The Meanest Ads You Never Saw

Remember when presidential candidates’ ads showed gentlemanly restraint?

Stop laughing.

Just because we’ve reached a moment one ad-watcher calls “kitchen sink time” -- the point in this season’s record-setting $1.2-billion ad campaign when no spot is too misleading or repugnant for Sen. John Kerry or President Bush to toss into the melee -- doesn’t mean it was always this way.

Seriously. Ask David Bushman, a curator at the Museum of Television & Radio who has put together an exhibit of campaign ads spanning 50 years and who can attest that the following ads never hit the air:

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1956: Democrat Adlai Stevenson never warmed up to TV and refused to air an ad targeting Richard Nixon, then the running mate of an ailing President Eisenhower. (“Nervous about Nixon? President Nixon?” the ad asked.) According to campaign scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Stevenson disapproved of the attack, but aides argued that Nixon was a “pretty evil guy” to be a heartbeat from the presidency, so voters saw print versions of the ad.

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1964: President Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign ads had the subtlety of a tuba, but one that trumpeted the Ku Klux Klan’s endorsement of Barry Goldwater (which Goldwater had publicly repudiated) didn’t pass muster. Another ad, which showed a pregnant woman walking in a park while an announcer listed the products of nuclear fallout, was canned because, Bushman explains, the president’s aides were “not 100% convinced” that fallout harmed fetuses.

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1972: Tony Schwartz, the provocateur behind Johnson’s 1964 ads, made a stark spot for Sen. George McGovern’s presidential bid. What the public never saw: An elegiac antiwar ad in which grainy footage of the aftermath of a U.S. napalm attack plays in slow motion as a jet engine whines in the background.

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1976: There’s mean and then there’s stupid. In a 5-minute ad meant to display his resolve, President Ford, who had survived two assassination attempts in 1975, mops his brow nervously after a prankster’s firecracker goes off during a speech. His campaign thought better of airing the ad.

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1988: GOP adman -- and future Fox News chief -- Roger Ailes’ Boston Harbor spot for then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, supposedly showing the flotsam of his foe’s failed policies, could hardly be described as fair or balanced. But Democrat Michael Dukakis vetoed a vigorous response, opting for a nuanced, largely positive approach. Other Democrats rebelled, launching state-based attack ads, but the damage was done.

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Many election experts, Bushman says, consider 1988 “the meanest campaign in history” (remember Willie Horton and the mocking GOP ad of Dukakis in a tank?). But the relative restraint shown before didn’t keep some ruthless ads from airing briefly -- a strategy that can be effective (and cheap, if cynically coy) when journalists take notice.

The most famous of these is the LBJ campaign’s 1964 “Daisy” spot, which showed a young girl pulling petals off a daisy as a male voice counted down to nuclear Armageddon. The ad ran only once, during NBC’s “Monday Night at the Movies,” but was replayed on nightly news shows.

That approach continues today. MoveOn.org milked CBS’ refusal to run its “Bush in 30 Seconds” ad during the Super Bowl. When the $1-million ad later aired, the media ate it up. Last summer, the first Swift boat spot, which accused Kerry of lying about his war record to win medals, ran in just four markets, Toledo and Youngstown, Ohio; Green Bay, Wis., and Charleston, W.Va., and cost a mere $550,000. But news broadcasts gave it lots of free play.

Bill Hillsman knows how the game is played. The campaign consultant’s famous “Looking for Rudy” ad in Democrat Paul Wellstone’s successful 1990 race against incumbent Sen. Rudy Boschwitz of Minnesota ran only three times. “You can’t fool the media just by shooting an ad,” Hillsman said. “You actually have to run the ad.”

-- Compiled by Michael Soller

For more about campaign ads, see “The Presidency: Political Image-Making and Television,” on view at the Museum of Television & Radio in Beverly Hills through Nov. 7 (www.mtr.org)and “The Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials 1952-2004,” an exhibit from the American Museum of the Moving Image, online at https://livingroomcandidate.movingimage.us/.