Authors: Gabriel Sherman
Tags: #Business & Economics, #Corporate & Business History, #Political Science, #General, #Social Science, #Media Studies
By the early 1980s, Ailes’s politics had become more crisply ideological. He populated his office, which he renamed Ailes Communications, Inc., in April 1982, with true believers. They included
Larry McCarthy, a twenty-nine-year-old former press secretary for Pennsylvania Republican senator John Heinz;
Jon Kraushar, a speech coach who handled corporate clients; and operatives
Kathy Ardleigh and
Ken LaCorte.
In his 1980s campaigns, Ailes was a swaggering tough guy with an
angry, at times megalomaniacal, edge to his leadership style. His rhetoric was violent, and he sometimes actually scuffled with colleagues.
“Whatever it takes” was one of his office catchphrases.
This philosophy prevailed outside the political realm.
After the D’Amato campaign, Ailes was appointed executive producer of NBC’s struggling late-night talk show,
Tomorrow
, co-hosted by Tom Snyder and Rona Barrett, which aired after Johnny Carson. Because Snyder was barely on speaking terms with Barrett, NBC needed an aggressive producer to seize control—which is what NBC got.
On one occasion, Ailes punched a hole through the wall of the control room. “If you have a reputation as a badass, you don’t need to fight,” he later said. But he
did
fight. During an office softball game, Ailes fought with
Tomorrow
producer John Huddy, whom Ailes met while working on the Fellini documentary.
“He got into this screaming match,” an eyewitness recalled. “It was so heated that they got into a fistfight. Everybody knew Roger had this blood disorder, and his hands swelled. Afterwards, he had ice around his hands. It was just crazy. This was his friend, and it was about
nothing
.”
The ball field brawl rattled the staff.
“Roger was not going to let someone tell him what to do. Never, never,
never
,” Barrett recalled. His approach to some young female staffers became a particular flashpoint.
While interviewing Randi Harrison, a twenty-something out-of-work producer who had come in from Florida, Ailes steered the conversation onto uncomfortable terrain. According to Harrison, Ailes looked over at his NBC office couch and said, “I have helped a lot of women get ahead and advance their careers in the broadcast television industry.” They were discussing her salary. Ailes offered $400 a week. Harrison told him it was a lowball figure. Ailes made a counteroffer: “If you agree to have sex with me whenever I want I will add an extra hundred dollars a week.”
“I guess we’ll be in touch,” Harrison said, getting up to leave. Ailes maneuvered around his desk and gave her a hug. “I remember seeing all the windows in his office and wondering, ‘Does he do it here?’ ” she later said. “I was in tears by the time I hit the street.”
From a pay phone in front of NBC’s offices at Rockefeller Center, she called her friend Chris Calhoun, who was hosting her while she was in town. He told her to call John Huddy, her original contact for the job, and withdraw her name from consideration. She reached Huddy’s secretary and told her, without going into details, that she was no longer interested in the position. Over the next twenty-four hours, Huddy placed multiple calls to Calhoun’s apartment. Each time Calhoun told Huddy she was not
available. In one conversation, according to Calhoun, Huddy pressed him about her whereabouts.
“Do you know when she is expected?”
“—expected to do
what
?”
Finally, Harrison agreed to meet Huddy for a drink at Hurley’s, a popular NBC watering hole on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 49th Street.
The first question he asked unnerved Harrison.
“Are you wired?” Huddy said.
“No, I’m not,” she replied, crying. She proceeded to recount her interview with Ailes. “Huddy assured me that there would be no more sexual demands,” Harrison recalled. “He said, ‘You’re the one we want.’ ” Harrison told Huddy she’d think about it. With no other employment alternatives, Harrison became a
Tomorrow
show researcher—at $400 a week. “This was the NBC network. It was New York City. And I needed the job,” she later said. At work, she had few interactions with Ailes. “I remember once going into his office and he asked me to do research on Alzheimer’s,” Harrison said. Ailes did not explain the reason, but at the time, his father was suffering from advanced stages of the disease and would die within eighteen months. “Every woman who worked on the show I’d wonder about,” she said.
Unbeknownst to Harrison,
Shelley Ross, a former newspaper reporter turned television producer, experienced an interview in which Ailes posed romantically suggestive questions and made flirtatious comments about her appearance.
“This is making me uncomfortable,” Ross recalled telling Ailes. She had worked with Huddy at
The Miami Herald
and he had recommended her for the
Tomorrow
job. In a follow-up telephone interview, she told Ailes that she would never date a boss. Ailes’s reaction was, according to Ross, “Don’t you know I’m single?” When Ross said she was no longer interested in the position, Ailes began apologizing profusely. “This must be middle-aged crazy. I’m
so
sorry,” he said. “If you come to work for me, you know, we’re not going to have any problems.” Ross eventually accepted the offer and had a positive experience working for Ailes.
When asked by a reporter in the mid-1990s about the comments he made to Ross in the interview, Ailes called her “crazy” and a “militant feminist.”
In fact, dominance was not only a crucial aspect of his self-image, but part of what he was selling.
“He has worked at cultivating this Hemingway image over the years,” Ailes’s friend, the Democratic strategist
Robert Squier, said.
In the summer of 1981, Shelley Ross arranged for Ailes and Tom Snyder to conduct an interview with Charles Manson, the murderous cult leader, at a maximum-security prison hospital for the criminally insane. It was the first network interview Manson had granted in more than a decade. As Snyder prepared his questions, Ailes canvassed the holding cell where the interview was to take place. Rounding a corner, he bumped into Manson himself.
“As our eyes locked, I at first said nothing. I realized that a very primitive confrontation and mutual assessment were taking place,” Ailes recalled in his book,
You Are the Message
. “Then I said, ‘Mr. Manson, I’m in charge of this interview. I’d like you to come with me.’ For a split second more he stared at me. Then he lowered his head, backed away, and suddenly acted very obsequious.” Shelley Ross, who attended the interview, did not find Manson intimidating.
“Let me just tell you, it wan’t hard to stare Manson down,” she said. “I hate to burst anybody’s bubble.”
The interview, which was widely criticized for providing Manson a public platform, was a ploy to juice ratings. It worked. The audience in key markets tripled. But it was not enough to revive
Tomorrow
’s fortunes.
In November 1981, NBC announced that it was replacing the show with a new one called
Late Night with David Letterman
.
T
he metamorphosis of Ailes was evident in the difference in approach between the 1976 and 1982 Senate campaigns of New Mexico astronaut
Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, a member of the final Apollo moon mission.
In 1976, Ailes had run a respectable operation, impressing the first-time long-shot candidate with his artistic flair. One frigid winter morning before dawn, Ailes drove Schmitt out to the desert north of Albuquerque to film a campaign spot near a windmill.
“We parked on the side of the freeway,” Schmitt recalled. “Roger had scouted the location.” Ailes filmed multiple takes of his client walking toward the camera introducing himself to the state’s electorate. “He wanted to get a sunrise. My hands remained partially numb for six months,” Schmitt said.
He went on to win the race with 57 percent of the vote.
But in the fall of 1982, Senator Schmitt saw his reelection bid imperiled after Ailes produced a controversial attack ad about his opponent, state attorney general Jeff Bingaman. The spot claimed that Bingaman had freed “a convicted felon” who had been on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. In reality, the FBI had requested his temporary release into its custody
in order for him to testify as a key prosecution witness at a trial in Texas for the murder of a judge. “There is nothing false in those spots,” Ailes told the press, explaining that his ad relied on an article in
The Albuquerque Tribune
. But the article had been retracted before the spot aired. In Ailes’s view, it was the challenger’s job to point out that fact. “My responsibility ends with the act. Maybe folks can say I’m an unethical guy. But it’s not my job to make … Bingaman’s case,” Ailes said.
Bingaman won the race 54–46 percent.
In the next election cycle, Ailes worked on behalf of Republican Mitch McConnell, a round-faced county judge from Kentucky. Ailes had been recruited by McConnell to devise a strategy against the two-term conservative Democratic senator Walter “Dee” Huddleston, a master of southern patronage politics.
With two months to go before the election, McConnell was more than ten points down.
“We were in a hopeless campaign,” McConnell’s campaign manager, Janet Mullins, recalled. “Roger lived it and breathed it and wanted to win as badly as Mitch did.”
As Ailes would tell it, he was watching television at home when a commercial came on that featured a pack of dogs chasing after a bag of kibble. A McConnell staffer had mentioned that Huddleston had missed several important votes while giving paid speeches around the country. Ailes jotted down the word “Dogs!” on a piece of paper.
During a strategy meeting, Ailes presented his vision. Mullins remembered the moment:
“There was Roger, sitting in a cloud of pipe smoke, and he said, ‘This is Kentucky. I see hunting dogs. I see hound dogs on the scent looking for the lost member of Congress.’ ”
The McConnell campaign, desperate for a way forward, gave Ailes the go-ahead.
Ailes dispatched Larry McCarthy to hire a dog trainer and a pack of bloodhounds. The script Ailes wrote included a goofy voice-over.
“My job was to find Dee Huddleston and get him back to work. Huddleston was skipping votes but making an extra fifty thousand dollars giving speeches. Let’s go, boys!”
The ad concluded with the tagline “Switch to Mitch for Senator.”
Ailes knew it might backfire.
“He called me at home that night when they just finished the ad,” McConnell’s pollster, Lance Tarrance, said. “Roger said, ‘This is either gonna blow us up or not. I’ll send it to you. If you think it’s too wild and crazy tell me.’ ”
When the campaign aired the commercial, subsequently known as the “Hound Dog” spot, the Huddleston campaign dismissed the attack as a carnival stunt.
“They flicked us off like a piece of dandruff,” Mullins
said. But ignoring the deceptive power of humor was a strategic error—the ad was a hit.
“All the local television stations and editorial cartoonists immediately picked up on it. It became the symbol of the race,” Larry McCarthy later said.
McConnell squeezed out a win by just five thousand votes out of 1.3 million cast.
“We all know Roger can be deadly. When you combine Roger being deadly with Roger being clever, it’s hard to beat,” Mullins said.
The victory demonstrated yet again that attacks did not have to be fair to be effective.
“The charge was baseless,”
Newsweek
reported at the time. “Huddleston was present 94 percent of the time, but the lackluster campaigner failed to shake the scent of slacker that the ad sprayed over him.”
The ad, Mullins said, is “taught in every Republican campaign school about how to use humor as a deadly weapon.”
Ailes leveraged the Hound Dog spot into bigger assignments.
Not long after it aired, he talked it up to Tom Messner, a member of Ronald Reagan’s advertising group, known as the Tuesday Team, over lunch at the ’84 Republican National Convention in Dallas. “I got this spot, we were down forty points and after it ran we were only down six,” Ailes told Messner. It was a classic Ailesian exaggeration, but his swagger paid off.
In early October, the Reagan brain trust summoned Ailes to Washington for an emergency meeting.
A few days earlier, Reagan had bombed during the opening presidential debate against his opponent, Walter Mondale. The Gipper returned to Washington visibly rattled. His poll numbers declined sharply in several states.
“It was a disaster,” Tuesday Team member Wally Carey said.
“When I arrived at the White House,” Ailes recalled, “the first thing Reagan’s top aides, Jim Baker and Michael Deaver, told me was that I would not be talking to Mr. Reagan directly.” After Ailes took his place at the table with Reagan’s image makers, the president walked in.
“Reagan said, ‘I was just wondering, how’d I do in the debate?’ ” Wally Carey remembered. “Roger said, ‘Mr. President, with all due respect, you were terrible.’ And the President said, ‘I really thought I was. It was all these numbers they made me memorize.’ Roger said, ‘You know Mr. President, the American people want you to be a leader and don’t care whether you don’t know a billion or a million and we’ll ensure going forward you won’t have those big cram sessions.’ ”
Ailes’s blunt talk encouraged Reagan.
Afterward, Ailes demanded that Deaver and Baker give him access. “If you give me that, he’ll win. If you don’t, he’ll probably lose,” Ailes said. The ultimatum worked: he was
invited to help Reagan rehearse for the second debate. During a final run-through at the White House, Ailes ignored prior warnings about broaching the age issue.
As Ailes walked with Reagan to the elevator, he said, “Mr. President, what are you going to do when they say you’re too old for the job?” Reagan, according to Ailes, “stopped cold and blinked.” Ailes went on: “It’s critical that you get by that issue successfully.”
It was the push Reagan needed.
At the second debate, Reagan delivered the iconic one-liner: “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.” Ailes observed Mondale’s reaction.
“Even he broke into a smile, but I could see in his eyes that he knew it was over,” Ailes recalled. “… I could almost hear him thinking, ‘Son of a gun, the old man got away with it!’ ”