A look back at "Face the Nation"

"Face the Nation" launched on Nov. 7, 1954.

The first guest was the key player on the biggest story of the day: anti-communist Sen. Joe McCarthy, on the eve of his censure by the Senate.

"They wouldn't be conducting this fifth investigation if I hadn't been fighting communism," McCarthy said in November 1954.

Sixty years later, "Face the Nation" looks different, but its approach is unchanged -- find the key players and ask them the questions Americans want asked, reports CBS News correspondent Jan Crawford.

There have been eight moderators since the beginning, but for 23 years, CBS News chief Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer has been the face of "Face the Nation."

The newsmaker who's been on the show the most is Arizona Sen. John McCain.

"I can't tell you if Bob Schieffer is a Republican or a Democrat or a Libertarian or a vegetarian. He asks straight questions and he asks tough questions and he's fair," McCain said.

The show has interviewed every president going back to Dwight Eisenhower.

Some were testy.

"If, as you say, there is nothing there, Mr. President, how can so many reputable, respected professionals keep pressing on with this?" Schieffer asked Bill Clinton in 1997 about the Whitewater investigation.

"Well, that's your characterization, not mine," Clinton responded.

Looking back over the show's 3,000 broadcasts, you see history being made.

"We feel the time is here for a full-scale assault on the system of segregation in Alabama," Martin Luther King, Jr. said in May 1964.

"I believe in Alabama we ought to have the school system the people of Alabama want to have," George Wallace said a few years after in 1967.

There were world leaders like Russia's Nikita Khrushchev who was interviewed from the Kremlin, and "Iron Lady" Margaret Thatcher, who sat down with the show's first female moderator, Lesley Stahl, known for her persistent questioning.

"You may go on asking the same question in a hundred different ways, and you will still get the same answer," Thatcher said in 1987.

But since 1991, the show has reflected the take-no-bull approach of Schieffer.

"Is that the best you can do?" Schieffer would ask a guest.

"This thing seems to be a disaster," he would say.

"His essential question is always, it seems to me, 'What the heck is going on? Can you explain to me what's going on?'" said Peggy Noonan, former Reagan speechwriter and regular contributor. "That is very Bob Schieffer to me, and it's sort of Bob being a surrogate for the American people."

And that's why America keeps watching.