the air, just as he had hired him on the air in 1951. Godfrey did so on October 19, 1953 without informing LaRosa before the airing. The move caused an enormous backlash against Godfrey. Stanton later told Godfrey biographer Arthur Singer, "Maybe (the recommendation) was a mistake." Role in televising presidential debates Stanton organized the first televised presidential debate in American history. After an eight-year effort, he convinced the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to suspend Section 315 of the Communications Act of 1934 for the election in 1960, which stipulated the provision of equal air time to all candidates. Stanton thereby enabled the first two-candidate presidential television debate, which was held at and televised from the CBS studio in Chicago, with candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. The debates, however, ceased after the 1960 election, as Lyndon B. Johnson avoided debating in 1964, and Nixon, widely perceived to have made a poor impression on television viewers in 1960, declined to debate in 1968 and in 1972. Thus televised presidential debates did not resume until 1976, when incumbent president Gerald Ford, perceiving he was behind in the polls, agreed to debate challenger Jimmy Carter. Quiz show scandals While Edward R. Murrow's 1958 speech before the Radio and Television News Directors Association is often praised for its call for a deeper commitment among broadcasters to public service, Stanton in May 1959 (speaking before his graduate alma mater, Ohio State) also voiced his own commitment to public affairs. He promised that the following year, CBS would air a frequent prime-time public-affairs series, a series which later became CBS Reports. A few months later, in an October 1959 speech before the same RTNDA that Murrow had addressed in 1958, Stanton promised there would be no repeat of the program deceptions embodied by the quiz show scandals and cancelled all quiz shows at the time. Controversial documentary As president of CBS, Stanton's greatest battle with the government occurred in 1971, and focused on just this parallel to print press rights. The controversy surrounded "The Selling of the Pentagon," a CBS Reports documentary, which exposed the huge expenditure of public funds, partly illegal, to promote militarism. The confrontation raised the issue of whether television news programming deserved protection under the First Amendment. The program came under intense criticism from two men who appeared on the program, from the House of Representatives, other media and