Frank Shakespeare, a former CBS executive who deployed his television skills for Richard M. Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign with a blitz of montage-style ads and on-air events that helped win the White House and underscored TV’s power as a political tool, died Dec. 14 at his home in Deerfield, Wis. He was 97.
The death was confirmed by Ed Feulner, founder of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank, where Mr. Shakespeare served as board chairman from 1981 to 1985. No cause was given.
Mr. Shakespeare’s role as a Republican envoy covered decades, including heading the United States Information Agency, during which he sought a sharper pro-American edge to its broadcasts and other media. That included “The Silent majority,” a 1970 news-style propaganda film produced by Mr. Shakespeare’s agency that asserted widespread American support for the Vietnam War and Nixon’s policies.
Mr. Shakespeare later served as an ambassador to Portugal and the Vatican, acting as a liaison between President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II in discussions over shared opposition to communism.
But Mr. Shakespeare’s most direct stamp on U.S. political sensibilities came during the homestretch of the wrenching 1968 campaign, which played out amid the assassinations of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and Democratic candidate Robert F. Kennedy. Then came harsh crackdowns on antiwar demonstrators outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that August that further rocked the nation.
Mr. Shakespeare was part of a team of media advisers, including future Fox News president Roger Ailes, tasked with remolding Nixon’s image as someone who could rise to the challenges. The former vice president, however, was burdened by his own lack of public finesse and the lingering infamy of his clunky performance in a 1960 televised debate with John F. Kennedy.
The group also grappled with questions that still preoccupy campaigns in the digital age: how best to directly reach voters beyond interviews and rallies? Mr. Shakespeare and his colleagues decided to give Nixon a more neighborly air.
Nixon voiced-over ads in a conversational style as if talking to a small group — while images extolling patriotism or decrying social strife, blamed on Democrats, flicked by on the screen.
Some ads pushed Nixon’s “law and order” platform. “In recent years, crime in this country has grown nine times as fast as the population,” Nixon intoned over images of guns and drug use. “I pledge to you,” he concluded, “the wave of crime is not going to be the wave of the future in America.”
Others sought to showcase Nixon’s empathy. To lilting music and snapshots of happy children, he says: “I see the face of a child. What his color is, what his ancestry is, doesn’t matter. What does matter is he’s an American child.”
One ad had just jarring, discordant music over scenes from Vietnam and street riots.