Authors: Gabriel Sherman
Tags: #Business & Economics, #Corporate & Business History, #Political Science, #General, #Social Science, #Media Studies
Despite the tensions caused by
The Selling of the President
, the book, which immediately shot to the top of the bestseller list, supercharged his reputation as a television impresario. McGinniss’s contention that presidential politics was really the realm of hidden behind-the-camera forces seemed perfectly calibrated to the conspiratorial zeitgeist of the late 1960s—and in this universe, a wizard like Ailes was a crucial figure. McGinniss’s ensemble cast of cynical characters were prime specimens of an altogether new archetype: the mercenary campaign operative. They constituted a vastly different breed from the public-spirited heroes who populated Theodore White’s
Making of the President 1968
, which had been published earlier that year. White’s elegant prose suddenly seemed dated.
Of all of McGinniss’s characters, Ailes emerged as the most vivid—
the prime manipulator. He was the expletive-spouting antihero—the private dialogue was diametrically opposed to the public—who was willing to push himself to exhaustion to get the job done. Even those who despised Richard Nixon could find an alluring, likable quality to Ailes’s roguish antics.
“That was the thing. These other guys were ciphers and Roger was in Technicolor,” McGinniss said. “Of course he’s going to become the star of the book. All the quips and everything, that’s the way he was all the time.”
And, as a coup of image making, it far outdistanced anything he had done for Richard Nixon. Although he professed outrage to his bosses at the White House, Ailes lapped up the attention in other spheres.
When McGinniss appeared on the
Today
show to promote the book, Barbara Walters berated him off-camera about how he portrayed her friend. “Roger isn’t offended at all,” McGinniss replied. “In fact, he likes the book.”
Only a few weeks later, Ailes was back to joking about the whole thing. He sent a letter to Jack Rourke reveling in all the salty quotes McGinniss included in the book. “It’s disgraceful,” he wrote in mock indignation. “I don’t know who the fuck he thinks he is.”
The book was a boon for Ailes’s consulting business. Republican politicians all over the country clamored for Ailes to do for them what McGinniss had shown him doing for Nixon.
“His career was started not by Richard Nixon but by Joe McGinniss,” Ailes’s brother observed. And the upcoming midterm elections in 1970 would offer many opportunities.
The week before McGinniss’s book hit the stores, Ailes quit
The Dennis Wholey Show
. Ailes claimed that Taft Broadcasting had “breached” a deal to give him “creative control of the show and final decisions with regard to staff assignments.”
And ultimately, even the White House was somewhat swayed by McGinniss’s portrayal. Television was a strategic priority, and Ailes was a master of the medium.
By the end of 1969, the administration finally turned its attention to developing a comprehensive TV plan at a time when Nixon was increasingly insecure about the public’s perception of his leadership. The massing antiwar movement had heightened Nixon’s paranoia that his adversaries were fomenting violent insurrection. Even the upsurge in support generated by his November 3 “Silent Majority” speech failed to erase his unshakable feeling that he lacked “mystique.”
The renewed focus on television provided Ailes with another chance to secure an official place in the administration.
A few days before Christmas,
Haldeman wrote Ailes requesting a pitch for how Nixon could use television. Ailes worked through the holidays crafting a
confidential seven-page proposal, which he sent to Haldeman on December 30. Ailes wanted to retain flexibility to build his business, so he proposed having the White House hire an assistant to work inside the administration, while Ailes remained on the outside, managing the staff person remotely. “I am proposing that you use me in this capacity because you know my work, I know your problems, I’m dedicated to the President on a personal and political basis, and I realize that in this type of work there is no margin for error,” he wrote.
Access was important. Ailes explained to Haldeman that he wanted to report directly to him, “so television doesn’t again slip to a secondary position of importance, given the President’s feelings about it.” He proposed that Nixon host a series of “fireside chats” and “person-to-person programs.” He wanted Nixon’s speechwriters to use language best suited to the medium. “Having spent a great deal of time studying audiences and writing introductions and interviews for TV, I know quite a bit about the ‘effect’ of words and phrases on people,” he wrote. “My feeling is in keeping with the President’s sincere style, sometimes more emotional words could be used to our advantage. ‘Kickers’ and memorable phrases need to be used more.” The proposal reflected Ailes’s earnest side, too. Under an idea he called the “Challenge of the 70s,” Ailes advised Nixon to “make a major address on this and state publicly that poverty, air and water pollution will be eliminated in America totally by 1980.” It was a strategy designed to burnish Nixon’s legacy. “This is similar to Kennedy’s challenge for the moon. It isn’t met in his administration but when it’s reached he gets the credit,” Ailes wrote. “If done well it will markedly counterbalance his pragmatic image with that of an idealist and dreamer.”
On January 7, Haldeman forwarded Ailes’s memo to Nixon. “I think Ailes is probably the best man for this job, at least for the present time,” he wrote. Nixon signed his initials in the box marked “Approve” and
Ailes was hired at the consultant’s rate of $100 per day, the equivalent of $600 in 2013.
Not everyone in the West Wing was on-board with the decision.
“If he is hired,” Dwight Chapin, who handled TV matters at the White House, wrote in a memo, “I think that the message should be made extremely clear that there is nothing permanent about the job.” Ailes recognized that he faced bureaucratic rivals in the press office.
Ailes told Chapin he wanted Haldeman to have a meeting with communications
director Herb Klein and press secretary Ron Ziegler to “make sure everyone understands the setup.”
A Nixon insider, Ziegler had known Chapin from their days together at the University of Southern California, and had been with Nixon since ’62. After the failed gubernatorial campaign, he worked alongside Haldeman at J. Walter Thompson. At thirty, he was the youngest presidential press secretary in history and he wasn’t going to cede ground easily to an outsider like Ailes.
On February 4, Ailes wrote an urgent memo to Haldeman raising concerns about the design of the
new press briefing room that was being built in the space of the White House swimming pool. Ailes had spoken with a lighting designer who had told him that “the present plans seem to [be] lacking for TV.” The comments must have embarrassed Ziegler, whom Ailes copied on the letter.
That same day, Ziegler fired off a two-page memo defending the press room’s design. “We have not looked at, nor do I think we should look at this facility as a television studio with highly sophisticated lighting capabilities,” he wrote. Haldeman backed Ziegler and the press room blueprints remained unchanged.
A few weeks later, when the press room was completed, Ziegler wrote a sarcastic memo to Chapin about Ailes. “I would like to test the lighting on the President in the new Press Room sometime in the very near future.… If you can give me an idea as to when we can do this, I will work it out with Roger Ailes. Of course, we would want to have our T.V. consultant Roger on the scene.”
In late February, Ailes was subverted by Ziegler again. Haldeman had asked Ailes to recommend producers for the position of White House TV assistant.
Ailes submitted three candidates, with Bob LaPorta, his former
Mike Douglas
colleague, at the top of his list.
“Roger wanted me to be his eyes down there,” LaPorta recalled.
The White House brought LaPorta in for an interview, but he was passed over for the position.
After another candidate, a thirty-five-year-old news director named Bob Knott, was also resisted, Ailes vented about being frozen out. “I would very much like to get things arranged according to my original memo of some months ago since I cannot afford to drop everything for four days and lose large sums of money very frequently,” Ailes wrote to Haldeman.
It may not have been the right message to convey. Nor did Nixon’s advisers appreciate Ailes’s bold self-promotion, even as he used interviews to spin the damage done by the McGinniss book.
In mid-March, Ziegler wrote a terse memo to Haldeman titled “Roger Ailes appearance
in CBS morning news show.” Ziegler complained to Haldeman that Ailes was talking too much about his behind-the-scenes work for Nixon. “I have no objection to Ailes discussing from time to time the President’s preparation for TV appearances. However, I think we should approach this extremely cautiously,” he wrote.
Ailes’s political work on behalf of Republican candidates caused problems, too. In Florida,
drugstore magnate Jack Eckerd had hired Ailes to help him mount a challenge to incumbent governor Claude Kirk. Eckerd’s move immediately prompted speculation that the Nixon administration was punishing Kirk for having supported Nelson Rockefeller at the 1968 GOP convention.
“Ailes is involving himself professionally in Republican primary contests and too close of a public association between Ailes and the President could lead to problems,” Ziegler wrote Haldeman.
Ziegler’s concerns were well founded. In the spring of 1970, Ailes was in the middle of another contentious GOP primary race for an open Senate seat in Ohio, one that would have spillover effects for Nixon’s presidency, and the country. Ailes was advising the Ohio congressman Robert Taft Jr. against the “law and order” candidate, Governor James Rhodes, who had been considered as a possible Nixon running mate in ’68. The race was pushing Rhodes even further to the right.
When Taft debated Rhodes in Akron in late April, Ailes walked onstage thirty seconds before airtime and handed Taft a note with one word written on it:
“Kill.”
“Rhodes got shook up,” Ailes bragged afterward to a
Boston Globe
reporter. “I gave Taft the note, partly facetiously, partly for a laugh—just to try to get Bob to be a little tougher in his answers.”
The gambit worked:
the
Toledo Blade
noted that “the usually placid Mr. Taft accused the governor of lying about his record and told him he should be ashamed of himself.”
A few days after the debate, Rhodes flew to Kent State University, which was engulfed in student unrest.
At a press conference on the morning of May 3, Rhodes lashed into protesters who had burned the ROTC building the previous night and declaimed that the demonstrators were “worse than the Brown Shirts and the Communist element.”
Rhodes’s inflammatory speech intensified the conflict in Kent. In the chaos, National Guardsmen fired into a group of marchers. The volley of more than sixty shots in thirteen seconds left four dead and nine wounded.
Kent State, Bob Haldeman later wrote in his book
The Ends of Power
,
“marked a turning point for Nixon, a beginning of his downward slide towards Watergate.”
A
s the Nixon administration began to circle the wagons, Ailes was increasingly left on the outside—in hindsight, a fortunate development. Unable to get the White House to make a decision on his television memo, Ailes headed west, taking a room at the
Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood. He was back into the zany world of daytime TV with a new variety program starring the game show host Tom Kennedy, who had a hit with
You Don’t Say!
on NBC.
It was the type of producing work Ailes seemed to enjoy most—having the blank canvas, being in charge. He hired Kelly Garrett, a beautiful cabaret singer whom he had met on the set of
Mike Douglas
, to be Tom Kennedy’s musical talent.
Even though he was still married to Marjorie (they would not get divorced until 1977), he never spoke of his wife around the set.
“All I knew was that he was single,” Tom Kennedy said.
The taping of the premiere episode of
The Real Tom Kennedy Show
, as the new show was called, took place on March 31, 1970, at the KTLA studios in Hollywood. Ailes employed many of the
Douglas
elements, filling the episode with pranks and stunts. He was learning how television could harness the liberal culture even as it was critiquing it, a technique he would later apply to Fox News. Near the end of the debut, Kennedy interviewed the sexploitation movie director Russ Meyer, who was promoting his surprise hit
Vixen!
Kennedy chatted with Meyer about the controversy, then turned to the audience for their reaction, which was decidedly critical. When a middle-aged man in a dark suit vowed he would never watch one of Meyer’s films, Kennedy called him on stage to appear in an improv skit with Edy Williams, the curvy star of a Meyer soft-core porn movie. Kennedy gave each of them cue cards to recite through a “scene.” Williams playfully purred that her reading partner was “very sexy” and slowly positioned his right arm over her bare shoulder. His wife watched pensively from the audience as he stuttered and giggled, mangling his lines.
In late May, Ailes learned he was fired from the Republican National Committee.
A White House memo later stated that Ailes had been “released by Jim Allison, Deputy Chairman of the Republican National Committee in February 1970, following statement made by Roger Ailes that REA would offer its services to Democrat as well as Republican candidates.”
There were competitive factors at play as well: Allison had a political consulting firm with his friend and former Ailes colleague Harry Treleaven.
A
Boston Globe
profile noted that Ailes was aggressively signing up Republican clients, and was involved in half a dozen races that year. In the interview, Ailes boasted that one day television could
replace
the party itself: “The skeletons of political parties will remain. But television will accelerate the breaking down of mass registration by party. The figures show this already. Youth are independent.”
After an unsuccessful attempt to get the White House to intervene to save his RNC contract,
Ailes fired off an angry letter to Allison, copying Haldeman and Nixon hand Murray Chotiner: