Forty Years On, RFK Ad Maker Still Frames The Campaigns

It's a historic year in American politics, and during a pivotal Democratic primary in Indiana, a television ad shows the candidate speaking casually but forcefully within a scrum of farmers. Other spots feature similar conversations -- spiked with talking points on crime, jobs and agricultural policy -- set in a roomful of schoolchildren, perhaps, or a group of homemakers sipping coffee.

It's not Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton visiting the stations of the campaign-media cross: It's Robert F. Kennedy in the first primary of his 1968 run for the presidency. Produced by Washington-based filmmaker Charles Guggenheim, the TV spots were made on the fly, just weeks after Kennedy announced his candidacy. Guggenheim created some of the ads from footage he had already shot for Kennedy's 1964 senatorial campaign, as well as stump speeches featuring the candidate's soaring oratorical skills.

But the most compelling pieces featured Kennedy -- always dressed in a suit and tie, with that famous unruly shock of hair and brooding eyes -- by turns challenging and charming the farmers, factory workers, women and even young children that Guggenheim and his team had hastily assembled for a series of what were meant to look like off-the-cuff encounters.

To watch Guggenheim's ads four decades later, it's possible to see the creation, almost in real time, of the grammar of political advertising -- the elements of style that are still evident today, at a time when emerging technologies and political passion are merging again to revolutionize political communications.

Filmed with the lightweight cameras and sound equipment that were reinventing documentary cinema in the 1960s, the Kennedy ads are a curious blend of the staged and the spontaneous, the crude and the sophisticated. With minimal narration and a mesmerizing public figure at their center, the ads beam from a crucial point in ancient political history, before the ascendancy of television, polls and focus groups, but poised on the very cusp of the media culture they would come to define.

The spots reflect the rushed, almost chaotic nature of a campaign that almost didn't happen. After an agonizing period of indecision, Kennedy finally announced his candidacy on March 16, after incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson narrowly won the New Hampshire primary. By May 7, the date of the Indiana primary, Johnson had dropped out and Kennedy had challenged Eugene McCarthy to what would be a bitter (and tragically brief) battle for control of the Democratic Party. (Hubert Humphrey entered the race too late to qualify for the Indiana primary.)

The day after Kennedy announced his candidacy, recalls former press secretary Frank Mankiewicz, "Steve Smith, his brother-in-law [and campaign manager], came around and threw a handful of those little tiny tin pieces that say 'Kennedy' and go over your lapel on the desk. And that was the campaign." Guggenheim, who had perfected the art of the half-hour biographical film in campaigns for Adlai Stevenson, former California governor Pat Brown, Kennedy and others, left for Indiana shortly thereafter.

"We said, 'We want him with ordinary folks,' " Mankiewicz recalls of the minimal directions Guggenheim received. Although Kennedy was routinely greeted by adoring crowds wherever he went, in Indiana he faced not only McCarthy's popularity on college campuses and Humphrey surrogate Roger Branigan's support of the state party machine, but Indiana voters, described by Kennedy adviser (and native Hoosier) John Bartlow Martin as "phlegmatic, skeptical [and] hard to move." What's more, he had to overcome the lingering perception of him by some observers as ruthless and opportunistic.

Armed with a 16mm camera and portable Nagra sound recorder, and perfecting a cinema verite technique that would become one of his signatures, Guggenheim filmed Kennedy with small groups of people who, while clearly not hostile, weren't shy about asking tough questions, at least by today's softball standards. "Mr. Kennedy, do you really think you can beat Nixon in the state of Indiana?" one woman asks skeptically, prompting the candidate to answer with a laugh, "Well, I know President Kennedy had some trouble with that."

Using one camera (sometimes two), Guggenheim made sure to capture multiple angles on the candidate as he extemporized on everything from urban violence to poverty in Appalachia, and also the facial expressions of reactions of his interlocutors. One can sense a group of diffident Indiana farmers being disarmed while, as a cow moos in the background, Kennedy cracks that "I'm doing a tremendous amount just personally for the farmer, with 10 children." He goes on to speak to the farmers about the links between food prices, poverty, foreign aid and welfare reform in a firm, even confrontational tone that today would be unheard-of. "I've seen children here in the United States starving," he says at one point. " Young children, starving to death."

The resulting ads -- which range in length from 30 and 60 seconds to five minutes -- provide fascinating records, not only of Kennedy's astonishingly frank political rhetoric, but of his evolving emotional connection with voters. They also prove that even in the days we look back on with nostalgia for their purity, lines could be crossed: The ad featuring children, presumably at school in Indiana, was filmed on a Saturday morning in Northwest Washington, and features a young John Harwood (who now covers politics for the New York Times and CNBC), whose father, Richard, was covering the race for The Washington Post.

Notwithstanding such liberties, Guggenheim's commercials were hugely influential within an industry that was still defining itself. "Charlie's stuff cut to the character of candidates," says Richard Parker, a biographer of Kennedy contemporary John Kenneth Galbraith. He notes that in some quarters Kennedy was still considered his brother's enforcer, the tough former attorney general who had authorized wiretaps of Martin Luther King Jr., had vacillated on his opposition to the Vietnam War and who, in the opinion of many Democrats, had let McCarthy do his dirty work before jumping into the race. "The whole point of Guggenheim doing those ads was to break through that narrative," Parker suggests. "This is the campaign that remakes Bobby Kennedy and in some sense, Guggenheim is capturing the formation of the man as it happens." (For his part, Guggenheim would go on to win three Oscars for documentaries on a range of subjects; in 2007 his son Davis won another one for "An Inconvenient Truth." The film starred Al Gore, whose father had hired Charles to make ads for his 1970 Senate campaign.)

Forty years later, in the first high-stakes Indiana primary since Kennedy's run, the ads that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are running bear Guggenheim's unmistakable, if distorted, influence. In a spot called "Dreams," for example, Clinton can be seen walking through a field with a farmer, then with a mother and her young daughter, then in a factory. But unlike Guggenheim's ads featuring similar settings, "Dreams" doesn't document what Clinton said in those situations, or her interaction with her audience. Rather, in a form of symbolic shorthand, the producers reduce what in 1968 were surprisingly revealing and substantive scenes to a series of single, virtually meaning-free shots. Mise-en-scene has become montage in a political media culture that has become increasingly fragmented, market-researched and overmanaged. ("It's hard to believe, but our polling was almost nonexistent," Mankiewicz recalls of Indiana in 1968.)

Obama's Indiana ad "Inspiring" hews to the same formula, packaging still images of the candidate meeting with "ordinary people," kids and blue-collar workers as part of a bland mix of archival images, talking-head testimonials and on-screen graphics. His newest ad, "Pennies," is yet another generic response to yet another generic attack ad from Clinton.

But if the Obama campaign, like Clinton's, has created its share of banal elaborations on Guggenheim's seminal work, it also suggests a return to and reinvention of some of the filmmaker's cardinal elements. The "Yes We Can" video made by musician Will.I.Am that went viral in February not only marks a return to spontaneity after years of carefully manipulated political communications, but also demonstrated the same kind of emotional impact a candidate can have on his followers that Guggenheim captured in Indiana 40 years ago. (It also resuscitated the art of political oratory, reminiscent of those stirring Kennedy stump appearances, in a vibrant and revolutionary way.) What's more, activists are harnessing technology to subvert the official campaign narratives or successfully changing their focus, from catching Hillary Clinton struggling with a convenience store coffee machine to uploading the sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright on YouTube.

And there are signs that technology might be bringing the art of political communications full circle. In an era when the idea of watching a half-hour biography or a five-minute ad seems impossibly quaint, the Web is making it possible for voters to see and hear the candidates in full. As of this writing, YouTube has registered more than 4 million hits on Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech in Philadelphia on March 18. It lasts 37 minutes 10 seconds; presumably more than a few viewers have taken the time to watch it all the way through . Forty years after Charles Guggenheim created the language of political advertising, it's being reinvented, again with the aid of an unusually charismatic candidate and new, nimble technology. The radical twist is that this time, the message-meisters and media-makers are likely to be the voters themselves.