Tony Schwartz

By Tiffany Sharples

A little girl tugs petals from a daisy, counting them in the meandering, unordered way of a child just learning--until she is drowned out by a louder count, one that culminates in a mushroom cloud. Then Lyndon Johnson's voice: "We must either love each other, or we must die."

The famous "daisy" campaign ad--the brainchild of media consultant Tony Schwartz, who died June 15 at age 84--was shown just once, on Sept. 7, 1964. But its cultural shock waves persist. "There hadn't been an effective ad of that sort in the history of the presidency," says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, former dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. "[It] works because the audience fills in the meaning." And it worked for Johnson, who took 61% of the popular vote in a landslide win over Barry Goldwater.

Yet for Schwartz, also a creator of the original antismoking campaigns, it is too brief a summary of his life's work. He made time for important causes, balancing blockbuster campaigns for Coca-Cola with public-service ads for AIDS awareness and fire safety. Finally, he was a skilled audio engineer whose diverse recordings are now in the Library of Congress. He displayed an unparalleled ability to home in on the sounds that best tell a story. As his son Anton remembers, "He was fond of saying that people who work in radio have the great fortune that humans do not have earlids."