THE RIGHTS STUFF

Miami Herald, The (FL)
May 17, 1987
Author: JOEL ACHENBACH Herald Staff Writer

Earl Carter sits in his small office 20 stories above Third Avenue in midtown Manhattan, staring at his typewriter, praying for a few simple words. This is the big one. Millions of people -- no, tens of millions -- will see his work, will hear those few simple words. The mission is precise and terrible: He must write half a dozen 30-second TV commercials about the Constitution of the United States.

The Constitution! An impossible sell . . . after all it is just a piece of paper, a parched, faded, antiquarian document, filled with words like "vested" and "enumeration," overwhelmed by shalls, the whole business sealed beneath glass in some museum, as colorful as chalk, as telegenic as a tree stump. The story of the Constitution is not exactly -- how can this be said without sounding unpatriotic -- riveting. The Declaration of Independence was a dramatic stroke of revolution, the Constitution a sexless exercise in compromise.

But is he not a copywriter extraordinaire? Is he, Earl Carter, not the very man who coined the phrase "Be All You Can Be"? One of the great theme lines, later changed slightly in song to "Be All That You Can Be." In its original, purest manifestation it is brilliantly economical . . . a mere five words, 13 letters, beautifully symmetrical, almost palindromic, the two "Be's" balanced unshakably on either end of a beam that pivots nicely on the "You." One cannot miss the Shakespearean echo. As the words burst from the lips you can almost see the melancholic Hamlet pacing his father's castle, uttering the immortal line -- "To Be All You Can Be, Or Not To Be?" Ask Carter how he is able to come up with this stuff, and he will say, "Either you have it or you don't."

And now this new assignment . . . it's daunting. The Constitution is not like the Statue. A functional illiterate could have written that copy. You just had to slap the Statue up on the screen and -- lo -- the corporations would open their coffers, little kids would sing songs, young scholars would write essays, old men would weep. Symbols sell. The Constitution, though . . . it's not good TV. No visuals. You could hire some actors to look like Franklin and Madison and Hamilton and Washington, but it'd look goofy, or worse, educational.

Straight-ahead double-barreled patriotism won't work either. Between the Olympics, Reagan, the Statue of Liberty and the various beer and car companies, America has been Americaed into a coma. We're older now. Wiser. Post-Iranscam. The '80s are over, history.

No, the commercials must strike a careful pose, they must be emotive, uplifting, stimulating, and comprehensible even by the daft; they must prove acceptable to a battery of corporate executives and network censors and former Chief Justice Warren Burger's Bicentennial Commission; most of all they must be able to drill their way through the glazed shell of the American TV viewer in less than 30 seconds.

What a job.

From the typewritten notes of Earl Carter:

Dad, what's this place?

That's a place that doesn't exist anymore, son . . .

It was called America

it was a dream of great men

that didn't work.

What happened?

These great men created a constitution to hold the country together, but it didn't pass. The country fell apart after they had won independence.

The Constitution: Without it there would have been no United States of America.

The Constitution: It turned a nightmare into the American Dream.

Without the Constitution of the United States an extraordinary thing would happen to America.

It wouldn't exist.

The hot dog would have never existed.

Baseball? Forget it.

And Hollywood, that would have been a dream.

You might even be speaking a different language.

The Constitution: Without it there would be no America.

THE CONSTITUTION: THE WORDS THAT MAKE THE AMERICAN DREAM POSSIBLE

THE CONSTITUTION: IT'S WHY WE'RE AMERICA.

THE CONSTITUTION: THE WORDS BEHIND WE THE PEOPLE

THE CONSTITUTION: THE WORDS THAT MAKE AMERICA POSSIBLE

THE CONSTITUTION: THE WORDS THAT FOLLOW WE THE PEOPLE

It's the Constitution of the United States

The words that created America

The greatest leap forward for freedom in human history

The Constitution: The words that created America

It is the American way of life

The Constitution: The American way of life

The words that created America

The words we live by.

The Constitution: The words we live by.

Bingo. That last line. That's the theme line. Everything else is disposable and will never ride the broadcast waves, but that last line . . . perfect. Earl Carter does not yet even realize how perfect. He has a collaborator, an art director named Bob Needleman, and eventually Needleman will have to convince Earl Carter that there is no theme line greater than "The Constitution: The Words We Live By." It exploits the obvious, harnesses the plainly evident.

"I think it was my destiny to work on this ad," Earl Carter will say a few weeks later. "I think the theme, 'The Words We Live By,' will live on forever."

But, to an extent he cannot foresee as he labors over his typewriter, even a phrase this harmless, this neutral, this de- scented, can prove controversial. There is ugliness on the horizon. When you enter the realm of network television, you have to check your First Amendment rights at the door.

This is the essence of comedy -- the confrontation and marriage of antagonistic forms. Madison Avenue and the U.S. Constitution are by any measure an unusual match, the TV commercials a herculean feat of jamming a square peg into a round hole. It is safe to guess that, as the commercials air in the coming months, the subtler ironies of the situation will go undetected by most Americans, because these are, on their own terms, good TV commercials, rendering a complex subject in simple hues, turning the dense into the digestible. The product may be strange but the style is familiar, faithful to broadcast conventions if less so to deeper historical truth.

It's a clean, professional hit.

The brutal fact in this, the Constitution's bicentennial, is that most Americans couldn't tell the Constitution from a car manual. It's like the deficit -- people know it exists, and suspect it's important, but can't quite work up a sweat over it.

A Hearst Corp. poll published earlier this year revealed that three-quarters of Americans think the Constitution mandates a free public education through high school, 64 percent think it declares English the official national language, and half think Americans do NOT have a constitutional right to advocate revolution. Six out of 10 didn't know that the first 10 amendments make up the Bill of Rights. Nearly half believed that the slogan, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," is in the Constitution. It's from the works of Karl Marx.

Perhaps you could look at this as a sign of health, that complacency bespeaks order, that it is only proper and fitting that a people this fat and sassy ignore the minutiae of republican federal government.

Or you could look at it another way: that self-government as conceived by the Framers, government in which the common man has an obligation to civic participation, has become a lie.

That citizenship is dead.

That America is slowly fulfilling the prophecy of Aldous Huxley that a Brave New World will emerge in which no external conqueror is needed to subdue the will of the individual because we will have come to love our oppressors and adore the technologies that sap us of our ability and need to think.

Heavy stuff. Probably too heavy to hang on the small nail at the center of this story -- the making of a few public service announcements for television. What we are doing here is taking a look at less than three minutes worth of videotape, examining where it came from and how it came to be exactly as it is, and then trying to figure out what it all means, if anything. It's like studying a great forest by examining the rings of a single tree, or trying to envision the whole of a dinosaur from a single fossilized rib. Inexact, but a valid and good-faith endeavor nonetheless. (Besides, it is our constitutional right.)

No accusation is herein made that any of the principals of this story have done their job poorly. To the contrary, these people are among the best in their business -- professional, intelligent, reflective, painstaking in their work, committed to excellence. But they are part of a system. In that system the process is as interesting as the product. The medium, to borrow Marshall McLuhan's phrase, is the message.

Let's put this all in some context:

Two hundred years ago today, representatives of the 13 states were still slogging into Philadelphia, trying to get a quorum for a convention to "rewrite" the Articles of Confederation, under which the states were virtually separate sovereignties. What happened in Philadelphia was more than a rewrite job; the Framers came up with a radical proposal to create a national government.

At the time, the nascent United States was largely frontier, filled with rugged individuals who had no desire to part with any share of their liberty. They feared power. They did not want to see power centralized. They did not want to be robbed of their ability and need to think freely. The Framers knew that any national government had to be strictly limited in its power, and so they burdened it with internal checks and balances, reserving chunks of authority to the separate states. The Framers signed the deal Sept. 17 of that year, but the real job had only begun: The greater public had to be convinced. So began the first effort to sell the Constitution.

If you can make your way to the rare manuscripts room of the New York Public Library, and can cloak yourself with some air of scholarship, a bespectacled librarian can bring you bound volumes of the late 18th Century New York newspapers. You can see the word from Philadelphia hot off the presses. The New York Journal and Weekly Register -- "Here TRUTH Unlicens'd reigns; and dares ACCOST -- e'en KINGS themselves, or RULERS of the FREE!" -- ran the story on Page 2 of the Sept. 27 edition (news came slowly in those days). First came a letter from George Washington explaining that a deal just went down in Philadelphia. Then came the Constitution, ne'er before seen by common man, spilling over onto Page 3 right next to the shipping news, just around the corner from where the paper ran some of the New World's first advertisements, ads with such subjects as Flax Seed and Hair Powders and Live Teeth Wanted, and For Sale: Negro Boy.

The anti-Federalists saw the proposed Constitution and went berserk. They filled the paper with brilliant, pseudonymous diatribes.

"The great powers of the President, connected with his duration in office, would lead to oppression and ruin," predicted one prominent naysayer who called himself "Cato." The proposed new seat of government near the Potomac River, Cato wrote, would become "the asylum of the base, idle, avaricious and ambitious."

Sensing that they were losing the battle for public opinion, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay concocted their own newspaper persona, a being called "Publius," and on deadline cranked out dozens of brilliant political tracts that would be later known as The Federalist Papers.

"A dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government," Publius wrote.

These are the kinds of things that ran in the tiny newspapers of the country. The Federalists proved persuasive; the Constitution was ratified by the states. In the two centuries since, the Constitution has survived wars, social upheavals and one explosive disunion, and America on the whole has gone from a typographic culture to an electronic culture. In the last half of this century, it has become possible to beam images and messages into the homes of the entire populace. The electromagnetic spectrum is theoretically public but is licensed to corporations. These corporations do not pay a cent for their licenses, but, under government regulation, provide free air time for public service ads. Sitcoms and other entertainment shows are the big money makers; news programs operate at a loss. In recent months the news departments have been cut back because the networks are worried about their profits.

The networks have found that, out there in the vastness of America, certain types of messages are more appealing and acceptable than others.

"What we watch," writes communications Professor Neil Postman in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, "is a medium which presents information in a form that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment."

Which brings us to Earl Carter, and his mandate: The Constitution in 30 seconds.

"I cannot think of any circumstance in which advertising would not be evil." -- attributed to historian Arnold Toynbee.

If the "product" was the Constitution, the "client" was the Bicentennial Commission, headed by Warren Burger, a character straight out of Central Casting -- basso profundo, distinguished white hair, a profile that'd look good on a coin. Burger had been given $26 million by Congress to promote awareness of the bicentennial. Naturally that would require some TV spots. The Chief had his own ideas . . . he kept talking about a "civics lesson." Lots of history. Ben Franklin. George Washington. The Miracle at Philadelphia.

Experts were assigned the task: the Advertising Council, the nonprofit group of ad execs who have given us Smokey the Bear and The Crying Indian and A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste. The Advertising Council knew that a "civics lesson" would be as appealing to Middle America as a Calder mobile to a Neanderthal.

"To Chief Justice Burger the Constitution is almost mystical," says Bob Keim, head of the Ad Council. "We wanted to convey more than reverence."

"They wanted America, America," says Gordon Kinney, Keim's No. 2 man. Kinney says there was a long discussion over whether to include a "response mechanism." That's where you write in for a booklet or a pamphlet or something. (The Ad Council has been accused of being a booklet-of-the-month-club.)

"Our committee said to the chief justice and the commission, 'It has nothing for people to do. You have to at least offer people something,' " Kinney says.

The commission consented. Now, when you see the commercials, you can write in for a Constitution kit, including a copy of the document itself. Usually commercials are elaborate efforts to help to justify to the viewer the purchase of merchandise. In this case the merchandise -- the copy of the Constitution -- was inserted as an afterthought to help justify the commercials.

To produce the ads, The Ad Council picked Scali, McCabe, Sloves Inc., one of the hottest and most respected agencies in the world, and not, incidentally, owned by the British, as is a growing portion of Madison Avenue. Scali McCabe would not get "paid" for the job -- officially it is out of the good of the heart -- but the agency would receive $490,000 in taxpayer dollars for out-of-pocket expenses in creating the TV commercials.

Scali McCabe gave the assignment to Earl Carter, a copywriter, and Bob Needleman, an art director. They had to create both print and TV ads. They knew they had to keep it simple. Provoke people to learn more.

"We had to make people aware of what the Constitution is, that it's not a hotel, it's not a boat. Most people think it's the Declaration of Independence," Needleman says.

In the early going Carter considered citing surveys that show how ignorant Americans are about the Constitution. Another one of his ideas would have shown a prisoner being ordered around by a guard. The voice-over would announce " . . . if you ever wondered what it would be like to give up some of the rights granted to you under the Constitution of the United States, just ask him . . . "

This was pretty radical stuff. It didn't survive the editing process. The creative bosses at Scali McCabe and at the Ad Council made clear that they wanted positive ads, uplifting ads from which the viewer would walk away feeling good, not disturbed, not dumb. At the Ad Council there were briefly some concerns about the theme line, The Words We Live By. Controversy comes in all shapes and sizes. The fear was that some people would be offended, because they live not by the words of the Constitution, but by -- of course -- the words of The Good Book.

Carter and Needleman also had to avoid hype. They didn't want to be accused of turning the Bill of Rights into a bill of goods. The ads couldn't look like Chevy commercials. This would be no Liberty Fest. No Elvis impersonators or chocolate replicas this time around. The bicentennial was going to be as sober as Sunday school, with lots of essay contests and symposia and exhibits. (Only the news media have gone bananas, as could be predicted -- or, more precisely, because it could be predicted. Editors love a story that can be both vast in scope and budgeted in advance.)

So Earl Carter and his partner had a unique problem:

Because of the edict against controversy, there were so many things they could not delve into (particularly not into any actual constitutional issues, such as gun control, affirmative action, civil rights, school integration, the rights of the accused, drug screening, the imperial presidency, school prayer or abortion) . . . and yet the subject matter was still so sweeping as to offer almost too many options.

At least they weren't trying to market motor oil. They could believe in the Constitution.

"This is a great product," Needleman says, "probably one of the best products we've ever had to sell."

Over the course of a nine-week creative process they did some homework, talked to historians, deep thinkers, constitutional experts. That didn't help much. The conversations were sort of obligatory.

"It didn't really give us the advertising. It's like taking a factory tour if the client makes applesauce or beer. You do it," Needleman says.

It's easy to knock the ad business. The common rap is that Madison Avenue is manipulative, that it exploits base desires, that it programs the viewer to want unnecessary products, that it is caters to the most common and therefore most insipid denominator of the people. Still, there are a lot of great ads. Particularly great TV commercials. A superior TV commercial can stick in the mind as long or longer than any brilliant passage in a novel.

It is also not true that the formulas are fixed. In fact the formulas are in upheaval. There is a new genre on Madison Avenue called anti-advertising. Anti-advertising is advertising that exploits the fact that people no longer believe advertising.

One example is the sleazy Joe Isuzu, who makes ludicrous claims about his cars as a disclaimer flashes on the screen: "He's Lying." Then there are the cinema verite commercials for Wang, in which the lighting is bad, the conversation elliptical, as if someone with a hidden camera slipped in to film something that really happened. AT&T has gone even further, with interviews of supposed victims of bad phone systems, in which the camera dips and darts and flops around as though handled by a spastic. The situation has gotten to the point where one advertising executive, Don Easdon, who worked on the "real life, real answers" campaign for John Hancock insurance, told The Wall Street Journal, "I'm concerned that too much reality in advertising will dilute its impact."

Reality, as he uses the term, doesn't mean reality but pretend reality. The fear on Madison Avenue is that the viewers will tire of pretend reality and want to return to real pretense. Carter and Needleman felt they couldn't be too avant-garde, but they did come up with one superior idea, an idea that had the odor of taboo. It was not anti-advertising so much as anti-symbolism.

The storyboard opened with a shot of the crown of the Statue of Liberty, then the face, then the torch, and finally some workers in a warehouse. The voice-over would say, "The Statue of Liberty. Our greatest symbol of freedom. But without the Constitution of the United States to stand behind her, Miss Liberty would have no meaning. In fact, without the Constitution" -- here the viewer would realize that the Statue is being dismantled and loaded into crates -- "Miss Liberty might as well be packed up and sent back to France.

"The Constitution: The words we live by."

A radical idea. The commercial attacked the very foundation of electronic advertising, the manipulation of symbols. Carter and Needleman were making the accurate and timely point that symbols have no meaning by themselves, that it is such (boring) things as the Constitution that really matter. Simultaneously -- cunningly -- the commercial would exploit both the lingering Statue-frenzy and the telegeneticism of Miss Liberty.

But the forces of convention had surrounded the project like Mexicans at the Alamo. No rogue ideas would escape alive.

It must be understood that Earl Carter, even though he makes about a hundred grand a year, inhabits the lowest level of a monstrous ziggurat of authority. He is like a plaintiff who wants to appeal a Traffic Court decision to the United States Supreme Court. There are many levels to climb before you get to Warren Burger.

Carter and Needleman put together an animated videotape (an "animatic") of the Statue ad, plus "animatics" of six other less ambitious concepts, and successfully ran them through the internal Scali McCabe gauntlet of account supervisors and corporate executives and legal beagles, then through the external gauntlet of the Ad Council, then on to the Bicentennial Commission.

Burger liked the Statue ad. But others balked. The commission approved the six less provocative ads but not the Miss Liberty idea.

The explanations vary. Too expensive to film. Wrong tone. Too anti-Statue.

Lynne Cheney, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and head of the commission's media committee, said, "I thought it was provocative and perhaps just a bit off-key."

Jack Taylor, campaign coordinator for the Ad Council, noted, "There was a potential for alienating some members of the U.S. consumer audience."

Although the six concepts were approved by the Scali McCabe bosses and the Ad Council bosses and the commission bosses, Carter and Needleman's ideas had to go to a final arbiter . . . an authority even more powerful than Warren Burger. The networks.

CBS wasn't happy. One of the ads was about freedom of religion and featured the line, "In America, because of the words of the Constitution, you can talk to God any way you want -- or not at all." The commercial implicitly declares that God exists . . . that He'll still be there even if you aren't on speaking terms. The Constitution, CBS noted, doesn't mention God anywhere. It only says the government won't establish an official religion or prevent religious worship.

CBS withheld approval. Ordinarily that will kill a commercial. That's the nature of free speech in America. Theoretically, the First Amendment allows people to say whatever they want. In reality, the networks censor the "public" airwaves, particularly with regard to advertising. The networks require that advertisers submit storyboards, then roughcuts, then final products. The advertisers have no choice but to comply -- no one wants to spend money filming something that won't air.

Scali McCabe bulled ahead with the religion ad.

"We decided to ignore CBS's comment," Earl Carter wrote in a manuscript prepared for a trade newsletter. "We don't think the other 6,000-plus stations around the country will have a problem having the word God mentioned in a religious spot. Just who the hell do these networks think they are?"

CBS later relented and agreed to run the ad.

NBC had its own gripe. The network objected to a spot that declared that because of the Constitution "the station you are watching" has "complete freedom" to broadcast anything it wants. NBC pointed out that TV stations and networks are regulated by the Federal Communications Commission, and must adhere to such irksome things as the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine theoretically requires that stations delve into issues of public importance, and give time to all viewpoints, but in practice the Fairness Doctrine has caused the networks to shy away from anything that might be controversial.

Scali McCabe decided to produce two versions of the ad, one with "complete freedom" and the other with just "freedom."

Next came the actual production. Scali McCabe hired Steve Horn, the brilliant director who made the "Reach Out and Touch Someone" ads for AT&T.

One of the spots Steve Horn had to shoot was called "Recruits." It would show a group of military recruits taking an oath to defend the Constitution. Steve Horn and his associates went to an Army office in Brooklyn where recruits actually were being sworn in. He was dismayed at how small, sterile, poorly lit and "unaesthetic" the room was.

"I can't show that on television," he says. "People wouldn't want to watch the ad."

So he filmed it in a cavernous, almost medieval room at Mount St. Vincent's College, a Catholic school at the northern tip of Manhattan. Light streamed in from the high windows, suffusing the interior with a golden warmth, the scene made all the more atmospheric by smoke pumped from a smoke machine. The recruits were spaced slightly apart, erect, feet together, profiles illuminated in the kind of chiaroscuro characteristic of the early Baroque.

Horn is not embarrassed by his use of artistic license. In any medium, including newspapers, he says, the truth is altered.

"Everything is a lie," Horn says. "You can't give the truth . . . I can't give the truth and the Army room can't look like that . . . That's such an undramatic room. So what I do, I do what I do best, so I make it look good. I try to make it look dramatic and heroic; I try to make it look like a good thing to join the Army, not a bad thing . . . The truth of the matter is that the Army is not a good place to go; it's a place for losers."

He adds, "Heightening reality makes things come across a little better. I think it helps to make it more real, more emotional."

The Ad Council is like a big brother -- it tells America what's right and wrong. But there are people out there -- people involved with politically liberal groups seeking greater access to the media -- who say the Ad Council is more like Big Brother. This is an adjunct of the Brave New World conspiracy. The thinking goes like this: The Ad Council is a collective of executives from Big Business, not only from Madison Avenue agencies but also from the networks and from large corporations with hefty advertising budgets, the General Motorses and Procter & Gambles. They care about profits, not people. They want to turn the public agenda to their own advantage -- to divert attention from their own crimes.

Smokey the Bear? He blames the little guy for starting fires, when it's really Big Business that clear-cuts and erodes our national forests.

The Crying Indian? He blames the little guy for littering, when it's really Big Business that dumps toxic waste into our rivers and pumps poison into the air.

The buckle-up campaigns? They blame the little guy for carelessness, when it's really Big Business that makes unsafe cars.

"They would have us believe that they are the public relations and ad agency for the entire nation, that what they do is in the public interest, but we argue that they are simply the voice of corporate America," says Herbert Gunther, head of the California-based Public Media Center, which makes commercials for left-of-center groups such as Amnesty International and the Union of Concerned Scientists. "What the Ad Council does is censor what Americans get to hear."

Andy Schwartzman, executive director of the Washington-based Media Access Project, says of the Ad Council, "They stick with extremely safe, noncontroversial campaigns. Anyone who is really concerned with economic justice cannot get through the front door of the Ad Council."

Bob Keim, the Ad Council boss, dismisses this kind of talk. He says the Ad Council was once a little squeamish, but started taking on tougher issues, like urban poverty, in the late 1960s. He says, "I don't think we're too Establishment-oriented. I think we're able to do what we accomplished because we have the people of the Establishment well represented and behind us."

Keim is a great admirer of the advertising business. He once told Adweek that the great thing about advertising people is "they really care about other people. Their response to human problems, to needs, is emotional, not clinical. Someone asked me once, if I were marooned on a desert island, who would I want to be with? I said, I hope they're in advertising . . . "

The Constitution campaign, Keim says, is brilliant.

"It's just good plain unadorned Americana. Very symbolic. Action oriented. It shows how the Constitution lives in our lives. I think this material is so good it's almost classic literature and can be used over and over again."

The six commercials debuted on Monday, Feb. 23, in the Edward R. Murrow Room of the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The executives from Scali McCabe were there (but not the guys in the trenches, Earl Carter and Bob Needleman), as were the executives from the Ad Council, former Chief Justice Burger and a sprinkling of reporters and other observers. Several people made introductory comments, and then the big moment arrived.

Several television monitors flicked on at once.

These are the finished commercials:

1 -- The Presidents. Time: 30 Seconds. FADE IN on film clip of John F. Kennedy being sworn into office by Chief Justice Earl Warren. DRAMATIC MUSIC. "I, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, do solemnly swear . . . " CUT TO Lyndon Johnson saying, ". . . that I will faithfully execute the office of the Presidency of the United States . . . " CUT TO Richard Nixon saying, ". . . and will to the best of my ability . . . "CUT TO Gerald Ford: ". . . preserve, protect and defend . . . " CUT TO Jimmy Carter. ". . . the Constitution of the United States . . ." CUT TO Ronald Reagan. ". . . so help me God." FREEZE ON REAGAN. FADE OUT. FADE IN on still shot of interior of National Archives with glass case containing actual Constitution. VOICE OF CHARLTON HESTON: "The Constitution: The Words We Live By."

2 -- Freedom of Religion. Time: 30 Seconds. FADE IN on priest walking toward altar, CUT TO Jewish boy at a Bar Mitzvah, CUT TO faces of Protestants reciting a prayer, CUT TO a preacher at a charismatic black church, CUT TO his congregants leaping to their feet and shouting with joy. VOICE OF CHARLTON HESTON: "In America, because of the words of the Constitution, you can talk to God any way you want . . ." SCREEN GOES BLACK. " . . . or not all all." THEME LINE.

3 -- The 26th Amendment. Time: 30 Seconds. FADE IN on a large hall, suffused with golden light, with about two dozen people lined up to vote in curtained voting booths. VOICE OF CHARLTON HESTON: "There was a time when an 18-year-old couldn't vote. A time when there was no meaningful way for young adults to express their opinions. What changed that? The 26th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States." CLOSE IN on one voting booth. The curtains part. A handsome all-American white male, apparently of college age, exits and smiles contentedly into the camera. FREEZE. FADE OUT. THEME LINE.

4 -- Recruits. Time: 30 Seconds. FADE IN on clean-cut young men and women standing at attention. They take an oath to defend the Constitution. VOICE OF CHARLTON HESTON: "The Constitution. If it's important enough to fight for, don't you think it's important enough to know about?" FADE OUT. THEME LINE.

5 -- Censorship. Time: 20 Seconds. FADE IN on man frowning as he turns pages of a newspaper. PULL BACK to see much of the newspaper blotted out. VOICE OF CHARLTON HESTON: "Without the protection of the Constitution, there would be something missing in your life." FADE OUT. THEME LINE.

6 -- Uncle Sam. Time: 20 Seconds. CLOSE UP of old man's face. "I don't want you to ever forget that the freedom of this station to broadcast the show you're watching is made possible by the Constitution of the United States!" PULL BACK to reveal that it is Uncle Sam. Uncle Sam is pointing a finger at the camera. FADE OUT. THEME LINE.

And that was it.

Everyone clapped.

Someone invited the Chief to make a few remarks. Burger gave his hearty endorsement to the ads, but then started talking about what he would have done.

"If I worked for you," he said to Bob Keim, the Ad Council director, "I'd be fired. I'd be inclined to have an ad -- and this is what you'd fire me for -- that said Mr. Sakharov couldn't have been confined in this country for seven years without a jury trial and appeals all the way to the highest court . . . Here Gorbachev tries to get a big P.R. boost out of releasing people -- only the Lord and perhaps Gorbachev know how many people are confined . . . "

Bob Keim explained to the Chief -- reminded him once again -- that you just can't do certain things, that there is a good way and a bad way, that ads that are too negative or too controversial . . . well, that's the bad way.

Keim said very politely, "We feel that we catch more flies with sugar than vinegar."

Later a few people mentioned to Marvin Sloves, the head of the ad agency, that the shot of Nixon in the first commercial is a little jolting. That it's a little ironic, maybe even distasteful, to see a man swearing to uphold a Constitution that he showed little respect for in certain crucial moments, a man who, had he not resigned, would probably have been impeached for obstruction of justice.

Sloves thought about it and said, "You have to put him in it," and then quickly added, "but you also have to pause before putting him in it."

"The Bill of Rights is largely a prescription for preventing government from restricting the flow of information and ideas. But the Founding Fathers did not foresee that tyranny by government might be superseded by another sort of problem altogether, namely, the corporate state, which through television now controls the flow of public discourse in America."

-- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death.

All systems were Go. Then the incredible happened.

CBS suddenly decided it wouldn't run the Presidents ad, the flagship of the campaign.

The network "withheld clearance," and as this story went to press, it was still withholding.

The top censor at CBS is an intense man named George Dessart, who occupies the corner office on the 26th floor of the network's headquarters on Sixth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. An Emmy stands atop his bookshelf, a relic of his days as a producer of documentaries. Nothing gets on the air at CBS without Dessart's approval. His department, Program Practices, has divided the world into 69 categories, such as "Bras and Girdles" and "Personal Deodorants and Depilatories" and "Public Service Announcements."

Dessart explained that the network had a problem with the clip of Reagan saying, "So help me God." The line had not been in the storyboard -- it had come aboard during production.

"I think our major concern is the offense to the truth," Dessart said. "I think, certainly, Article Six and later the First Amendment clearly spoke to the issue of the establishment of religion. This PSA seems to suggest that there is an establishment of religion in the Constitution."

The problem really lies not in what Reagan says -- after all, he did say "So help me God" when he took the oath of office -- the problem lies more with . . . brace yourself, Earl Carter . . . the theme line.

The Words We Live By. Controversial again! To CBS the implication is that the words "So help me God" are literally in the Constitution, are literally among the words that we live by, and in fact the rest of the oath of office is in the Constitution, right there in Article Two, Section One, Subsection G, and it stops with Jimmy Carter's part. "So help me God" is apparently an ad lib that goes back at least as far as Eisenhower.

"It's not the oath of office," Dessart said. "We think that's misleading and unfortunate, and though it's a lovely spot, certainly the Bicentennial Commission has a mandate to be faithful to the spirit of that document."

Bicentennial Commission media chairman Lynne Cheney, stunned when told by a reporter that CBS had rejected the ad, said, "What's so appalling about this is it's simply the recording of what people have said . . . What have we come to if we can't mention God on network television?"

All of which takes us back to the Brave New World conspiracy.

Ralph Nader recently gave a lecture in Fort Lauderdale, and took a few minutes to screen a videotape of the Constitution commercials.

He was appalled.

"It's all empty," he said. "It's symbolic. The ads turn the Constitution into a symbol, like the flag, instead of telling people how they can use it. It also associates the Constitution with governmental authority, instead of informing people of the rights the Constitution gives them against arbitrary government."

He added, "It focused very much on authority symbols and not very much on dissent symbols."

Symbols . . . that is the field of study of Marshall Blonsky, a teacher of semiotics at the New School for Social Research in New York City.

Blonsky said, "The function of television is to neutralize individuals in their homes. It's a kind of a tranquilizer, and that's why it has to be bland."

After hearing a description of the Constitution ads, he said they were totally out of synch with the national mood. Maybe a year ago they would have been fine, he said. "There has been created over the last six years an advertising of the United States itself that is almost identical to advertisements for products, products like Bud." Americans began to love their country as never before. But something was missing. The patriotism seemed hollow. America hadn't won a war. America hadn't done much of anything. The orgy had been fueled entirely by images. Sometime in the last year everyone woke up. It's morning again in America, and everyone has a hangover.

Blonsky added that he found Uncle Sam a particularly inane symbol for a commercial. The symbol has been beaten to death by car salesmen with Fourth of July specials. Blonsky said, "That piece of iconography has been commercially cheapened to the point of nullity."

Greenwich Village, the Lion's Head tavern. Earl Carter drinks a New Amsterdam beer and leans against a sill. He's in a particularly loquacious mood. He's talking about how he wants to be a novelist. He's sent a manuscript to a publisher and is waiting for an answer. Says he just wants his foot in the door. The novel is titled The Turtle and the Scorpion.

"I used all my experience in advertising to write it," he says.

The fact is, he's a little geriatric for the ad business. At 42 he's the oldest copywriter at Scali. It's a young person's game. And there are the other problems . . .

"It's inhibited as much as any system with a lot of people having approval . . . It's the system of clients who are concerned about spending a lot of money and want to make sure all the bases are covered. . . . A lot of advertising is done with a cookie-cutter mold."

Not the Constitution ads, though.

" 'Be All You Can Be' is very famous, but 'The Words We Live By' is the hardest thing I ever had to come up with. I didn't write it. I said a little prayer to God that I come up with something good for the Constitution. And I got that.

"In a way, I've had more influence on America than a lot of writers have had," he says. "Be All You Can Be."

Warren Burger is sitting backstage at a convention center in Orlando. He seems in a good mood as he talks to a small cluster of reporters. He likes the product that he is promoting. He says he always reassures young people that America's system of government is the best on Earth.

"In what other country," Burger asks, "could you have a Walt Disney come from nowhere and create the empire that he did?"

He is asked about recent reports that the Philadelphia organizers have severe management problems. The dirty rumor is that the bicentennial is turning into a bust. The Supreme Court and Congress have declined to hold special sessions in Philadelphia. Corporations have been stingy with donations. The books about the Constitution aren't selling.

Burger says he's not worried. The Chief is indefatigable.

"We are told by the McDonald's people -- fasten your seat belts -- that they will go through 12 million of these a day," he says.

He's talking about place mats. McDonald's will print the Preamble on place mats. Not the Constitution. Just the Preamble.

"Are you worried about the commercialism of the whole thing?" an Orlando journalist asks him.

"Would you consider it commercialism?" the Chief responds.

Silence. No one is going to argue the point with the former chief justice of the United States.

Someone mentions the TV commercials. Burger says he likes them. But he acknowledges that the Constitution is a tough sell.

"The difficulty is that we haven't got that great big Statue of Liberty."

He holds up a small, plain brown pamphlet. It is a copy of the United States Constitution.

"This is a piece of paper," Burger says, looking at the little thing the way a mother looks at a child with a bad haircut or scraped-up knees. He says the commission is redoing the pamphlet.

"The next one we have coming along will be a brighter color," he says, smiling, "better for television."

Section: TROPIC

Copyright (c) 1987 The Miami Herald