Greg Stevens, who died Monday at 58, was a wily political advertisement maker whose handiwork helped turn elections and became part of political lore.

Working on behalf of Republicans, he was responsible for such iconic spots as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads in the 2004 presidential election and the 1988 ad featuring the Democratic presidential candidate, Michael Dukakis, in a tank.

Stevens was a one-time protégé of Roger Ailes, who hired him during the 1988 presidential campaign after seeing Stevens’s work in the primaries on behalf of Jack Kemp.

“Greg’s too good to be working against me,” Mr. Ailes told Roll Call at the time.

After taking charge of Mr. Ailes’s political advertising operations in 1991, Stevens went on to found his own firm in 1993, now called Stevens Reed Curcio & Potholm. He produced ads for dozens of state and national races, including the successful efforts of John Rowland to become Connecticut governor, Craig Benson to become New Hampshire governor, George Allen to become Virginia governor, and Mike DeWine to become Ohio senator.

Stevens’s spots on behalf of Mr. DeWine were popularly known as the “Marlboro Mike” ads because they featured the candidate seated at his kitchen table, talking about the issues while dressed in a plaid flannel shirt. This was not focusgrouped artifice, reported the Dayton Daily News in 1996: “DeWine really does own those shirts and he really does talk politics over still-warming apple pies.”

If Stevens’s work was sometimes criticized for coarsening political discourse — he was forced to apologize on more than one occasion for digitally manipulating images — he defended using devices such as a stammering schoolboy explaining that the dog ate his homework to illustrate President Clinton’s problematic relationship with truth-telling.

“People are laughing about politics anyway,” Stevens told the Washington Post in 1996. “All of this stuff is entertainment anyway.”

But it was serious business for Stevens, too, both financially and politically. Stevens Reed took in more than $56 million in the 2004 election year, according to a study by the Center for Public Integrity. Stevens could respond to accusations that he produced only negative ads by pointing to dozens of positive ads he created for Senator McCain’s 2000 presidential run. But going negative was fair play, too. “People do need contrasting information,” he told the New York Times in 2000.

Raised in Maine and New Jersey and the son of a minister, Stevens was a reporter at the Woodbridge (N.J.) News Tribune in 1976 when he was recruited by future Governor Tom Kean to work as the state press secretary for President Ford’s unsuccessful re-election bid. From there he worked on the successful Senate campaign of William Cohen of Maine and then ran Mr. Cohen’s Portland office.

After several other jobs as a political operative, Stevens returned to New Jersey in 1983 to become chief of staff to Mr. Kean, then the state’s governor. Mr. Kean, in his 1988 book “The Politics of Inclusion,” credited Stevens with being the architect of his 1985 landslide re-election.

Stevens hired Mr. Ailes to produce ads for the 1985 campaign and worked closely with the ad maker, even then a veteran whose reputation stretched back to President Nixon. Mr. Ailes then turned around and hired Stevens in 1988. The Dukakis tank commercial made Stevens famous, and when he opened his doors as an independent consultant, candidates lined up for his services.

By 2000, the veteran tactician struck a new tone, coming out early for Mr. McCain’s presidential bid. “In terms of politics, I have done everything there is to do,” he told Advertising Age. “I wanted to work for somebody — and this sounds hokey — that I believed in and felt it would be a joy to help.” Mr. McCain lost out to President Bush in the primaries, but the Arizona senator and Stevens remained friends, and he visited Stevens during his final illness.

Their friendship seemed briefly challenged by Stevens’s next project, the Swift Boat ads, which Mr. McCain called “dishonorable.” The ads had the Stevens touch: simple and inexpensive production consisting mainly of interviews and archival footage of the Democratic presidential candidate, Senator Kerry. But they packed a unique wallop and have not ceased to ring in the ears of the body politic.

“I thought he was a person of tremendous courage,” a co-founder of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, John O’Neill, said. “He had absolutely nothing to gain from helping us at all.”

To his critics, Stevens responded in the Times, “Don’t those veterans have as much right to talk about Vietnam as John Kerry?”

Greg Stevens
Born November 1, 1948, in Abington, Pa.; died Monday at his home in Portland, Maine., of brain cancer; survived by his wife, Judi, and three sons, Clark, Brent, and Luke.