Authors: Gabriel Sherman
Tags: #Business & Economics, #Corporate & Business History, #Political Science, #General, #Social Science, #Media Studies
In an instant, Dole was laid bare on national television.
“He responded with a Nixon-like scowl,” recalled Janet Mullins, who was then on the Bush campaign. “There was always that talk of Dole not being a nice person, and of course that was opposite of George Bush’s public persona.”
Five weeks later, Dole dropped out of the race.
O
n Thursday, May 26, the day before Memorial Day weekend, Ailes arrived at a nondescript office park in Paramus, New Jersey, to observe a focus group of likely voters. Massachusetts Democratic governor Michael Dukakis was all but certain to be Bush’s opponent. Around the table sat white, middle-class Reagan Democrats who didn’t know much about Dukakis but found his qualities attractive.
The son of Greek immigrants, Dukakis was a Harvard-trained lawyer who had served in the military.
His brand was technocratic and moderate. As governor, he had helped turn around his state—the “Massachusetts Miracle,” as his campaign called it.
If Bush did not take back these voters, he would lose.
Ailes watched from behind a one-way mirror, as a moderator asked the group questions based on Jim Pinkerton’s oppo research.
“If you learned the following things about Dukakis, would it change your mind about him?” the moderator asked. Willie Horton, a black convicted murderer from Massachusetts, had been given a “weekend pass” to get out of jail as part of a prison furlough program Governor Dukakis had approved. While on leave, Horton brutally raped a white woman and stabbed her boyfriend. Furthermore, Dukakis was also against the death penalty and prayer in school. “I didn’t realize all these things when I said I was for Dukakis,” one woman said. By the end of the session, half the room switched their support to George Bush.
Ailes maintained that focus groups were a waste of time and money. But the New Jersey session confirmed what he felt in his gut: Dukakis was impressive on paper but weak in person.
Ailes had consulted a psychiatrist
to get a read on Dukakis. Word came back that he was a narcissist. Ailes thought of him as the annoying kid in school who raised his hand at the end of class to remind the teacher she had forgotten to assign homework.
At a campaign retreat in Kennebunkport that weekend, Ailes and Atwater planned to tag-team Bush to convince him to go negative.
“We’re gonna have to destroy the littler fucker,” one Bush official recalled Ailes saying.
Polls showed Bush trailing Dukakis by as much as seventeen points. Before going to bed the first night, Atwater and Ailes left tapes of the New Jersey focus group with Bush. The next morning, they never had to make a sales pitch.
“Well, you guys are the experts,” Bush said quietly.
The assault started a week later.
On June 9, in a speech at the Texas state GOP convention, Bush attacked Dukakis as a tax-hiking, U.N.-appeasing Cambridge hippie.
“Michael Dukakis on crime is standard old-style sixties liberalism!” Bush crowed. “He has steadfastly opposed the death penalty … he supported the only state program in the whole country—the only one—that gives unsupervised weekend furloughs to first degree murderers!”
With Bush on board, Ailes got to work on his search-and-destroy battle plan for television.
Ignoring the slick Madison Avenue creative types, he recruited lesser knowns who would be loyal to him. Dennis Frankenberry was one. He ran a small agency out of Milwaukee that produced commercials for Sentry Insurance and Leinenkugel Beer. He had done only one political race—a campaign for district attorney in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
Ailes also tapped some loyalists from the ’84 Reagan campaign: Tom Messner and Sig Rogich.
In his multiple roles of grand strategist, speech coach, and television guru, Ailes set the creative tone of the campaign.
While only fifteen of the campaign’s forty spots were negative, such bald appeals to race, patriotism, and class had rarely been displayed on the national stage.
To attack Dukakis on the furlough issue, Rogich came up with the idea to film actors dressed as prisoners walking through a revolving door.
The ad’s centerpiece was a black man who gazed menacingly at the camera the moment he walked through.
To hammer Dukakis’s reputation as an environmentalist, Rogich captured footage of the Boston Harbor on a drizzly, gray day, brazenly filming a bright orange sign that read “DANGER RADIATION HAZARD NO SWIMMING.”
The warning was an artifact from a decommissioned nuclear submarine base, and had nothing to do with Dukakis.
At least one of Ailes’s own contributions was rejected for going out of bounds.
The proposed ad, titled “Bestiality,” featureed simple text scrolling across a black screen: “In 1970, Governor Michael Dukakis introduced legislation in Massachusetts to repeal the ban on sodomy and bestiality.” As the word “bestiality” appeared, a soundtrack of bleating barnyard animals would play.
Ailes told his team that ads like “Bestiality” weren’t actually “negative.” They were “comparative.”
As the fall campaign revved into high gear, Ailes was a constant presence at Bush’s side.
“He didn’t give a significant speech without Roger,” Sheila Tate, Bush’s campaign spokesperson, recalled.
“Roger had an uncanny ability to buck up a candidate,” campaign chief James Baker recalled. “He made them feel good about themselves. He gave them some confidence, and some great zingers. He always had good zingers.” Bush enjoyed Ailes’s dirty jokes and mordant asides.
He called Dukakis “Shorty,” and “Grapeleaf,” a dig at his Greek ancestry, as well as a “Heartless Little Robot,” for spouting policy positions and arcane statistics. Bush played along. One day when his dog walked into a campaign meeting, he joked about Ailes’s bestiality ad pitch.
“You’re the reason I’m running,” he said. “We’ve got to keep
those
people away from you.”
On September 21, four days before the first presidential debate, a shadowy outfit called Americans for Bush, an arm of the National Security Political Action Committee, aired an attack spot titled
“Weekend Passes.” The ad’s centerpiece was a grainy mug shot of Willie Horton. As Horton’s bearded, black visage hovered on the screen, a male narrator intoned:
“Bush and Dukakis on crime. Bush supports the death penalty for first degree murderers. Dukakis not only opposes the death penalty, he allowed first degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison. One was Willie Horton, who murdered a boy in a robbery, stabbing him nineteen times. Despite a life sentence, Horton received 10 weekend passes from prison. Horton fled, kidnapped a young couple, stabbing the man and repeatedly raping his girlfriend. Weekend prison passes. Dukakis on crime.”
The words “Kidnapping … Stabbing … Raping” were displayed under Horton’s picture, explicitly calibrated to stoke the racial fears of white Reagan Democrats.
The ad created blowback for Bush. Federal election law barred campaigns from coordinating their media strategy with independent groups. Ailes denied any involvement in the ad’s creation, but there were suspicious signs.
In August, Ailes had boasted to the press, “The only question
is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it.”
And the Horton ad was created by two former employees of Ailes Communications: Larry McCarthy, who had left the company the previous year, and Jesse Raiford, a thirty-year-old director, who had spent six years at Ailes Communications.
Roger Stone said that, while he did not think Ailes was involved in the Horton spot, Lee Atwater was. Atwater played it for Stone before it aired, an act that Stone called “an admission of illegality.” When Stone told him, “You don’t need to do this. You got this issue,” Atwater called him “a pussy.” Whether or not Ailes had any direct role in putting Horton’s picture on millions of television screens, his style had clearly inspired the ad.
“I know Roger very well,” Larry McCarthy told the press. “I just tried to [make] it as if I were Roger.”
In the hours leading up to the debate, Bush studied an array of briefing books.
“Roger detected that the most important thing for Bush was to be relaxed,” Sheila Tate said. “Roger said to him, ‘Now what are you going to do if Mike Dukakis rips off his microphone and walks over to you and says, ‘Iran-Contra! Iran-Contra!’ Bush goes to look at his briefing book. Roger slams it closed. He said, ‘No! That’s when you say, ‘Get out of my face, you little shit!’ And Bush started laughing. Roger was just trying to get him to loosen up. That’s one of his techniques.”
That night, Ailes kept up his guerrilla tactics. He stood with Bush offstage as Jim Lehrer, the moderator, prepared to call the candidates out. When Dukakis looked over at Ailes, he pointed down to a riser that was installed behind Dukakis’s podium and started to laugh.
“That was his idea of getting inside Dukakis’s head,” Tate said.
As Election Day approached, Ailes behaved like a defensive lineman preparing for a game, his aggression spilling over into all of his relationships.
In August, he walked into Bush headquarters and flipped a conference table over. He was verbally abusive to Janet Mullins, who was in charge of the campaign’s ad budgets.
“He threatened to kill me—twice—because I had the audacity to question some of his expenditures,” Mullins recalled. “He was getting paid in a lot of different ways and earned every bit of it. But if you’re in charge of the media budget, you want to make sure you’re not spending it on the Ritz or the Four Seasons when Roger came to town.”
Staffers noted that Lee Atwater seemed afraid of Ailes.
He told the press that Ailes had two speeds: “attack and destroy.”
Ailes’s appetite seemed to be a barometer of his ego.
His weight ballooned
to 240 pounds.
Craig Fuller recalled one hotel stop when Ailes declared, “ ‘Dammit, I’m hungry! Can’t we get some room service?’ We said, ‘Sure.’ Well, Roger grabs the room service menu. He was kind of agitated and he said, ‘I want page three, I want page four and I want page five and I want it now.’ ”
He was also known to inhale Häagen-Dazs ice cream and donuts. During one commercial shoot,
Tom Messner recalled, Ailes was “sitting there with a donut, and there’s this frosting on it, and the frosting is dripping down his shirt.” Ailes could turn donuts into projectiles.
“When he would have his emotional moments, he’d throw his donuts across the room,” Sig Rogich said. “I’d ask him if it was a one or two donut day.”
Leaks sent Ailes into fits. “A donut throwing moment” occurred, according to Rogich, when the trade journal
Advertising Age
sent a reporter to write about one of Ailes’s commercials. After
The New York Times
wrote a column about Tom Messner’s contributions to the campaign, he received a heated phone call from Ailes. “How
did
you get this Bush assignment?” Messner recalled Ailes saying. He did not appreciate his subordinate getting press.
Bush marched toward Election Day along the low road paved by Ailes.
A week and a half after the debate, Rogich’s “Revolving Door” ad aired. Although Horton’s name never appeared in the spot, the linkage between it and Horton was obvious. Television news producers were mostly interested in pictures, attacks, and gaffes, which was why Ailes’s attack spots were discussed so widely in the press.
“It was a hard ad to do without appearing to be racist,” Janet Mullins said.
By mid-October, Ailes green-lighted an ad that showed Dukakis wearing a helmet and grinning while he rode around in a tank as an announcer ticked off various weapons systems he opposed. The visual said it all. As Mike Douglas had once told Woody Fraser: never wear a funny hat.
From the time Dukakis clinched the nomination in early June, his unfavorability standing among voters doubled, from 20 percent to 43 percent. Meanwhile, Bush held steady at around 40 percent unfavorable. Even Bush’s positive spots were devastating to Dukakis’s image.
In the campaign’s most memorable ad, titled “Family/Children,” Ailes filmed Bush on the lawn in Kennebunkport surrounded by his adorable, flaxen-haired grandchildren—a Kennedyesque tableau that made Dukakis seem foreign by comparison. The force of Bush’s ad war was met by Dukakis’s
inept response.
“I sat there mute, which is one of the dumbest decisions I’ve ever made,” Dukakis said years later. “I made a decision early on that I was simply not gonna respond to this stuff.… I blew it.”
Roger Stone—no stranger to dirty tricks—said he felt Ailes ran an insignificant campaign.
“Wedge issues can still be about big ideas,” he said. “My problem was that the wedge issues in ’88 were all confections.”
Even the candidate himself recoiled at trafficking in race baiting.
“Here’s a man who has an exemplary record on civil rights,” Craig Fuller recalled. “The Bush family hated it. None of us liked it, we knew it was a problem.”
In late October, Bush called Ailes and complained about his slash-and-burn stump speeches.
“I want to get back on the issues and quit talking about
him
,” Bush said.
“We plan to do that November ninth”—the morning after election day—Ailes said.
Bush won by a commanding eight-point margin. It was validation that Ailes’s brand of divisive politics could win national majorities.
D
espite the professional success, it had been a difficult few years.
Ailes’s marriage to Norma, strained by the stress of the Bush campaign, was on the verge of ending.
“My wife has made the case that I will be destroyed eventually,” he told
Newsweek
around this time.
In 1983, Ailes’s father had succumbed to complications from severe Alzheimer’s. His decline was painful for Roger and his siblings. “It hit Roger hard, very hard,” his brother said. “He broke down, he couldn’t think of Dad being dead. He was sobbing on the way to the cemetery.” And after Bush’s victory, Ailes was forced to defend his reputation. As Democrats and journalists singled Ailes out for the divisive, racially charged tone of Bush’s media message, calling him
“New York’s master of the slick and sleazy” and a practitioner of
“political terrorism,” he had his assistants at Ailes Communications release a survey showing that 80 percent of ads he produced in his career were, in fact, positive.
He offered a $100,000 reward to anyone who could prove he created the Horton ad and told the press that he did not even know that two of his former employees made the Horton ad. In April 1989, he blasted out a press release that read:
“TO IMPLY COLLUSION BETWEEN ROGER AILES OR THE BUSH ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN AND THE POLITICAL ACTION COMMITTEE INVOLVED IN THIS AD IS TO ACCUSE US OF A FELONY.”