David Haven Blake. Liking Ike

David Haven Blake’s compelling and convincing new book on American politics could not be better timed. In Liking Ike: Eisenhower, Advertising, and the Rise of Celebrity Politics, Blake examines the successful synthesis of advertising, celebrity, and television in the 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns of Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower. In these campaigns, the Republican Party engaged Madison Avenue advertising executives and deployed movie and musical stars to publicize and popularize the military commander as a political leader. Both advertising and celebrity politics had appeared in previous U.S. elections, as Blake and earlier scholars make clear, but their integration with the decade’s new medium of television in Eisenhower’s campaigns was innovative. This finding challenges the popular assumption that it was the Democratic Party that initiated the first “glamour candidate” with John F. Kennedy in 1960. But throughout the 1950s, the Democrats and their presidential nominee in both elections, Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, remained far behind the Republicans in utilizing the new electioneering methods.

Advertising · Business · Democracy · Governor · Haven · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Politics of the United States · Presidential campaign · Presidential election · Presidential system · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Engineering · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies