how Nixon "lost" the first debate to Kennedy because he looked so bad, sweaty and pale, with a suit too close to the gray color of the backdrop.

TV anchor for ABC

Shadel was then a TV anchor for ABC.

The press didn't pay too much attention to the debates before that first match in Chicago. The second debate was in Washington, D.C.

Shadel moderated the third from a studio in Los Angeles. Nixon was in a separate studio there; Kennedy was on a set built on a New York soundstage.

The journalists on the panel and Shadel were also in separate studios. It was a technical achievement.

Actors were hired to stand in for the candidates for two days as the network practiced camera angles so that when Nixon and Kennedy spoke, it would appear to viewers that they were turning to look at each other.

Debate "was a nothing"

But Shadel doesn't think much of the content. "The third debate was a nothing," he said.

Much of the debate was filled with talk about two Taiwanese-controlled islands, Quemoy and Matsu. After an exchange about the islands in the second debate, Nixon had said Kennedy would give up control of the islands to Communist China.

"It was a carry-over," Shadel said. The reporters on the panel kept asking questions about it, to his annoyance.

"They thought they had something hot. Just for controversy. They were separated from me. I couldn't tell them to shut up. And it just kept on and on and on."

Kennedy and Nixon were also asked about the less-than-weighty issue of former President Truman's coarse language in talking about Nixon.

Said Kennedy: "I really don't think there's anything that I could say to President Truman that's going to cause him, at the age of 76, to change his particular speaking manner. Perhaps Mrs. Truman can."

"Sanctimonious spiel"

Nixon took a different approach, which Shadel this week called the "most sanctimonious spiel you ever heard."

Nixon said that if he were elected "whenever any mother or father talks to his child, he can look at the man in the White House, and, whatever he may think of his policies, he will say: 'Well, there is a man who maintains the kind of standards personally that I would want my child to follow.' "

Shadel laughs at the retelling because the Nixon White House tapes would later show Nixon used language far worse than Truman's.

Shadel said he heard some of it the night of the debate when Nixon cursed him and accused him of failing to enforce a debate rule against using notes, which Kennedy appeared to have done.

Soon after the debate went off the air, the three network presidents grabbed Shadel and told him Nixon was in his studio, surrounded by reporters.

"The crowd parted for me like the Red Sea," Shadel said. "And Nixon said, 'Oh, here comes that impartial moderator. Dammit Shadel, you knew. You knew Kennedy was using notes. It was your job to stop him.' "

But there was no rule. Nixon had written Kennedy proposing they prohibit notes, but Kennedy had never responded.

Shadel's memory of the debate is precise. He read from a transcript in a voice that still resonates in anchorman tones.

He says the 1960 meetings don't count as real debates.

"Not in my book because I'm so hepped on this face-to-face, question-to-question business."

When was the last real debate?

"Lincoln / Douglas," he said.

This year, he said, will be his last to watch presidential debates. "I don't want to make it to 100, so this is my last go-around."

Enthusiasm for politics

Shadel gets most animated when he talks about presidential politics. He considers himself a Democrat but said Kerry "has flubbed it" and can't win unless he reveals a new, tough, focused, side tonight.

Four more years of Bush, he fears, will fulfill a prophecy told Shadel by a BBC reporter in a pub after World War II.

The reporter told him America was top dog then but that time would show no nation ever rose and fell so fast.

"That may be old age talking, but by God I believe it," Shadel said. "You compare socially, financially, militarily, 20 years ago with where we stand today, good God, your kids are not going to be able to pay the debt. The second or third generation are not. And that is just one part of it. Look where we stand in the world.

"Is that old age talking?"

David Postman: 360-943-9882 or dpostman@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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