By John Harwood
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, April 30, 2000

Since both parties have long since chosen their nominees for the White House, nobody will pay any attention to Indiana's presidential primary on Tuesday. But back when I had something to do with it, at age 11, the Hoosier contest mattered a lot.

The year was 1968; I was a skinny sixth-grader with dreadful dark-rimmed glasses, a paper route, a decent Little League fastball--and a spot in a campaign ad for Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy.

Until recently, the nature of my role remained a hazy memory: a hastily arranged gathering of kids in a Northwest Washington school, bright lights and heavy cameras, a sprint to the boys' room when the seemingly interminable shoot ended. A few weeks later, Kennedy was assassinated. I never knew what became of that footage from a springtime Saturday morning more than 30 years ago.

If I could find it, would I see the kind of ad that political journalists like me are so quick to deride now? Weren't Americans less cynical then, weren't our candidates more heroic, wasn't the political process higher-toned? Though there's no simple answer, perhaps a peek back at my bit part might at least provide a few celluloid clues.

On a trip to the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston this winter, as I headed for New Hampshire to cover the 2000 presidential race, I finally laid eyes on my brief, shining moment in the annals of political advertising. Rolling through the tape collection documenting RFK's presidential campaign, I found my pre-adolescent face among the farmers, factory workers and political allies deployed to win votes for the New York senator through the still-emerging medium of political advertising.

"How much help do you think the federal government should give to the schools?" I ask the candidate, hitting my marks with a query that has a familiar ring to anyone covering campaign 2000.

RFK's calibrated answer itself is so well-matched to today's politics that it heightens the out-of-body experience provoked by watching myself from another time. "The federal government can't take over direction or control," he says, "but it can help with the construction of facilities." Imploring children to press for change, he adds, "You have the greatest stake in the future, and the least ties to the past."

"Indiana," a deep-voiced narrator concludes, "can choose the next president of the United States."

The 60-second ad is jarring to observe--and not only because we were nowhere near Indiana when the ad was made. The style is quaint alongside today's slickly produced spots, which would use Indiana kids or risk media flak for lack of "authenticity." Kennedy's primary rival, Eugene McCarthy (whom RFK declined to debate during the Indiana contest), isn't mentioned. There are no special effects or specific campaign proposals. There's the narrator's simple introduction: "Robert Kennedy, and some people who aren't registered this year." Then we talk and he talks, and he grins winningly, eyes atwinkle.

What was I doing in that ad in the first place? As it happens, my father, Richard Harwood, was covering Kennedy's campaign--covering that same Indiana primary, in fact--as a political reporter for The Washington Post. He says he had nothing to do with my participation; my mother had been enlisted by a friend and Kennedy supporter to lend a child to the cause. Dad had earlier decided, when Mom had protested against the Vietnam War he also covered, that her political endeavors were beyond the jurisdiction of his ethical rule book. That included the deployment of her son.

Our current obsession with ethics (or at least the appearance of ethics) would render such a thing out of the question. Now that I'm covering presidential politics for a national newspaper, a role for my 10-year-old daughter in a campaign spot for George W. Bush or Al Gore would set off alarm bells for media watchers at publications such as Brill's Content or the American Journalism Review.

I took a videotape of the ad--and others from RFK's 1968 campaign--to the man who made them, Charles Guggenheim. He hadn't seen them in years. "Too soft," he says, as we watched his handiwork in his Georgetown office. He means too soft by today's standards.

Negative ads were hardly unheard of in 1968. Four years earlier, Lyndon Johnson's reelection campaign ran what remains the most famous attack spot in history, the so-called "Daisy" ad suggesting that Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater might trigger nuclear war. But the hopeful tone that Guggenheim struck in his ads bespeaks a nation not yet ready to assume the worst about the candidates who aspired to lead it.

Guggenheim recalled the scramble to assemble spots for the late-starting campaign. He borrowed clips from a biographical film he had made for RFK's 1964 New York Senate race. Other ads were simply extended clips from Kennedy stump appearances, capturing his blend of passion (for aiding the poor) and populism (disdain for welfare handouts and Washington paternalism) that hasn't quite been matched since.

At the same time, there were foreshadows of the manipulative arts that have contributed to the current cynicism about politics. The Indiana spot we filmed in Northwest Washington was repackaged--to excise a specific reference to the state--for the Nebraska contest one week later. (The Nebraska spot was on the same reel at the JFK Library.)

Of course, the calendar for Campaign 2000--jammed with early primaries--would have rendered Kennedy's entire strategy moot. This year, both parties' nomination fights effectively ended on March 7, precisely two months before Indianans went to the polls in 1968. Back then, however, Indiana mattered because it was one of just 14 states that held primaries, all but one of them in April or later. Most delegates were still picked by party insiders. That's why RFK could enter the race after that year's March 12 New Hampshire primary and still hope to build enough momentum to prevail at the Chicago convention. His victory over McCarthy and favorite-son Indiana Gov. Roger Branigin (an ally of the Johnson administration) on May 7 was a strong first step. After RFK's death, Vice President Hubert Humphrey captured the Democratic nomination without having won a single primary.

For Guggenheim, the 1968 race contributed to his disillusionment with the political ad business. He cringed when the Democratic Party sought permission to recycle one particularly affecting piece of RFK campaign footage--in which Guggenheim's toddler son pulls a toy school bus up the Capitol steps--for use in House and Senate campaigns that had nothing to do with Kennedy. It made him feel, Guggenheim says, that "I was not in a very good profession."

He worked in campaigns for a few more years, notably handling Al Gore Sr.'s unsuccessful bid for reelection as Tennessee senator in 1970. He then left the business to make documentaries, which have won several Academy Awards. Meanwhile, the son who marched up the Capitol steps has eschewed the political world altogether; he produced episodes of TV shows such as "ER" and "NYPD Blue" and now makes feature films.

By contrast, my role as a child campaign hack seems only to have whetted a lifelong appetite for presidential politics. I promise, however, at least one small contribution to the health of the democratic process: Should my fifth-grader somehow manage to worm her way into this year's campaign dialogue, I'll do everything I can to keep her from going negative.

John Harwood, the political editor of the Wall Street Journal, is covering his fifth consecutive presidential campaign.