WASHINGTON – He'd led allied armies in the defeat of Nazi Germany only to find himself, a decade later, a tad intimidated before the cameras in an echoey room of the Old Executive Office Building, ready to make history again. “Well, I see we’re trying a new experiment this morning,” President Dwight Eisenhower told the press corps. “I hope that doesn’t prove to be a disturbing influence.” It was the first presidential news conference captured for broadcast by television.
In the scratchy black and white of 1955 TV sets, Americans saw those trademark Ike grins and heard him beef about being asked a “loaded question.” With that, an enlightening, contentious and often showboating tradition came into the modern age, one President Joe Biden