San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Adman helped rescue campaign of seemingly doomed N.Y. mayor
Tony Isidore, the advertising man behind the contrite “I made mistakes” campaign that helped reelect Mayor John V. Lindsay in 1969 and the New York Urban Coalition’s galvanizing battle cry against complacency, “Give a Damn,” died Sunday in Paterson, N.J. He was 89.
The cause was complications of an aortic aneurysm, his son Christopher said.
Isidore was working as a copywriter for Young & Rubicam in the late 1960s when he was enlisted in both of those long-shot advertising campaigns.
Lindsay, among the last of New York’s liberal Republicans, had been denied renomination by his party and was facing two conservative rivals: state Sen. John J. Marchi, who had defeated him in the primary, and Mario Procaccino, a Democrat.
Lindsay’s reelection seemed like a lost cause until Richard R. Aurelio, the campaign manager; David Garth, his media adviser; and Isidore’s team from Young & Rubicam persuaded the mayor to publicly admit that he had made mistakes during his first term.
The breakthrough television advertisement was filmed on the back porch of Gracie Mansion, the New York City mayor’s residence, where Lindsay cringed through the script during 33 takes until his mea culpa seemed credible.
“I guessed wrong on the weather before the city’s biggest snowfall last winter, and that was a mistake,” Lindsay began, referring to the blizzard that February that killed 42 people. The resulting crisis had factored into his near political downfall. “But I put 6,000 more cops on the streets, and that was no mistake.”
Isidore later explained that his team had collaborated with Aurelio and Garth to cast the mayoralty, implicitly, as too challenging for a typical politician, like his two rivals.
“Rather than tear down the man we were running against, we built up the size of the job,” Isidore told the New York Times, declaring it “the second-toughest job in America,” a phrase credited to many authors and one that Michael Bloomberg echoed when he ran for a third term in 2009. For Lindsay, the strategy worked: He served a second term through 1973.
Isidore worked on the public service media campaign for the New York Urban Coalition. The nonpartisan group was mounting a campaign on behalf of Black people in low-income communities and other minority groups in an era when conservative candidates were rallying a “silent majority” of white voters fed up with the perceived sudden pace of civil rights and liberal excesses. The coalition wanted to “send them a message” — the “them” and the “message” being vague enough to appeal to a broad spectrum of the electorate.
“Give a Damn” was the Isidore team’s provocative challenge in 1968, urging corporate and labor leaders to get involved with generating jobs and with providing other support that the government could not or would not.
Anthony Francis Isidore, the son of Italian immigrants, was born June 13, 1933, in Richmond, New York, and grew up in nearby East Rochester. His father, Violante Isidore (born Isidoro Violante),
built railroad cars and died when Tony was 9. His mother, Agnes (Agata) Taverrite, worked in a defense plant during World War II and later opened a dress shop and sold real estate.
Tony attended Rutgers University in New Jersey on a football scholarship and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English.
Isidore aspired to be a novelist. He supported himself as a messenger, worked for an ad agency in Rochester and was hired by Young & Rubicam in 1959. He rose to copy chief and then senior vice president before leaving the firm to join or to start others.
He also collaborated on advertising
campaigns for the United Farm Workers union (“There’s blood on those grapes”), Jell-O (“There’s always room for JellO”), and an effort by two airplane manufacturers — one British, the other French — to gain landing rights for the supersonic Concorde jetliner at Kennedy Airport in New York in 1977.
Isidore’s marriage to Nancy Meyer in 1956 ended in divorce in 1977. He married Rosemary Fairchild in 1983; she died in 2016.
In addition to his sons, both from his marriage to Meyer, his survivors include a stepdaughter, Ashley O’Keeffe; two stepsons, Chris and Ethan Eichrodt; and 10 grandchildren.