As a student of American politics, sometimes I become slightly upset when studying the Cold War era. It’s not because I’m frightened at the prospect of the Soviet Union, but rather it’s because I was born in 1992 after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviets.
For my whole life I’ve felt like I just missed out on one of the most significant periods of this country’s history, and I feel that in some ways it’s difficult for me fully comprehend the impact that the Cold War had on this country without having experienced that time period myself. However, in spite of not having lived through the Bay of Pigs, Détente and Reagan’s “Tear Down This Wall” speech, I feel as though I can still develop an appreciation for the Cold War’s importance by analyzing the ways in which it still continues to affect us.
Foreign policy played a huge part of the election process in the 1950s and 1960s and still continues to be relevant today. With the growth of the War on Terror in the mid-2000s, I think it’s especially interesting to compare the ways in which politicians approach these two nuanced and complex issues in their rhetoric and campaign strategies.
Consider political campaign commercials as an example. One infamous commercial comes from Lyndon Johnson’s 1962 reelection campaign. Commonly referred to as the “Daisy Ad,” the commercial illustrates a young girl sitting a field as she plucks petals from a flower while counting them all one by one. The girl behaves especially adorably when she skips a few of the numbers since it’s obvious she’s probably too young to even be able to count past ten. Suddenly, her image freezes on the screen at a certain point and her voice gives way to another, disembodied male voice counting down from 10, likely somewhere in a military facility.
When the countdown reaches zero, we witness a nuclear explosion on the screen. While the mushroom cloud expands, we hear President Johnson reading the final lines of W.H. Auden’s poem “Sept. 1 1939” (“We must love one another or we must die”) and an announcer urges citizens to go out and vote on election day because “the stakes are too high for you to stay at home.”
What exactly was Johnson’s strategy in using this commercial? Even by today’s standards such an ad would appear shocking, so the response in the 1960s likely would have been complete outrage. When he was running against Barry Goldwater, Johnson likely knew that he was more heavily favored to win. During Goldwater’s campaign he advocated making Social Security voluntary, selling off the Tennessee Valley Authority and favored allowing NATO commanders to use nuclear weapons against the Soviets if they thought it necessary. “In your heart you know he’s right” eventually became “In your gut you know he’s nuts.”
The problem that Johnson faced was that Goldwater, in the eyes of many citizens, was so unfavorable that the President feared that people might assume that Goldwater was going to lose anyway and thus they wouldn’t need to go out and vote against him. By creating an ad like this, Johnson effectively hoped to scare his Democratic constituents into voting against a man many feared could bring about a third World War. Did the ad work? Johnson won the 1964 election in one of the biggest landslides in a presidential election up to that point (only to be outdone by Reagan in 1984). While we can’t say for certain whether or not this ad was a direct cause, it’s become largely synonymous with Johnson’s campaign and was certainly influential in corralling voters to his side.
The Daisy Ad might be considered anomalous by some, but in my studies I’ve come across an interesting parallel to today’s politics. Congressional Republicans seemed to take a page out of LBJ’s book in 2006. During the midterm elections that year the Republicans created a now infamous ad entitled “These are the Stakes.” It features images of people like Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri with quotes like “Kill the Americans” superimposed across their faces, and the only sound playing in the background is a ticking clock. As the commercial ends, the text shifts to a black screen that says nothing more than “These are the stakes. Vote Nov. 7.”
There are certainly parallels between this ad and Johnson’s 1964 ad: both play on the incumbent party’s power to maintain the security of the country and both suggest that by putting someone else in power we might essentially be turning the nation over to destruction. Was the ad as effective for the Republicans as it was for Johnson? Not exactly. In 2006 the Republicans lost control of both the House and the Senate; the House would remain in Democratic hands for four years while the Senate still has a majority of Democrats to this day.
This might mean that foreign wars simply don’t have the same staying power in terms of issue significance that they used to in the 1950s and 1960s, but I feel like the answer is more nuanced than that. When Johnson was running in 1964, he had the advantage of being able to run with the Cold War in the background without having to deal with the issue of land-based combat. While the United States was certainly increasing the number of troops and advisors in Vietnam, the issue was hardly on the radar at the time of the 1964 election.
In 2006, on the other hand, we had been fighting a physical war with Afghanistan for nearly five years and Iraq for over three years. Saddam Hussein had been captured, Osama Bin Laden was still nowhere to be found and Americans were beginning to wonder what exactly our objective was.
It’s a classic example of the War Trap: since visible progress in counterinsurgency campaigns like the Iraq War is so difficult to demonstrate, voters were becoming increasingly disillusioned with the issue. Increasing pressure and troop numbers might have drawn ire from voters and the international community alike, but staying the course could just as easily make people think we were losing.
The Republicans succumbed to the War Trap in much the same manner that Johnson did in 1968 when he refused to seek reelection. For that reason I would be hesitant to say that the foreign policy issue has changed a dramatic amount between the Cold War era and the War on Terror era.
Indeed, the outcome of these advertisements more than anything seems to say that when a war is viewed as more nebulous it can make for a more effective campaign issue, whereas when the war becomes more “real” (such as the escalation of the Vietnam War or the prolonged nature of the Iraq War) voters are less likely to support military actions. In sum, between these two advertisements the rhetoric seems especially similar, and while they both had hugely different outcomes it seems that these outcomes can be explained less by a change in voter preferences and more by the nature of war itself as a campaign issue.
Brandon Bub is a sophomore majoring in English and edits The Daily Campus opinion column. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
