Dwight D. Eisenhower–born on this date in 1890–is widely credited with being the first Presidential candidate to use television advertising; you can see many of his 1952 TV spots at the excellent web site The Living Room Candidate maintained by our colleagues at the Museum of the Moving Image. Eisenhower’s media team also produced a series of longer form newsreel-like films to be shown in movie theaters and distributed to civic organizations, just as Thomas Dewey did in 1948. We have one of them in the Mary Margaret McBride Collection; McBride was a popular radio personality and Eisenhower supporter whose papers are here at the Library. It’s a nicely produced biography of a man the narrator hails as “a new Lincoln to meet the challenge.”
Mister American: Dwight D. Eisenhower (1952)