Authors: Gabriel Sherman
Tags: #Business & Economics, #Corporate & Business History, #Political Science, #General, #Social Science, #Media Studies
At
The Mike Douglas Show
, colleagues did not hear Ailes express
antipathy toward the media. But in the crucible of the ’68 campaign, Ailes adopted a new view: journalists were the enemy. Ailes warned Treleaven that reporters would point out all the crafty television techniques that went into the show. They might reveal for instance that the hopped-up studio audience had been primed by a jowly warm-up man named Jack Rourke.
“The audience is part of the show,” Ailes told him. McGinniss stood by listening. “And that’s the whole point. It’s a television show. Our television show.” As McLuhan had theorized, the image on-screen was what mattered. Anything else was a distraction. “The press has no business on the set.… This is an electronic election. The first there’s ever been.… TV has the power now,” Ailes said. Like the voters at home, the press would watch the proceedings from a separate studio.
At 9:00 p.m., viewers tuning in to
The Dom DeLuise Show
were greeted instead with news footage of Richard Nixon receiving a hero’s welcome on the streets of Chicago. Like a freak summer snow, confetti fluttered down on the thousands of smiling faces in the crowd. The title credits “NIXON IN ILLINOIS” flashed on the screen in bold yellow lettering. A baritone-voiced announcer intoned: “This afternoon, Richard Nixon arrived in Chicago and received one of the warmest and most enthusiastic welcomes in this city’s history.”
It was Treleaven’s idea to open the broadcast with clips of Nixon, standing in an open-air limousine, arms thrust victoriously in the air, making his trademark V. For the audience at home, the jubilant scene would contrast starkly with that of a week earlier, when Democrats had brought insurrection to the streets. When Richard Nixon came to town, there was a parade.
Ailes watched the introduction unfold on monitors in the control room as the director cued the next shot: Nixon bounding onto the stage. The studio audience jumped to their feet applauding vigorously, as Jack Rourke had coached them. The director cut back and forth between the candidate and the crowd. Nixon was beaming, seeming in that moment as warm and as human as Mike Douglas. He even had his own gag man onstage with him: former Oklahoma football coach turned ABC announcer Bud Wilkinson, one of the few celebrities backing Nixon in ’68. Moments earlier, Wilkinson had greeted the audience and introduced the panel. “I’d like to stress the point that Mr. Nixon has absolutely no idea what questions will be asked,” he said, sounding like a color commentator before a big game. “There could not have been any prior preparation.”
Except Nixon had done nothing but prepare for this moment. And
Ailes had helped him. Before the broadcast, Nixon honed a series of stock answers that he could deploy at will, artfully tailoring the response to whatever question was posed.
“If the material he is presenting can be made more succinct and memorable, there is no doubt that he can control this medium in the upcoming election,” Ailes wrote in his July 1968 memo to Garment and Shakespeare. Because the broadcasts would be seen only in their local markets, Nixon could repeat his answers in one city after the next. He could also calibrate his response to the sensibilities of different audiences.
Thus he would affirm civil rights in Chicago but hedge on school integration weeks later in Charlotte. (
Years later, Ailes would advise his clients to use the same trick: “On an index card you can keep in your wallet, list the key phrases of ten stories that will entertain audiences for the next ten years,” he wrote in his book,
You Are the Message
, “because you rarely speak to the same audience twice.”)
Nixon followed Wilkinson’s introduction with a monologue—it really was a talk show. “I’m not trying to filibuster before we go to the questions,” he quipped, before turning sincere. “I would like to say a word about the pictures you saw a moment ago of the arrival in Chicago. Those pictures brought back many memories to me.” The camera zoomed in tight: “Sixteen years ago in 1952, I was nominated for vice president in Chicago at the Republican National Convention. And then eight years ago, I was nominated for president of the United States in Chicago at the Republican National Convention. And today, as I begin this campaign tour, I would have to say I’ve received the greatest political reception that I’ve ever received in my life in Chicago.” Over and over, a half dozen times, he repeated that code word for Democratic lawlessness:
Chicago
.
Jack Sundine, editor of the
Moline Dispatch
, asked the first question. “Yes, Mr. Nixon, George Wallace has said that, and others I suppose have said this, that there isn’t a thin dime of difference between the two parties nor between the nominees of the two parties. Would you, sir, in specifics, recite what you think the differences are between you and the nominee of the Democratic Party?”
The camera flashed back to Nixon.
“How much time do I have?”
The audience provided the laugh track. Nixon picked up right where his monologue ended. “At the convention last week in
Chicago
, I think the American people received there a picture of the choice that they have, and I think it’s probably the most decisive choice and the greatest difference you have between two candidates in this century.” He went on for
almost two minutes. He spoke of “new leadership” and a “new foreign policy” and “new policies to deal with the domestic economy.” There wasn’t a specific to be had.
The director switched to a camera positioned at the back of the studio. From this perspective, the room resembled an arena. Even though every member of the audience was on Nixon’s team, the image suggested a candidate bravely facing threats from all sides without a podium or teleprompter to defend him. The viewers at home could sympathize with his position.
The director panned to the next questioner. It was Morris Leibman, the Jewish lawyer, and a Democrat to boot. The camera filmed Leibman from the front. Almost entirely bald and wearing thick plastic frame glasses, he had to tilt his head back to make eye contact with Nixon. It looked as if Leibman was gazing up in admiration.
“Mr. Nixon, would you comment on the accusation that’s been made from time to time that your views have shifted, and that they’re based on expediencies?”
Nixon showed no discomfort. The camera captured him looking down at Leibman, arms clasped loosely behind his back. More comedy: “Well, I suppose, Mr. Leibman, that what you’re referring to in more the vernacular is, is there a ‘New Nixon’ or is there an ‘Old Nixon’? I suppose I could counter by saying, which Humphrey should we listen to today?”
Nixon laughed. The audience laughed. Even Leibman was chuckling.
The game was fun for everyone except the panelists: set ’em up, knock ’em down. The cheers from the crowd revealed that the real prey was the panel, not Nixon. Every time the citizen questioners opened their mouths, they could surely feel the stares of six hundred Republican eyes on their backs.
Ailes had spent days perfecting it all. Treleaven, Shakespeare, and Price had come up with the controlled television concept but Ailes fine-tuned the camera placements and the staging. Filming Nixon below his eye level made him appear taller, a commanding leader.
Midway through the broadcast, Warner Saunders, the black community leader and former schoolteacher, sat at the microphone with his arms crossed, signaling confrontation. “I’d like to step out of the box of an educator and talk about communications. A communications gap that is basically a color gap,” Saunders began in a voice steady with resolve. “I would like to explain to you that the black community feels the term ‘law
and order’ means violence, destruction inside of our community on the part of a recalcitrant police department, on the part of recalcitrant mayors and other officials inside of our community. What does ‘law and order’ mean to
you
?”
If anyone at home had grown bored by the proceedings, they surely snapped to attention now.
Nixon leaned back and took a deep breath. “Well, first, Mr. Saunders,” he said, “I’m quite aware of this fact that law and order, I think the term that I’ve heard used, is a code word, a code word for basically racism.” Then he pivoted to one of his prepared points: past injustices never justified lawbreaking. “I have often said you cannot have order unless you have justice. You cannot have order unless you have progress. Because order without progress, if you just stifle the dissent, if you just stifle the progress, you’re going to have an explosion, and you’re going to have disorder. On the other hand, you can’t have progress without order because when you have disorder—
revolution
—what you do is you destroy all the progress.”
The director caught a reaction shot from Ed Brooke, the black Massachusetts senator, who was seated in the front row next to Pat Nixon. Then it was back to the candidate: “The greatness of America, with few exceptions, over the period of our history, is that we have had the combination of having a system in which we could have peaceful change, peaceful progress, with order. Now that’s what I want for America.”
The virtually all-white audience responded with ecstatic applause. This well-run talk show was a microcosm of the civil society Nixon and his team were trying to sell.
Nixon sailed through the rest of the broadcast. He spoke of ending the war and building “bridges to human dignity” and getting “this country on a sound basis again.”
At the fifty-five-minute mark, Wilkinson spoke up. “I’m very sorry I have to interrupt this very interesting discussion, but our time is running short.”
Nixon asked Wilkinson if Mary Frances Squires, the housewife, could have one more question.
“I never like to cut off a lady, you know,” Nixon said. On cue: more laughs.
Squires wanted to know if Nixon favored releasing the names of POWs held in Vietnam. “If it doesn’t involve the security of the country,
there’s no excuse whatever for that kind of retention of information,” he said. “I will certainly look into it.”
The final question of the night came from Wilkinson. “I wonder if definite plans have been set for Julie and David’s wedding?”
The camera held on Julie Nixon and David Eisenhower grinning and squirming in their seats.
“That is confidential information,” Nixon replied, with mock conspiracy.
The audience tittered. It was the payoff, just like one on
The Mike Douglas Show
.
T
he next morning, Ailes reviewed tape of Nixon’s performance. On the Douglas set, Ailes’s perfectionist streak would often cause him to feel down immediately after the taping. But watching the footage of Nixon in Chicago reassured him that Nixon had delivered.
“Mr. Nixon is strong now on television and has good control of the situation,” Ailes wrote in a memo to Garment and Shakespeare. “He looks good on his feet and shooting ‘in the round’ gives dimension to him.… The ‘arena effect’ is excellent and he plays well to all areas. The look has ‘guts.’ ”
Nixon would tape three more panels that month. The next stops were Cleveland and Los Angeles, where
Nixon made a four-second taped appearance on
Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In
. (“Sock it to
me
?” he deadpanned.)
Ailes had already developed more than two dozen ideas to improve the Man in the Arena shows, which he delivered to Garment and Shakespeare. To play to the home audience, Nixon had to speak more directly into the camera. Because he would sweat under the hot studio lights, the air-conditioning needed to be turned up to the max at least four hours before his arrival. His deep-set eyes benefited from slightly whiter makeup applied to his upper eyelids. Ailes had timed all twenty of Nixon’s answers: “Some … are still too long and over half tended to be the same length,” he explained. Nixon needed “memorable phrases to use in wrapping up certain points.” Ailes also recommended more applause and more music, perhaps a Connie Francis soundtrack. “It might give us a classy ‘standard’ opening to use,” he wrote.
On September 18, McGinniss and Ailes arrived in Philadelphia two days ahead of the candidate. Ailes loved to ham it up for McGinniss’s notebook.
“He never forgot I was writing,” McGinniss later said. Ailes’s mordant one-liners about Nixon’s running mate, Spiro Agnew, were especially
bold:
“We’re doing all right,” he told McGinniss. “If we could only get someone to play Hide The Greek.”
Although his home in the suburbs was just ten miles from the studio, Ailes was staying at the Marriott Motor Hotel. Things were not going well with Marjorie. He had been on the road for six weeks working eighteen hours a day and the pace of the campaign was naturally pulling them apart. In Philadelphia, Ailes wanted to push the envelope. The previous taping in California had been flat—the panelists asked stale questions. Ailes wanted to scramble the cast.
“Nixon gets bored by the same kind of people,” he said. “We’ve got to screw around with this one a little bit.” Dan Buser, an assistant from the local Republican Party, recommended the head of a black community group as a panelist.
“And he is black,” Buser added.
“What do you mean, he’s black?” Ailes asked.
“I mean he’s dark. It will be obvious on television that he’s not white.”
“You mean we won’t have to put a sign around him that says, ‘This is our Negro’?”
Ailes booked him. McGinniss suggested the name of a political reporter, who Ailes found out was also black.
“Oh, shit, we can’t have two. Even in Philadelphia.”
The panel was almost complete. He had secured an Italian lawyer from Pittsburgh, a suburban housewife, a Wharton student, a Camden newsman, and a raspy-voiced radio and TV commentator named Jack McKinney. That left one open slot. As Ailes sat with McGinniss eating room service, Ailes told his friend just what he wanted. “A good, mean, Wallaceite cab driver. Wouldn’t that be great? Some guy to sit there and say, ‘Awright, mac, what about these niggers?’ ” Ailes went on: “A lot of people think Nixon is dull. They think he’s a bore, a pain in the ass. They look at him as the kind of kid who always carried a bookbag. Who was forty-two years old the day he was born.… Now you put him on television, you’ve got a problem right away. He’s a funny-looking guy. He looks like somebody hung him in a closet overnight and he jumps out in the morning with his suit all bunched up and starts running around saying, ‘I want to be president.’ I mean this is how he strikes some people. That’s why these shows are important. To make them forget all that.”