Daisy (television advertisement)

"Daisy", sometimes known as "Daisy Girl" or "Peace, Little Girl", was a controversial political advertisement aired on television during the 1964 United States presidential election by incumbent president Lyndon B. Johnson's campaign. Though only aired once (by the campaign), it is considered to be an important factor in Johnson's landslide victory over Barry Goldwater and an important turning point in political and advertising history. It remains one of the most controversial political advertisements ever made.

The advertisement begins with a little girl (three-year-old Monique M. Corzilius) standing in a meadow with chirping birds, picking the petals of a daisy while counting each one—repeating some numbers and counting some in the wrong order. After she reaches "nine", she pauses, as if trying to remember the next number, and a male voice is then heard saying "ten", at the start of a missile launch countdown. Seemingly in response to the countdown, the girl turns her head toward a point off-screen, and then the scene freezes. As the countdown continues, a zoom of the video still focuses on the girl's right eye until her pupil fills the screen, eventually blacking it out as the countdown simultaneously reaches zero. The blackness is instantly replaced by the bright flash and thunderous sound of a nuclear explosion, featuring video footage of a detonation similar in appearance to the near surface burst Trinity test of 1945. The scene then cuts to footage of a mushroom cloud from a different nuclear explosion, and then to a final cut of a slowed close-up section of incandescence in yet another nuclear explosion.

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