Wow, just saw this Clinton “Daisy” ad play in Colorado. Lyndon Johnson’s “Daisy” ad was probably the most controversial political ad ever made.
The advertisement begins with a little girl (three-year-old Monique M. Corzilius) standing in a meadow with chirping birds, picking the petals of a daisy while counting each one—repeating some numbers and counting some in the wrong order. After she reaches "nine", she pauses, as if trying to remember the next number, and a male voice is then heard saying "ten", at the start of a missile launch countdown. Seemingly in response to the countdown, the girl turns her head toward a point off-screen, and then the scene freezes. As the countdown continues, a zoom of the video still focuses on the girl's right eye until her pupil fills the screen, eventually blacking it out as the countdown simultaneously reaches zero. The blackness is instantly replaced by the bright flash and thunderous sound of a nuclear explosion, featuring video footage of an detonation similar in appearance to the near surface burst Trinity test of 1945. The scene then cuts to footage of a mushroom cloud from a different nuclear explosion, and then to a final cut of a slowed close-up section of incandescence in yet another nuclear explosion.
A voiceover from Johnson plays over all three pieces of nuclear detonation footage, stating emphatically, "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." At the end of the voiceover, the explosion footage is replaced by white letters on a black screen, with another voiceover (sportscaster Chris Schenkel) reading the words on the screen, "Vote for President Johnson on November 3rd", then adding, "The stakes are too high for you to stay home."
Though the ad is regarded as a negative ad against Johnson's opponent, Barry Goldwater, Goldwater is never mentioned in the ad.
This was an extremely controversial ad at the time and was pulled immediately.
"Daisy" aired only once, during a September 7, 1964, telecast of David and Bathsheba on The NBC Monday Movie. Johnson's campaign was widely criticized for using the prospect of nuclear war, as well as for 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. Jack Valenti, who served as a special assistant to Johnson, later suggested that pulling the ad was a calculated move, arguing that "it showed a certain gallantry on the part of the Johnson campaign to withdraw the ad."
Here is the daisy ad:
And here’s Clinton’s new ad:
This is powerful stuff.