Daisy (advertisement)

"Daisy," sometimes known as "Daisy Girl" or "Peace, Little Girl," was a controversial campaign television advertisement. Though aired only once (by the campaign), during a September 7, 1964, telecast of David and Bathsheba on The NBC Monday Movie, it was a factor in President Lyndon B. Johnson's landslide victory over Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election and an important turning point in political and advertising history. Its creator was Tony Schwartz of Doyle Dane Bernbach. It remains one of the most controversial political advertisements ever made.

Concept

The advertisement begins with a little girl (Birgitte Olsen) standing in a meadow with chirping birds, picking the petals of what appears to be a daisy (according to Olsen it was a Black-eyed Susan) while counting each petal slowly. (Because she does not know her numbers perfectly, she repeats some and says others in the wrong order, saying them in the order of 1,2,3,4,5,7,6,6,8,9, all of which adds to her childlike appeal.) When she reaches "nine", an ominous-sounding male voice is then heard counting down a missile launch, and as the girl's eyes turn toward something she sees in the sky, the camera zooms in until her pupil fills the screen, blacking it out. When the countdown reaches zero, the blackness is replaced by the flash and mushroom cloud from a nuclear explosion.

As the firestorm rages, a voiceover from Johnson states, "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." Another voiceover (sportscaster Chris Schenkel) then says, "Vote for President Johnson on November 3. The stakes are too high for you to stay home."

The attack ad was designed to capitalize on comments made by Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater about the possibility of using nuclear weapons in Vietnam. The Johnson campaign attempted to portray Goldwater as a dangerous warmonger who would needlessly, and recklessly, escalate the conflict in Vietnam.

Fallout

As soon as the ad aired, Johnson's campaign was widely criticized for using the prospect of nuclear war, as well as the implication that Goldwater would start one, to frighten voters. The ad was immediately pulled, but the point was made, appearing on the nightly news and on conversation programs in its entirety.

Johnson's line "We must either love each other, or we must die" echoes W. H. Auden's poem "September 1, 1939" in which line 88 reads "We must love one another or die". The words "children" and "the dark" also occur in Auden's poem.

In 1984, Walter Mondale's presidential campaign used ads with a similar theme to the Daisy ad. Mondale's advertisements cut between footage of children and footage of ballistic missiles and nuclear explosions, over a soundtrack of the song "Teach Your Children" by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Unlike Johnson, Mondale's campaign was much less successful.

In 2000, Aretino Industries, a Texas-based group, released an attack ad, clearly modeled on the Daisy ad, targeting Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore, attempting to tie him to the prior election's campaign finance controversies.

Popular culture

• In 2000, it was used in a music video for Fatboy Slim's "Sunset (Bird of Prey)".
• In 2001, post-metal group Cult of Luna used a sample of the line "These are the stakes" on the opening track of their debut album.
• In 2003, the liberal group MoveOn.org attempted to revive the 'Daisy' ad campaign. The updated version was intended to denounce the imminent invasion of Iraq.
• The scene of a little girl pulling flower petals just prior to a nuclear attack was recreated for a scene in the 2003 Battlestar Galactica miniseries.
• The final shots of the classic 1964 film Fail-Safe are strikingly similar to the ad, with the last shot of a child playing frozen immediately before a nuclear bomb detonates.
• The ad was parodied in 1995 on The Simpsons on the episode "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming." One of the scenes before a supposed nuclear blast shows Maggie picking flowers in a field, with the camera zooming into her eye, and then a mushroom cloud appears on screen — only for the camera to zoom out, showing a minuscule puff of smoke coming out of the bomb, which was a dud.
• On July 21, 2010 Congressional Candidate from Michigan, Bill Cooper released a new version of the "Daisy Ad". Bill Cooper's new ad can be viewed here.

External links

• Video of the ad at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum
• Production history of "Daisy" with source documents at Conelrad.com