In an interview on Political Spin

Your next book is The Hidden Persuaders, written in 1957. What is that about?

This is a classic expose of the advertising industry from the 1950s. And what is interesting about the 20th century is that even in Lippmann’s time, in the 1920s, there are anxieties about what the rise of advertising and public relations are doing to democracy, and the degree to which people can be so easily spun or persuaded. It makes a lot of people – journalists, thinkers, ordinary citizens – worried about whether our democracy is as well-functioning as traditionally presumed. But in the 1950s and early 1960s, with television and the vogue of the “advertising man”, these fears about PR and advertising reached fever pitch.

This is the era of David Ogilvy’s Confessions of an Advertising Man, it’s the era that the television show Mad Men is set in. And what Vance Packard did in this book (admittedly in a sometimes reckless and exaggerated tone) was to try to play the role of the exposer of the magician’s secrets. We take this delight in seeing him explain different techniques that advertisers use to try to get us to buy products that we didn’t think we wanted. The book was influential. And for all the ways it might have been exaggerated and a reflection of certain anxieties of that historical moment, it did help people appreciate that advertising does stimulate consumer demand. Consumer demand is not just this naturally occurring phenomenon. People don’t just buy what they need and that’s how the market works. The book is also interesting from a political point of view. Packard does have a section on the new techniques of advertising brought to bear on politics. Looking back from our own time, some of these techniques look pretty naïve and benign. Eisenhower in 1952 had what was then this fancy television advertising campaign. You watch those ads today and they’re incredibly crude and simplistic and you wonder how anyone could have charged, as Democrats did, that these ads were corrupting American politics. And Packard also focuses a lot on one of my favourite people, Richard Nixon. And by favourite I mean as an object of study, not of admiration.

Packard marks Nixon as one of the key practitioners of this new modern politics that relies so heavily on advertising and public relations. And I see this as the origins of “Tricky Dick” and this concern we now have, that was exhibited most by Nixon, but we have it about all our presidents, about whether a person is authentic. This has become this kind of recurring concern in our politics and with every president – Obama, Bush, Clinton. You can go back and find these debates going on about every president. I think it has to do with what Packard identified – this kind of sense that politicians are using these tricks of the trade that are very sophisticated to present themselves as someone they’re not. And that is deeply disturbing to people’s sense of how politics, especially presidential politics, should function.