# Daisy Ad On the night of **September 7, 1964**, during a movie on NBC, viewers saw a three-year-old girl in a meadow pulling petals off a daisy and counting them, getting the numbers slightly wrong. When she reached nine, a man's voice took over and counted down from ten. The camera pushed into her eye. At zero the screen became a nuclear explosion. The spot ran sixty seconds, it was paid for once, and it never said the name [[Barry Goldwater]]. It is routinely called the most famous political ad ever made. Its official title was "Peace, Little Girl." It has been known as "Daisy" ever since. ## The ad Over the mushroom cloud, President [[Lyndon B. Johnson]] is heard saying "These are the stakes," and that people must love each other or die. An announcer closes: vote for President Johnson on November 3, because the stakes are too high to stay home. That is the whole argument. Goldwater is not shown, named or quoted. The ad did not have to say what it meant, because Goldwater's own remarks about nuclear weapons were already well known, and the [[Cuban Missile Crisis]] was less than two years in the past. The viewer supplied the rest. ## Who made it and who paid The Democratic National Committee paid for it on behalf of the Johnson campaign. It was made by Doyle Dane Bernbach, the New York agency known for its Volkswagen ads, working with the sound designer Tony Schwartz. Who on that team deserves credit for which part has been disputed ever since; the Library of Congress catalog entry for the film says plainly that responsibility for some of its content is not clear from the sources. The girl was Monique Corzilius, a child model. ## Reaction It aired once as a paid commercial, at about 9:50 p.m. Eastern during the NBC Monday movie. Republicans protested, and the campaign did not buy time for it again. It did not need to. The networks replayed it on their news programs, which put the ad in front of far more people than the single purchase had, and at no cost. Tony Schwartz later called it the first Rorschach test on the American public: the ad contained no claim about Goldwater, so each viewer saw their own fear in it. ## What happened next Johnson won the [[1964 Presidential Election]] in a landslide, 486 electoral votes to 52. The ad was one piece of a campaign that painted Goldwater as reckless, and how much of the margin belongs to sixty seconds of television cannot be measured. What can be said is that later campaigns treated it as proof of concept. Walter Mondale's campaign echoed it in 1984, [[Bob Dole]]'s in 1996, and [[Hillary Clinton]]'s in 2016, when it brought the same actress back on camera as an adult. ## Why it's on the map - **It invented the free replay.** One paid airing, then days of news coverage. Every provocative ad since has been built with that second audience in mind, and the pattern is visible again in the [[Willie Horton]] ad of 1988 and the [[Swift Boat Veterans for Truth Ads]] of 2004, both of which were seen mostly on the news. - **It attacked without making a claim.** There is nothing in it to fact-check. It works by association and by what the audience already believes, the technique that advertising people brought into politics and that never left. - **It is the reference point for fear.** When a campaign today is accused of running on fear, this is the ad it is being compared to. It also shows that the method has no party: the template for the modern attack ad was made for a Democratic president. ## Connections - [[1964 Presidential Election]] · [[Lyndon B. Johnson]] · [[Barry Goldwater]] - [[Goldwater Nomination]] - [[US Strategic Nuclear Weapons]] · [[Cold War]] - [[3 AM Ad]] — the 2008 primary ad most often compared to it - [[Political Ads Hub]] · [[Willie Horton]] · [[Swift Boat Veterans for Truth Ads]] · [[Ramaswamy Ad Featuring Amy Acton's Mother]]