On September 16, 1968, in one of the more unfortunate media gimmicks of all time, presidential candidate Richard Milhouse Nixon appeared on the hugely popular NBC sketch show Laugh-In, a move which, for the rest of his life, he would credit with winning him the election.
Laugh-In‘s catch-phrase was “sock it to me,” and the show’s producers liked to feature brief clips of noted celebrities or politicians saying it. Laugh-In got to show its power to make famous people say silly things, and the famous people got to make themselves look cool in front of the show’s mostly young audience of millions. Same principle as SNL today. Everyone won. So when Nixon was campaigning in California in 1968, one of the shows writers, Paul Keyes, talked him into appearing.
This was an unlikely appearance for Nixon, who—aware of how much television had hurt him in the 1960 election against Kennedy—tended to avoid TV appearances as much as possible. Most of his aides advised him against it. Keyes was a friend of Nixon’s, and somehow convinced him to take a break from a press conference to film a short cameo, in which Nixon looked at the camera and said ‘Sock it to me?”
Actually, that’s not quite accurate. Take after take, Nixon kept saying “Sock it to me!” angrily, which the producer didn’t like. Finally, he tried it with an upturned inflection— “sock it to meeee?” —making it a question. The producer loved it.
He loved it so much, in fact, that he thought that Democratic candidate and former VP Hubert Humphrey should go on the show, saying something like, “I’ll sock it to ya, Dick!” or “Good idea!” But Humphrey, in the manner of so many politicians who have missed the power of new media, declined. Or more accurately, his handlers declined, saying that it wouldn’t be a dignified thing for a presidential candidate to do. And they were right, because when the clip aired before millions of viewers, it made Richard Milhouse Nixon, a man whose name was synonymous with ‘uptight, stodgy politician’ look almost, well . . . human. Nixon was paid $230 for his appearance, and went on to win the ’68 election.
It’s impossible, of course, to say whether his Laugh-In appearance won Nixon the election, effectively ending forty years of more-or-less liberal control of the government, just as it’s impossible to say whether his poor showing in the 1960 televised debates lost him that election. But George Schlatter, creator of Laugh-In, liked to quote Hubert Humphrey as saying that not appearing may have lost the Democrats the 1968 election.
And Nixon, Schlatter said on a PBS documentary called Satire and Parody; Sock it to Me? “said the rest of his life that appearing on Laugh-In is what got him elected.
“And I believe that. And I’ve had to live with that.”
