Once upon a time, Barry Goldwater was the model of a reckless presidential candidate who couldn’t be trusted with the nuclear codes.

The conservative Arizona senator who upended the East Coast Republican establishment in the 1964 Republican race brought on the nuclear issue himself. There were wisecracks about “lobbing one into the men’s room in the Kremlin,” but even more damaging were Goldwater’s serious comments about giving battlefield commanders control over nuclear weapons.

In the days leading up the 1964 California GOP primary, Nelson Rockefeller’s collapsing campaign mailed out a glossy pamphlet that asked bluntly, “Who Do You Want in the Room with the H Bomb?”

The Daisy ad

All this was prelude to the most famous TV attack ad in history. The first commercial of President Lyndon Johnson’s fall campaign against Goldwater aired a few minutes before 10 p.m. on September 7, 1964. In the era of just three broadcast networks, more than 50 million Americans were watching NBC’s “Monday Night at the Movies.”

What they saw was a little girl, with long hair and freckles, picking the petals off a daisy as she tried to count (“four, five, seven, six, six, eight, nine”). As the camera closed in on the child’s hopeful face, the voiceover switched to a military-style countdown that ended with a thermonuclear explosion washing over the entire screen. Then a few lines from an LBJ arms-control speech: “These are the stakes … We must either love each other or we must die.”