60 Years After Lyndon Johnson’s ‘Daisy Ad,’ The Silence On Nuclear War Is Dangerous – OpEd

One evening in early September 1964, a frightening commercial jolted 50 million Americans who were partway through watching “Monday Night at the Movies” on NBC. The ad began with an adorable three-year-old girl counting petals as she pulled them from a daisy. Then came a man’s somber voiceover, counting down from ten to zero. Then an ominous roar and a mushroom cloud from a nuclear bomb explosion.

The one-minute TV spot reached its climax with audio from President Lyndon Johnson, concluding that “we must love each other, or we must die.” The ad did not mention his opponent in the upcoming election, Sen. Barry Goldwater, but it didn’t need to. By then, his cavalier attitude toward nuclear weapons was well established.

Goldwater’s bestsellerThe Conscience of a Conservative, published at the start of the decade, was unnervingly open to the idea of launching a nuclear war, while the book exuded disdain for leaders who “would rather crawl on knees to Moscow than die under an Atom bomb.” Closing in on the Republican nomination for president, the Arizona senatorsuggestedthat “low-yield” nuclear bombs could be useful to defoliate forests in Vietnam.

His own words gave plenty of fodder to others seeking the GOP nomination. Pennsylvania Gov. William ScrantoncalledGoldwater “a trigger-happy dreamer” andsaidthat he “too often casually prescribed nuclear war as a solution to a troubled world.” New York Gov. Nelson Rockefellerunloadedwith a rhetorical question: “How can there be sanity when he wants to give area commanders the authority to make decisions on the use of nuclear weapons?”

So, the stage was set for the “daisy ad,” which packed an emotional wallop — and provoked a fierce backlash. Critics cried foul, deploring an attempt to use the specter of nuclear annihilation for political gain. Having accomplished the goal of putting the Goldwater camp on the defensive, the commercial never aired again as a paid ad. But national newscasts showed it while reporting on the controversy.

Today, a campaign ad akin to the daisy spot is hard to imagine from the Democratic or Republican nominee to be commander in chief, who seem content to bypass the subject of nuclear-war dangers. Yet those dangers are actually much higher now than they were 60 years ago. In 1964, theDoomsday Clockmaintained by experts at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was set at 12 minutes to apocalyptic midnight. The ominous hands are now just 90 seconds away.

Yet, in their convention speeches this summer, both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were silent on the need to engage in genuine diplomacy for nuclear arms control, let alone take steps toward disarmament.

Trump offered standard warnings about Russian and Chinese arsenals and Iran’s nuclear program, and boasted of his rapport with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Left unmentioned was Trump’s presidentialstatementin 2017 that if North Korea made “any more threats to the United States,” that country “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Nor did he refer to his highly irresponsibletweetthat Kim should be informed “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

When Harris delivered her acceptance speech, it did not include the words “atomic” or “nuclear” at all.

Now in high gear, the 2024 presidential campaign is completely lacking in the kind of wisdom about nuclear weapons and relations between the nuclear superpowers that Lyndon Johnson and, eventually, Ronald Reagan attained during their presidencies.

Johnson privately acknowledged that the daisy commercial scared voters about Goldwater, which “we goddamned set out to do.” But the president was engaged in more than an electoral tactic. At the same time that he methodically deceived the American people while escalating the horrific war on Vietnam, Johnson pursued efforts to defuse the nuclear time bomb.

“We have made further progress in an effort to improve our understanding of each other’s thinking on a number of questions,”Johnsonsaidat the conclusion of his extensivesummit meetingwith Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in Glassboro, New Jersey, on June 25, 1967. But fifty-seven years later, there is scant evidence that the current or next president of the United States is genuinely interested in improving such understanding between leaders of the biggest nuclear states.

Two decades after the summit that defrosted the cold war and gave rise to what was dubbed “the spirit of Glassboro,” President Reagan stood next to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev andsaid: “We decided to talktoeach other instead ofabouteach other.” But such an attitude would be heresy in the 2024 presidential campaign.

“These are the stakes,” Johnson said inthe daisy adas a mushroom cloud rose on screen, “to make a world in which all God’s children can live, or to go into the dark.”

Those are still the stakes. But you wouldn’t know it now from either of the candidates vying to be the next president of the United States.

• About the author: Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, is published by The New Press.