What makes you cast your ballot? A Presidential candidate or a good campaign? How he stands on the issues or how he stands up to the camera? The Selling of the President is the enduring story of the 1968 campaign that wrote the script for modern Presidential politicking—and how that script came to be. It introduces: Harry Treleaven, the first adman to suggest that issues bore voters, that image is what counts Roger Ailes, a PR man who coordinated the TV presentations that delivered the product Frank Shakespeare, the man behind the whole campaign, who, after eighteen years at CBS, cast the image that sold America a President And the candidate, Richard Nixon himself—a politician running on television for the highest office in the land In his introduction, Joe McGinniss discusses why—unfortunately—his classic book is as pertinent today to understanding our political culture as it was the year it was published.

The race for the White House in 1968 was a watershed event in American politics. In this brilliantly succinct narrative analysis, Lewis L. Gould shows how the events of that tumultuous year changed the way Americans felt about politics and their national leaders; how Republicans used the skills they brought to Richard Nixon's campaign to create a generation-long ascendancy in presidential politics; and how Democrats, divided and torn after 1968, emerged as only crippled challengers for the White House throughout most of the years until the early twenty-first century. Bitterness over racial issues and the Vietnam War that marked the 1968 election continued to shape national affairs and to rile American society for years afterward. And the election accelerated an erosion of confidence in American institutions that has not yet reached a conclusion. In his lucid account, now revised and updated, Mr. Gould emphasizes the importance of race as the campaign's key issue and examines the now infamous "October surprises" of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon as he describes the extraordinary events of what Eugene McCarthy later called the "Hard Year."