The popular smile face button, a common sight in the early 1970's, was actually designed by the US government as a replacement to the popular peace button of the late 1960's.
This is one of a number of bizarre ways the Nixon administration attempted "grass roots" sabotage of the anti-war effort. Nixon doesn't get credit for it though; most of the orders for this kind of psych-ops came from Vice President Agnew, who had a personal vendetta against hippies, especially politicized ones.
The button's designer is credited to Brigadier General Harvey Ball, a career military man in the National Guard and Army Reserves, who came up with the idea in 1962 after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. One weird plan the military was considering was a second invasion of Cuba, in which the invading soldiers were to pass out the smile buttons to civilians as a gesture of goodwill. It might sound weird, but this was the same government that had plans to poison Castro's cigars or dose him with a chemical that would make his beard fall out. These plans for a second invasion were shelved during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Ball's buttons were mothballed. A small number were released to the public at political rallies and demonstrations in order to gauge their popularity. Ball was paid a single lump-sum payment for his work, $45. It was never copyrighted or trademarked.
The turning point was the Democratic National convention of 1968, when protesters rioted and cops busted heads. The whole scene appalled Agnew, who was running with Nixon for the Republicans, filling him with loathing for hippie scum. After the new administration took office in 1969, Agnew began his obsessive trolling of hippies. One of his first moves was to contact the Federal Communications Commission and get them to ban "With a Little Help From My Friends" by the Beatles and "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane, two songs that really stuck in his craw, from radio airplay. He spent his entire tenure as Vice President engaged in this weird penny-ante harassment of the counter culture.
It was at Agnew's behest that COINTELPRO went digging in their vaults in the Spring of 1969 to see what stuff they had with which to troll the counterculture. They still had Ball's smile buttons, which were brought to his attention, but he saw no use for them.
Fast forward to 1972. The Vietnam war is reaching its apex, and anti-war forces are driving the Democrats. Anti-war activist and senator Eugene McCarthy is a surprisingly strong contender in the primaries against establishment senator George McGovern. One one front, Watergate is put into motion to disrupt the Democrats. And on another front, Agnew finally figured out what to do with those damn hippies and their peace signs.
COINTELPRO had been disbanded in 1971, but remnants of it were still involved in covert operations that included infiltrating anti-war and radical fringe groups, including the Weathermen, the SDS, and others of that ilk. Someone within one of these covert groups brought up the smile buttons again, and suggested they be passed out both to radicals and people on the street. The idea was that the peace signs were simply a fashion trend, albeit one with a political meaning. Replace them with an innocuous and meaningless icon, and one visible symbol of the anti-war effort would eventually vanish from the streets.
The story gets a little murky at this point. It is known that nearly 15 million smile buttons were distributed, mostly for free, throughout the autumn of 1972. They caught on immediately, and soon had risen to icon status. The peace symbol, which had been visible on every urban streetcorner in early 1972 had vanished seemingly overnight. By 1973, it was rare to see a peace symbol anywhere; smile faces were everywhere. Agnew got bogged down in his own scandals during late 1972, and never publicly commented on the operation except an ambiguous comment he made shortly before his death: "I look back on the hippie movement...and you know what? I smile..."
Nixon stopped sending troops to Vietnam by the end of 1972, and by 1974 the troops had been withdrawn. Saigon fell in 1975, due mainly to the absence of American troops. The smile face lives today, appropriated by Wal-Mart. General Ball died in 2001.
