This is not a cage match? Of course it is.

Last night at the most fun Republican candidate debate to date, Ted Cruz told the CNBC moderators, with the kind of pompous indignation politicians the world over are famous for: "This is not a cate match."

But of course it is. You have ten candidates squaring off against each other on national television, most of them desperate in the extreme--John Kasich's shrill attacks being a case in point--and, yeah, you are going to get some kickboxing and flying teeth.

None of this, though, was anything compared with the first JFK/Nixon debate back in 1960, which made one man, and destroyed the other. Herewith a small sample from the new edition of Anything For A Vote, which was published yesterday. And, by the way, thank you to radio stations from Boston to Cedar Rapids for having me on your shows. I can barely talk, but I had a great time.

Test Prep As your school teachers undoubtedly told you, there is a right way and a wrong way to prepare for the big test.

The “wrong” way: Richard Nixon shows up in Chicago at midnight the day before the debate, exhausted from barnstorming through eleven states and plagued by a recurrent fever. The next morning, instead of resting, he gives a major speech and then spends six hours in his hotel room by himself, studying policy reports and refusing to see anyone. Then he heads for the television studio. His temperature is over 100 degrees. Instead of wearing regular makeup for television, he insists on smearing something called Lazy Shave, a kind of talcum powder, which casts his face in a ghostly pallor. And he agrees that the debate can take place with both candidates standing—something the Democrats, aware of his hurt knee, insist on.
The “right” way: Kennedy shows up in Chicago a day and a half before the debate and asks an aide, “Any girls lined up?” On the day of the debate, he gets a suntan on the roof the Palmer House Hotel, has lunch with some friends, and then “studies” in his hotel room by doing Q&A sessions with staff while lying on the bed in his underwear. Ninety minutes before the debate starts, Kennedy slips into a room where a call girl awaits and emerges fifteen minutes later, according to an aide, “with a big grin on his face.” Then he dashes to the television studio, arriving only moments before the debate. 

Sixty million Americans watched the debate, and millions more listened to the radio broadcast. Most listeners (not viewers) thought that Nixon had won. But those who tuned in to their televisions saw a poised, cool, and confident Kennedy and a strained, tired-looking Nixon whose makeup seemed to be streaking with sweat over his five o’clock shadow. Afterward, Nixon’s mother called to ask if he was ill; in fact, he was fighting off the effects of a debilitating infection that arose after he banged his knee on a car door earlier in the campaign. Although the candidates had three more debates to go—in which Nixon looked much more refreshed and confident—it is the first one in Chicago that voters, and American history, remembered.