The grainy black-and-white television ad shows a young girl in a
flower-filled meadow, holding a daisy and plucking its petals,
which she counts one by one. As the camera slowly zooms in on her
eye, a man's solemn countdown replaces hers. At zero the little
girl's eye is engulfed by an atomic mushroom cloud. As the inferno
roils in the background, President Lyndon B. Johnson's voice
intones, "These are the stakes -- to make a world in which all of
God's children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either
love each other, or we must die."
In this thought-provoking and highly readable book, Robert Mann
provides a concise, engaging study of the "Daisy Girl" ad, widely
acknowledged as the most important and memorable political ad in
American history. Commissioned by Johnson's campaign and aired only
once during Johnson's 1964 presidential contest against Barry
Goldwater, it remains an iconic piece of electoral propaganda,
intertwining cold war fears of nuclear annihilation with the
increasingly savvy world of media and advertising. Mann presents a
nuanced view of how Johnson's campaign successfully cast Barry
Goldwater as a radical too dangerous to control the nation's
nuclear arsenal, a depiction that sparked immediate controversy
across the United States.
Repeatedly analyzed in countless books and articles, the spot
purportedly destroyed Goldwater's presidential campaign. Although
that degree of impact on the Goldwater campaign is debatable, what
is certain is that the ad ushered in a new era of political
advertising using emotional appeals as a routine aspect of campaign
strategy.
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