In 2004, during the Bush-Kerry campaign, retired Adm. Roy Hoffmann, head of the Swift Boat group, appears before the famous anti-John Kerry ad that questioned Kerry’s Vietnam service.

AP

PROVIDENCE — It was the most notorious political television spot of the 1960s: An angelic young girl — think Abigail Breslin — picks daisies in a sun-dappled meadow, then quickly dissolves into a nuclear mushroom cloud flashing across the screen.

The spot was done for Democratic President Lyndon Johnson’s reelection campaign against Republican Barry Goldwater. At the height of the Cold War, the message was harshly negative: that conservative Goldwater couldn’t be trusted with the nation’s nuclear arsenal.

As the mushroom cloud vanishes, the Texas drawl of Johnson says, “These are the stakes. To make a world where all God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other or we must die.”

Viewed from the prism of 2008, the “Daisy” ad looks quaint, like an artifact from the days of black-and-white TV. To a nation numbed by years of scorching negative political television spots, it appears as just another salvo in the thrust and parry of modern politics.

But if you roll back the screen to 1964 — shortly after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and the 1963 murder of President John F. Kennedy — the Daisy ad created havoc for Johnson’s campaign.

“There weren’t that many negative ads back then,” says Darrell West, a Brown University political science professor and expert on campaign advertising. “So this one really stood out in the nuclear age. It only ran once, but it attracted so much media attention that it became a cultural icon.”

Decades ago, presidential campaigns ran only a handful of commercials. This year, more money has been spent than ever on campaign ads, roughly $200 million so far, according to a study by University of Wisconsin Prof. Kenneth Goldstein. More than 300 different spots have been aired this year and more are produced on such new media Internet sites as YouTube.

West has teamed up with L. Patrick Devlin, a retired University of Rhode Island professor, to create one of the nation’s most complete archives of presidential election TV commercials, a genre that began with the 1952 election between Republican Dwight Eisenhower and Democrat Adlai Stevenson.

West and Devlin say they believe their collection is the most complete trove of presidential campaign ads, although the University of Oklahoma has what is regarded as the most extensive archive of TV ads for campaigns in general.

West and Devlin sell compilations of representative older spots to college and university teachers to use in classes. Recent ads can be obtained with the click of a mouse by logging on to the candidate campaign Web sites.

While West has collected spots from recent campaigns, it was Devlin’s obsession with such commercials that gave the archive its historic depth, with footage from the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

Both West and Devlin have long studied and written scholarly papers and books on campaign commercials from slightly different perspectives. Devlin was a professor of political communication for 39 years at URI, and West, who has taught at Brown for more than two decades, is leaving the university next month to take a top position at The Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

In 1972, Devlin used a URI sabbatical to begin researching presidential campaign ads. Not surprisingly, he found the fiercely competitive campaign consultants and advertising execs who produced the spots unwilling to talk to him during the campaign. But after it was over, he interviewed the ad makers and found them ready to spill all about campaign messages and how the ads were produced.

Most of his collection came from those who made the ads. “I got to know these people and had relationships with them from my research,” says Devlin.

IN THE EARLIEST days, Devlin says, the campaigns produced biographical ads, often using footage from candidate news conferences and public speeches. Thus, Eisenhower in 1952 ran a spot called “The Man From Abilene,” focusing on his Kansas roots and his persona as a World War II hero.

Eisenhower defeated Stevenson that year. So it was no surprise that in the Eisenhower-Stevenson rematch of 1956, Stevenson ran an ad titled “The Man from Libertyville,” stressing his small-town Illinois background.

“Stevenson was seen as an intellectual, an egghead, and his campaign was trying to make him look like more of a common man,” says Devlin.

Devlin went through several permutations of recording technology to preserve the commercials. “At the start, I had reel-to-reel two-inch tapes. I’d take them up to Channel 36 in Providence and transfer them to three-quarter-inch tape. Then Betamax came along and VHS. … Now Darrell has compiled all the current ads on DVD, and they are accessible on the Internet.”

After each campaign, after he had debriefed the consultants, Devlin would write an article reviewing the ads for scholarly journals in his field, such as the Journal of Broadcasting, Political Communication Review and Central States Communication Journal.

One of the verities of political consulting is that many of the same ad makers work from presidential campaign to campaign, Devlin says.

Another trend that Devlin discovered is that “negative ads are nothing new.” Eisenhower used them against Stevenson by trying to link the Illinoisan to scandals of the administration of Harry Truman, a Democrat.

By 1960, Democrat John F. Kennedy used a famous Eisenhower news conference quip to slam Richard Nixon, that year’s Republican nominee. Nixon had been Eisenhower’s vice president and ran on a platform that he had more experience than Kennedy, then a Massachusetts senator who had no executive experience.

To undercut Nixon’s theme — his campaign buttons stated “Experience Counts” — Kennedy used footage from an Eisenhower news conference. Asked by a reporter what “major idea” of Nixon’s that Eisenhower had incorporated into his presidency, Eisenhower, in jest, said, “If you give me a week I might think of one. I don’t remember.”

Kennedy’s was the first campaign to make extensive use of polling to fashion commercial messages, Devlin says. Yet, the JFK ads look dated; television in those days was monochromatic; color wasn’t used in ads until 1968 when Nixon defeated Democrat Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor who ran as a candidate of the American Party, a third party.

The older ads — those run before the 1980 election between Republican Ronald Reagan and Democrat Jimmy Carter — were much longer than the 30-second spots that are now familiar, says Devlin. “Before 1980, 40 percent of all ads were of the 4 minute, 20-second variety.”

WEST SAYS one of the most remarkable aspects of campaign commercials is that how often a commercial runs or how many media markets it covers does not always determine how it registers in the public consciousness.

Rather, how much coverage an ad receives in newspapers and on TV news shows often determines how far the message travels. This is especially true of partisan, hard-hitting spots, says West.

Johnson’s 1964 Daisy ad is an early example. That spot aired just once, on NBC’s Monday Night at the Movies. LBJ’s campaign caught so much grief for invoking the specter of nuclear Armageddon that it quickly took the ad off the air.

But the damage had been done. The spot attracted so much newspaper and television news coverage that it became a symbol for tough political TV attacks.

Another truism of TV campaign ads is that the same messages are used over and over. The best current example is the “red phone” 3 a.m. ad that New York Sen. Hillary Clinton used against Sen. Barack Obama in later primaries.

The ad showed a telephone ringing at 3 a.m. at the White House and asked voters which candidate had the credentials to assume the role of commander in chief in an emergency.

In 1984, Minnesota Sen. Walter Mondale used a similar ringing red phone ad to question Colorado Sen. Gary Hart’s readiness to handle the duties of commander in chief.

“This is a pretty typical message to use against a candidate seen as having less experience,” says West. “The Clinton telephone ad received more news coverage than any other ad during the [2008] primary season.

“I think you are going to see McCain use something similar against Obama in the general election,” says West.

Patrick Devlin can be contacted at patdevlin@mail.uri.edu

Selected presidential campaign television spots can be viewed at www.ou.edu/pccenter/spotsonline. htm

smackay@projo.com