Reviews for The selling of the President, 1968

The average rating for The selling of the President, 1968 based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-01-21 00:00:00 Norman Cohan The Selling of the President 1968 tells the behind the scenes story of how Roger Ailes, now president of Fox News Channel, and others sold Richard Nixon -- this most flawed and corrupt politician -- as a leader of great sagacity and Main Street virtue. It's one of a kind. Since McGinniss wrote this book, no other active journalist has been granted such free access to the media campaign of a presidential candidate. It is a good read for those interested in political history and for all interested in the veracity of media portrayals, election year or otherwise.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-09-26 00:00:00 Peter Taylor The differences between THE SELLING OF THE PRESIDENT 1968 by Joe (FATAL VISION, BLIND FAITH) McGinnis and THE MAKING OF THE PRESIDENT 1960 (Theodore White) are striking, and saddening. MAKING presented the electoral process as complex, frustrating, occasionally maddening, but essentially a rational process of democracy despite its legacies and flaws. SELLING -- whose original hardcover dust jacket presented Richard Nixon's face as a packet of cigarettes, something to be hawked on TV as cigarettes still could be -- is an exercise in marketing a winning politician. There is much truth in what McGinnis says. The slow usurpation of issues by images owing to the onslaught of commercial television in the 1960s was crucial if not fatal. Issue: John F. Kennedy's 1960 statement that although he was Catholic, he was American and would enforce American laws may have helped him clinch the Presidency in an agonizingly close campaign. Image: Richard Nixon went through take after take in a Calif0rnia studio to get the line "Sock it . . . to ME?" just right for a two-second clip on NBC's ROWAN AND MARTIN'S LAUGH-IN comedy show in 1968, a sop to younger voters. That content-free sound bite (sound nibble?) may have been just as influential in terms of getting out the vote as Kennedy's statement eight years prior. The problem with The Selling of the President, like some other McGinnis books, is that once the author gets his teeth into something he concedes no other point of view. Expediency and marketing-driven precepts are not only the main points, but the only points, in this hard-hitting book. But while many things had changed in the course of the 1960s, not everything had: in-person speeches to small groups, unofficial caucuses and straw polls, private fund-raisers and what might be called "smoke-filled rooms" still took place, though their impact may have been diminished. It was still no mere abstraction to speak of "the labor vote" or "the ethnic vote." The major parties' Presidential conventions had not yet become made-for-TV coronations. Yet history has vindicated Joe McGinnis' outlook. Advertising, particularly paid television advertising, dominates political campaigns. This is painfully apparent in my own Illinois this year, where a slew of gubernatorial "attack" ads from both sides have much bad to say about the opponent, obscuring the fact that there is not much in the way of positive message that the candidates want to present about themselves, or promise to the electorate. THE SELLING OF THE PRESIDENT 1968 is not a perfect book by any means, but it was and is an influential one. It's worth noting that SELLING is a much shorter book than MAKING was: about 275 pages compared to 400. Another sop to the coming era of shortened attention spans and sound bites?