SAN FRANCISCO, USA, Sep 10 (IPS) – One evening in early September 1964, a terrifying commercial shocked 50 million Americans halfway through NBC’s “Monday Night at the Movies.” The ad began with a cute three-year-old girl counting flower petals as she pulled them from a daisy. Then came the somber voice-over of a man, counting down from ten to zero. Then an ominous roar and a mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb explosion.
The one-minute TV spot climaxed with audio of President Lyndon Johnson concluding that “we must love one another or we must die.” The ad made no mention of his upcoming election opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater, but it didn’t need to. By then, his nonchalant attitude toward nuclear weapons was well established. Goldwater’s best-seller The Conscience of a Conservative , published at the turn of the decade, was disturbingly open to the idea of starting a nuclear war, while the book exuded disdain for leaders who “would rather crawl on their knees to Moscow than die under an atomic bomb.” Close to winning the Republican presidential nomination, the Arizona senator suggested that “low-yield” nuclear bombs might be useful for defoliating forests in Vietnam. His own words gave others seeking the GOP nomination plenty to think about. Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton called Goldwater “a quick-fire dreamer” and said he “too often carelessly prescribed nuclear war as a solution to a troubled world.” New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller asked rhetorically: “How can it be common sense to give field commanders the authority to make decisions about the use of nuclear weapons?” Thus the stage was set for the “daisy” ad, which packed an emotional punch — and provoked a fierce backlash. Critics screamed bloody murder, decrying an attempt to use the specter of nuclear annihilation for political gain. After its purpose of putting the Goldwater camp on the defensive was accomplished, the ad never aired again as a paid advertisement. But national news outlets ran it while reporting on the controversy. Today it’s hard to imagine a campaign ad quite like the daisy spot from either the Democratic or Republican candidates for commander in chief, who seem to sidestep the issue of the dangers of nuclear war.
Yet those dangers are far greater today than they were 60 years ago. In 1964, the Doomsday Clock, kept by experts at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, was set to 12 minutes before apocalyptic midnight. Its ominous hands are now just 90 seconds away. Yet both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were silent in their convention speeches this summer on the need for real diplomacy on nuclear arms control, let alone steps toward disarmament. Trump issued standard warnings about Russian and Chinese arsenals and Iran’s nuclear program, and bragged about his rapport with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Left unmentioned was Trump’s presidential declaration in 2017 that if North Korea “makes any more threats to the United States,” it “will be met with fire and fury the likes of which the world has never seen.” Nor did he refer to his highly irresponsible tweet that Kim should be informed: “I have a nuclear button too, but it’s a much bigger and more powerful one than his, and my button works!” When Harris gave her acceptance speech, she did not include the words “atomic” or “nuclear” at all. The 2024 presidential campaign is now in full swing and completely lacking the kind of wisdom about nuclear weapons and nuclear superpower relations that Lyndon Johnson and eventually Ronald Reagan achieved during their presidencies. Johnson privately admitted that the daisy ad made voters afraid of Goldwater, which “we were going to do, damn it.” But the president was engaged in more than an electoral tactic. While he was methodically deceiving the American people while escalating the horrific war in Vietnam, Johnson was working to defuse the nuclear time bomb. “We have made further progress in an effort to improve our understanding of each other’s views on a number of issues,” Johnson said at the end of his extended summit meeting with 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 really interested in improving such understanding among leaders of the world’s major nuclear powers. Two decades after the summit that thawed the Cold War and gave rise to what was called “the spirit of Glassboro,” President Reagan stood next to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and said, “We decided to talk to each other instead of about each other.” But such a stance would be heresy in the 2024 presidential campaign. “These are the stakes,” Johnson said in the daisy ad as a mushroom cloud appeared on the screen, “to create a world in which all of God’s children can live, or go into darkness.” That’s still the stakes. But you wouldn’t know that from any of the candidates vying 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 released in paperback this month with a new afterword about the war in Gaza.
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© Inter Press Service (2024) — All rights reservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service