Joe McGinniss - The Selling of the President

There have been ten presidential elections since the 1968 contest between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey that is the subject of this book.

In 1968, the hiring of advertising agencies to develop campaign strategy was a deep, closely held secret. When I first learned, by sheer accident, that Humphrey had hired Doyle Dane Bernbachan archetype of the agency in Mad Men my attempts to gain access were quickly rebuffed. Executive vice president Ed Russell said, Do you think were crazy? Nobody is supposed to know about this stuff.

At Fuller & Smith & Ross, on Fifth Avenue, Harry Treleaven, borrowed from J. Walter Thompson for the Nixon campaign, was far more congenial. After he received approval from Nixon adviser Leonard Garment, who didnt see what harm I could do because I was just a naive kid from Philadelphia of whom no one in the big leagues of journalism had ever heard, Treleaven welcomed me to the team and kept all doors open for me throughout the campaign.

There was one dicey moment when TV wunderkind Roger Ailes came aboard. He was fresh from the successfully syndicated Mike Douglas Show, which taped in Philadelphia, where I worked as a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer . Roger would become a close friend and, in fact, despite the political abyss that separates us, remains one of my closest friends today.

Arriving at the Fuller & Smith & Ross offices for his first planning session with Treleaven, Rogera reader of my locally infamous liberal and antiwar column from Philadelphiatook one look at me and said, Holy shit! Who let you in here?

Please, Roger, dont rat me out.

Dont worry, he said. If theyre too dumb to read the Inquirer and find out how much you hate Nixon, its not my job to tell them.

Rogers job was to direct Nixons supposedly spontaneous Man in the Arena television appearances, something he did with sublime skill. As we all know, as the head of Fox News, hes now the most influential and powerful media figure in America. In The Selling of the President, youll meet the brash, brilliant, irreverent, twenty-something Roger Ailes. Its probably no exaggeration to say that without him, Richard Nixon would never have been elected president.

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In retrospectviewed from a vantage point that encompasses the craven madness of nominating Sarah Palin for national office1968 seems a time of innocence.

The Selling of the President is the first account of the marriage of convenience/mnage trois between national politics, network television, and Madison Avenue.

Im old enough to remember the last pre- Selling campaign: a bare-knuckle clash of ideologies between the Great Societys Lyndon Johnson and right-wing extremist Barry Goldwater. But even Goldwater had integrity. Had anyone come sniffing around him selling image-making advice, they would have received a swift boot out the door.

The last great selling job was on behalf of Barack Obama in 2008. A largely unknown black man with an un-American-sounding nameand the middle name Hussein!he needed all the help he could get, although it might well have been John McCains choice of Palin as his running mate, even more than all the craftiness of television and advertising professionals, that assured Obamas election.

The biggest changes in presidential campaigning since 1968 have been caused by the growth of cable TV and the Internet, thus assuring the decentralization of the dissemination of information. Print is dead, and even on television, partisan attack ads have replaced the kind of image enhancement that Roger Ailes gave to the rough-edged, sweaty, dark-bearded, scowling neurotic Richard Nixon.

Read The Selling of the President today and be present at the creation of the postmodern era of American politics, one that, Im sorry to say, Im not sure our republic will survive.

Joe McGinniss

Pelham, Massachusetts

July 22, 2012