The Selling of the President

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR

Joe McGinniss was just twenty-six when he wrote the book that would redefine political journalism. “The Selling of the President”, about Richard Nixon’s 1968 run for the White House, was the first book ever to take an unvarnished look at the dirty game of campaign politics. “Overnight,” Dwight Garner of The New York Times noted, “it made Theodore White’s ‘Making of the President’ campaign books seem wan and dated.” McGinniss’s startling behind-the-scenes narrative of how a candidate is packaged and sold to the American public stunned readers of the time. Forty-five years later, in the thick of another presidential election, the story is as relevant—and surprising—as ever.

With its lively accounts of the clever and cynical men hired to market the Nixon brand (including a young and witty Roger Ailes) and its fresh insights into McLuhanesque campaign techniques, “The Selling of the President” examines the genesis of the modern political campaign. As McGinniss writes in a new introduction to this digital edition, “‘The Selling of the President’ is the first account of the marriage of convenience/ménage à trois between national politics, network television, and Madison Avenue.”

Politics as usual began right here.

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PRAISE FOR "THE SELLING OF THE PRESIDENT"

“McGinniss blessed this land with his book ‘The Selling of the President, 1968’.”

–Robert Sherrill, “Washington Post Book World”

“Devastatingly funny and angry…McGinniss has given us a damning but terribly amusing picture of the flackery in one campaign…The problem will be around longer than Nixon will…You can read this book and laugh—-or maybe weep a little at how you were sold a president.”

–David Broder, “Washington Post”

“Stinging, bitterly comic…What McGinniss saw and heard he has recorded artfully enough to simultaneously entertain us and make us fear for the future of the Republic.”

–“New York Times”

“An appalled, savage and charming chronicle of Mr. Nixon’s 1968 electoral campaign.”

–Murray Kempton, “Life Magazine”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Over the course of forty years, the late Joe McGinniss wrote dozens of magazine articles and published twelve books, eleven of them nonfiction. In every decade of his unconventional career, one of his books became a classic: “The Selling of the President,” “Going to Extremes,” “Fatal Vision,” and “The Miracle of Castel di Sangro.” He is also the author of “The Dream Team,” “Blind Faith,” “Cruel Doubt,” and “The Last Brother.”