The Fifties

by David Halberstam

modern and a bit less of a prig, he might have been elected President that year. So in 1952, when a group of Texas oilmen (“I had some oil interests at the time,” Reeves once noted) who supported Eisenhower asked him to come up with a retaliatory slogan to the Democrats’ “You Never Had It So Good,” he told them that what they needed was not a slogan but a campaign of quick television spots, featuring the general speaking to the American people on a vast range of issues—in short, punchy, unanswerable takes. Some of Reeves’s people got together and came up with a plan called “How to Insure an Eisenhower Victory in November.” It recommended that $2 million be spent in the last three weeks on spots, “the quickest, most effective and cheapest means of getting across a message in the shortest possible time.” With that, American politics and American television advertising were about to be married by a man who did not believe in overestimating the intelligence and attention span of his audience. Reeves, who was relatively new to politics, went out and did his homework. He read a popular book by Samuel Lubell, one of the early analysts on ethnic voting in America, and came away with the belief that the Dewey people had been incalculably stupid in their campaign. A shift of very few votes in just a few critical states would have won the election for him. Reeves was so impressed by the Lubell study that he hired a brilliant young man named Michael Levin, a disciple of Lubell’s and a...