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The Dangerous Silence on Nuclear War 60 Years After Famous 'Daisy Ad'
When Harris delivered her acceptance speech in Chicago, it did not include the words “atomic” or “nuclear” at all.
Sep 09, 2024
One evening in early September 1964, a frightening commercial jolted 50 million Americans who were partway through watching “Monday Night at the Movies” on NBC. The ad began with an adorable three-year-old girl counting petals as she pulled them from a daisy. Then came a man’s somber voiceover, counting down from ten to zero. Then an ominous roar and a mushroom cloud from a nuclear bomb explosion.
The one-minute TV spot reached its climax with audio from President Lyndon Johnson, concluding that “we must love each other, or we must die.” The ad did not mention his opponent in the upcoming election, Sen. Barry Goldwater, but it didn’t need to. By then, his cavalier attitude toward nuclear weapons was well established.
Goldwater’s bestseller The Conscience of a Conservative, published at the start of the decade, was unnervingly open to the idea of launching a nuclear war, while the book exuded disdain for leaders who “would rather crawl on knees to Moscow than die under an Atom bomb.” Closing in on the Republican nomination for president, the Arizona senator suggested that “low-yield” nuclear bombs could be useful to defoliate forests in Vietnam.
His own words gave plenty of fodder to others seeking the GOP nomination. Pennsylvania Gov. William Scranton called Goldwater “a trigger-happy dreamer” and said that he “too often casually prescribed nuclear war as a solution to a troubled world.” New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller unloaded with a rhetorical question: “How can there be sanity when he wants to give area commanders the authority to make decisions on the use of nuclear weapons?”
- YouTubeyoutu.be
So, the stage was set for the “daisy ad,” which packed an emotional wallop -- and provoked a fierce backlash. Critics cried foul, deploring an attempt to use the specter of nuclear annihilation for political gain. Having accomplished the goal of putting the Goldwater camp on the defensive, the commercial never aired again as a paid ad. But national newscasts showed it while reporting on the controversy.
Today, a campaign ad akin to the daisy spot is hard to imagine from the Democratic or Republican nominee to be commander in chief, who seem content to bypass the subject of nuclear-war dangers. Yet those dangers are actually much higher now than they were 60 years ago. In 1964, the Doomsday Clock maintained by experts at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was set at 12 minutes to apocalyptic midnight. The ominous hands are now just 90 seconds away.
Yet, in their convention speeches this summer, both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were silent on the need to engage in genuine diplomacy for nuclear arms control, let alone take steps toward disarmament.
Trump offered standard warnings about Russian and Chinese arsenals and Iran’s nuclear program, and boasted of his rapport with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Left unmentioned was Trump’s presidential statement in 2017 that if North Korea made “any more threats to the United States,” that country “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Nor did he refer to his highly irresponsible tweet that Kim should be informed “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
When Harris delivered her acceptance speech, it did not include the words “atomic” or “nuclear” at all.
Now in high gear, the 2024 presidential campaign is completely lacking in the kind of wisdom about nuclear weapons and relations between the nuclear superpowers that Lyndon Johnson and, eventually, Ronald Reagan attained during their presidencies.
Johnson privately acknowledged that the daisy commercial scared voters about Goldwater, which “we goddamned set out to do.” But the president was engaged in more than an electoral tactic. At the same time that he methodically deceived the American people while escalating the horrific war on Vietnam, Johnson pursued efforts to defuse the nuclear time bomb.
“We have made further progress in an effort to improve our understanding of each other’s thinking on a number of questions,” Johnson said at the conclusion of his extensive 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 genuinely interested in improving such understanding between leaders of the biggest nuclear states.
Two decades after the summit that defrosted the Cold War and gave rise to what was dubbed “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 an attitude would be heresy in the 2024 presidential campaign.
“These are the stakes,” Johnson said in the daisy ad as a mushroom cloud rose on screen, “to make a world in which all God’s children can live, or to go into the dark.”
Those are still the stakes. But you wouldn’t know it now from either of the candidates vying to be the next president of the United States.
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Is the Ghost of Hubert Humphrey Stalking Kamala Harris?
As a pivotal election neared, a candidate had to decide whether to keep supporting an unpopular war or speak out for a meaningful change. Humphrey faced that choice in 1968. Harris faces it now.
Aug 15, 2024
After the Democrat in the White House decided not to run for reelection, the vice president got the party’s presidential nod—and continued to back the administration’s policies for an unpopular war. As the election neared, the candidate had to decide whether to keep supporting the war or speak out for a change.
Hubert Humphrey faced that choice in 1968. Kamala Harris faces it now.
Despite the differences in eras and circumstances, key dynamics are eerily similar. The history of how Vice President Humphrey navigated the political terrain of the war in Vietnam has ominous parallels with how Vice President Harris has been dealing with the war in Gaza.
From Landslide to Chaos
For millions of liberals, during the first half of the 1960s, Hubert Humphrey was the nation’s most heroic politician. As the Senate majority whip, he deftly championed landmark bills for civil rights and social programs. By the time President Lyndon B. Johnson put him on the Democratic ticket in 1964, progressive momentum was in high gear.
LBJ defeated ultra-conservative Barry Goldwater in a landslide. As vice president, Humphrey assisted Johnson to follow up on the 1964 Civil Rights Act with the 1965 Voting Rights Act and a huge set of antipoverty measures while enacting broad social programs in realms of education, health care, nutrition, housing and the environment. Midway through the summer of 1965, Johnson signed Medicare and Medicaid into law.
The chaos and bitterness in Chicago underscored how the vice president’s deference to the war president had weakened the party while undermining the chances for victory.
Meanwhile, escalation of the U.S. war on Vietnam was taking off. And, as Martin Luther King Jr. soon pointed out, “When a nation becomes obsessed with the guns of war, social programs must inevitably suffer. We can talk about guns and butter all we want to, but when the guns are there with all of its emphasis you don’t even get good oleo [margarine]. These are facts of life.”
At first, Vice President Humphrey wrote slightly dovish memos to Johnson, who angrily rejected the advice and retaliated by excluding him from key meetings. Banished to the doghouse, Humphrey licked his wounds and changed his approach. By early 1966, he was deferring to Johnson’s war views in private and advocating for the Vietnam War in public.
As the war escalated, so did the vice president’s zeal to extol it as a fight for freedom and democracy. “By 1967 he had become a hawk on Vietnam,” biographer Arnold Offner noted. Beneath the lofty rhetoric was cold calculation.
“Humphrey’s passage from dove to hawk on Vietnam was not the result of one-sided White House briefings or of his ability, as one journalist had noted, to see silver linings in the stormiest clouds,” Offner wrote. “His change of position derived from a case of willful mind over matter, from his strong anti-Communism combined with political expediency driven by ambition, namely desire to remain in Johnson’s good graces and perhaps succeed him whenever his presidency ended.”
That desire to be in the president’s good graces did not dissipate after Johnson suddenly announced in a televised address on March 31, 1968 that he would not seek reelection. Four weeks later, Humphrey launched a presidential campaign that pitted him against two antiwar candidates, Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy.
From the outset, Humphrey was plagued by his fear of antagonizing Johnson if he were to depart from a pro-war script. The United States had “nothing to apologize for,” Humphrey said. He didn’t run in any primaries and was not willing to debate McCarthy or Kennedy.
Humphrey mouthed the same old rhetoric to rationalize the administration’s policies for the war in Vietnam. Several high-level supporters—including Iowa’s Governor Harold Hughes, Vermont’s Governor Philip Hoff, and the venerable former New York governor and ambassador Averell Harriman—advised him to resign the vice presidency and thus free himself from entanglement with Johnson. But to Humphrey, such a step was unthinkable.
And so, Hubert Humphrey rode in the caboose of the war train all summer. In late August, the day before the Democratic National Convention got underway in Chicago, he told viewers of the CBS program Face the Nation that the administration’s policies in Vietnam were “basically sound.”
The convention nominated him while, outside, tear gas filled the air during what a report from a special federal commission later called a police riot that meted out violence to antiwar demonstrators as well as some journalists. Inside the turbulent convention, dissenting delegates were outshouted, outvoted and suppressed by the pro-Humphrey forces.
The chaos and bitterness in Chicago underscored how the vice president’s deference to the war president had weakened the party while undermining the chances for victory. In polls, Humphrey trailed the Republican candidate Richard Nixon by double digits.
And yet, like a true warhorse, the VP could not bring himself to break from the president’s steely insistence on maintaining the U.S. government’s horrific violence in Vietnam. The Democratic ticket of Humphrey and Maine’s senator Edmund Muskie was in a tailspin, propelled downward by Humphrey’s refusal to break ranks with Johnson.
It wasn’t until Sept. 30 that Humphrey took a meaningful step. His campaign bought 30 minutes of national TV air time on NBC, and he used it to deliver a speech that finally created a bit of daylight between him and Johnson’s war. Humphrey said that as president he’d be willing to halt the bombing of North Vietnam. The speech revived his campaign, which nearly closed the gap with Nixon in October. But it was too little, too late.
Trying to Square a Circle of Mass Murder With the 'Politics of Joy'?
Like Hubert Humphrey six decades ago, Kamala Harris has remained in step with the man responsible for changing her title from senator to vice president. She has toed President Biden’s war line, while at times voicing sympathy for the victims of the Gaza war that’s made possible by policies that she supports. Her words of compassion have yet to translate into opposing the pipeline of weapons and ammunition to the Israeli military as it keeps slaughtering Palestinian civilians.
As the Democratic standard-bearer during carnage in Gaza, Harris has been trying to square a circle of mass murder, expressing empathy for victims while staying within bounds of U.S. government policies. Last week, Harris had her national security adviser declare that “she does not support an arms embargo on Israel.”
Like Hubert Humphrey six decades ago, Kamala Harris has remained in step with the man responsible for changing her title from senator to vice president
If maintained, that stance will continue to be a moral catastrophe—while increasing the chances that Harris will lose to Donald Trump. In effect, so far, Harris has opted to stay aligned with power brokers, big donors and conventional political wisdom instead of aligning with most voters. A CBS News/YouGov poll in June found that Americans opposed sending “weapons and supplies to Israel” by 61 to 39 percent.
Last week, Harris described herself and running-mate Tim Walz as “joyful warriors.” Many outlets have heralded their joyride along the campaign trail. The Associated Pressreported that “Harris is pushing joy.” A New York Times headline proclaimed that “joy is fueling her campaign.” The brand of the Harris campaign is fast becoming “the politics of joy.”
Such branding will be a sharp contrast to the outcries from thousands of protesters in Chicago outside the Democratic National Convention next week, as they denounce U.S. complicity with the methodical killing of so many children, women and other civilians in Gaza.
Campaigning for joy while supporting horrendous warfare is nothing new. Fifty-six years before Vice President Harris called herself a “joyful warrior,” Vice President Humphrey declared that he stood for the “politics of joy” when announcing his run for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination.
At that point, the Pentagon was several years into its massive killing spree in Vietnam, as Humphrey kicked off his campaign by saying: “here we are the spirit of dedication, here we are the way politics ought to be in America, the politics of happiness, politics of purpose, politics of joy; and that’s the way it’s going to be, all the way, too, from here on out.”
If Kamala Harris loses to Trump after sticking with her support for arming the slaughter in Gaza, historians will likely echo words from biographer Offner, who wrote that after the 1968 election Humphrey “asked himself repeatedly whether he should have distanced himself sooner from President Johnson on the war. The answer was all too obvious.”
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Blank Checks for War: Congress Has Abdicated Its Power From Tonkin to Gaza
As the 60th anniversary of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution approaches, it’s time to reflect on how Congress solidified its long-standing deference to the presidency on foreign policy and how the people can make their voices heard.
Aug 01, 2024
With the U.S.- backed carnage in Gaza continuing and the threat of growing violence looming throughout the region (in Lebanon, Iran, and who knows where else), we need to think more deeply than ever about how the American people have historically been excluded from foreign policy decision-making. An upcoming anniversary should remind us of what sent us down this undemocratic path.
Sixty years ago, on August 7, 1964, U.S. Congress handed President Lyndon B. Johnson the power to wage a major war in Vietnam, solidifying its long-standing deference to the presidency on foreign policy. Not once since World War II has Congress exercised its constitutional responsibility to vote on declarations to decide if, when, and where the United States goes to war.
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964 flew through Congress, in part because most members trusted the president’s assurance that he sought “no wider war.” Their trust was misplaced. The Johnson administration kept secret and lied about its plans for future military escalation in Vietnam. It also lied about the incident used to persuade Congress to give LBJ a blank check to use military force however he wanted: the false claim that American ships had been the targets of unprovoked and unequivocal attacks by North Vietnamese patrol boats.
We have long had more than enough evidence to demand fundamental changes in U.S. foreign policy. We can’t wait for Congress to represent us faithfully.
In fact, the United States had been fighting a secret war against North Vietnam since 1961. The U.S. destroyers that LBJ said were innocently sailing on the “high seas” were there to support South Vietnamese attacks (organized by the U.S. military and CIA) on North Vietnamese coastal villages. On August 2, 1964, these ongoing acts of war finally provoked a few Vietnamese patrol boats to chase after a U.S. destroyer which, firing first, easily disabled the small vessels. The Vietnamese managed to fire a few torpedoes but missed. There were no American casualties. Not exactly Pearl Harbor.
What’s more, the White House also claimed it had “unequivocal” evidence that North Vietnamese patrol boats attacked again on August 4. In fact, the U.S. commander on the scene sent a “flash message” urging civilian authorities to delay any decision—because what first seemed like an attack may have been a false alarm caused by “freak weather effects on radar and overeager sonarmen.” Within days it was all but certain that no second attack had occurred. As President Johnson said to an aide, “Hell, those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish!”
Nonetheless, Johnson went on television near midnight on August 4 to announce that it was his “duty” to launch a “retaliatory” airstrike. As he spoke, 64 U.S. warplanes were on their way to bomb North Vietnam. The next day LBJ asked Congress for a resolution giving him the authority “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States.” We now know that the heart of this resolution had been drafted months earlier. The administration had just been waiting for a pretext to ram it through Congress.
We also know the lies didn’t stop there. That fall, as Johnson campaigned for the presidency, he sounded like a peace candidate, promising that he would not send “our boys to do the fighting for Asian boys.” Running against pro-war Republican Barry Goldwater, LBJ won in a landslide. Americans voted for peace and ended up with a war that killed more than 3 million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans.
Virtually every top U.S. foreign policy official knew the Johnson administration was lying about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, including 33-year-old Daniel Ellsberg. By chance, Ellsberg’s first full day on the job, as one of Robert McNamara’s Pentagon “whiz kids,” was August 4, 1964. Ellsberg was then a Cold War hawk who supported the U.S. mission in Vietnam. Like all his colleagues, he raised no internal objections to Johnson’s airstrikes or the administration’s effort to sell the Tonkin Gulf Resolution through deceit. And no insider gave a second’s thought to revealing those lies to Congress, the media, or the public.
After a year in the Pentagon, nearly two years in Vietnam, and two more years meeting young anti-war activists and intensely studying the 7,000-page top-secret history of decision-making in Vietnam that became known as the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg underwent a dramatic political and moral conversion. By 1967, he believed the war an unwinnable stalemate from which the U.S. should find a face-saving exit. By 1969, he regarded it as fundamentally immoral and unjust, and thought the U.S. should withdraw unilaterally and immediately.
At that point, Ellsberg decided to photocopy the Pentagon Papers and make them public, hoping that their sordid record of government lying would further ignite anti-war activism. He did so with the knowledge that it might bring him a life sentence in prison. First Ellsberg tried to persuade anti-war senators to put the Pentagon Papers into the public record. When that effort failed, he took the papers to The New York Times and 18 other newspapers. Each of them published substantial portions in June 1971.
Later that year, Ellsberg spoke with former Oregon Senator Wayne Morse, one of only two members of Congress who voted against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. They talked about the documents in the Pentagon Papers that contained detailed evidence of the Johnson administration’s lies about the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Morse said to Ellsberg, “If you’d given me those documents, at the time, in 1964, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution would never have gotten out of committee. And if they had brought it to the floor, it would have lost.”
You can’t replay history, so we can’t test Morse’s claim, but Ellsberg has many times said that the greatest regret of his life was not exposing the government’s lies about Vietnam much earlier. There were many reasons why he didn’t, and why so few officials ever expose national security wrongdoing. The biggest reason, Ellsberg came to realize, was the intense culture of power, loyalty, and careerism that characterizes foreign policy circles. Almost no one in those positions, even those who have serious objections to ongoing policies, is willing to risk their insider status and their access to power and privileged information. Most fully internalize the arrogant assumption that the foreign policy elite understands far better than Congress or the people how the world works and how the U.S. should exercise its power.
And Congress, for its part, continues to enable an ever more imperial presidency that decides when and where the U.S. goes to war. It almost never uses the power of the purse to reduce U.S. militarism or to cut funding for unpopular wars. The nearly trillion-dollar Pentagon budget is rubber-stamped every year. There is no guarantee that a more engaged Congress would give us a less militarized and interventionist foreign policy. But it would make that policy more accountable to a public which historically has been substantially more anti-war than its representatives. As in the Vietnam era, a majority of Americans opposed the 21st century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan many years before they ended. And since at least March 2024 a majority of Americans have opposed the Israeli government’s war on Gaza, yet Congress continues to bankroll U.S. support for it.
We have seen, in the last 10 months, an unprecedented outpouring of American protest in support of Palestinian rights. For good reason. Nearly 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them civilians, and many of them children, have been killed by the Israeli military’s indiscriminate and disproportionate response to the Hamas killing of some 1,100 Israelis on October 7, 2023. Around 1.7% of the Gazan population (2.3 million) have been killed and at least 90% displaced from their homes (many have had to flee multiple times). A recent study by the medical journal The Lancet, estimates that the death toll in Gaza could reach 186,000 even if there is a cease-fire today.
For most Americans, this level of suffering is unimaginable. Yet we must try to imagine it. If we were Gaza, at least 5.7 million of us would be dead, the vast majority women, children, and other civilians. Many millions more would be among the uncounted dead and dying—buried, lost, sick, starving. More than 300 million of us would be forced from our homes, on the road seeking shelter, food, and water under ongoing military attacks and perils beyond description.
That is the reality in Gaza.
In the end, only a mass democratic movement has the potential to dramatically change U.S. foreign policy. The first challenge is to overthrow the baseless claim that the United States is the greatest force for good in the world, the “indispensable nation” that stands for the rule of law, freedom, and democracy. Our record does not warrant such a delusion. Only when that ideology and naïve faith is broadly undermined can we hope to chip away at the long-standing infrastructure of U.S. militarism—the over 750 military bases on foreign soil, the annual military exercises in two-thirds of the world’s nations, and the “defense” budget that equals the next nine most militarized nations combined.
Ellsberg and Morse were right. The people must know the truth. But we have long had more than enough evidence to demand fundamental changes in U.S. foreign policy. We can’t wait for Congress to represent us faithfully. The people’s voice must be heard.
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