• by John Capone , July 22, 2008

For better or for worse, Tony Schwartz had a hand in creating modern political campaigning, but not as directly as he has generally been credited with - or accused of. When he went to that big media consultancy in the sky this summer, there could not have been an obit that did not mention the infamous "daisy ad" created by Schwartz and the agency Doyle Dane Bernbach for Lyndon Johnson's presidential campaign in 1964.

The ad dropped an H-bomb on Barry Goldwater's campaign, playing on public paranoia and fear of nuclear catastrophe by going for the jugular - showing a young girl picking daisies in a field and implying with Eisenstein-school cuts that she is obliterated by a mushroom cloud. It only aired once, during NBC's Monday Night at the Movies, but once was enough. Though not subtle, the one-minute spot exhibited an artfulness not typical of attack ads. It never mentions Goldwater, but it plays off the zeitgeist and fear generated by his statements that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" and "moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

You can see the dark side of Schwartz's legacy in ads like the Willie Horton spot used by the Bush I campaign against Michael Dukakis; it was crude, salacious and tabloid. Then there's the famed tank ad, which similarly reeked of standard mudslinging: A voice-over detailed Dukakis' service record while the camera zoomed in on the grinning, helmet-wearing candidate riding in a tank. Perhaps most evocative of the daisy ad was the Hillary Clinton campaign's "red phone ad." Similar to Schwartz's in its nuclear fear-mongering, the manipulation with the little girl and the fact that it never mentions her opponent, it differs in its heavy-handed narration and proved easily spoofable. 

The genius of the daisy ad, and perhaps from whence it drew its force, is its simplicity. Schwartz's virtuoso use of sound (he was a noted sound designer, record producer and media theorist) is the powerful driver of the ad's awful beauty. The sounds of the bucolic meadow (actually Central Park) and the girl counting up juxtaposed with an ominous countdown and then the explosion rumbling under a snippet from an LBJ speech create a carefully constructed collage that - when set to the images and the slow zoom on the child's eye - calls to mind Kubrick or Godard more than anything we recognize as muckraking. The essential horror of the ad is that it does these things so well, that it so fully emotionalizes and de-intellectualizes complex issues of vital importance.

The man who left this legacy hardly ever left home. Agoraphobia confined him to the immediate area around Hell's Kitchen, where he obsessively collected sounds. In his apartment he sat surrounded by more than 10,000 tapes full of field recordings he had made over the years, which he donated to the Library of Congress (which values the tapes at about $2.5 million). Among those recordings, one might imagine, must be the real soundtrack to a little girl dropping petals in the Central Park grass.