AMERICAN NOTES: Unselling the War

A 20-year-old Yale junior named Ira Nerken, inspired by CBS-TV's documentary "The Selling of the Pentagon," decided that if the military could use elaborate advertising and public relations to win support for the war, the same techniques could be used to "unsell" it. Nerken contacted David McCall, president of the New York advertising agency of LaRoche, McCaffrey and McCall, Inc., and a new, remarkably sophisticated form of antiwar protest began.

Art directors, copywriters and others from 35 different ad agencies contributed their talents to the effort, named UNSELL, which was backed by some of the leaders of the trade, including Maxwell Dane of Doyle Dane Bernbach Inc. Last week UNSELL began displaying its antiwar campaign: 125 posters, 33 TV commercials and 31 radio spots, all of them pitched to political moderates and free of radical vitriol. In one TV ad, a pie is cut at a dinner table, and a black man, an old lady and a hardhat receive small slivers served up by Uncle Sam. A military man in gaudy uniform gets three-quarters of the pie, which he gulps down noisily. If radio and TV stations decline to air the ads as a "public service," then antiwar groups may buy time for them.

It is a peculiarly American operation but in some ways a belated one, since most public opinion polls indicate that a clear majority of Americans have already been unsold on the war. The White House, meantime, is starting an ad campaign of its own. With Administration backing, the New York agency of SSC&B is preparing a worldwide advertising effort to pressure North Viet Nam to allow impartial inspection of its prisoner-of-war camps. It would be one of the final ironies of Viet Nam if its great issues were settled on Madison Avenue.