(written February 4, 2006)

Available for purchase in the gallery.

I accepted the commission to do this poster in April of 1967, close to the time that my rock posters had been featured in the art section of TIME magazine. It was to announce the opening of new offices in Los Angeles for the J. Walter Thompson Company (now JWT) which was/is one of the largest advertising and public relations firms in the United States. Perhaps largely because of my fame and notoriety at that time I was granted unprecedented freedom in carrying out the design. The manager of this new office was Mr. Bob (H. R.) Haldeman and it was probably either he or his assistant, Mr. Ron Ziegler, who originally spoke with me on the phone about it. I was given the specific wording for the poster and a picture of Mr. J. Walter Thompson himself, should I see fit to use it in the design.

I was, and I guess one could say still am, a liberal. One who was opposed to the unjust inhumanity of our ongoing war in Viet Nam that was being carried out in the name of “American interests.” An example being the Monsanto Chemical Company, who were making and selling hundreds of thousands of gallons of dioxin laden Agent Orange (the ultra poisonous jungle defoliant) to the Defense Department. My personal feelings at the time about the inherent dangers of industrial advertising were not good. I saw it as a work of persuasion used in the selling of products for the sake of profit. Often spinning deceptions about political and economic matters, which regularly confounded ordinary Americans into buying and/or voting in certain ways which were often not for their better interests. These thoughts were uppermost in my mind as I came up with this poster, giving it a one eye open and one shut look along with the emphasis on the words open up and see.

A few years later while in San Francisco I happened to meet a former employee who had worked at the J. Walter Thompson Company at that time. He told me that Haldeman had the printing plates for this poster framed and hung on the walls of his office. Confused, I asked why but didn’t get an explanation. I later learned that Richard Nixon had been a client of this firm during his successful 1968 campaign for the presidency.

Truly it is a small world. Once elected, President Nixon appointed Haldeman to be his right hand-man in the White House, the Chief of Staff. Mr. Dwight L. Chapin, also employed by the J. Walter Thompson Company, was appointed Special Assistant to President Nixon. Interestingly, Dwight L. Chapin, Ron Ziegler, and Donald Segretti all studied law together at the University of Southern California. Ron Ziegler also found a place in the White House as President Nixon’s Press Secretary.

In the Nixon White House Mr. Chapin was assigned the special responsibility of attending to various acts of political sabotage and espionage against the Democratic Party. Chapin then recruited Donald Segretti as part of an anti-Democrat “dirty tricks” campaign. I believe that journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein later discovered that Segretti had attempted to smear leading politicians such as Democratic Senators George McGovern, Edward Kennedy, Edmund Muskie, and Henry Jackson. These smear tactics included the release of a faked letter on Muskie’s letterhead falsely alleging that Jackson had had an illegitimate child with a 17-year-old girl. Segretti, the Republican “dirty tricks” operative working for Nixon, was later convicted and sent to prison for involvement in Watergate.

So where are they today? Many have died. However, President Bush’s Executive Assistant is, of course, Karl Christian Rove. It’s my understanding that Karl Rove’s mentor was Donald Segretti. Segretti is now out of prison and could be up to his old tricks again. He is back into politics, in 2000 Segretti surfaced as co-chair of John McCain’s campaign in Orange County, California.

“Dirty tricks” are still being used in politics so as to confound the many and serve the few. As I understand it, documents released to the IRS nineteen months after the 2000 election show that the Bush team spent over a million dollars to fly operatives into Florida to block the vote counting (clogging up the public counting places, shouting, shoving, and being as rowdy as needed to fulfill their mission) and another million to pay for their hotel bills. The effort also relied on a fleet of corporate jets controlled by people like Enron chairman Kenneth Lay and Halliburton, where Vice President Dick Cheney had just served as CEO.

When Karl Rove was publicly honored by President Bush right after his re-election, he smiled toward the blushing Karl and declared that his Executive Assistant was the architect of it all. On February 8, 2005, Karl Rove was appointed Deputy Chief of Staff in charge of policy.

I designed the Open Up & See! poster in 1967. Along with the Are We Next? poster, these became part of the 15 minutes of fame accorded me by fate, good luck, and plenty of late nights. Giving me a personal brush with history, if you will, during the wonderful good ole days in the mid-60s out in San Francisco. I still believe in keeping our minds open, so we can better see what’s going on, just as much as I did back in 1967.

Today my eyes tell me that, even though husband Bill did later embarrass her, dear Hillary was correct about there being a “vast right-wing conspiracy!” Today it is surfacing slowly like a dark, secret leviathan. Truly we are primarily being ruled by a stack of unimaginative, narrow-minded Republicans who are mostly aging, adult brats who have proven just how impatiently shortsighted, ignorant, and overly greedy they all are by their actions. Actions which, perhaps to their own detriment, are now beginning to show their true colors to the public in such a way that soon even the blind will see it all. Nothing will change, in fact things will only get much much worse, if Democrats allow the Karl Rove style idiot-bait issues like gay marriage and machine gun rights to preempt the core sensibility of voters. Mainstream Democrats can have all the dynamic social issues on their side now. Democrats can show that necessary health care can be provided more efficiently as a social service industry like the police and fire departments, the army and navy, etc., if they so choose. Surely if some wish to pay for their own private health insurance or have vanity plastic surgeries this should not prevent that. Why should it? Politicians shouldn’t hesitate to reprimand the insurance industry as a huge bumbling bureaucracy which has failed to provide much needed health care services for all Americans. The boom times for the planned dumbing down of Americans about health care is soon to be coming to an end. Democrats can gather all together as one and ‘vote their lights out!’

by Wes Wilson