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

by Sherman, Gabriel

  The next day, the country would issue its verdict. After breakfast, Ailes, McGinniss, and the rest of the campaign staff drove to the airport for the cross-country journey to New York. Ailes had arranged for Marje to meet him at his room at the New York Hilton, near Nixon campaign headquarters at the Waldorf Astoria. They would only see each other for a few hours, but a night in a luxury Manhattan hotel was a small gesture to make up for months of separation. Ailes spent the night watching the returns come in and talking to McGinniss, who had checked into a room four floors below. It was a long wait. A slew of eastern states went early for Humphrey. But California, Illinois, Ohio, and Texas were too close to call for most of the evening. Commentators proclaimed the race a toss-up.

  Then, triumph: in the early hours of November 6, 1968, Ohio and Texas broke Nixon’s way. At 12:30 p.m. that day, an hour after Humphrey had called to concede, Nixon addressed the nation from the Waldorf ballroom. Ailes watched the victory speech from the balcony as Nixon spoke of a desire to mend the country’s divisions. “I saw many signs in this campaign, some of them were not friendly; some were very friendly,” Nixon said. “But the one that touched me the most was one that I saw in Deshler, Ohio, at the end of a long day of whistle-stopping. A little town. I suppose five times the population was there in the dusk. It was almost impossible to see, but a teenager held up a sign, BRING US TOGETHER. And that will be the great objective of this administration at the outset, to bring the American people together.”

  Ailes surely knew Deshler. It was a farm town at the intersection of the B&O Railroad, less than a hundred miles from his grandfather Melville’s birthplace in Shelby County. In 1948, Ailes’s father had taken him to see Harry Truman wave from the back of a train that had brought him through towns like Deshler and Warren during his whistle-stop tour of the state. “I remember my dad holding me up and waving to the President,” Ailes recalled. “Everybody went home and thought they knew Harry Truman.”

  Ailes had come a long way since then. The Nixon television experiment convinced him there was a vast new market to tap. “This is it. This is the way they’ll be elected forevermore,” he had told McGinniss the night before the election. “The next guys up will have to be performers.” But he had doubts, too. “The interesting question is, how sincere is a TV set? If you take a cold guy and stage him warm, can you get away with it?”

  The Nixon victory was evidence that you could get away with it. In his victory speech, Nixon projected himself as a humble conciliator pledging to heal a fractured electorate. It did not matter that Nixon’s friend Dick Moore, who told the campaign about the Deshler girl with the sign, “may have made that up,” as Bill Safire later wrote. The words were true in the sense that they were spoken by the president-elect of the United States and transmitted into living rooms across the country.

  No matter what happened on Election Day, Ailes had made up his mind to strike out on his own. Going back to Philadelphia felt like the minor leagues. “I decided that after the campaign was over I didn’t want to go back to the studio and figure out what to have a comedian talk about,” Ailes said.

  But politics, too, had its drawbacks. After watching Nixon’s acceptance speech, Ailes and McGinniss went out to dinner. McGinniss asked Ailes about his plans.

  “Are you going to move to Washington and become press secretary?”

  “I wouldn’t take that job with a million a year salary,” Ailes said. “Whatever I do, and I haven’t even discussed it, but it would be behind the scenes.” Ailes told McGinniss he was burned out by politics. “TV is my business.” Plus he was intrigued by his first passion—the theater. “I’m really interested in Broadway shows,” he added.

  He wanted to move to New York. Even before the campaign was over, he’d begun laying the groundwork, meeting with Ronald Kidd, a young associate at the Philadelphia law firm Duane Morris, to fill out paperwork to incorporate an entertainment company. He called it REA Productions. Then, shortly after Nixon’s victory, Ailes looked for funding. At a Pennsylvania Society dinner at the Waldorf, he was introduced to a wealthy investment banker named Howard Butcher IV, who agreed to meet with him. In Philadelphia, Ailes pitched himself to a group of investors who asked him about his track record. “Well, my track record is actually pretty good,” Ailes later recalled telling them. “I was the youngest producer of a national television show.… I took it to 182 markets. Tremendous success. And I took over a very difficult job when everybody said Richard Nixon couldn’t win an election and he won it by television. So I think my track record is fine.” They asked him about his business experience. “Let me tell you my business experience. My business experience is that you’ve got two columns. One’s called ‘in’ and one’s called ‘out.’ And if you’ve got more going out than you’ve got coming in, you’re going to go belly-up.”

  Ailes cast it as yet another triumph of Midwest common sense over Ivy League frippery. One of the men asked Ailes to go outside for a few minutes. When he returned to the room, the men announced they were going to make an investment. “You know how many Harvard guys will get in here?” Ailes recalled one of the investors saying. “They’ve got charts, matrixes, and every other goddamn thing.… They don’t know that if you got more going out than you got coming in, you can’t make it.”

  It wasn’t only Ailes’s bottom-line approach that made an impression on Butcher. He could see his instincts as a campaigner. “Roger was very determined, very smart. He’s the guy who understood the dark side better than I do,” Butcher recalled. “When I say dark side, I mean the dark side of politics and human nature.”

  FIVE

  REA PRODUCTIONS

  AILES SOLD HIMSELF TO HIS NEW INVESTMENT PARTNERS as Nixon’s indispensable image consultant, having played a role that had scarcely existed before, but the pitch was itself a form of image manipulation. From the moment of Nixon’s election, Ailes found himself frozen out of Nixon’s inner circle, and he would spend the next three years trying to fight his way back in.

  In November 1968, Ailes sent a confidential report to the Nixon team on how the White House could use television as a propaganda tool. “To whatever extent possible, [the president’s advisers] should make a conscious effort to control Mr. Nixon’s image on TV,” he wrote. “When it is necessary to run for re-election, it will be the public’s composite impression of the President (formed over four years) that will influence them.” The two-page document offered sixteen possible strategies the new administration could use to shape public opinion. His ideas dealt with logistics (making sure presidential television appearances were archived for later use) to questions of appearance (having Nixon talk directly into the camera to “give him a style of communication”). The memo also suggested creating a White House–produced program starring the president giving progress reports to the nation: “In effect, Mr. Nixon’s own TV show giving the public something to look forward to and the feeling he is keeping them informed.” As Nixon spoke publicly about bringing the country together, Ailes explained privately how TV could be a potent weapon for division. “Use TV as a political wedge with recalcitrant Congressmen for voting,” he wrote.

  The memo concluded with a sales pitch. “Any TV advisory group should include a TV production and direction specialist who is successfully working in the television industry. The person should also understand Mr. Nixon, his media history and problems, and the aims of the administration.”

  In the winter of 1969, Ailes moved into a Manhattan apartment on Eighth Avenue near 52nd Street, leaving Marjorie behind in Pennsylvania. That fall they had, for all practical purposes, separated. “Roger was going a lot of places in a hurry and Marje wasn’t,” Joe McGinniss said. Unburdened from the responsibilities of married life, Ailes focused on building his new production company. “At night, his office was his bedroom,” his brother, who helped get the company off the ground, recalled. One of his first assignments after the campaign was for his old employer. Westinghouse tasked him with boosting ratings for aili
ng programs.

  Ailes also looked for work in Los Angeles. Following the campaign, he cultivated his relationship with Jack Rourke, who hovered on the margins of Hollywood as a TV telethon host and member of the country club at Toluca Lake, where he socialized with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. Two decades older than Ailes, Rourke was an industry insider who could help an upstart build his career. On January 8, 1969, Ailes wrote, “I think you know how much I enjoyed working with you, but I also want you to know that I have the greatest amount of professional respect for the job you do.” Many of the twenty-eight-year-old’s letters were signed “Roger E. Ailes, President/REA Productions, Inc.”

  In their correspondance, Rourke and Ailes enjoyed skewering politicians with towel-snapping one-liners reflective of a certain type of 1960s man. “I saw RN and several of the governors at the Governors’ Conference a couple of weeks ago out here. Then I got the flu,” Rourke wrote Ailes. Spiro Agnew was an especially easy target. Ailes wrote to Rourke shortly before the inauguration: “I requested that they send you an invitation. You are also invited to a very private party with Vice President Spiro T. Agnew.… Just you and him.” In late January, after Ailes learned that Rourke was in the middle of a PR stunt—running for mayor of Los Angeles—he sent Rourke a typed letter on Westinghouse stationery: “I think it’s time the minority groups had a representative. You faggots have been held down too long.”

  Rourke ribbed Ailes for a rumored dalliance with Lucy Winchester, the Kentucky socialite who became Nixon’s social secretary. “I’m glad to see that no mention was made of your very special relationship with Mrs. Lucy Winchester,” he wrote after seeing Ailes’s name in a Los Angeles Times article. “And you can count on my not mentioning it to anyone with the possible exception of Joe Gargan”—a Kennedy cousin who was on Chappaquiddick Island two weeks earlier, the night Ted Kennedy crashed his Oldsmobile Delmont, killing Mary Jo Kopechne—“and you know he won’t say anything.” (“I regret to report, he and I never held hands,” Winchester later said when asked if she had a fling with Ailes. “It’s like what Churchill once said, ‘There’s no truth to it at all, but thanks for the report.’ ”)

  As he pursued new entertainment opportunities, Ailes continued to court the Nixon White House. He wrote a series of solicitous letters to top Nixon advisers trying to drum up business, making sure that his new production company had the imprimatur of Nixon’s successful campaign. In early March, he asked Dwight Chapin, who had been named a special assistant to the president, for an autographed photo of Nixon for his Manhattan workspace. On March 14, Ailes picked up the picture at the White House and met with Nixon for ten minutes. A few days later, Ailes expressed to Haldeman his desire to consult for Republican politicians. To that end, Haldeman sent a letter on Ailes’s behalf to Maryland congressman Rogers Morton, the chairman of the Republican National Committee: “The President was very pleased with the capable manner in which Roger carried out his responsibilities and the results, of course speak for themselves.” Morton signed Ailes up for a $12,000 contract to offer television consulting to the RNC.

  Although Haldeman was happy to praise Ailes to other GOP officials, he would not let Ailes into the tightening inner circle. Despite repeated efforts, Ailes could not get the administration to focus on the television pitch he had submitted after the election. Gone were the shambolic days of the campaign, in which Ailes had wide latitude to operate. Haldeman strictly controlled access to the president, policing which action memos made it to his attention. The centralized decision making reflected Nixon’s obsession with control, and prevented movement on key initiatives including television strategy. Instead, Ailes was given piecemeal assignments. In May, he was not helped when one of his first productions—the televised introduction of Nixon’s Supreme Court nominee Warren Burger—went awry. “He blew things pretty well,” Haldeman wrote in his diaries. “Mistimed ‘Hail to the Chief,’ forgot the flags on the podium, etc. Probably would have done better without him, but CBS producer was a real nervous type.”

  Haldeman let the lapse slide, and in June, the White House paid Ailes $1,300 to review the presidential podium and suggest how to improve the lighting. The next month, Ailes helped produce the live broadcast of Nixon’s dramatic phone call from the Oval Office to Neil Armstrong on the moon. On occasion, Ailes was brought in to provide basic sartorial advice. “He felt there was no problem with a dark suit but that it was crucial that the President should wear an off-white shirt and a tie with a non-busy pattern,” Haldeman’s aide, Lawrence Higby, wrote in a memo. “He felt that the President should have the barber take a look at his hair that day to make sure that there are no strands of hair or curls that are sticking out.” Ailes also reminded Nixon’s advisers to make use of the “hero shot” by positioning the camera at eye level and at a three-quarter angle to give the president dimension and depth. Ailes told Higby it was “crucial that when the President is on camera the camera be placed at eye level—not above him and shooting down at the President.”

  In August, Ailes was given his biggest assignment since the campaign: producing the first televised state dinner in presidential history, the star-studded gala to honor the Apollo 11 astronauts at the Century Plaza Hotel in Beverly Hills. Ailes was again pushing the boundaries of political communication. “The White House is concerned that it maintain the dinner’s dignity,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “On the other hand, we’re concerned that the people at home enjoy it too.” He cast Nixon as one of the heroes of the evening. Cameras captured the president, the first family, and the astronauts descending from the sky in a military helicopter to the parking lot of the hotel. As they emerged from the cabin, it seemed as if Nixon had also returned from space. The networks covered the occasion like the Oscars.

  The astronaut dinner was essentially a one-off, which freed Ailes to take on entertainment projects. In the months since Election Day, Ailes looked to re-create Mike Douglas on his own. Living out of the Sheraton Gibson Hotel in downtown Cincinnati, he launched a new syndicated talk program, The Dennis Wholey Show, starring a thirty-one-year-old former game show host for Taft Broadcasting, the Ohio-based media conglomerate. For the debut on September 22, 1969, Muhammad Ali appeared alongside the old-time comic Irwin Corey, and an infantry officer back from Vietnam. The press panned the show. The problem was that the square Douglas style, with its roots in the placid American consensus, had fallen out of step. “Yesterday’s premiere was embarrassingly ordinary,” a Washington Post critic wrote, adding that it had a “total lack of novelty or entertainment or inspiration.” It also lacked a fully dedicated producer. “Roger would say, ‘I have to leave for a couple of days and go to Washington. Or I have to go to wherever Nixon is,’ ” Dennis Wholey recalled. “You could tell there was a little bit of a tug of war going on.” Where possible, Ailes fused his two roles. “Early on, he booked Julie and David Eisenhower. That was a huge get,” Wholey said.

  As it turned out, the White House was more interested in Ailes’s foothold in the world of celebrity than in his political ideas. “Your new show is most exciting, for lots of reasons,” Lucy Winchester wrote Ailes. “One of them is that it is a real boon to the Administration having an intelligent intelligence agent in the talent field who can tell us who is a good performer-cum-Republican. I would welcome your suggestions and advice.” She included a handwritten note at the bottom of the letter. “Will you even have time for D.C.? We hope so!”

  Ailes proved a shrewd promoter of his own image. When Nixon addressed the United Nations General Assembly several days before the Wholey debut, Ailes detailed for The New York Times all the advice he provided (even though the extent of it was a two-minute briefing with Nixon). “He told the President to be careful not to touch the button on the lectern in the Assembly hall, because it activated a hydraulic lift that caused a platform behind the lectern to rise or descend,” the paper reported.

  At the time Ailes was still an obscure figure on the national stage, his work for Nixon known
mainly to political and entertainment insiders. But Joe McGinniss’s Selling of the President, which would be published in October 1969, was about to change all that. McGinniss had shared a prepublication copy of the book with Ailes, and he was all too happy to help promote it. In July, Ailes appeared on a radio show with McGinniss to hype a fifteen-page excerpt of the book in Harper’s Magazine. Then, a few weeks before the title hit the stores, Ailes traveled to New York to join McGinniss for a panel discussion on presidential image making. McGinniss was critical of the Nixon effort, telling the audience that the Man in the Arena panelists were too timid to challenge Nixon on substance. Ailes contended that television revealed its own truth. “I don’t think you can be dishonest for any length of time,” he told the audience.

  But by the time Ailes realized that his cutting and indiscreet remarks that McGinniss had recorded in the book might antagonize the White House, it was too late. Four days before the book was released, he wrote a face-saving, back-pedaling letter to Nixon advisers John Ehrlichman and Bob Haldeman. “I am sending this letter to you and to Bob Haldeman to inform you of a situation which I just became aware of,” he wrote. “Talking to a friend of mine in the newspaper business, I found out that the New York Times is publishing a book review of ‘The Selling of The President 1968’ in this weekend’s book section. I’m sure you are aware of this book. My friend thought I should be aware of it since I was mentioned prominently, and I had it read to me over the phone. I was upset to find that quotes by me, which are inaccurate in the first place, have been lifted out and featured. I regret that the New York Times has decided to use me as a tool to embarrass the President. If you have any comments or suggestions on the handling of this, please advise.”