On the “Why Aren’t the Debates Debates?” thread, I posted a comment with a link to the first Nixon/Kennedy debate in 1960. Here are links to all four debates. I used what I could get: Only two have video, and one of the videos has Italian subtitles. If you have the four hours, listen to them, and consider that this was a serious time, and that both of these candidates spoke at length, in depth, about issues ranging from foreign policy, economics, agriculture, energy, civil rights, defense strategy, and numerous other topics, without notes and without repeating briefing-book talking points. The correspondents who questioned them asked substantive questions about serious policy points, and the candidates responded in kind.

Update: Thanks to ctlaw in comment #6, here are links to C-SPAN.org videos of the four debates. These videos cannot be embedded here, but are clean kinescopes of the original broadcasts. Click the links to play the videos. (2015-11-01 20:12 UTC)