Daisy Petals and Mushroom Clouds

LBJ, Barry Goldwater, and the Ad That Changed American Politics

Robert Mann

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780807142967
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politische Kampagnen & Wahlen

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. At zero the little girl's eye is engulfed by an atomic mushroom cloud. As the inferno roils in the background, President Lyndon B. Johnson's voice 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" ad, widely acknowledged as the most important and memorable political ad in American history. Commissioned by Johnson's campaign and aired only once during Johnson's 1964 presidential contest against Barry Goldwater, it remains an iconic piece of electoral propaganda, intertwining cold war fears of nuclear annihilation with the increasingly savvy world of media and advertising. Mann presents a nuanced view of 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 books and articles, the spot purportedly destroyed Goldwater's presidential campaign. Although that degree of impact on the Goldwater campaign is debatable, what is certain is that the ad ushered in a new era of political advertising using emotional appeals as a routine aspect of campaign strategy.

1 THE ATOM THEME

It was more than two months before the presidential election of 1964 and less than ten days before Labor Day, the traditional start of the fall campaign season. In the Oval Office on the late morning of August 29, President Lyndon B. Johnson spoke by phone with his press secretary, George Reedy.

“We got to play that atom theme as heavy as we can,” Reedy said. “I think it’s a little too early right now to—”

“What theme?” Johnson asked.

“The atom theme.”

“Yeah,” Johnson replied, “A-T-O-M.” He then added, sternly, “But you don’t say it.”¹

As instinctive and canny as any politician in U.S. history, Johnson understood the fear and anxiety over nuclear weapons that had dominated American life for the previous fifteen years. Since the day in August 1945 when the U.S. Army Air Forces had destroyed Hiroshima, the world had lived with the very real threat of nuclear war. In the early years of the cold war, however, American officials continued to focus on beefing up the nation’s conventional forces to blunt perceived Soviet military advances in Korea, Southeast Asia, Greece, and Turkey. Nuclear weapons were part of America’s arsenal but not its first line of defense. Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower never seriously considered using nuclear weapons in Korea or Vietnam (although some of their military advisors did).

All that changed in January 1954, when Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, announced a new American defense policy because “it is not sound to become permanently committed to military expenditures so vast [that] they lead to ‘practical bankruptcy.’” To defend the nation more economically, Dulles revealed, the United States would rely more on “deterrent power” and less on “local defensive power.” That meant greater reliance on nuclear weapons. “Local defenses must be reinforced by the further deterrent of massive retaliatory power,” Dulles said. While he did not utter the words “nuclear weapons,” Dulles’s insistence that the United States should be “willing and able to respond vigorously at places and with means of its own choosing,” left little doubt about the new weapon of choice.²

The Soviet threat and the fear of its burgeoning nuclear arsenal would dominate American politics for the next thirty-five years. The fear would result, among other things, in the expenditure of hundreds of billions for the U.S. defense budget. By 1964, Russia would possess a nuclear stockpile of roughly 5,000 weapons (compared to a U.S. stockpile greater than 25,000). By the mid-1980s, the Soviet stockpile would climb to 40,000. All the while, dominating the national psyche was the fear of a nuclear war that could destroy a large percentage of the U.S. and Soviet populations. President John F. Kennedy gave voice to those fears in 1962, observing that a “massive [nuclear] exchange” would be “the end, because you are talking about … 150 million fatalities in the first eighteen hours.”³

Powerful images of nuclear annihilation captured the imagination—and stoked the fears—of millions of Americans, beginning in 1957 with the publication of Nevil Shute’s novel On the Beach. Made into a motion picture in 1959, the book was the story of the destruction of virtually all life on Earth by nuclear war and the resulting fallout.

Kennedy entered the White House skeptical of relying so heavily on nuclear weapons, as opposed to more expensive, but far more flexible, conventional forces. Kennedy agreed with his friend and future Joint Chiefs chairman, General Maxwell Taylor, who had written that massive retaliation “could offer our leaders only two choices, the initiation of general nuclear war or compromise and retreat.”⁴ Said Kennedy in July 1961, “We intend to have a wider choice than humiliation or all-out war.”⁵ To give U.S. leaders more latitude, Kennedy’s advisors developed a new strategy. “Flexible response” relied heavily on nuclear weapons but also emphasized the gradual application of force, more reliance on conventional forces, greater airlift capacity, and new anti-guerrilla efforts. (Flexible as it purported to be, the new military strategy would prove inadequate to deal with a nuclear confrontation with Cuba in 1963.)⁶

At the same time, Kennedy tried to prepare the nation for the possibility of nuclear war with the Soviets and the need for an aggressive national civil defense program, proposing $207 million for fallout shelters.⁷ Such structures, designed to shield a family or a larger group from the force of a nearby nuclear blast, as well as the subsequent atmospheric fallout, were becoming more common in the darkening days of the cold war. The federal government’s civil defense agency estimated that more than a million families had constructed fallout shelters by the end of 1960.⁸

In his May 25, 1961, State of the Union Address to Congress, Kennedy made clear, however, that bomb shelters provided scant protection from nuclear attack. “We will deter an enemy from making a nuclear attack only if our retaliatory power is so strong and so invulnerable that he knows he would be destroyed by our response,” he declared. “If we have that strength, civil defense is not needed to deter an attack. If we should ever lack it, civil defense would not be an adequate substitute.”⁹

Fears about the health effects of nuclear fallout, which had steadily grown since the first U.S. test of a hydrogen bomb in 1952, led several organizations to call for a ban on nuclear testing. Among them was the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), which sprang to life in 1957, led by Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review, and Clarence Pickett of the American Friends Service Committee. “We are facing a danger unlike any danger that has ever existed,” SANE declared in a New York Times ad in November 1957. Another ad—designed by Doyle Dane Bernbach, the advertising firm that would produce Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 campaign spots—showed the renowned pediatrician Benjamin Spock, with a worried expression, looking at a young girl. The ad said, “Dr. Spock Is Worried.” Beginning in March 1959, Consumer Reports published the results of a series of investigations, revealing troublesome levels of strontium-90 in milk and other grocery products around the country. “The radioactive materials which fall out of the upper atmosphere after nuclear blasts pass through a number of physical, chemical and biological processes, some of which take years to occur,” the magazine informed readers. “Every day each person in the world is exposed to and consumes some measurable debris from fallout in his food, in his drink, in the air he breathes.” The campaign against nuclear tests worked, at least so far as public opinion was concerned. In 1959, 77 percent of Americans surveyed in one poll said they favored the then-temporary moratorium on nuclear testing.¹⁰

The fear of nuclear Armageddon culminated in the early 1960s with a series of frightening—and sometimes terrifying—confrontations with the Soviets in Berlin and Cuba. The first crisis occurred in Berlin when, following a contentious June 1961 summit in Vienna between Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviets revised their longstanding proposed treaty with East Germany to give the Soviet-satellite nation control of its borders. U.S. officials feared that the practical result of the treaty, if consummated, might be no more unfettered Western access to the portions of Berlin controlled by the United States, France, and Great Britain since the end of World War II. It would also mean that the citizens of Soviet-controlled East Germany would no longer be allowed to emigrate to democratic West Berlin. Khrushchev also signaled that he no longer wanted to negotiate a nuclear test ban treaty, which Kennedy had advocated as a path toward nuclear disarmament.

It was the potential of a crisis in West Berlin—a Western enclave more than one hundred miles inside Soviet-controlled East Germany—that was most urgent to Kennedy and his advisors. Alarmed and embarrassed by the exodus of 3.5 million East Germans who had fled to the far-more-prosperous West Berlin by the summer of 1961, Khrushchev wanted to staunch the bleeding. “Berlin was turning out to be a gigantic hole in the Iron Curtain,” former secretary of state Henry Kissinger later observed. “If the trend continued, East Germany, a self-proclaimed ‘worker’s paradise,’ would not have any workers left.”¹¹ From the U.S. perspective, closing Western routes into West Berlin conjured images of the yearlong Berlin blockade of 1948, which the U.S. and its allies overcame with a massive airlift of food and supplies. That crisis, however, occurred before the Soviets had acquired nuclear weapons. While the blockade had raised cold war tensions between the two powers, there had been no risk of nuclear confrontation. This looming crisis, however, had the potential to be much more dangerous.

Open access to West Berlin was vital to the West, as the city was not legally part of East Germany but a territory under the control of the Allied victors in World War II. “Thus our rights are clear and deep-rooted,” Kennedy said in a speech on Berlin on July 25, 1961. Berlin, Kennedy believed, was “more than a link with the free world, a beacon of hope behind the Iron Curtain.” It was, he declared, “the greatest testing place of Western courage and will.”¹² “No one can fail to appreciate the gravity of this threat,” the president said at a press conference in late June. “It involves the peace and security of the Western world.”¹³ In other words, the crisis over Berlin threatened to spark a nuclear war, something Kennedy clearly wanted to avoid, believing “the only alternatives were authentic negotiations or mutual annihilation.”¹⁴ As he told a reporter for the New York Post, “If Khrushchev wants to rub my nose in the dirt, it’s all over.”¹⁵

On August 13, when the Soviets began shutting off access from East Berlin to West Berlin with barbed wire—a division that ultimately became the Berlin Wall—U.S. officials initially worried that it might be the beginning of an inexorable escalation toward nuclear war. Eventually, they would conclude that Khrushchev’s move was shrewd and not entirely confrontational. The Soviet leader simply wanted to preserve the status quo by stopping the hemorrhaging of his East German population into the West. Indeed, Soviet officials did not shut off Western access to West Berlin. There was no blockade as in 1948. At the time, however, U.S. officials were not so sure how this “crisis” would end. Therefore, Kennedy countered with a restrained military show of force, sending 1,500 additional U.S. troops to Berlin and asking Congress to increase military appropriations by $3.2 billion and to beef up the U.S. military with more than 200,000 additional troops.

Kennedy framed his request in stark terms. “We cannot and will not permit the Communists to drive us out of Berlin, either gradually for by force,” he declared.¹⁶ In a press interview, Attorney General Robert Kennedy presented a more frightening picture of the situation. “The United States and the Soviet Union are on a collision course,” he said. “Unless the situation changes, we will run into one another in a short period of time. I don’t think that there is any problem that even comes close to this … On this question really rests the future not just of the country but of the world.”¹⁷

With tensions high over Berlin, the Soviets resumed atmospheric nuclear weapons testing in early September, in violation of their agreement with the United States to refrain while negotiating a test ban treaty. After the initial test, the Soviets announced the resumption of the “experimental explosions of nuclear weapons,” which they claimed they could “lift and deliver … to any point on the globe.” While the first test had an explosive power as great as 500,000 tons of TNT, the Soviets signaled their intent to explode far-more-powerful weapons. A furious Kennedy publicly decried the decision as “utter disregard of the desire of mankind for a decrease in the arms race” and as “a form of atomic blackmail.” The chief U.S. diplomat for test ban negotiations, Arthur Dean, linked the renewed testing with the Berlin crisis, observing that the explosion was “coldly calculated” by the Soviets “in the belief that someone … would beg the Soviets not to test if the United States would agree not to stand firm on its commitment in West Berlin.”¹⁸ Khrushchev, however, did not want a nuclear confrontation. He merely wanted to make a point and rattle his nuclear sabers. By mid-October, he unceremoniously dropped plans for the peace treaty with East Germany. What had appeared a crisis for the West was primarily a tragedy for the citizens of Berlin, cut off from family and friends for more than a generation.

While tensions over Berlin dissipated, Kennedy remained dedicated to continuing test ban and disarmament negotiations with the Soviets. Publicly, however, the administration signaled the Soviets that, while it was increasing conventional forces to protect West Berlin and the rest of Western Europe, it possessed a superior nuclear arsenal and was willing to fight a nuclear war. The Soviets responded with more nuclear testing, detonating a thirty-megaton nuclear bomb on October 23.¹⁹ Seven months later, the United States would respond by resuming its own nuclear testing program.

Despite worldwide anxiety over Berlin’s potential to spark a nuclear confrontation, Kennedy had never seriously believed it would come to that. “It seems particularly stupid to risk killing a million Americans over an argument about access rights on an Autobahn,” Kennedy had told an aide earlier in the year. “If I’m going to threaten Russia with a nuclear war, it will have to be for much bigger and more important reasons than that.”²⁰ Little did Kennedy know that by October of the following year, just such a crisis would bring the two nations to the brink of nuclear war.

The Berlin crisis and the April 1961 Bay of Pigs episode—in which U.S.-trained Cuban exiles disastrously botched an attempt to invade Cuba and overthrow its Communist dictator, Fidel Castro—had seriously damaged U.S.-Soviet relations, deepening further distrust and antagonism between the two nuclear powers. Nothing, however, rivaled the fear that would grip the world in October 1962 after U.S. intelligence discovered evidence that Russia was installing, in Cuba, medium-range and intermediate-range offensive nuclear missiles, some capable of reaching as far north as Canada. The Soviets were also in the process of deploying to Cuba 44,000 support troops, supported by an additional 1,300 civilian construction workers. Plans were underway for a naval base to house Soviet ships and “nuclear-missile equipped submarines.”²¹ Seemingly irked and threatened by the presence of seventeen U.S. intermediate-range nuclear missiles installed in Turkey earlier that year, Khrushchev wanted to find ways to counter the growing U.S. nuclear superiority. He also wanted to defend his Cuban allies who had, after all, been attacked by U.S.-sponsored rebels only the year before. Explaining his rationale for arming Cuba with nuclear missiles, the Soviet leader told associates that the missiles “have one purpose—to scare them [the United States], to restrain them … to give them back some of their own medicine.”²²

After a week of top-secret deliberations among his closest civilian and military advisors—some of whom argued for an attack on Cuba to take out the missiles—Kennedy went public with the news on October 22. He told the nation the United States would not tolerate the presence of offensive nuclear missiles on an island ninety miles south of Key West, Florida. “We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be the ashes in our mouth,” Kennedy vowed. “But neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced.”²³ Responding to the Soviet provocation, Kennedy imposed a naval “quarantine” on all offensive military equipment bound for Cuba, a decision that some hawkish congressional leaders regarded as weak and that others feared could spark outright war should the Soviets attempt to run the blockade.

In a private letter to Khrushchev on the day of the speech, Kennedy confessed his concern over a Soviet miscalculation, “since I have not assumed that you or any other sane man would, in this nuclear age, plunge the world into war which it is crystal clear no country could win and which could only result in catastrophic consequences to the whole world, including the aggressor.” The missiles, Kennedy said, must go.²⁴ Kennedy’...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Atom Theme
• 2. Why Not Victory?
• 3. Rules Are Made to Be Broken
• 4. These Are the Stakes
• 5. The Homes of America Are Horrifi ed
• 6. In Your Heart, You Know He Might
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Behind the Scenes in Documents
• Notes
• Index
• Footnotes