Treleaven, Harry

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<span style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 32px; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 1; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; display: inline !important; float: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">advertising executive Harry Treleaven,

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/how-did-monster-get-created-decades-gop-lies-brought-us-donald-trump

ow did America get to such a place that someone like Donald Trump can <a href="http://talkingpointsmemo.com/polltracker/suffolk-usa-today-trump-poll" style=" text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(241, 96, 44); outline: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">command a lead in the Republican primaries</a>? Trump is the product of a deliberate Republican strategy, adopted by Richard Nixon’s people in 1968, to attract voters with an apocalyptic redemption story rather than reasoned argument.  It has taken almost 50 years, but we have finally arrived at the culmination of postmodern politics in which Republican leaders use words to create their own reality.

After World War II, President Dwight Eisenhower and men like New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller led the Republican Party with policies based in reasoned argument. They used the government to regulate the economy and to promote social welfare, much as Democrats did, although with a philosophy that emphasized social unity rather than class conflict. The policies of these “Me Too” Republicans infuriated Movement Conservatives on the far right, who insisted that all government activism was communism. In 1964, Movement Conservative spokesman Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater won the Republican nomination when Rockefeller’s womanizing spectacularly imploded his candidacy. Movement Conservatives used their hero’s nomination to advance a new kind of politics.

America’s moderate consensus was enormously popular, but Phyllis Schlafly, the president of the Illinois Federation of Republican Women, flat-out denied that reality. In her famous book “A Choice Not an Echo,” she insisted that studies showing that voters opposed Goldwater’s extremism were part of a “propaganda machine” that used fake polls, radio and newspapers to destroy anyone but the chosen candidates of an elite cabal. She explained that all government activism outside of military buildup was a conspiracy to bankrupt regular Americans. Financiers and banking interests fed off expensive policies pushed by an educated Eastern elite, and together these men were dragging America into the web of communism.

The world was really quite simple, Schlafly insisted, and it could be understood without any fancy education. It was divided in two, black and white, Communism and Freedom. Eggheads complained that Goldwater “had one-sentence solutions” for complicated problems, she wrote, but simple solutions were the answer. What should America do about communism? Stop it! The very fact that establishment Republicans opposed Goldwater’s nomination proved that he was the right man for the job. He was the “grass roots” candidate, the candidate for the little guy who voted his principles, not because he wanted a payoff.

Goldwater’s candidacy crashed and burned, leaving Republicans in trouble in 1968. To candidate Richard Nixon was left the task of pulling together mainstream Eisenhower Republicans and upstart Movement Conservatives. How could his team attract support for an unlikable candidate who needed to bridge a fundamental ideological gulf? Nixon’s handlers used new media to play to Schlafly’s script. They ignored people’s brains and went for their guts.

“Voters are basically lazy,” one Nixon media adviser wrote. “Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand…. When we argue with him, we… seek to engage his intellect…. The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable….” Nixon’s people hired advertising executive Harry Treleaven, who believed the new medium of television had changed the nature of politics. For him, politicians were no longer policy wonks; they were actors with a narrative.

Under Treleaven, Nixon’s people ignored policy positions and instead used television to create a candidate with a simple message: America was on the brink of disaster, and only Nixon could save it. They hired a brilliant young photographer to put together a series of television ads from stock photographs strung together to create a sense of doom; at the end a voice intoned “Nixon” over an iconic image of the nation. At the end of every ad ran the words: “Vote like your whole world depended on it.”

The campaign also hired a young television producer named Roger Ailes to stage “town hall” events for the candidate. Ailes hand-picked “regular” people to question Nixon in carefully managed shows from which the press was excluded. Ailes arranged applause, the set, Nixon’s answers, the camera angles, the crowd cheering the candidate, the careful shading of Nixon’s makeup. “Let’s face it,” he said. “A lot of people think Nixon is dull. Think he’s a bore, a pain in the ass.” But carefully managed television could “make them forget all that.”

It did. And so, after 1968, Republicans increasingly relied on their apocalyptic redemption story. America was in terrible trouble, because grasping minorities, women and workers wanted government policies that would suck tax dollars from hardworking white people. Democrats backed those policies because they would do anything to buy votes. It was up to Republicans to restore America to its former glory. In a time of dramatic economic and social upheaval, this story reassured voters left behind in the new conditions that the answers to their problems were simple, and that coming up with those answers required no great education or thought. It simply required the right principles.

The Movement Conservative story was never based in reality. Facts repeatedly gave way to the narrative that America was on the ropes because of Democratic social welfare policies that sucked tax dollars and threatened the nation’s safety. Ronald Reagan’s Welfare Queen represented the misuse of tax dollars for lazy African-Americans, for example, but he also incorrectly insisted that President Carter had slashed the nation’s military budget, and warned in his inaugural address that the nation was in a crisis that rivaled the Great Depression, a crisis created by government activism.

To avoid niggling fact-checkers, in 1987, President Reagan’s FCC abandoned the Fairness Doctrine, a decision that meant that public broadcasters were no longer required to provide their audience with opposing viewpoints. Within a year, talk radio had taken off, with hosts like Rush Limbaugh hammering home the vision of a nation gone to ruin, awaiting redemption from the latest Movement Conservative candidate. In 1992, Limbaugh began to broadcast a television show, produced by Roger Ailes, to take the story to viewers. By 1994, the show was carried by 225 television stations. Two years later, Ailes would become the CEO of a new media channel, Fox News, which used the same formula—albeit updated—that Ailes had used to package Nixon’s story almost 30 years before....

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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1998/12/20/us/hw-treleaven-nixon-consultant-dies-at-76.html">http://www.nytimes.com/1998/12/20/us/hw-treleaven-nixon-consultant-dies-at-76.html</a>

: December 20, 1998

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WASHINGTON, Dec. 19— Harry W. Treleaven Jr., an advertising executive and early political consultant who is credited with creating the ''Nixon's the One!'' slogan for the 1968 Presidential campaign, died Dec. 9 at the Sarah Neuman Nursing Home in Mamaroneck, N.Y. He was 76 and lived in Manhattan and Amagansett, N.Y.

A former wife, Elsie Lawall Treleaven, said the cause was heart failure.

Mr. Treleaven (pronounced TRELL-eh-ven) was one of the first practitioners of techniques that are used commonly in politics today in the packaging and handling of candidates. Though he was not the best known of Richard M. Nixon's Republican brain trust in the 1968 campaign (others included Leonard Garment, Roger Ailes and Frank Shakespeare), he played an important role in setting its tone and conveying the desired image to the public.

Some of his contributions were recorded by Joe McGinniss in his book about the campaign, ''The Selling of the President,'' for which Mr. McGinniss received access to Mr. Treleaven's confidential staff memorandums. In one memorandum quoted by Mr. McGinniss, Mr. Treleaven discussed how the campaign had to turn Nixon's liabilities into assets. ''Not always loved, he is universally respected,'' Mr. Treleaven wrote. ''Not glamorous, he does have a certain star quality going for him.''

Mr. Treleaven conceded that there were some negatives to Mr. Nixon's personality, but said, ''If we recognize them, deal with them intelligently instead of worrying about them, their effect can be minimized.''

There was, for example, Mr. Nixon's apparent lack of humor. ''Can be corrected to a degree,'' Mr. Treleaven wrote, ''but let's not be too obvious about it.''

On another of the candidate's shortcomings, warmth, Mr. Treleaven wrote, ''He can be helped greatly in this respect by how he is handled, by what he says and how he says it.'' One solution offered by Mr. Treleaven: ''presenting him informally.''

In another memorandum, Mr. Treleaven wrote of Mr. Nixon's pictures: ''Avoid closeups.''

Mr. Nixon presented a difficult case for the handlers. At one point, Mr. Treleaven wrote, ''the chances of overcoming Richard Nixon's cold image and the chances of making him loved and making him glamorous via commercial exposure on television (where admittedly he has not been at his best) are far less than the chances of making him loved and making him glamorous via saturation exposure of artfully conceived and produced four-color, full-page (or double spread) magazine advertisements.''

Mr. Treleaven was born in Oak Park, Ill., and graduated from Duke University, where he was editor in chief of The Duke Chronicle, and rose to the rank of lieutenant while serving with the Navy's Seabees in the South Pacific during World War II.

After the war he wrote plays for radio shows like ''The Whistler'' in California and then moved to New York as an executive at the J. Walter Thompson agency, working on accounts like Ford, Pan Am and Singer.

Mr. Treleaven's first political job was as consultant to George Bush's Congressional campaign in Houston, which Mr. Bush won in an upset at the start of his political career. He then was involved in Republican campaigns for many years.

Mr. Treleaven is survived by a son from his first marriage, to Joan Westphal, Gregory P. Treleaven of Boston; two children from his second marriage, to Elsie Lawall Treleaven, Bruce D. Treleaven of Montclair, N.J., and Gwyneth T. Claiborne of Fairfield, Conn., and four grandchildren.

Mr. Garment, the Nixon counsel, in his book ''Crazy Rhythm,'' said Mr. Treleaven had a genius for political advertising. ''He enjoyed the manipulative esthetic of advertising's words, pictures and music in the same way he enjoyed the late-afternoon light bouncing off the ocean waves at Amagansett.''

Mr. Garment once said the ''Nixon's the One!'' campaign showed Mr. Nixon as a person ''who has had experience and has been able to stay on his feet -- even if he is unpleasant.''

Photos: Experience, not personality, was the key in ''Nixon's the One'' ads. (The New York Times); Harry W. Treleaven Jr.

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