Transcripts For CSPAN2 Liking Ike 20170521

Porch president ial campaign. With harding they kept harding at home, and everybody would come and visit harding, which would create a day of newspaper reportage as we would stay home and be folksy in ohio. The singer al joelson came from 50 broadway stories and paraded down main street and started singing songs in hardings praise. Thats the first time we have celebrities in the modern age who are very interested in advocating for a candidate. Its really with the advent of television in the 1950s that celebrity kole politics becomes a national episode. Eisenhower was an interesting case. Eisenhower was somebody who was noted . Politics. Was not interested in politics and wasnt interested in celebrity. Had been a military man his entire life and in fact he refused to run for president in 1952 but allowed his name to be entered and nominated so he spent most of the 1952 primary campaign overseas in paris where he was cream Supreme Commander of nato. He has the president ial candidate who was offsite, who wasnt participating in his campaign, and so what did people do at various recalls and events supporting rallies and events supports eisenhower . They relied on people like clark gable, or helen hayes, to come out some speak on his behalf and to support him as a candidate. One of the interesting things about the 1952 campaign is that the democrats had been in power for 20 years. Roosevelt had taken them through the depression and through most of world war ii. Truman had his own term, and now many people in the country felt that there needed to be a change in government. The republican front runner was a man named senator robert taft. Taft was from an old republican family in ohio. His father had been president and he was known in party circles as mr. Republican. Eisenhower came in and the taft people were meetly concerned about the emergence of this celebrity candidate. They called him a glamor candidate. Its a little hard for us to emergency to imagine eisenhower being labeled the glamor candidate but to the taft people whose who eisenhower represented. So eisenhower came in and there was a big struggle between traditional republicans and many of these people were not in internationalists, and then people like eisenhower, who were very media savvy, and very good on television and very good on the radio, and also had a much more Global Vision for the united states. Eisenhower was such a hero of monumental proportions. The person who had led the allied forces to victory in world war ii. So that many republicans in hollywood and Many Democrats who had previously supported roosevelt, found themselves being attracted to eisenhower. Theres something. The man that exyoud it exude ate lot of conversation and inspired confident in his supporters. So, one thing that eisenhowers candidateys for a lot of of peoplees celebrates are good at attracting people from the other people, people who can bring in independents and can bring in swing voters, in this case swingvoting democrats. Something that eisenhowers advertising people knew and they worked very hard to exploit it. You like ike, i like ike, everybody likes ike. For president. Well take ike to was. We dont want john or dean or hari harry. You like ike, eye like ike, everybody likes ike for president. Hang out the banner, beat the trumps, well take ike to washington. Note. In the 1950s commentate tokers were concerned that politics would become an exercise in show business, and their concern was that it would politics would turn voters into an audience and that the audiences would just soak up everything that had been told to them. A time period when people believed advertising was a form of mind control, and so people saw that if there was a totalitarian regime in the soviet union where people were not allowed to think independently, we were creating our own totalitarian environment through mass advertising so people like john steinbeck, or vans packard, who wrote eloquently about the problems of turning the nation into a mass of tv viewer. Somehow they would all become zombies and that was a word that people used, become zombies and thats one thing when youre buying a breakfast cereal but another thing when youre looking at a president ial candidate. Icening hour has a very uncover eisenhower has a very uncomfortable relationship with television and advertising. He was uncomfortable when he was asked to appear in television commercials. He was filmed by a guy named rosser reeves, very famous advertising he created the First Television commercials for a president ial campaign. Eisenhower was leery of the process and he was heard muttering to himself to think an old soldier has come to this. So there was a lot of resistance with eisenhower. But in it took him several years until he realized this was a useful way of connect with the elect for ata useful way of expecting connecting with the American People so hob would uncomfortable with television and show business as firms, came at first and came around seeing it could be beneficial to him and his administration. So politics has changed and grown tremendously since the 1950s. After eisenhower we had the rise of jfk and the glamorization of the first family. By the late 1960s, we have celebrities who are very involved in nixons campaign, and extraordinarily involved in the campaigns for the democratic candidates, particularly during the primaries, gene mccarthy, Bobby Kennedy being among them. Then in the 1980s we had the rise of Ronald Reagan. And reagan was an interesting case because reagan got his start in politics and in television back in the 1950s. The same advertising agency, dbdo, that had controlled many of ikes political appearances, that got Ronald Reagan to move from being a film actor to being a television host, and then a spokesman for conservative causes. So we can actually trace reagan back to the sort of same Promotional Team that had played such an Important Role in eisenhower. The age of mass media, an outage of Television First radio and then television and now Cable Television and social media celebrity has become for good or for bad a pretty important ingredient in how people evaluate president ial candidates. Its not that theyre looking for somebody who is a star. Its not like theyre looking for somebody who has their chops in entertainment. But they are looking for people who have a certain star quality, people who look good on television, who they feel they can live with seeing on their tv screens and on their newspapers for the next four years. So, the influence of celebrity is more powerful today than it certainly was in eisenhowers time. Id love for readers to come away from liking ike with a strong history of the phenomenal. People talk about its just come to us and something that has just come from the hollywood left. But in reality, this has been with us for a long time, and it raises a lot of questions about what we expect from our democracy. One of the interesting things to think. Today is, of course we have a Reality Television star who is our president. One thing that reading about eisenhower in the 1950s showed me is how things change very much in terms of what we expect from our entertainment and our media. As i was saying before, most of the commentators in the 1950s were worried that the influence of show business on politics would create a kind of listless environment in which we wouldnt really think critically about our politics. This is what eisenhowers adviserred aimed to do. They wanted to create a very peaceful center, that people could find a lot of agreement in as they watched variety shows supporting a president ial candidate. The same time there were a few commentators who said, you know, television may seem like its going to neuter all of us and may seem like its going to seem very make things very peaceful. But in fact television is going to be better at expressing conflict than it is expressing or creating peace, and i think we can say now in 2017 that television is much, much better at creating conflict and creating division rather than creating a sense of agreement and consensus. [inaudible conversations] dufor being here. Im the director of events. 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