Television: Electronic Politics: The Image Game

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In maximizing his candidates' assets and overcoming, if not ignoring, their liabilities, Guggenheim has filmed: Harry Golden in front of the New York Public Library, speaking in support of Robert Kennedy, when Kennedy faced the antipathy of New York's Jewish voters; Senator Abraham Ribicoff walking in the country with his grandchildren, when Ribicoffs image was one of some stiffness; Senator George McGovern on a farm and at a country fair, when McGovern was being challenged as more interested in grand affairs of state than in the problems of his state.

Guggenheim, 45, is a liberal and works almost exclusively for Democrats. Exceptions were Simon and liberal Kentucky Senator John Sherman Cooper. Guggenheim reluctantly agrees with most of his competitors that the majority of people simply do not vote on the issues. But in fashioning his portraits of men seeking office, he says: "The question always narrows down to: Can you also become a demagogue [against a demagogic opponent] to win for a good man? Does the end justify the means? And always the answer is the same. Always it is no."

Guggenheim left the world of commercial television early in his career, because "the values seemed to revolve around deodorants." Harry Treleaven, 48, did not flee Madison Avenue. He mastered it. At 32, he became the youngest vice president in the history of the J. Walter Thompson agency, and quit after 19 years out of boredom. "I really love politics, where it all comes down to the wire and there is no second place," he says.

Unlike Guggenheim, whose skills are concentrated in film making, Treleaven manages all media aspects for his candidates. "I handle a campaign as 1 would an account," he says. "The discipline is the same. The problems are different." Treleaven solves them with an amazingly small staff: four people, including himself, and an answering service for his New York office. He goes into a client's state himself, often spending weeks there, speaking only to ask questions and absorb the political climate. He then goes to work with hired guns from a local advertising agency, making his headquarters and editing his film there. He accepts only Republicans, and not just any Republican. He would not handle one with anti-Nixon inclinations, like Goodell.

The stocky, gray-haired Treleaven is crisp and businesslike, though not unfriendly, but keeps his deepest feelings to himself. Even his business partner, James Allison, says: "I don't really know what Harry's philosophy is." Professionally, it parallels Guggenheim's. "You can't put phony words in somebody's mouth." But it is carefully selected mouthfuls his candidates utter, and not until polls help determine which ones they ought to be.

New Environment. Treleaven was the unwitting host to writer Joe McGinniss during the 1968 campaign and emerged as a main character in McGinniss's damning and documented book, The Selling of the President 1968. Treleaven insists on the essential honesty of Nixon's heavily used question-and-answer shows, almost universally regarded as staged. "There was no new Nixon; there was a new environment," he says.