It ran only once 47 years ago, but a one-minute effort for LBJ’s 1964 reelection campaign was still being parsed this week at a college symposium as “the most negative political ad in American history.”
During the network airing of a Hollywood biblical epic back then, amid cheery product pitches, suddenly there was the image of a little girl pulling petals from a daisy and counting erratically, to be replaced by a nuclear countdown as the camera zoomed in on her eye, froze and cut to a mushroom cloud explosion with Lyndon Johnson intoning the warning that the election stakes are “we must love each other or die.”
The commercial played off Barry Goldwater’s defense of extremism and offhand suggestion about defoliating Vietnam with nuclear weapons but never mentioned his name. Yet the message was clear: Vote for LBJ or die.
It never ran again but didn’t have to. Coming two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, American voters were highly sensitive to the dangers of nuclear war and susceptible to the suggestion that a steady hand in the White House was crucial.
The campaign commercials are starting again now, and they doubtlessly will be tough and bitter, but there is no way to raise the stakes any higher.
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