Disguised as a slender monograph, "Daisy Petals and Mushroom Clouds" is actually a political thriller. Robert Mann, a journalism professor at Louisiana State University, worked in the mosh pit of Louisiana politics when it was firmly Democratic, and his expertise is evident as he dissects the watershed presidential election of 1964.
Mr. Mann begins with a review of Barry Goldwater's embrace of and by the far right. In 1959, Goldwater allowed a National Review editor to combine some of his speeches with an articulation of his near-obsessive view of the Soviet menace. The resulting bestseller, "The Conscience of a Conservative," catapulted the Arizona Republican to the 1964 nomination. Goldwater proposed what he called "small, clean nuclear weapons for use in limited wars" against Communist foes. (Over the years, he refined his ideas to include defoliating the forests of Vietnam and Laos with "low-yield atomic weapons.") Goldwater accepted the Presidential nomination in his typical fiery manner and uncorked a classic that has inspired principled conservatives ever since: "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."
Democrats were not the only Americans alarmed by Goldwater's fervor. An aide to George Romney—Mitt's father and Michigan's governor at the time—fretted to a Time reporter, "Can you imagine what would have happened if Goldwater had been in the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis?" The reporter continues, deliciously, "The aide thereupon touched a lighted cigarette to an inflated balloon. Pop!"
Having watched Goldwater flail all summer, Lyndon Johnson summoned his entire campaign team in late August of 1964. He related a story of a man rescued from a fire. The man was too high to reach with a ladder, so the firemen threw him a rope and pulled him down. As Johnson saw it, "Barry's already got a rope around him, and he's knotted it pretty firm. All you have to do is give it a little tug."
Enter Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB), a small New York ad firm best known for its spots selling the Volkswagen Beetle. DDB had radical plans for political advertising, which previously had consisted mostly of candidates buying blocks of air time to sit behind a desk and deliver a speech for 30 minutes. This was as scintillating as it sounds: In 1952, one disgruntled viewer sent a telegram to Adlai Stevenson that read "I like Ike and I love Lucy. Drop dead." That same year, Eisenhower did a ground-breaking series of television ads in which he answered questions from "regular" Americans. Although the former general found the ads humiliating, they were an enormous success.
DDB had come to the attention of the Johnson campaign by way of the young aides Lloyd Wright and Bill Moyers, and discovered a president whose own approach to advertising was blunt: "Everybody worries about war and peace. Everything else is chickens—."
Mr. Mann skillfully builds the tension of his narrative as Election Day approaches. Expected to win by a landslide, Johnson was nevertheless concerned by the firebrand Goldwater. Polls on August 14, 1964 predicted a 59-32 victory for Johnson. This gap was not wide enough to quell Johnson's fear, so DDB finalized their first ad—they had prepared others that they would have run had the polls been to Johnson's liking—and showed it to the president. His comment was a simple "Good job, boys." DDB bought time on September 7, 1964, during NBC's popular "Monday Night at the Movies."
The infamous "Daisy Girl" commercial shows a young girl plucking and counting daisy petals, adorably inverting a few numbers. Her idyll is interrupted by the harsh sound of a man's voice droning a countdown. The ad ends with a nuclear mushroom cloud filling the screen.
Mr. Mann describes the ad and its creation in brilliant detail. He finds the sound man who pioneered both the use of real children's voices and the disembodied voice of a countdown. The ad itself, is a masterpiece of suspense. Never does it mention Goldwater. Never does it claim a candidate will start a nuclear war. But it instantly ended Goldwater's campaign.
The ad only aired once, a strategy that Mr. Mann concludes was a masterstroke. The specter of nuclear holocaust was terrifying. But if the ad had been repeated, audiences would have grown inured to the threat, a psychological effect called habituation. And Goldwater managed to keep getting in his own way. On September 18, he delivered a half-hour televised speech responding to the ad, giving it an extra radioactive half-life.
Goldwater never forgave the Johnson campaign for what he called "electronic dirt." Goldwater particularly hated Bill Moyers, writing of him that "he portrayed himself as a poor preacher boy, but he was actually involved in the dirtiest work . . . . Every time I see him, I get sick to my stomach." Indeed, Mr. Moyers, at Johnson's request, asked the FBI to investigate several members of the Goldwater team. Johnson's own aide, Walter Jenkins, had been arrested on October 7 for homosexual acts at a YMCA. In a 1974 Newsweek article about the investigation, Mr. Moyers gives what Mr. Mann concludes is a misleading account of why he asked the FBI for information. Mr. Moyers refused to discuss the investigation with Mr. Mann for the book and thus leaves uncontested a spectacularly nasty act for a man who later would instruct PBS viewers to follow their bliss.
While the "Daisy Girl" ad annihilated the Goldwater campaign, Mr. Mann believes it may have been a Pyrrhic victory for the Democrats. The Republican party shifted its base dramatically after the Goldwater fiasco, as conservatives in the Goldwater mold shrewdly outflanked East Coast moderates, setting the stage for Ronald Reagan's victory in 1980. The country rejected Goldwater in 1964, but Goldwater's position on the political spectrum is much closer to the middle today than to the edge.
Mr. Mann's book is as carefully conducted as a symphony, and it crescendos with great intensity on the night of the ad's airing. Memos included in an appendix bolster his research and contain some gems, such as this note to the president on October 20, 1964: "Our television has been most ineffective. We have used the same spots over and over until they have outlived their usefulness." How fascinating that the campaign that ran the single most effective political ad in history complains, only five weeks after it aired, about the ability of its ads to matter to voters.
—Mr. Kurson is co-author, with Rudy Giuliani, of "Leadership."