Marketing: Programming a President

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Folksy Manner. Nixon was also mar keted through commercials supervised by Harry Treleaven, formerly of J. Walter Thompson. Treleaven was drinking a can of beer on the beach at Amagansett, L.I., one September day in 1967 when he was approached by a neigh bor, Len Garment, a partner in Nixon's law firm. Garment invited Treleaven to handle Nixon's TV ad campaign.

"We went to Treleaven," said Garment later, "because of his experience with the great institutional products of America. He handled Pan Am, Ford, RCA —the established American institutions.'

Nixon's staff even heeded the guidelines of a report pointing out that "the simple folksy manner of John Wayne can be effective with the target group" of voters they were after. Kevin Phillips, a vote analyst, added that "Wayne might sound bad to people in New York, but he sounds great to the shmucks we're trying to reach. The people down there along the Yahoo belt."

The crass language of TV huckstering rings authentically throughout The Selling of a President, particularly since nearly one-third of the book is devoted to reprinting notes and memos from Nixon's TV advisers. The book is fast-paced, fascinating—and a bit frightening. The men who wrote the memos probably meant no disrespect; they were merely transferring the cynicism of the ad world to the business of politics. The fact that they cannot differentiate between a candidate for President and a container of Ban tells a great deal more about advertising and television than it does about Nixon.