Everybody likes ike for president hang out the banner beat the drum well take ike to Washington Well take ike to washington now is the time for all good americans to come to the aid of their country. Ike for president , ike for resident president [video clip ends] [video clip plays] ike. Ike. Bob. Ike. Bob. I am so glad we are friends again, bob. Yes, ike, we agree on everything. Lets never separate again, bob. Never again, ike. Bob. Ike. Bob. Ike. Announcer will ike and bob really live happily ever after . Is the white house big enough for both of them . Stay tuned for a musical interlude. Reuben, reuben, ive been thinking bob and ike now think alike with the general in the white house, who will give the orders, bob or ike . Lets vote for adlai and john [video clip ends] host it is a joint production of American History tv on cspan 3 and cspans washington journal. We are pleased to be joined by Professor Robert mann, professor of Mass Communications at Louisiana State university and author of daisy petals and mushroom clouds. Take a look, these 90 minutes, here at the history of tv political ad advertising. Professor mann, thanks for joining us here. Guest thank you. Good to be with you this morning. Host we start with 1952, so that was the first Year Television was used as a medium for political ads . Yeah, television had been used a little bit in 1948 to broadcast the Democratic Convention. Harry truman made a speech from new jersey at the latter part of the race in 1948. It was aired on a Regional Television linkup along the east coast. But, really, 1952 was the first time that you saw candidates advertising in a way that was not just a speech. So even though we are going to see a lot of spots this morning, these 30, 60second spots, its important to remember from the beginning, i think, that 1952, 1956, 1960, the candidates still saw television as a way to give speeches. So, in 1952, for example, even though Adlai Stevenson, the democratic nominee, and Dwight Eisenhower, the republican nominee, were airing some spot advertising, the vast majority of people who were seeing them, or at least certainly with stevenson were seeing them give 18, 30minute speeches at 10 30 at night on tuesdays and thursdays in the latter part of the campaign. And both candidates were very reluctant to do this kind of spot advertising. They just they saw politics as being more dignified. They saw spots as the way you sell soup, soap, and cereal, not lofty political ideas. Host we are going to see a lot of spots, a lot of ads, in the next hour and a half year with Professor Bob mann from lsu. We welcome your calls and your comments and questions on ads that are particularly notable to you. So we will open up our lines. For republicans, its 202 7488001. Democrats, 202 7488000. And independents, 202 7488002. So it is fair to say both candidates in 1952, Ike Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, had to be pushed to do advertising, correct . Guest yeah. So, there was an advertising executive who was fairly prominent, Fairly Famous for his innovations at the time, rosser reeves, who worked with the ted bates agency. And he was hired by the eisenhower campaign to manage their advertisements. At the time, eisenhower and his people thought it just would be, as i said earlier, just speeches. Reeves looks at one of eisenhowers speeches, i think it was his announcement speech early in the campaign, and came to the conclusion he made two major conclusions. That eisenhower was a terrible speaker and that these 30minute speeches were just too complex , too long, that people left the speech without having a single idea of really what it was about. It was just kind of a jumble of issues. And so, he persuaded eisenhower to do this spot advertising. And the major way that people were seeing eisenhower spots was not this animated spot, this jingle you just saw, which is interesting, and a lot of people enjoy watching it because it is sort of recognized as the First Political spot, but most eisenhower spots were these 20second eisenhower answers america, where eisenhower just looks in the camera and answers questions from average people off the street. And eisenhower thought it was humiliating. Stevenson thought his spots were a humiliating exercise that really degraded the candidacy and the office of the president. They were both sort of dragged into doing this. Host two quick questions about the ads we just saw about eisenhower and stevenson. One, the donkeys in that animated ad for thencandidate eisenhower kind of a negative ad in that regard. And, two, who is bob in the Adlai Stevenson . Guest ok, so the donkeys that you see riding the going backwards, which, as you point out, is sort of a subtle negative ad, that is john sparkman, who was Adlai Stevensons running mate. Who was Adlai Stevensons a democratic senator from alabama who was Adlai Stevensons running mate. Dean atchinson, who was the secretary of state under truman who was much reviled by conservatives and republicans and Adlai Stevenson, the nominee. In the other ad, the bob and ike, the bob was bob taft, robert taft, who was mr. Conservative, the leader of the conservative republicans, senator from ohio, son of president taft. And before eisenhower ran against taft. Taft was his main opponent for the nomination in 1952, and to win tafts support, he went to taft and promised him he would support his conservative agenda and even promised that he would give taft some patronage. And democrats called that the great surrender, that eisenhower had gone and surrendered to taft, and that taft was now controlling the nominee. So the point of that spot is that they had fallen in love, and taft has captured eisenhower. He is actually going to be the power behind the throne if eisenhower is elected president. Host the title of your book, bob mann, is daisy petals and mushroom clouds, based on the daisy ad, so lets go to that ad, the 1964 ad from the lyndon by the Lyndon Johnson campaign, and we will follow that with ads from the Goldwater Campaign. Here is a look. [video clip] [birds chirping] 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 6, 6, 8, 9, 9 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0. [explosion] these are the stakes. To make a world in which all of gods children can live or to go into the dark, we must either love each other, or we must die. Announcer vote for president johnson on november 3. The stakes are too high for you to stay home. [video clip ends] [video clip plays] announcer graft. Swindles. Juvenile delinquency. Crime. Riots. Hear what Barry Goldwater has to say about our lack of moral leadership. Mr. Goldwater the leadership of this nation has a clear and immediate challenge to go to work effectively and go to work immediately to restore proper respect for law and order in this land, and not just prior to election day either. Americas greatness is the greatness of her people. And let this generation then make a new mark for that greatness. Let this generation of americans set a standard of responsibility that will inspire the world. Announcer in your heart, you know he is right. Vote for Barry Goldwater. [video clip ends] host there is a lot there. There, bob mann. Start with the daisy add and tell us the tenor of the times. 1964, and why that came about. Guest thank you for asking me to set the stage. I think it is important to understand the atmosphere in the country at that time, in 1964. We are still in the shadow of the cuban missile crisis. Teeth,still armed to the facing the soviet union, which is also armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. People at that time are fearful that the soviet union and the United States even though the cuban missile crisis had been resolved that we would still end up going to war with them, and it would not be a conventional land war. It would be a nuclear war that would destroy the world. In that environment comes along goldwater, who has been a very prominent leader of the conservative wing of the Republican Party since the 1950s. A republican senator from arizona who is speaking with using a lot of bellicose language. When kennedy announces the moonshot, goldwater tells reporters, i am not interested in sending a man to the moon. I want to lob a missile of the mens room of the kremlin. He calls the nuclear bomb just another weapon. He goes on television and suggests we should defoliate the ho chi minh trail in vietnam using nuclear weapons. He made a lot of comments like that over the years that suggested that he was kind of reckless and not serious about the responsibility of being president when it came to using nuclear weapons. So people already knew goldwaters position on that very well. That spot takes advantage it is clever in many ways it never mentions goldwater because it did not need to. The people who created that spot realized all they had to do was give sort of a story and let the viewers do the work, let the viewers fill in the blanks with the information and knowledge and emotions that they brought to that spot. That is what makes it so , and ireaking, so clever think, so effective. It put the viewers to work. It did not give them a lot of information. It assumed they had a lot of information and used that in a very creative, clever way. Host is it correct the daisy ad only ran once . Guest it only ran once as a paid ad on september 7, 1964. Probably, in those days, there was only three networks, so probably around 40 million, 50 Million People saw that ad. It was not unusual to run that ad a couple of times and then move onto to something else. Host i thought go ahead. The spot did air on several network news broadcasts in its entirety later that week. It started making news. Goldwater people and people in the Republican Party, officials, started to object to it. It made news, which ensured got a free ride on the Networks Later in the week. I am guessing between 70 million and 100 Million People saw it by the end of the week. Host i thought it was interesting we always associated Richard Nixon with barryw and, but with goldwater, that is his message. Guest yes, that spot that you saw there is a distillation of a 30minute documentary the Goldwater Campaign had created called choice. They planned to air it as a Political Program on national television. Goldwater saw it and decided he said it was a racist spot. He stopped it from being run by the Goldwater Campaign on national television. It did get run on regional , local television stations, and a lot of house parties. But they did take the essence of it and distill it down to this 32nd spot which try to take advantage of the anxiety in the public 32nd spot that took of the anxiety in the public over civil unrest. Lyndon johnson, who had become president after the death of john f. Kennedy, was seen by a lot of republicans as having added and caused a lot of the moral degradation of the country. The civil rights movement, and there were not a lot of protests over the vietnam war at the time. But all of this unrest and this unsettled environment was growing, and conservatives were nervous and scared about it, and goldwater and his campaign were trying to take advantage of that fear and growing unease with a certain percentage of the population. Host we are looking at the history of president ial campaign tv advertising here on American History tv on cspan3. A joint production with cspans washington journal. We are welcoming your phone calls. We will get to the momentarily. 202 7488001, for republicans. Democrats, 202 7488000. Independents, 202 7488002. But, robert mann, a comment from twitter says, tv in its infancy , more reflective of the ads shown during theater intermissions. The American Culture was much more conservative then. His observation. Guest yeah. From 1952 through 1964, infancy is the right word to use. The people who were doing this stuff for politicians were really experimenting. They did not really know what they were doing. Today you would hire an ad firm, one that specializes only in producing political spots that relied on gobs of Public Opinion research. They just didnt know anything about that. These were mostly technicians who were producing most of the spots. There were people who arranged the presentation of a 30minute speech, or a four to fiveminute distillation. It was not until bernbach, the madison avenue firm that got the account to do Lyndon Johnsons campaign, that true advertising principles were brought to president ial campaigns. The reason i wrote my book about this is because this is the hinge moment in american political advertising when everybody saw, oh, this is how it is done. This is how you advertise political ideas. This is how you create spots that are interesting, clever, that put the viewers information to work. That involve the viewer, not just a passive experience. If you look at the spots before 1964, 1968, and forward, you can see there is a moment in time when everything changes. Host lets go to our collars. Callers. We go first to brent in jacksonville, florida. You are on with professor mann. Caller good morning. How are you doing . Guest good, thank you. Caller i had a question about the modernday president ial commercials. It just seems to me biden said he ran for president because of the fine people comments by president trump. And he seems to cut off right after that line, where he did not condemn white supremacists, neonazis, and but that is always left out. You know what i am saying . Host ok. Professor mann, what are some of your observations of modernday, today, 2020 ads, compared to what we are seeing here in 1952 . 1964 . Guest it is a torrent of ads. And they are targeted in a way they were not. In 1964, the daisy ad, the ad we saw, were mostly meant to be aired on national television. Even then there were certainly swing states. More of them, but they were just broadcasts. They were meant for almost everyone to see them. So they were not targeted. Today, what you see is a much more finely sliced and diced electorate based on profiling and political polling that these candidates and their campaigns do. If you see an ad, especially if you see it online you are just scrolling through the internet that is usually an ad that was intended exactly for you or a person just like you. It was not meant for your neighbor. It made not have been it may not have been for your spouse. It was meant for you personally because either of your shopping behavior, your buying behavior or registration, where you live. These are much more finally targeted to people. It does not mean they always hit the mark, but that is the main other than stylistic differences, that is the main difference in advertising today as opposed to 1964 and before the invention of the internet. Host lets hear from john in mechanicsburg, pennsylvania. Caller thanks for taking my call. Just curious. From doing the research i remember looking at history, 1961, president kennedy did a speech at the waldorfastoria. During that same era, you had the edward r. Murrow folks talking about the media and its value to society. Both speeches, both of those folks, talked about how the media was not used properly to educate the American People about the issues of the day. I am curious about the speakers thoughts. You have done a lot of research on these political ads. Were those men right . Was kennedy and merle right . When they said, we are not using television to educate . Just to amuse and entertain . Even in the realm of political ads, it seems that is where we have gotten to. As opposed to providing useful, helpful education to the American People. Just curious what the guest thinks. Host thanks, john. Guest that is a really good question. I would say they were not so much right, but they were prescient. I would say in the early to mid1960s, there was an advantage and a disadvantage. You may not have had access to different sources of news. There were three networks. Maybe you had a couple of local newspapers. Some radio news. But there were generally agreed upon facts that every american understood. If something happened, every american sort of had the same basic understanding of that. You may think that is good, you may think that is bad, but it is the way it was. Where we are now, i do not have to belabor this point, but we are a totally Fragmented Society , depending on your political views or your lifestyle you are getting your news in one way, your neighbor is getting his or her news in another way. There is no commonly, widely agreedupon fact about anything. We are working our silos. We dont talk to each other. We are not hearing the same thing. We are not talking about the same thing. Personally, i am not sure that is a good thing. But it is what it is. And i think kennedy and those were probably prescient. Maybe they saw what was coming or maybe they were criticizing something that they they certainly did not anticipate the internet, but here we are. Host lets go to tim, north chicago, illinois on our independent line. Caller good morning. Thank you for cspan and mr. Mann. This question has to do with the rules and ethics of political campaigns, president ial campaigns. Historically and up until especially presentday is there a commission or a set of rules that campaigns must follow to make sure campaign ads are done properly outside of slander . Guest excellent question. In the 1960s, there was a federal commission, the Fair ElectionPractices Commission i may be botching the