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. In the little girl's eye, we see an atomic mushroom cloud and then we hear President Lyndon Baines Johnson's voice as it 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 spot, which helped usher presidential campaign advertising into the modern era. Commissioned by Johnson's campaign and aired only once during Johnson's 1964 presidential contest against Barry Goldwater, the spot remains an iconic piece of electoral propaganda, intertwining Cold War fears of nuclear annihilation with the increasingly savvy world of media and advertising. Mann illustrates 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 print publications, the spot helped contribute to Johnson's crushing defeat over Goldwater and also opened the way to a new age of political advertising that accepts emotional appeals as a routine aspect of campaign strategy.
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''Daisy Petals and Mushroom Clouds is a great read for anyone interested in what goes on behind the scenes in politics. Why do campaigns behave the way they do? How was campaign strategy implemented through advertising during the infancy of television? It's a short (156 pages), rich look at a very important turning point in the history of American political campaigns: the birth of negative ads.'' ----Charlie Cook, National Journal (5 Nov 2011)
''Disguised as a slender monograph, Daisy Petals and Mushroom Clouds is actually a political thriller. Robert Mann, a journalism professor at Louisiana State University, worked in the mosh pit of Louisiana politics when it was firmly Democratic, and his expertise is evident as he dissects the watershed presidential election of 1964. . . . Mr. Mann's book is as carefully conducted as a symphony, and it crescendos with great intensity on the night of the ad's airing. Memos included in an appendix bolster his research and contain some gems, such as this note to the president on October 20, 1964: 'Our television has been most ineffective. We have used the same spots over and over until they have outlived their usefulness.' How fascinating that the campaign that ran the single most effective political ad in history complains, only five weeks after it aired, about the ability of its ads to matter to voters.'' ----Ken Kurson, Wall Street Journal
About the Author
Robert Mann holds the Manship Chair in Journalism at the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University and is co-director of the school's Reilly Center for Media & Public Affairs. Formerly an aide to three U.S. senators and a Louisiana governor, Mann is the author of critically acclaimed political histories of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. His essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times and the Boston Globe.
Product Details
Hardcover: 216 pages
Publisher: Louisiana State University Press (October 26, 2011)
A journalist and historian, Robert Mann has written critically acclaimed political histories of the Vietnam War and the U.S. civil rights movement.
Mann holds the Manship Chair in Mass Communication at Louisiana State University's Manship School of Mass Communication.
Mann spent more than 20 years working in national and Louisiana state politics. Prior to joining the Manship School in 2006, he served as communications director to Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco. He joined the governor's staff in 2004 after serving 17 years as state director and press secretary to U.S. Senator John Breaux of Louisiana. He was also press secretary to U.S. Senator Russell Long of Louisiana and press secretary for the 1990 re-election campaign of U.S. Senator J. Bennett Johnston of Louisiana.
In the early 1980s, he covered Louisiana politics as a reporter for the Shreveport Journal and the Monroe News-Star. His essays and book reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times and the Boston Globe.
He is director of LSU's Reilly Center for Media & Public Affairs and editor of the Center's Media & Public Affairs Book Series, a series sponsored by the Reilly Center and LSU Press.
The entire point of the book is to put this media changing spot in context and to trace it's enduring impact on political advertizing. Mann does a masterful job in meeting this objective. The primary research offered in the study goes beyond being impressive.
The critic who awarded one star to the book is completely off base. His criticism is that the book didn't cover the entire campaign. As noted,that was not the author's purpose. The critical reader could have learned that from reading the dust jacket!
Very well researched and honestly objective for the most part. The impact of these 60 seconds of ad time has had the greatest impact on the political sphere and has influenced future campaigns since it's original braodcast more than any other political ad before or since. The ad took the art of saber rattling to new levels and the impact of it on Ronald Reagans stiff upper lip approach to the USSR is probably rooted in the success of this ad in bringing a landslide victory for LBJ over Reagans man Barry Goldwater, the grandfather of the Libertarian movement. Only this kind of ad could have set the tne and lead to Nixon and the direction our country took for the next 16 years.
