Roger Ailes: Off Camera (5 page)

I asked Ailes what happened.

“He did the spot and won.”

“And what did he do about busing?”

Ailes seemed surprised by the question. “I have no idea,” he said.

For the next decade, Ailes kept up a frenetic schedule. He produced Broadway shows, including
Mother Earth
, a short-lived environmental musical, as well as
The Hot l Baltimore
. He traveled to Africa to shoot a wildlife documentary starring Bobby Kennedy Jr. He and John Huddy (and, typically, two of Huddy’s children now work for him) made a TV special on Federico Fellini,
Fellini: Wizards, Clowns and Honest Liars
. He consulted for local television stations around New York and the country, and he took on corporate clients as an expert in image making and damage control. He also made his first venture into conservative television. In 1973, Joseph Coors, a right-wing multimillionaire, sought to combat the ideological tilt of the networks by establishing his own TV news provider, Television News, Inc. (TVN). Ailes served as a consultant who had a license to fire, and he used it to get rid of some thirty employees. One he kept was Charlie Gibson, who went on to a distinguished network career. But no amount of hiring and firing could save TVN. Conservative television news was an idea whose time had not yet come. It closed in 1975 and Ailes busied himself with his filmmaking and his commercial and political clients.

In 1980, a Long Island machine politician named Al D’Amato came to see Ailes. He had unseated the venerable incumbent senator, liberal Republican Jacob Javits, in a nasty primary in which D’Amato illustrated Javits’s old age and precarious health by showing a kid popping a balloon. Javits, who was in the early stages of Lou Gehrig’s disease, responded by running against D’Amato in the general election on the Liberal Party ticket. The Democrats fielded Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman.

“I went from ‘Al who?’ to a nasty guy,” says D’Amato. “People hated those ads and I don’t blame them.” He realized that he had no chance unless he could change his image in a hurry. He went to see Roger Ailes.

Ailes looked at the situation and came to a simple conclusion: D’Amato was perceived as a jerk. “Jesus, nobody likes you. Your own mother wouldn’t vote for you. Do you even have a mother?” D’Amato assured him that he did, in fact, have one, and Ailes proceeded to turn her into a television star. In what became known as the “mama” ad, he showed an elderly woman, returning from the market with an armful of groceries, talking about how hard it was these days (of Carter-era inflation) for the middle class to make ends meet. Then she turned to the camera, introduced herself, and told viewers that if they wanted things to change they should vote for her son, Al D’Amato.

“That ad was stupendous,” says D’Amato. “Everybody loved her. [Liberal columnist] Jimmy Breslin wrote, ‘I’d never vote for Al D’Amato, but I’d vote for his mother.’ That one spot turned the election around, and made my victory possible.” It was a narrow victory—he got fewer than half the votes in the three-way race—but a win is a win and he spent the next eighteen years in the Senate.

By 1998, Ailes was out of the consulting business and running Fox News, but he is not the kind of guy who loses touch with old friends and clients, and he agreed to meet with D’Amato for a friendly chat about the senator’s political future. D’Amato wanted a fourth term. Ailes advised against it. “You’ve had three. What do you need another one for?” he asked. He told D’Amato he would probably lose, and he did, defeated by Representative Chuck Schumer. Without Ailes, D’Amato ran a tasteless campaign whose low point came when he called Schumer a putz-head. Today, he says he should have listened to Ailes. “The thing about Roger is, he doesn’t tell you something he doesn’t believe. If he tells you something, take it to the bank. But he tells you and that’s that. He doesn’t insist that you agree with him.”

Ailes’s early successes with D’Amato secured him a place as a New York Republican power broker. He became one of the de facto leaders of the GOP in the Empire State. Tim Carey, a longtime Republican operative, worked on New York campaigns for Javits, Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, and George Pataki, and served as a consultant to the Republican National Committee. Carey also worked for Lew Lehrman, the drugstore magnate who ran against Mario Cuomo in the 1982 New York gubernatorial race. “Lehrman was stiff,” recalls Carey. “I took him to Roger to learn how to communicate.” Lehrman improved, but not enough to defeat Cuomo, who didn’t need lessons to connect with the public.

That same year, the job of Westchester county executive became vacant. Tony Colavita, the outgoing incumbent, needed to pick a successor from a roster of aspiring candidates, including future governor George Pataki, who was then mayor of Peekskill. Colavita brought his potential successors down to Ailes Communications one at a time and Ailes checked them out, taping and assessing speeches. He settled on Andy O’Rourke of Yonkers. “Let’s just say Andy was the kind of guy who would wear two different plaids,” says Carey. “But Ailes saw past that. To him, O’Rourke was like a guy from
GQ
, a winner. And Roger was right about him—he was reelected three times and then went on to be a state judge.” Pataki didn’t get the job, but there were no hard feelings. “Roger thought he was too young,” says Carey.

Carey worked with Ailes on numerous campaigns and came away with an education. “Roger taught me to always be honest with candidates, and firm. In political consulting you have a lot of clients who mistakenly think they know more than they do. And every candidate meets people who have ideas. Roger could say no. He fought for his candidates, but he didn’t empathize with them.”

“He also taught me that there is no cookie cutter. A lot of consultants work with a one-size-fits-all pattern, and they lose. But for Roger, it was always a matter of sizing up the opponent, finding his weaknesses, or turning his strengths against him.”

For years, Ailes had lived a peripatetic single life. He met lots of women at shoots and on the trail and he dated from time to time, but he was more interested, he says, in work. But as time went on, he began to yearn for family life. In 1981, he married Norma Ferrer, a divorced mother of two, whom he met in Florida, where she worked at an ad agency at whose facilities Ailes was editing the documentary on Fellini. Ferrer had two children: a son, who was living on the West Coast with his father, and a daughter, Shawn. “I didn’t adopt Shawn,” Ailes says. “She called me Roger, not Dad, but I did everything for her that a dad would do and I stayed married to her mother until she was in college.” Ailes and Norma were divorced after eleven years. After the divorce, Norma went to work for Mission Broadcasting, an evangelical television production company. Shawn majored in journalism at the University of Georgia, moved to New York, and is now an executive at HGTV.

•   •   •

Ailes sat out the seventies in presidential politics, but he was active in the 1980 Reagan-Carter contest as a member of the Tuesday Group, a weekly gathering of senior image makers.

He played a more dramatic role in 1984, when he was called in to coach Ronald Reagan in his second debate with Walter Mondale. It was emergency surgery. Reagan, who was seventy-four, had appeared old and befuddled in the first debate, misstating facts, wandering off topic, and reinforcing the Democratic charge that he was too old for the job. The Reagan inner circle, led by his wife, Nancy, blamed Reagan’s debate coaches and handlers for failing to prepare her husband. They were especially angry at David Stockman, the young director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, who had been tapped to play Mondale in rehearsal debates and had gone after Reagan so hard that, at one point, while talking about Social Security, the president lost his customary geniality and shouted at Stockman to shut up. Nancy Reagan thought the mock debates had undermined her husband’s confidence. So did the head debate coach, Richard Darman. Ailes was called in.

Reagan biographer Lou Cannon describes the intervention:

Ailes knew that Reagan needed praise, not criticism, and interrupted the first rehearsal of the [second] debate to declare that the president had just given a “terrific answer” to some minor question. . . . Ailes told the president not to bother with facts and figures but to concentrate on the big themes. And he frankly raised the subject everyone had been avoiding: Reagan’s age. He told Reagan that the entire country was now wondering if he was past his prime. He needed a response to that. Reagan came up with a quip, which he used at the second debate: “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

Even Mondale laughed, and the issue of Reagan’s age disappeared. Ailes, who had learned from his McGinniss experience to stay in the background, did not take credit for the change. He didn’t need to; everyone in Washington knew.

Ailes became a favorite of the Reagans, who grew comfortable enough with him to permit an occasional glimpse past their “Ronnie-Mommy” image. “We were taping an antidrug commercial,” Ailes recalls. “It was probably the first time they had acted together since
Hellcats of the Navy
in 1945. Nancy kept giving the president line readings—‘do this, do that’—stopping the teleprompter and the tape. I could see that the president was getting pissed off at her and finally he said, ‘You know, I’ve actually done this before.’ Nancy glared at him and marched out of the room. Reagan and I just stood there, looking at each other, and I was thinking, What the fuck happens now? The commercial was written for two people, and one of them was gone. I said, ‘Mr. President, what are our plans?’

“Reagan didn’t bat an eye. He said, ‘Let’s watch the football game. She’ll be back in fifteen minutes.’ I forget who was playing but we sat there and watched, and after fourteen minutes and fifty seconds, Nancy walked back into the room. She was chilly but professional—they were both actors when you come down to it, and we finished the shoot with no more problems. People say that Nancy ran him, and maybe sometimes she did, but I saw a different side of that relationship.”

In 1989, Ailes published
You Are the Message
, a book that still earns royalties more than twenty years later. (This is rare—trust me.) A review on CNN called Ailes “one of the best debate coaches in America.” In macho style, he began the book with a story about how he stared down and tamed Charles Manson during a prison interview.

You Are the Message
was aimed primarily at corporate executives who wanted to improve their public performance, especially on television. The prescriptions have an unmistakable Fox News flavor. To be a really good communicator, Ailes wrote, “you have to be punchy and graphic in your conversation—at least some of the time—to hold people’s interest.”

He also offered advice to would-be politicos. “There are heart issues and head issues. You can talk about taxes and roads and those are head issues. They require intellectual conceptualization. But if you start talking about abortion, missing children, or health care, those are heart issues. They concern people.”

Ailes has become increasingly disenchanted with the format of presidential debates, which he considers formulaic, predictable, and unenlightening. “I’d stage a series of three debates, so that if somebody screws up, there’s a chance to fix it next time. I’d hold the debates in an empty studio, nobody there but the two candidates sitting face-to-face and five cameras. No audience. No questioners. No moderator. I wouldn’t even tell them who goes first, just turn on the lights and let them talk to each other. That’s the debate that I’d like to see.”

•   •   •

Over the years, Ailes stayed in touch with his old boss, Woody Fraser, who was in New York producing network shows including
Good Morning America
and
Nightline
. They sometimes met for lunch at the Redeye Grill in Midtown, near Ailes Communications. “Roger was very proud of his company and the clients he had,” says Fraser. “He had become a man of the world. I was impressed by the fact that he knew how to get things done without breaking legs or screaming, which were my usual methods as a producer.”

One of Fraser’s projects was a talk show hosted by basketball legend Bill Russell, an intimidating figure with a keen intellect and an ego to match. The show got off to a rocky start: Fraser couldn’t get his star to take it seriously or prepare. “I’d go up to his apartment, which was always filled with friends and old teammates walking in and out, a real party scene. I’d try to sit him down and get him ready for the show. He was nice, but he didn’t really pay much attention. I very much wanted this to work—I was a huge Russell fan—and I went to Roger for advice.”

As Ailes diagnosed the problem, Fraser had himself to blame. Ailes told him, “Don’t go up to his place; make him come to your office, no distractions. It will make him realize you are in charge, and that you mean business.”

“I was pissed off,” said Fraser, “but I took the advice. Russell began coming to me. And you know what? He started doing his job and the show worked. It seems like a simple thing, but I realized that Roger had learned over the years how to manage powerful people.” Ailes had dealt with a lot of them in his career, from Mike Douglas and Bob Hope to Dick Nixon and Ronald Reagan. But he had never really been the top banana. George H. W. Bush gave him that chance.

1988

George H. W. Bush was elected president of the United States against all political logic. “It wasn’t a tide-of-history election,” says Democratic consultant Paul Begala. “Republicans had been in for eight years and people were ready for change. And the only vice president who had ever succeeded his boss after eight years in office was Martin Van Buren. It was Roger Ailes who created the dominant issues in that campaign. He did it by defining Dukakis. The campaign was incredibly impressive, and it was mostly because of Ailes. He has an intuitive grasp of what Bill Clinton calls ‘walking around people.’”

Ailes played many roles. Brit Hume, who covered the campaign for ABC News, remembers him as a spine stiffener for the sometimes indecisive Bush. When Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis began publicly complaining about the aggressive tone of the Republican ads, some in the Bush camp counseled toning them down. Ailes advised the candidate to double down and tell his opponent to quit whining. It was a tactic that worked; it cast Dukakis as a wimp who couldn’t take criticism.

Ailes also acted as Bush’s morale officer. The patrician vice president had a tendency to come off as stiff and distant; Ailes wanted to keep him loose. Early in the campaign, Republican opposition researchers discovered that Dukakis, as governor of Massachusetts, once vetoed a law that would have made it illegal for humans to have sex with animals. It had been tacked onto a piece of legislation that Dukakis opposed; his veto was no more than pro forma. But Ailes found a use for it. During the campaign he frequently mentioned it, facetiously, as an issue that could be deployed. At the first debate, Ailes saw an opportunity. Bush seemed tense and nervous. Just before he took the stage, Ailes took him aside and whispered, “If you get in trouble out there, just call him an animal fucker.” Bush cracked up. To further lighten the mood, Ailes looked across the stage at Bob Squier, Dukakis’s consultant, and motioned that the Democratic candidate’s fly was open, causing a disconcerting moment on the Democratic side.

Mostly, though, Ailes was the man whose political ads set the tone of the campaign and kept Dukakis on the defensive. The Boston Harbor ad was one of those. Dukakis had a strong environmental record, especially contrasted with Bush’s history as a Texas oilman, and it earned him the support of the major green groups. Ailes decided to take that advantage away. He produced a commercial showing garbage and debris floating in the water of Boston Harbor, along with a sign that read Radiation Hazard: No Swimming, and a narration: “As a candidate, Michael Dukakis called Boston Harbor an open sewer. As governor he had the opportunity to do something about it but chose not to. The Environmental Protection Agency called his lack of action the most expensive public policy mistake in the history of New England. Now Boston Harbor, the dirtiest harbor in America, will cost residents $6 million to clean. And Michael Dukakis promises to do for America what he had done for Massachusetts.”

“I could almost see Dukakis drowning in the polluted water,” says Tim Carey.

It was Ailes’s idea to cast Dukakis as weak on national defense. Dukakis aided and abetted the effort by dressing up in a flak jacket and an oversized helmet to take a photo-op ride in the turret of an M1 Abrams tank in testing grounds near Detroit. The idea was to make Dukakis look like a commander in chief. In fact, he came off as ridiculous, a little boy playing soldier. Ailes let the footage of the grinning Dukakis speak for itself. Nothing could have better emphasized the difference between Dukakis and Bush, a World War II combat pilot.

The most infamous ad of the campaign was actually two ads, both on the subject of a Massachusetts prison furlough granted to an incarcerated murderer. Willie Horton was serving a life sentence for robbing and killing a seventeen-year-old gas station attendant. The crime was especially grisly: The victim was stabbed nineteen times and dumped into a garbage can.

There were other states (and the federal government) that had similar prisoner furlough plans. But they did not grant furloughs to murderers. The Massachusetts legislature passed a law to prevent such leniency, but Governor Dukakis vetoed it. He made the case that in 99 percent of cases, the furloughed prisoners returned without incident. It was his bad luck that Willie Horton belonged to the 1 percent.

In 1986, after more than a decade behind bars, Horton was released for a weekend. He traveled to Maryland, where he seized an engaged couple, knifed and tied up the man, and then proceeded to rape his fiancée twice as he looked on. The crime was so egregious that a Maryland judge refused to extradite him to Massachusetts on the grounds that he might again be furloughed.

The issue of the lenient Massachusetts furlough policy was first raised by Al Gore in the 1988 primary campaign, although Gore didn’t actually mention Horton by name. In the fall presidential campaign the National Security Political Action Committee began running a TV ad, which did mention Horton and displayed his picture. The NSPAC was supposedly an independent player, although it was clearly pro-Bush, and then run by Larry McCarthy, a former employee of Ailes Communications who had left the firm to work for Bob Dole in the primaries.

The NSPAC ad was denounced as racially incendiary by the Democrats, and was dropped. Shortly thereafter a Bush ad called “Revolving Door,” produced by Ailes, began airing. “Revolving Door” also attacked the Massachusetts prison furlough program, but it didn’t use a photo of Willie Horton. Ailes didn’t want to be charged with exploiting racial fears, as the NSPAC had. “At one point Lee Atwater [the hyperaggressive Republican campaign manager] handed me a picture of Horton and I tore it up,” Ailes says.

Still, the two ads became conflated in the mind of the media.

In 1990, the Ohio Democratic Party lodged a formal complaint with the Federal Election Commission, charging that the Bush campaign had coordinated with the National Security PAC, which would have been a violation of campaign finance laws. The FEC split 3–3, and the case was dismissed.

During the campaign, Ailes himself exacerbated the impression that the Bush campaign was connected to the NSPAC ad. A
Time
magazine profile at the time quoted him as saying that “the only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it.” Ailes doesn’t deny he said it to reporter David Beckwith. “We were supposed to be off the record. Beckwith and I were friends and I was just joking,” he told me. “Hell, I had no idea I’d be running a network someday.”

The controversy over the Horton ad had a predictable effect. The media picked it up and ran the ads over and over; the glowering mug shot of the black murderer-rapist became familiar to millions. Atwater bragged that “by the time we’re finished, they’re going to wonder if Willie Horton is Dukakis’s running mate.” At Harvard’s quadrennial electoral postmortem at the end of 1988—a seminar that includes the major professionals in all the campaigns—the Willie Horton ads were still a hot topic. Bob Beckel, a Democratic consultant who had run Mondale’s campaign four years earlier, conceded that Ailes might not have ordered the NSPAC ad, but noted that there had been “a lot of Republican money behind it.” Ailes responded by pointing out that the Dukakis campaign had run a similar commercial, featuring a woman in a body bag who had been raped and murdered by a Hispanic man on federal penal parole. Susan Estrich, Dukakis’s campaign manager, fired back that the Democratic ad had been simple retaliation. “You want to play to fear, you’ve got your ugly story of a black man raping a white woman. Well, we’ll tell you an even uglier story,” she said.

Ron Brown, who headed Jesse Jackson’s primary campaign and later served as Bill Clinton’s secretary of commerce, seconded Beckel’s accusation. “You knew what was happening,” he told Ailes. “Maybe you couldn’t control everything, but nobody stepped up to the plate and said, ‘This is divisive, it’s dangerous, it’s wrong.’”

“So you’re saying because he was black we can’t use the issue?” Ailes shot back. “Despite the fact that he was a murderer and a rapist, he should have been given special treatment because he was black?”

There were many disputes at Harvard, but very little doubt about Ailes’s crucial contribution to the Bush victory. Susan Estrich admitted that the campaign had been lost because the Republicans had seized control of the message and because “we didn’t have a Roger Ailes. I mean two things. First, a person of his talent, because it’s clear it doesn’t matter unless you have his talent. But second, and perhaps equally important, a person whose judgment and relationship with the candidate is such that he had his trust and respect.” Ed Rollins, who had been the campaign manager in Reagan’s reelection campaign, agreed. “As much money as we spent in 1984, nobody ever moved the entire course of the campaign,” he told his fellow participants. “There’s no presidential campaign in the age of television where one ad, or a series of ads, really made a difference. I mean, people will go back and argue that the Lyndon Johnson daisy-plucker ad made a difference. The truth is, that ad was run once on network television. In this particular campaign, Roger’s ads worked. . . . We have now come of age in presidential campaigns, with tough, hard-hitting negative comments in the arena. They will be here from [now] on.”

Much of the 1988 Harvard seminar was given over to a discussion of the flaws of the American electoral process. Ailes himself raised the issue, and offered a typically pragmatic analysis. “When I get hired by a candidate, my job is to help him get elected. I would like to change the system. I would like to spend all of my time on deep issues and talk about the homeless problem and figure out how to solve it, but it’s damn hard to do it in a ten-week campaign when you are getting banged around by the opponent and the press is interested in pictures, mistakes, and attacks.” Ailes said that no single consultant or campaign manager could effect change. “Unless we are all willing to admit that we have a stake in it, to admit that we had a part of it and discuss mistakes we’ve made, it ain’t ever going to change, folks. It’s going to get tougher. And next time it’s going to be six-second sound bites.”

There is etiquette among political professionals. Like defense lawyers and prosecutors, they accept the verdict and move on. Politics is business; personal animosity is for amateurs. Ailes has always set an example. In the eighties, the top Democratic consultant was Bob Squier. He and Ailes faced each other in a series of campaigns and, for five years, as debate partners on
The Today Show
. They would put each other down on the air and then go out to dinner afterward. When Squier died, Ailes wrote a glowing eulogy in
Time
magazine and spoke at his funeral.

Most of the pros at Harvard observed this rule. But one, Jack Corrigan, a senior Dukakis operative, insisted on refighting old battles. He accused Ailes of running a dirty campaign. “The difference between the two campaigns, and the way we [portrayed the two candidates] . . . is the difference between truth and fiction,” he said.

“Oh, come on,” said Ailes in a dismissive tone.

Corrigan was undeterred. “Michael Dukakis took very specific positions on all of the issues. Your candidate had fundamentally flip-flopped on basic values, in particular on the abortion question and on what he once called ‘voodoo economics.’”

Ailes reminded Corrigan that Dukakis, too, had changed positions on trade and weapons systems.

“That’s not true,” snapped Corrigan. “The positions as you characterized them are not correct . . . he ran on his values. He had a firm set of beliefs.”

“I don’t believe that at all,” said Ailes. “He ran to the right. He ran as a moderate. He didn’t run as a liberal.”

“You can’t imagine a different worldview than your own,” said Corrigan.

“Don’t attack me personally. There’s no need for that,” Ailes said.

The exchange was an excellent illustration of why Ailes was so effective. Corrigan saw the election as a battle between virtue and sin. If an Ailes opponent insisted on believing in fairy tales about the virtuous Sir Michael and the evil George Bush, so much the better. Corrigan was making the cardinal mistake of campaign operatives. He believed his own bullshit. And he took it personally.

Ailes never did. In fact, he used the Harvard seminar to network with the enemy. You never know when a senior liberal might come in handy. Eventually he hired Susan Estrich and Bob Beckel as commentators at Fox. He also hired Geraldine Ferraro, a liberal New York Democrat who in 1984, as the first female vice presidential candidate, had been Beckel’s candidate.

•   •   •

The 1988 election made Ailes into the first superstar political consultant, so famous and infamous that his mere participation in a campaign became an issue. George Voinovich wanted him enough to risk his own family.

Voinovich was the ex-mayor of Cleveland, acclaimed for bringing the city back from the racial and financial troubles that had typified it. In 1988, before the presidential election, he decided to run for the Senate against incumbent Howard Metzenbaum, and he wanted Roger Ailes on board. They were fellow graduates of Ohio University. Ailes knew Ohio politics, and Voinovich had never run statewide. But there was a problem.

“My brother was married to Mike Douglas’s daughter,” recalls Voinovich. “And Douglas was still teed off at Roger for leaving his show and going into politics. My brother heard I was going to hire Roger and he begged me not to. ‘Mike won’t be happy,’ he said. I don’t know if he asked him, but I didn’t hire Roger.” Nineteen eighty-eight was a Republican year in Ohio: George H. W. Bush won the state by 11 percent. But Voinovich lost to Metzenbaum by fourteen points. The campaign was amateurish and nasty (at one point Voinovich accused his opponent of being soft on child pornography) and it left him bruised but determined. Two years later, when he decided to run for governor, he informed his family that he was going to hire Roger Ailes whether Mike Douglas liked it or not, and he did.

“Why did I do it? I wanted Roger on my side. Going into the race I was behind my opponent in fund-raising by $3 million. Roger’s reputation was so good among Republicans that the mere fact that he was with me made it possible to close the money gap. Roger Ailes gave me gravitas.”