The so-called “daisy ad,” made for Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidential campaign in 1964.
Tony Schwartz, a self-taught, sought-after and highly reclusive media consultant who helped create what is generally considered to be the most famous political ad to appear on television, died Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 84.
His death was announced by his daughter, Kayla Schwartz-Burridge.
“Media consultant” is barely adequate to describe Mr. Schwartz’s portfolio. In a career of more than half a century, he was variously an art director; advertising executive; urban folklorist who captured the cacophony of New York streets on phonograph records; radio host; Broadway sound designer; college professor, media theorist and author who wrote books about the persuasive power of sound and image; and maker of commercials for products, candidates and causes. What was more, Mr. Schwartz, who had suffered from agoraphobia since the age of 13, accomplished most of these things entirely within his Manhattan home.
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.
In interviews and on his Web site, www.tonyschwartz.org, Mr. Schwartz said he had created the daisy ad in its entirety, an account that was publicly disputed over the years by members of the Doyle Dane Bernbach team. (The daisy ad was modeled directly on a radio commercial for nuclear disarmament that Mr. Schwartz had made for the United Nations in the early 1960s.) What is generally acknowledged is that Mr. Schwartz was at least responsible for the overall audio concept of the daisy ad — the child counting up, the man counting down, the explosion — and for producing the soundtrack.
Over the years, Mr. Schwartz helped develop advertising campaigns for hundreds of political candidates, most Democrats, among them Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. (All of them, no matter how eminent, made the trek to Mr. Schwartz’s home to be filmed.) He was also known for creating some of television’s earliest, and most evocative, anti-smoking commercials, a cause on which he worked for much of his career.
The subject of frequent articles in the news media, Mr. Schwartz was described often as an impassioned visionary and occasionally as a skilled trafficker in truisms with a talent for self-promotion. His work was likened frequently — sometimes approvingly, sometimes not — to that of the media scholar Marshall McLuhan, a mentor and close friend. (He was sometimes confused with the Tony Schwartz who was a co-author of memoirs by Michael D. Eisner and Donald Trump.) But detractors and admirers alike praised Mr. Schwartz for being one of the first people to put the neglected medium of sound to effective use in television advertising. He was widely credited, for instance, with being the first person to use real children’s voices in the soundtracks of television commercials, something he began doing in the late 1950s. Advertisers had long considered young children too intractable to deliver their lines on cue; their dialogue had traditionally been recorded by adult actresses attempting to sound like children.
Anthony Schwartz was born in Manhattan on Aug. 19, 1923. He was reared in New York City and Crompond, N.Y., near Peekskill. As a youth, Tony was an ardent ham-radio operator and also interested in visual art. At 16, he went blind for about six months as a result of an unspecified episode of “an emotional type,” as he told People magazine years later. His blindness strengthened his already deep connection to the auditory world.
Mr. Schwartz earned an undergraduate degree in graphic design from the Pratt Institute, followed by service during World War II as a civilian artist for the Navy. Afterward, he worked as an art director at several ad agencies and later ran his own agency, the Wexton Company, which later became Solow/Wexton.
Around this time, Mr. Schwartz also bought his first wire recorder. Slinging it heavily over his shoulder, he began to harvest the intoxicating sounds of the city: foghorns and folk singers; street vendors hawking their wares; a shoemaker plying his trade; a Central Park zookeeper waxing poetic on the care and feeding of lions; hundreds of taxi drivers; and a slew of ordinary New Yorkers, just talking.
Mr. Schwartz also built an important archive of folk music, recording young artists like Harry Belafonte and the Weavers performing in his home. Through his extensive correspondence with other, far-flung audiophiles, he augmented his collection with their recordings of music from around the globe.
During the 1950s and afterward, Mr. Schwartz produced more than dozen record albums, most for the Folkways label. Among them were “Sounds of My City”; “1, 2, 3 and a Zing, Zing, Zing,” featuring the songs and games of New York children; and “A Dog’s Life,” which captured the sounds in the first year in the life of a real dog. (Many of these albums are available as CD’s from Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, www.folkways.si.edu.)
Because of his agoraphobia, Mr. Schwartz confined his fieldwork to his immediate neighborhood, on Manhattan’s West Side. One result was “New York 19” — the number denoted the district’s old postal zone — which documented the “music” Mr. Schwartz encountered on his walks there, from street performers to the lilting cadences of immigrant speech to a pneumatic drill singing its achingly familiar aria.
For 31 years, from 1945 to 1976, Mr. Schwartz was the producer and host of “Around New York,” a radio program broadcast on WNYC. He was also a sound designer for several Broadway plays, among them “Two for the Seesaw” (1958) and “The Miracle Worker” (1959).
Mr. Schwartz was a shrewd observer of communication in its many forms, in particular the persuasive marriage of word and image known as advertising. The aim of advertising, Mr. Schwartz often said, should not be to introduce viewers to new ideas, but rather to bring out ones that were already present, lurking subconsciously in the mind.
“The best political commercials are Rorschach patterns,” he wrote in his book “The Responsive Chord” (Anchor Press, 1973). “They do not tell the viewer anything. They surface his feelings and provide a context for him to express these feelings.”
Mr. Schwartz also wrote “Media, the Second God,” published by Random House in 1981. He taught media studies at several universities, including Fordham, Columbia, New York University and Harvard, using a variety of technologies — among them two-way telephones and live satellite transmissions — to conduct his classes from the security of his home. As he often said late in life, he had delivered lectures to every continent but Antarctica, all without leaving the house.
Besides his daughter Michaela Schwartz-Burridge, who is known as Kayla, Mr. Schwartz is survived by his wife, the former Reenah Lurie, whom he married in 1959; a son, Anton; a brother, Lasker, known as Larry; and one grandchild.
Among Mr. Schwartz’s most famous television ads is one he wrote and produced for the American Cancer Society; it was first broadcast in 1963, a year before the Surgeon General’s warning on the dangers of smoking was released. The ad showed two children dressing up in adult clothes. The announcer’s voice said, simply: “Children love to imitate their parents. Children learn by imitating their parents. Do you smoke cigarettes?”
He later produced an evocative television ad in which Patrick Reynolds, a grandson of the tobacco magnate R. J. Reynolds, named the members of his family who had died of cancer, emphysema and heart disease.
Mr. Schwartz’s commercial clients included Coca-Cola (for which he created the well-known TV ad featuring a sumptuously sweating bottle with the sound of pouring liquid as the only audio element); American Express; Chrysler; Kodak; and Paine Webber, among many others.
In 2007, Mr. Schwartz’s entire body of work from 1947 to 1999, including his field recordings and the thousands of radio and television commercials he made, was acquired by the Library of Congress.
To the end of his career, Mr. Schwartz was asked often about the daisy ad. To the end of his career, he defended it.
“For many years, it’s been referred to as the beginning of negative commercials,” Mr. Schwartz said in an interview with MSNBC in 2000. “There was nothing negative about it. Frankly, I think it was the most positive commercial ever made.”