Liking Ike
Eisenhower, Advertising, and the Rise of Celebrity Politics
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc
Published:8th Sep '16
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
To most historians, the first televised presdential debate between the haggard, unshaven Richard Nixon and the clean-cut, handsome John F. Kennedy provides the first example of television, then a new medium, demonstrating its unique power in American politics for the first time and for heralding a shift toward the primacy of the visual in presidential campaigns more generally. Yet, this popular narrative of JFK as the first media-savvy president overlooks the deft, innovative advertising techiniques and canny use of TV airtime adopted by his predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Liking Ike examines the prominent role that celebrities and advertising agencies played in Dwight Eisenhower's presidency. Guided by Madison Avenue executives and television pioneers, Eisenhower cultivated famous supporters as a way of building the broad-based support that had eluded Republicans for twenty years. It is customary to see the charismatic John F. Kennedy and his Rat Pack entourage as the beginning of presidential glamour in the United States, but from Walt Disney and Irving Berlin to Jimmy Stewart and Helen Hayes, celebrities regularly appeared in Eisenhower's campaigns. Ike's political career was so saturated with celebrity that opponents from the right and left accused him of being a "glamour " candidate. In a series of absorbing chapters covering the major candidates of the era--Eisenhower, Adlai Stevenson, Kennedy, Reagan--David Haven Blake foregrounds the behind-the-scenes operators who worked with the Madison Avenue executives who strategically brought celebrities into the political process. Based on extensive research, the book explores the changing dynamics of celebrity politics as Americans adjusted to the television age. By the mid-1920s, entertainers were routinely drawing publicity to their favorite candidates. But with the rise of television and mass advertising, political advisers began to professionalize the attention celebrities could bring to presidential campaigns. In meetings, memos, and television scripts, they charted a strategy for "leavening " political programming with celebrity interviews, musical performances, and elaborate "television spectaculars " that would surround their candidates with beautiful sets and popular personalities. Commentators worried about the seemingly superficial values that television had introduced to political campaigns, and writers, filmmakers, and fellow politicians criticized the influence of glamour and publicity. But despite these complaints, Eisenhower's legacy would live on in the subsequent careers of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan--and ultimately, provide the template for the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama, John McCain, and Hillary Clinton.
[A] lively and entertaining chronicle of the intersection of politics, advertising and celebrity in the 1950s Liking Ike makes an important contribution to our understanding of how modern politics has developed, particularly through the commodification of the presidency itself and the changing nature of Americans' relationship to the concept of celebrity David Haven Blake has succeeded in producing a book that stands on its own terms as a significant piece of historical research, while also prompting the reader to consider how we choose our political leaders and the means by which the foundations of presidential images are created. * Dr. Thomas Tunstall Allcock, Reviews in History *
A highly entertaining and informative book for collections on the media and American politics. Highly recommended. * CHOICE *
Liking Ike is the most comprehensive treatment yet of the ways in which the two Eisenhower presidential campaigns launched the commodification of American politicians. * The American Conservative *
David Haven Blake's Liking Ike is an outstanding contribution to the growing literature exploring the intimate links between Hollywood and politics. His lively narrative reveals how during the early 1950s, movie stars and advertising agencies recognized the importance of television and worked with Dwight Eisenhower to transform the ways in which candidates were sold to a mass audience of potential voters. * Steven Ross, author of Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics *
Liking Ike leavens the necessity of advertising with the buoyant yeast of celebrity when television was new. Blake's carefully researched and elegantly argued political history of celebrity's charming and disarming effects upon the American presidential campaign and the conduct of government arrives not a moment too soon. * William L. Bird, Curator Emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History *
Liking Ike has never been easier than in David Blake's fascinating account of the transformation of the heroic General Dwight David Eisenhower into Ike, the plain-spoken man from Abilene. Madison Avenue used television to mobilize voters by reassuring them that Eisenhower was someone they could relate to, and exposing the back room machinations of entrenched local Republicans. A good read for anyone interested in the intersection of media and politics. * Samuel L. Popkin, author of The Candidate: What It Takes to Win-And Hold-The White House *
[Liking Ike] serves as a useful account about the beginning of the modern presidential campaign, as we have come to know it ... We would all do well, in this environment, to meditate on the story Blake tells and to begin to reimagine how our politics can be different going forward. * John Kitch, VoegelinView *
This excellent book is an important contribution to the study of politics and culture in the United States. * Anne Mork, History *
- Winner of Winner of the 2017 PROSE Award in Media & Cultural Studies.
ISBN: 9780190278182
Dimensions: 241mm x 163mm x 31mm
Weight: 544g
298 pages