Creator of daisy ad dies

Something I didn't know: Tony Schwartz, the adman responsible for the infamous "daisy ad," which helped propel Lyndon B. Johnson to victory in the 1964 U.S. presidential election, suffered from agoraphobia. Indeed, according to his NYT obituary, his anxiety was severe enough that he never left his neighborhood on the West Side of Manhattan -- and the people who worked with him had to travel to his apartment to do so, no matter how famous or important they were.

From the obit, for those of you unfamiliar with the daisy ad:

Of the thousands of television and radio advertisements on which Mr. Schwartz worked, none is as well known, or as controversial, as one that was broadcast exactly once: the so-called “daisy ad,” made for Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidential campaign in 1964.

Produced by the advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach in collaboration with Mr. Schwartz, the minute-long spot was broadcast on Sept. 7, 1964, during NBC’s “Monday Night at the Movies.” It showed a little girl in a meadow (in reality a Manhattan park), counting aloud as she plucks the petals from a daisy. Her voice dissolves into a man’s voice counting downward, followed by the image of an atomic blast. President Johnson’s voice is heard on the soundtrack:

“These are the stakes. To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.” (The president’s speech deliberately invoked a line from “September 1, 1939,” a poem by W. H. Auden written at the outbreak of World War II.)

Though the name of Johnson’s opponent, Senator Barry M. Goldwater, was never mentioned, Goldwater’s campaign objected strenuously to the ad. So did many members of the public, Republicans and Democrats alike. The spot was pulled from the air after a single commercial showing, but it had done its work: with its dire implications about Goldwater and nuclear responsibility, the daisy ad was generally credited with contributing to Johnson’s victory at the polls in November. It was also credited with heralding the start of ferociously negative political advertising in the United States.

It makes sense to me, that Schwartz suffered from agoraphobia. Who else but an agoraphobic -- who else but someone so attuned to threats in his environment, so viscerally aware of the ability of anxiety to change one's behavior -- to create the ad that jumpstarts the rise of the politics of fear?