Creator of famous ad dies

Tony Schwartz, the creator of the famed "daisy ad" for Lyndon Johnson's 1964 presidential campaign, has died. You can read his NY Times obit here.

It's funny, I keep reading that the ad ran only once, during the Movie of the Week (yes, that was the only way one saw movies on TV back then). I remember it so well, I would swear it ran multiple times.

Since I have no idea how to insert a YouTube video, click below to view the ad.
daisy ad - Google Search

From the Times:

Of the thousands of television and radio advertisements on which Mr. Schwartz worked, none is as well known, or as controversial, as the so-called “daisy ad,” made for Lyndon B. Johnson's presidential campaign.

Produced by the advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach in collaboration with Mr. Schwartz, the minutelong spot was broadcast on Sept. 7, 1964, during NBC’s “Monday Night at the Movies.” It showed a little girl in a meadow (in reality a Manhattan park), counting [upward] aloud as she plucks the petals from a daisy. Her voice dissolves into a man’s voice counting downward, followed by the image of an atomic blast. President Johnson’s voice is heard on the soundtrack:

“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.” (The president’s speech deliberately invoked a line from “September 1, 1939,” a poem by W.H. Auden written at the outbreak of World War II.)

The full poem is here, but this is the stanza from which Johnson borrowed.
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Though the name of Johnson’s opponent, Senator Barry M. Goldwater, was never mentioned, Goldwater’s campaign objected strenuously to the ad. So did many members of the public, Republicans and Democrats alike. The spot was pulled from the air after a single commercial, though it was soon repeated on news broadcasts. It had done its work: with its dire implications about Goldwater and nuclear responsibility, the daisy ad was credited with contributing to Johnson’s landslide victory at the polls in November. It was also credited with heralding the arrival of ferociously negative political advertising in the United States.

So there you have it. The 'father' of not only that single ad, but the 'father' of the political advertising that we have today.

If you read Frank Schaeffer's Crazy for God, and then think of this, you'll see how so very few people in the 1960s shaped today's political landscape. I'm talking 5 or 6 people here - but I guess, all it really takes is one.