“It was less than twenty-minutes before airtime when an unshaven, sweaty and rumpled Richard Nixon burst into the studio from Brooklyn where he had been campaigning all day in the hot sun. He made the rash decision to decline a quick shave, makeup and a change of shirts. The rest is History!
"Knowing that LIFE was shooting at the same time, and not wanting to duplicate the images of our sister magazine, TIME’s editors asked me to 'to get something different!,' which turned out to be my shooting the entire debate off of the monitor in the control room. My editors were delighted! Before this, they were unaware of the effect of shooting black and white still photographs from a black and white television monitor. The stark, contrasty black and white images emphasized Nixon’s untidiness and 'five o’clock shadow.' Candidate Richard Nixon was not as pleased.
He accused TIME magazine, and me in particular, of causing him to lose the 1960 election. After he was elected to office in 1968, he made it difficult for me to photograph him throughout his presidency, although I traveled with Pat Nixon on her tour of Africa."
Ben photographed by LIFE photographer Paul Schutzer photographing Richard Nixon prior to the debate.
Several years after he resigned from office, Richard Nixon called Ben to ask him to photograph him for the book jacket of his biography. He stipulated that he wanted to be photographed at eight o’clock in the morning in his New York office.
As Ben and his assistant were setting up the lighting, he heard a zzzzzz sound emanating from Nixon’s private office bathroom. The former president emerged holding an electric razor in his hand and said, “You’re not going to get me twice!"
Ben Martin recalls, "One evening in 1985, after LIFE published the double-page photograph of Richard Nixon, for which he’d posed some years earlier, the telephone rang as my wife and I were having dinner. It was Richard Nixon! Not his aide, not a secretary, just the former president.
"'Ben, that was a good picture you took of me in LIFE last week. I haven’t had an official portrait taken since I left office, so I was wondering.... if we let bygones be bygones, could I have that to use as my new official portrait?'"