The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--and Divided a Country

by Sherman, Gabriel

  So Ailes dealt with reality. From the start, he’d been lukewarm on the front-runner and eventual nominee, Mitt Romney. “Romney came for a meeting at Fox during the primaries and did his speech in the second-floor conference room,” a person in the room said. “What was most telling was that Roger himself didn’t ask too many questions. Roger never liked Romney.” Ailes told Romney once over dinner, “You ought to be looser on the air.” In another conversation, he told him, “Be more real. Look the camera in the eye. Stop being a preppy.” Behind his back, he had sharper words. He told one Fox host that Romney was “like Chinese food—twenty minutes after you eat it, you can’t remember what you had.” In a conversation at his Fox office with Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, Ailes questioned Romney’s spine. “Romney’s gotta rip Obama’s face off,” Ailes said. “It’s really hard to do.”

  If Romney would not rip Obama’s face off, Fox would. “Roger was running a political campaign,” a person close to Ailes said. “He felt, ‘We’re going to have to do a lot of things to get this guy elected.’ Instead of propping up Romney, it was more, ‘Let’s go after Obama.’ ” Ailes personally directed and stage-managed his channel’s campaign, using entertainment techniques to shape a political narrative that was presented as unbiased news, a hybrid that makes Ailes a unique American auteur.

  On the morning of May 30, 2012, the day after Romney clinched the GOP nomination, Fox unofficially launched Romney’s general election campaign with a Fox & Friends segment. “What sort of change have we really seen over the last four years from the Obama administration?” host Steve Doocy asked.

  “Let’s take a look back,” his co-host Gretchen Carlson chirped.

  A four-minute video began to play. After several seconds of inspiring images of Obama’s victory night speech in Grant Park, an ominous orchestral score, as if from a horror film, drowned out the cheers of Obama’s supporters. Throughout the segment, the voices of news anchors broadcasted dire headlines. Dissonant alarm sirens blared. An animated money bag made a mockery of the mounting national debt. Unemployment numbers ticked up on the screen like a doomsday clock in reverse. A cartoon image of farm animals on a spinning circular platform illustrated the rising cost of food. At the end, Obama was given the last word: “That’s the power of hope. That’s the change we seek. That’s the change we can stand for.”

  The video was Ailes’s brainchild. According to an executive with firsthand knowledge, Ailes “gave the overview” of the segment in a meeting with Bill Shine. Shine then handed off the instructions to Fox & Friends executive producer Lauren Petterson, who tasked associate producer Chris White with the project. Before it was televised, Shine played the clip for Ailes.

  Not surprisingly, the segment sparked a media firestorm. A news channel had produced and aired what could only be classified as a political attack ad. Ailes, in classic fashion, took no responsibility. Fox pulled the clip off its website and released a statement with Shine’s name attached that assigned blame to a junior staffer. “Roger was not aware of the video,” a Fox spokeswoman told The New York Times.

  Obama’s camp was not persuaded. Senior adviser David Axelrod emailed Ailes that day. “I see you’re back in the spot business,” he wrote, alluding to the infamous attack ads Ailes produced in the 1980s.

  As the campaign unfolded, Fox would serve as a crucial plank in Romney’s media strategy. “Fox is watched by the true believers,” Romney told guests at a private fundraiser in Florida. Romney, for the most part, shunned the Big Three networks and CNN in favor of Ailes’s channel. In the year after he announced he was running for president, Romney gave twenty-one separate interviews to Fox & Friends. The appearances gave Romney a pulpit to stoke his base’s passions. So when Gretchen Carlson asked, “Would you go as far as Rush Limbaugh did yesterday in saying this is the first president in modern time who’s going to run a campaign against capitalism?” Romney played along. “Well, it certainly sounds like that’s what he’s doing.”

  In August, when Romney introduced his vice presidential pick, Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan, Fox anchor Megyn Kelly giddily compared Ryan to Ronald Reagan. On her program, a montage of video clips showed Ryan and the Gipper inveighing against government spending with similar language. Kelly then welcomed Reagan’s son Michael to make the comparison himself on camera.

  Behind the scenes, Ailes helped prep Ryan for the race. “Ryan met with Roger,” a person close to Ailes said. Ailes told Ryan he needed to work on his television skills and referred him to speech coach Jon Kraushar, who had worked at his consulting company Ailes Communications in the 1980s and coauthored with Ailes the book You Are the Message. “I know a guy who can teach you to read off a prompter,” Ailes said.

  That a news executive was essentially running the Republican Party was a remarkable development in American politics. But it was an outcome Ailes foretold. After the 1968 campaign, Ailes spoke of a time when television would replace the political party, that other mass organizer of the twentieth century. With Fox News, that reality was arguably established.

  Ailes owes his power to a long tradition. The media mobilizers of an earlier era—Father Charles Coughlin, Walter Winchell—paved the way for Fox News, building followings that, in their time, vectored the country toward their goals. But these firebrands were limited by the reach of their own voices. At Fox News, Ailes commands a whole platoon of firebrands, multiplying his force.

  Ailes built Fox into an entire political universe. But ultimately, it’s the expression of one man, with all his obsessions and idiosyncrasies, everything he’d absorbed. “Roger is Fox News, without him you don’t have it,” Christopher Ruddy, the editor in chief of Newsmax, the conservative monthly, said. Ed Rollins, Ronald Reagan’s campaign director and Fox News contributor, agreed. “Every single element of the network is his design,” he explained. “He’s not just an executive, he understands how to drive a message.”

  Not long before the 2012 election, Ailes told a reporter, “If Richard Nixon was alive today, he’d be on the couch with Oprah, talking about how he was poor, his brother died, his mother didn’t love him, and his father beat the shit out of him. And everybody would say, Oh, poor guy, he’s doing the best he can. See, every human being has stuff—stuff they have to carry around, stuff they have to deal with. And Richard Nixon had a lot of stuff. He did the best he could with it, but it got him in the end.”

  Ailes’s own stuff is what has transformed Fox News from a news channel into a national phenomenon. “I built this channel from my life experience,” he told an interviewer. And it was true. At his daily 8:00 a.m. editorial meeting, Ailes regularly lectures his closest advisers, about a dozen men and women, on his experience of American postwar history, which they use to program the channel. As the producer of The Mike Douglas Show, he had soaked up the chatty commercialism of 1960s daytime television, learning countless techniques to hold viewers’ attention. As a consultant to Nixon, he adopted a sense of political victimhood, and a paranoia about enemies that has marked his career ever since. In the 1970s, he honed his theatrical instincts as a Broadway producer and ran a fledgling conservative television news service bankrolled by the right-wing beer magnate Joseph Coors—in essence, a dry run for Fox News. And in the 1980s, Ailes mastered the dark art of attack politics as a mercenary campaign strategist, skills he would soon put to use in turning a television news network into an unprecedented political force. At Fox, Ailes speaks frequently of his father, a factory foreman who lived a frustrated life. Fox News launched on October 7, 1996, but it truly began a half century earlier, out of a small frame house on a shady street in Warren, Ohio.

  ONE

  “JUMP ROGER, JUMP”

  THE RAW MATERIALS FOR ROGER AILES’S MYTH of an America in danger of being lost come from his hometown of Warren, in the northeastern corner of Ohio. In the late 1800s, Warren became a center of trade and manufacturing, a city that worked. The town of six thousand boasted five newspapers, seven churches, and three banks.
In 1890, two sons of Warren founded the Packard Electric Company, which would one day employ Roger’s father. They produced the first Packard motorcar in their Warren factory in 1899, and made Warren’s streets the first in America to be illuminated by incandescent light. Through the twentieth century, the company’s growth was spurred by deposits of coal and iron ore in the Mahoning Valley. The region became one of the largest steel manufacturers in the country.

  In 1932, the General Motors Corporation acquired Packard Electric to manufacture cables for its automobiles. Roger’s father, who had been working at the plant since around the time of the 1929 stock market crash, held on to his job under the new management. Packard continued to thrive, as did the rest of Warren. In 1936, Neil Armstrong, age five, went for his first airplane ride in Warren in a Ford Tri-Motor. After World War II, Warren’s industries boomed, and throughout the middle part of the last century it was a seat of limitless American potential.

  That was the world into which Roger Eugene Ailes was born, on May 15, 1940. Warren residents earned incomes that were nearly 30 percent above the national average, redefining the middle class in ways that still have painful resonance today. “There were no slums,” recalled Ailes’s childhood friend Launa Newman. Warren, like blue-collar towns across postwar America, had been built on a benevolent compact between management and labor, which spread prosperity widely, as long as profits were growing. Packard, which employed six thousand workers in 1953, was like a city unto itself. It had its own newspaper, the Cablegram, and sponsored annual picnics for tens of thousands, where kids competed in pie-eating contests and lucky penny scrambles. The career of Roger’s father, Robert Sr., who rose to the rank of foreman in the maintenance department, benefited from this arrangement. He raised his children in a tidy home on Belmont Street, with enough yard for his prized tomato garden and the family beagle hound, Tip. He worked for forty years at the company, retired in 1969 in his early sixties, and lived the last years of his life on a company pension.

  Warren was a labor stronghold, but there were conservative currents coursing through the city’s politics. Growing up in the 1920s, Robert Ailes Sr. was drawn toward them. He recoiled from unions. To him, they were arbitrary, often rewarding people who were undeserving. At the Packard plant, Robert was considered management, and thus excluded from the benefits of joining the union. But without a college degree he had no chance to advance into the corporate hierarchy. “I never could understand why he’d ever be a Republican. Ninety-nine percent of the people who came up through the school of hard knocks were Democrats,” his son Robert Jr. said. His conservatism was a reaction against those who got breaks he never did, and his resentments consumed him.

  Robert Sr. came of age at a time in which Warren was engaged in a culture war brought on by increasing ethnic and racial discord. Rapid industrialization brought waves of immigrants—Hungarians, Romanians, Italians, Yugoslavians, Greeks—to northeast Ohio. They came in search of work in the mills. In Warren, the immigrants lived in the Flats, a scruffy neighborhood by the rail depot. It was the Prohibition era, and corruption bloomed. The foreigners operated betting parlors and speakeasies—“vice dens”—in the back rooms of social clubs in the Flats. The city’s Protestants blamed the newcomers, many of whom were Catholics and Orthodox Christians, for subverting their efforts to curtail bootlegging. One minister complained to the Dry Enforcement League that the county was “rich enough to lock up every bootlegger,” but refused to do so.

  As an adult, Robert joined Freemasonry, a fraternal organization that also stood up against the city’s changing character. Robert devoted himself to the Masons. He became a 32nd-degree master and served for twenty-five years as chaplain of the Carroll F. Clapp Lodge in Warren. As a Master Mason, he was given entrée into an affiliated body called the Mystic Order of Veiled Prophets, for which he served as Shriner and Past Monarch. The organizations were the pride of his career. They gave him the titles and the respect he was denied at Packard. His wife complained that he spent far too many hours at the lodge. “One of his disappointments in life was that Roger and I didn’t become Masons,” Robert Jr. recalled.

  Robert Sr. and his wife, Donna, met at church. She was a famous beauty, lithe, nine years younger than he, with brown hair and wide-set eyes. She had come to Warren from Parkersburg, West Virginia, when she was less than a year old. Her father, James Arley Cunningham, who lacked a high school diploma, sought work in the local steel industry. He was a religious man, who took his family to the fervent Evangelical United Brethren Church every Sunday. “They didn’t believe in movies or dancing,” Roger said. Robert and Donna had a swift courtship, and less than a year into their marriage she became pregnant with Robert Jr.

  When Roger Ailes spoke of Warren, he invoked a small-town idyll, a lost American dream, but those images were only part of his childhood story, one in which tenebrous parts were edited out. The difficulties started with his illness. At the age of two, not long after learning to walk, Roger fell and bit his tongue. His parents couldn’t stop the bleeding. Terrified, they rushed him to Trumbull Memorial Hospital. A doctor diagnosed their child with hemophilia, a genetic disorder that hinders the ability of the body’s blood to clot. There was no cure for the little-understood condition. “Well, you died. That’s what you knew about it,” Roger later recalled. “I was told many times I wasn’t going to make it.” “The treatment for hemophilia back then was terribly crude,” remembered Robert Jr., who would become a doctor. Their parents did what they could to keep Roger out of trouble, protecting him from uneven stretches of sidewalk where he could trip and scrape his knee, and from getting into backyard scuffles. The average life expectancy of a severe hemophiliac at the time was eleven years.

  Notwithstanding his hemophilia, or perhaps in angry defiance of it, Roger had an incongruous physical boldness, with sometimes dire consequences. In grade school, when his parents weren’t looking, Roger sneaked up onto the roof of his family’s garage. He jumped to the ground and bit his tongue on impact. His father rushed him to Trumbull Memorial. This time the doctors there were unable to help him. “I heard the doctor say—I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I heard him say, ‘We really can’t do anything,’ ” Roger said. His father, a short, obstinate man, pugnacious by nature, refused to give up. Robert Jr. remembered the incident vividly: “My dad bundled Roger in a blanket and put him in the family Chevy and drove to the Cleveland Clinic.” Driving eighty miles an hour down Route 422, they were soon stopped by a state police car.

  “Look, my son’s bleeding. We’ve got to get to the hospital,” Robert pleaded to a man in a Mountie hat standing outside his window.

  The trooper looked at the boy wrapped in a blood-stained blanket in the backseat. “Get behind me,” he said and escorted them, his lights flashing the rest of the way to Cleveland.

  A whole crew of Robert’s work friends, who had names like “Dirty Neck Watson,” went to the hospital to donate their blood. Many were so filthy that the doctors had to scrub them down before they gave Roger a direct blood transfusion from their arms to his. “Well, son,” his father said after he pulled through. “You have a lot of blue-collar blood in you. Never forget that.”

  The hospital traumatized the young boy, and the threat of returning there denied him many of the pleasures of childhood. “Roger told me one time, when he was really young, he was suspended upside down for hours at the hospital to keep the blood from pooling in dangerous ways,” Launa Newman said. During recess, Roger often sat at his desk as the other kids played outside. But after school hours, his teacher could not stop him from playing touch football and sandlot baseball. “He participated until he got so black-and-blue he couldn’t move,” his brother said.

  Simply walking to and from school was hazardous. A passing car clipped him once when he was in the second grade, an accident that landed him back in the hospital. “What saved me was a little square lunch box that I had,” Roger said. “He hit the lunchbox and I flew into the air and into the
curb.” On another occasion, some neighborhood boys roughed him up on his walk home. “My dad, I saw tears in his eyes for the first time,” Roger recalled. “I’d never seen it. And he said, ‘That’s never going to happen to you again.’ ”

  Robert Sr. inculcated in his son a kind of Warren catechism, a blue-collar ethos summed up in epigrams: violence never solves anything, but the threat of violence can be very useful; if you have to take two, disarm one; if you have no options, then remember, son: for them, it’s a fight. For you, it’s life and death. “Roger and my dad were very, very close,” Robert Jr. said. “It’s all because of his handicap, his physical problem. He was very protective of Roger. He taught him a lot. My dad was a tough guy. He was built like a brick shithouse. He was quite the scrapper in his day. Sometimes, he had to fight. He was the low man on the totem pole. At work, you can’t fight back. But his feeling was, don’t take it if you don’t have to.” One time, Donna and Robert Sr. were out driving. She was behind the wheel and a man in a pickup truck yelled at her. Robert leapt out of the car and ran to the truck. “He stood on the running board and reached through the window and grabbed him and pulled him through the window, had him hanging out in the street,” Roger recalled.

  In spite of his protectiveness, Robert Sr. didn’t believe his son’s hemophilia should be an obstacle. “When I was thirteen, he allowed me to go to the Canadian north woods with the YMCA, a bunch of guys with an Indian guide,” Roger said. “We were up there for three weeks. Now I remember my parents arguing about it but my dad said, ‘Let him go, he’ll be alright. He’s a tough guy.’ So they sent me. And I went up there and we went down the rapids of the Montreal River—we did a lot of stuff. And I got through it and it gave me a lot of confidence. And my dad said, ‘You’re going to lead a perfectly normal life, don’t ever back out, don’t ever back away. Don’t ever be afraid.’ So that set the course, and I think that had a big impact on me.”