Authors: Gabriel Sherman
Tags: #Business & Economics, #Corporate & Business History, #Political Science, #General, #Social Science, #Media Studies
The Philadelphia taping was scheduled to begin at 7:30 the next evening. Ailes showed up at the studio at 2:00 in a fighting mood. “I’m going to fire this fucking director!” he snarled. The camera placements were all off. He needed close-ups of individual audience members. Having multiple
people in every shot was dated 1940s direction. “I want to see faces,” he said. “I want to see pores. That’s what people are. That’s what television is.”
The director protested. “I don’t want to hear that shit!” Ailes said. “I told you what I wanted, and it’s your job to give it to me.”
“He’s crazy,” the director later told McGinniss. “He says he wants close-ups, it’s like saying he wants to go to the moon.” (After the show, Ailes fired him.)
The evening show would be the fourth panel Nixon had done, on top of the thirty-minute “Nixon Answer” specials. But Roger Ailes was about to teach Nixon a lesson: the best television is unpredictable television.
Jack McKinney set the tone for the evening. His demeanor was decidedly unfriendly.
He questioned why Nixon was being so evasive on his Vietnam position, noting that in 1952 the candidate had made partisan remarks about the political situation in Korea. Nixon winced.
“It was really a question, I think, of the timing,” he replied defensively. “As a potential president of the United States, anything that I say would be interpreted by the enemy in Hanoi as an indication they would wait for me rather than discuss with the man we have as president.”
The camera captured a woman wearing a gold dress glowering at McKinney.
Twenty minutes later, the floor returned to him. McKinney repeated a charge made by Humphrey: why had Nixon refused to appear on national political programs like
Face the Nation
where he would be interviewed by professionals and not by amateurs in a room full of Republicans ready to intimidate any questioner who sought to ask a tough question?
In the control room, Ailes’s experiment was playing poorly. “The guy’s making a speech!” Frank Shakespeare yelled. Ailes reached for the phone to tell Wilkinson to cut McKinney off, but he stopped before that was necessary.
Nixon stared down his accuser. “You talk about these quiz shows that take place on Sundays. I’ve done
Meet the Press
and
Face the Nation
until they were running out of my ears.”
It was the exact image that Ailes wanted to create: Nixon was taking it and fighting back.
“That socks it to him, Dickie Baby!” Shakespeare said.
Later in the taping, another guest asked Nixon why, in 1965, he had called for the ouster of a Marxist professor at Rutgers. Insisting that he knew the facts, Nixon explained that on campus the professor had called
for the victory of the Vietcong over American troops in Vietnam. When the questioning returned to McKinney, he went at Nixon one more time.
Referring to the Rutgers professor, he said, “When you said you knew the story, you did not give it in full context. He did not call for a victory of the Vietcong, he referred to what he recognized as the impending victory—”
Nixon cut him off abruptly. “And he said—and I quote him exactly—‘I welcome that victory.’ He used that word.”
The crowd broke into applause.
McKinney replied, “I think there’s a critical difference—”
And got cut off again by the candidate: “You think there’s a difference between welcome or calling for?”
McKinney did not get it. That kind of nuance mattered in print journalism, not television. Television was about emotion. The audience did not care that Nixon had fudged a few words. What they saw was the candidate telling a sanctimonious newsman that some Commie professor had no right to say nice things about the enemy killing American teenagers.
After the taping, McKinney complained to reporters, “I don’t think you can finalize a question with an applause-getting technique.”
The Philadelphia panel was a step forward in political communication.
“Mr. Nixon came off the undisputed winner in the McKinney questioning,” Ailes later wrote in a memo to Garment and Shakespeare. “The audience sympathy was with him (McKinney was not likeable) … and when he ‘turned it over to the television audience’ to decide the semantics of ‘call for’ or ‘welcome’ victory by the Vietcong, it showed the strongest use of and confidence in television I’ve ever seen.” In a way, Ailes had manipulated Nixon into delivering the performance he wanted.
“Boy, is he going to be pissed,” he told McGinniss. “He’ll think we really tried to screw him.”
On his way out that evening, Ailes bumped into Pat Nixon in the elevator. She greeted him with pursed lips.
“Everyone seems to think it was by far the best,” Ailes declared. Mrs. Nixon did not say a word.
A
fter Philadelphia, Ailes found himself working under a Nixon team that was increasingly reluctant to indulge his freewheeling vision. He was a television risk taker among political operatives who were becoming risk-averse. The ground was moving beneath their feet.
On September 30, Humphrey called for a unilateral halt to bombing as “an acceptable risk
for peace,” and the antiwar tides flowed in his direction. Nixon’s team responded to the tightening polls by blaming Ailes.
Shakespeare in particular second-guessed Ailes’s directing.
Ailes attributed Nixon’s declining numbers to the fact that Nixon had been in front of television audiences nonstop since the primaries.
“My honest opinion was that it did peak too early,” Ailes later said. “It’s such a highly sophisticated technical problem to keep a thing hyped for a whole bloody year.” The press caught on to Ailes’s frustration. During a stop in New York on October 8, where he was editing five hours of panel footage into a thirty-minute television special,
Ailes gave a candid interview to
The New York Times
, which stated that his strength was growing up in an age of TV and that his “candidate’s weakness might be that he didn’t.” Ailes noted: “Nixon is not a child of TV and he may be the last candidate who couldn’t make it on the Johnny Carson show who could make it in an election.… He’s a communicator and a personality on television, but not at his best when they say on the talk shows, ‘Now here he is … Dick.’ ” If nothing else, Ailes would at least make a name for himself with these comments.
Ten days later, Nixon’s political advisers pinned Nixon’s poor performance at a Boston panel show on Ailes’s choice of questioners. In truth, the campaign’s only swing through Massachusetts was an all-around mess that had nothing to do with Ailes. But a week later, the campaign stripped Ailes of the task of selecting panelists.
On October 25, the final taping at the CBS studio in New York was turned over in part to a young demographer named
Kevin Phillips, who would later write a book about the campaign titled
The Emerging Republican Majority
. In the control booth shortly before the broadcast, Phillips proudly proclaimed that his panel was “perfectly ethnically weighted.” Ailes groused that it was “the worst panel we’ve had,” and complained to McGinniss that if Shakespeare knocked him again for his directing, he would walk out.
The Nixon campaign spent the final days of the race lurching from one self-inflicted crisis to the next. Ailes believed they were panicking.
On Sunday, Nixon reversed himself and did what Jack McKinney had asked him to do: he appeared on CBS’s
Face the Nation
. It was a middling performance. Nonetheless he agreed to do
Meet the Press
the next week.
On Sunday, November 3, Ailes met with Nixon to prep for his
Meet the Press
appearance. Still in a foul mood about being second-guessed, Ailes later told a reporter that “too many people were bugging” him.
To blow off steam, he drove an hour and a half north to a rural airstrip and
went skydiving. On the second jump, he took a hard landing. The impact shredded ligaments in his ankle.
The next morning, his ankle wrapped but hardly usable, he rode in a rented yellow Ford Thunderbird over to NBC’s Burbank studios, where 125 telephones had been installed for a pre-election live telethon. He hobbled around the set on crutches, taking painkillers and barking orders to the staff. The injury seemed to draw out Ailes’s cynicism.
“It’s going to be a dull fucking two hours,” Ailes told McGinniss.
Indeed, the telethon was a polite and restrained affair—a celebration of square chic. Nixon trotted out a taped endorsement from Jackie Gleason. David Eisenhower earnestly read a letter from his grandfather that hoped for a Nixon victory.
The Humphrey telethon, by contrast, tacked hip. The candidate surrounded himself with celebrities including Paul Newman, fresh off his Oscar-nominated role in
Cool Hand Luke
, and the Brooklyn-born singer Abbe Lane, who offended many Americans with her frank sex talk.
“That’s crazy,” Al Scott said when he saw that Humphrey was taking live, unscripted phone calls. “They’ve got no control.”
That was the point.
Rick Rosner, Humphrey’s television adviser and a former colleague of Ailes’s from
Mike Douglas
, was counterprogramming against Nixon’s controlled image.
Throughout the evening, Humphrey roamed freely across the set, stepping over tangled electrical wires and discarded coffee cups, as he conversed with callers directly. The messy scene was deliberate: advisers wanted the stage to have an authentic feel. In its self-conscious messiness, the show attempted to tap into the deep vein of antiauthority running through America. To the millions of Americans tuning in, Hubert Humphrey’s closing argument was that he was real; Richard Nixon was a television construct.
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.
N
o 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.”