By Michael Barone

He was the first president to be photographed not in repose but in action–ready to rise in front of his Roughriders tent, manipulating the controls of a steam shovel in Panama, speaking with his hands raised so energetically that you can almost hear them clap together a moment later. Pudgy and short, with a squeaky voice and an aristocratic accent, Theodore Roosevelt would not have been well suited to the television age, but he used the emerging technology of the photograph to impress his personality and his policies on the American people.

To be sure, other presidents, starting with John Tyler in the 1840s, had been photographed, and political parties had mass-distributed photographs of their candidates, like the doctored photo of a beardless Abraham Lincoln in 1860. But halftone photos did not appear in newspapers until 1897–just in time for TR, who became president four years later. And it was just at the time when popular enthusiasm for politics was ebbing. For decades political parties had run monster rallies, and partisan feelings, forged in the crucible of the Civil War, were strong. But by 1901 the late rebellion was fading in memory, and voter turnout was plummeting. Roosevelt, wary of the power of big business and of the possible socialist tendencies of the immigrant masses, wanted to build personal support beyond his party. His chief resource: the photograph.

And it was still photographs that provided the most vivid impressions of American politics and public life over the next 60 years. They were disseminated in newspapers, especially tabloids–the first tab, the New York Daily News, appeared in 1919–and in weekly picture magazines, the most successful of which, Life, appeared in 1936. TR's cousin Franklin Roosevelt was especially impressive in photographs; his infectious grin, strong jaw, and massive shoulders helped the country gain confidence during the Depression and work its way to victory in war. (It was in large part to maintain this impression that his aides made sure that FDR was never photographed in his wheelchair.)

World War II was the photographers' war: We still know the broken ships at Pearl Harbor, the men landing on the beach at Normandy, and the crowds cheering on V-J Day primarily through the medium of black-and-white photographs. (The military discouraged color photography.) Postwar politics was also photograph politics. Voters were attracted less by Harry Truman's reedy speechmaking than by the triumphant grin he showed while holding up the headline "Dewey Defeats Truman." And voters were less likely to remember Dwight Eisenhower's soberly delivered television addresses than Ike's enormous smile. Photographs could confer glamour on a politician and his family: Look at Life's 1937 photo spread of "The Large and Attractive Family of Joseph P. Kennedy." Photographs, and the allegiance of his fellow candidates, made John F. Kennedy a leader in polls for the presidency when he was a freshman senator barely past 40. And they made him a source of glamour, greeted by huge adoring crowds hoping somehow to touch him.

Of course, Kennedy, like Theodore Roosevelt before him, chose a new medium to strengthen his hold on the public in the 1960 presidential campaign. Television, in only 9 percent of homes 10 years before, was now in 88 percent, and in their TV debates the tanned, self-confident Kennedy prevailed over a pasty, nervous Richard Nixon. It was over television newscasts, expanded to 30 minutes in 1963, that Americans would see Kennedy's funeral, the civil rights movements, the war in Vietnam, riots in the streets. As voters become less interested in politics, candidates follow them to the late-night talk shows and MTV. The photograph still has power, but it is videotape that gets our attention–at least until we click the clicker, turn off the TV, and take our minds off politics.