60 Years After Lyndon Johnson’s “Daisy Ad,” Nuclear Silence Is Dangerous – World Issues
SAN FRANCISCO, USA, Sep 10 (IPS) – One night in early September 1964, a terrifying commercial shook the 50 million Americans who were watching “Monday Night at the Movies” on NBC. The ad began with a cute three-year-old girl counting petals as she plucked them from a daisy. Then came the man’s sad voice, counting from ten to zero. Then there was a terrible rumble and a mushroom cloud from the detonation of the nuclear bomb.
The one-minute TV spot culminated in a voiceover from President Lyndon Johnson, concluding that “we must love one another, or we must die.” This ad did not mention his opponent in the upcoming election, Sen. Barry Goldwater, but it wasn’t necessary. By then, his proud attitude toward nuclear weapons was well known. Goldwater’s bestseller, The Conscience of a Conservative, published earlier this decade, was pitifully open to the idea of nuclear war, while the book expressed contempt for leaders who “would rather crawl on their knees to Moscow than die under an Atom bomb. .” Closing in on the Republican presidential nomination, the Arizona senator suggested that “low-yield” nuclear bombs could be useful in destroying the forests of Vietnam. His words gave him plenty of fodder for other GOP candidates. Pennsylvania Gov. William Scranton called Goldwater “a dream come true” and he said “he often carelessly mentions nuclear war as the solution to a troubled world.” New York governor Nelson Rockefeller dropped the unanswerable question: “How can there be any sense in giving the governors the authority to make decisions about the use of nuclear weapons?” So, the stage was set for a “daisy ad,” filled with emotional wallop — and it stirred The critics cried foul, denouncing the attempt to use nuclear weapons for political gain. After serving the purpose of putting the Goldwater camp on the defensive, the commercial was no longer aired while reporting on the same campaign and the daisy chain is hard to imagine from a Democratic or Republican nominee for commander-in-chief, who seems content to skip over the dangers of nuclear war.
Yet those risks are actually much higher now than they were 60 years ago. In 1964, the Doomsday Clock maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was set to 12 minutes to midnight. Scary hands are now 90 seconds away. However, in their congressional speeches this summer, both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were silent on the need to engage in real negotiations on nuclear arms control, let alone taking steps toward disarmament. Trump issued the usual warnings about Russian and Chinese weapons and Iran’s nuclear program, and boasted of his relationship with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Left unsaid was President Trump’s statement in 2017 that if North Korea made “any more threats to the United States,” that country would “face fire and fury like the world has never seen.” He also didn’t refer to his very useless tweet that Kim should be informed that “I have a Nuclear Button too, but it’s much bigger and more powerful than hers, and my Button works!” When Harris gave his acceptance speech, he did not include the words “atomic” or “nuclear” at all. Now in high gear, the 2024 presidential campaign lacks the kind of wisdom about nuclear weapons and nuclear power relations that Lyndon Johnson and, eventually, Ronald Reagan achieved during their presidencies. Johnson privately admitted that the commercials were intimidating voters about Goldwater, “which we were willing to do.” But the president was using more than an election strategy. At the same time that he was deceiving the American people while fueling the horrific war in Vietnam, Johnson pursued efforts to defuse the nuclear time bomb. “We have made more progress in an effort to improve our understanding of each other’s thinking on many questions,” Johnson said at the end of his major meeting with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in Glassboro, New Jersey, on June 25, 1967. .
But fifty-seven years later, there is little evidence that the current or next president of the United States has a sincere interest in promoting such an understanding among the leaders of the major nuclear powers. Two decades after the summit that ended the cold war and gave rise to the so-called “Glassboro spirit,” President Reagan stood next to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and said: “We decided to talk to each other instead of talking about each other.” ” But such an attitude would be treacherous in the 2024 presidential campaign. “These are the stakes,” Johnson says in the daisy commercial as a mushroom cloud rises on the screen, “to make a world where all God’s children can live, or go into darkness.” Those are still the stakes. But you wouldn’t know now from any of the candidates to be the next president of the United States.
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, was published in paperback this month with a new title about the war in Gaza.
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© Inter Press Service (2024) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service
