Authors: Gabriel Sherman
Tags: #Business & Economics, #Corporate & Business History, #Political Science, #General, #Social Science, #Media Studies
In July 1989, Ailes welcomed the journalist Donald Baer to his home in Westchester County for lunch with his wife, Norma, and his mother, Donna, who was in town visiting. Over hamburgers and hot dogs, Ailes’s family provided Baer with glowing testimonials. They spoke of his childhood struggle with hemophilia and how he once slept on the floor to comfort a sick dog. “Underneath that exterior, he’s really soft inside,” Donna told Baer.
“Yeah,” Ailes chimed in, “that’s what Mrs. Manson said.”
Baer’s profile, which was published in the business magazine
Manhattan Inc.
, was an attempt to dispel what Baer described as Ailes’s “Jabba the Hutt” image. But Ailes’s campaign for absolution was complicated by the fact that he showed no signs of modulating his explosive style. If anything, he was giving freer rein to his impulses.
In the fall of 1989, he went to war for his friend, former federal prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani, who was locked in a struggling campaign for New York City mayor against the popular black Manhattan borough president, David Dinkins.
Ailes continued to stoke racial fears, running a spot on television that linked Dinkins to black community organizer Robert “Sonny” Carson, who was convicted in 1974 of kidnapping.
At another point in the campaign, Ailes ran a print ad in a Jewish newspaper that featured a photograph of Dinkins standing next to Jesse Jackson (five years earlier,
Jackson had called New York “Hymietown”).
Dinkins attacked Ailes’s charges as “gutter politics.”
On the night of October 23, 1989, Ailes displayed the violence his father once unleashed in Warren. He charged at a group of AIDS activists who had infiltrated a Giuliani fundraiser in the ballroom of the Sheraton in Midtown Manhattan. As security guards escorted the protesters out of the room, Ailes plunged into the melee.
“We were screaming, and I’m being hit in the hands and in the head. That’s when Ailes started hitting me,” recalled Kathy Ottersten, one of the activists, who
at the time was a man known as Kevin. “I recognized him. I’d seen him before in the papers with the Bush campaign with the Willie Horton stuff.” Ottersten said that Ailes was in a group that dragged her down the hotel stairs as her head slammed against each step. “I wound up having to be taken to St. Vincent’s,” she said, recalling the incident years later. “I’m at the point now where I’m suffering from early stages of brain issues most likely related to all the concussions I got. I’m slowly losing nerve functions in my hands and legs.”
At the time, Sergeant Raymond O’Donnell told reporters that Ailes
could face a third-degree assault charge, a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail. But in the end, no charges were filed.
“I attempted to file charges,” Ottersten said, “but was told by cops there wasn’t enough evidence.”
On the Sunday before Election Day, Ailes got into another scuffle with a news photographer during the final debate at NBC’s Manhattan studios.
No matter how hard Ailes tried, he could not get the yoke of Willie Horton off his neck.
Giuliani lost by 47,000 votes.
Ailes’s candidate for New Jersey governor, James Courter, was also defeated handily that Election Day by Democrat James Florio.
In the fall of 1989, Ohio Democrats protested outside a conference in Columbus where Ailes was giving a speech. Ailes responded in typical fashion: he hit back harder. “They’re trying to make me the issue. Screw ’em!” he told a reporter around this time.
One thing was certain: Willie Horton was bad for business.
Lee Atwater’s sudden diagnosis of brain cancer in March 1990 left Ailes as the GOP’s prime exemplar of scorched-earth politics. Sensing partisan advantage, Democrats turned Ailes’s attack ad strategy on him.
In May 1990, the Ohio Democratic Party filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission calling for an investigation into Ailes’s ties to the PAC that produced the Horton spot. The inquiry proved that Ailes did speak with Larry McCarthy during the campaign, but
the FEC was deadlocked 3–3 along party lines on whether to bring formal charges against the Bush campaign and the National Security PAC. Ailes denied any wrongdoing.
“I’m not the candidate,” Ailes complained to a reporter. “If I wanted to run for public office, I would.”
By the fall of 1990, his political career was confronting a branding crisis. The constant fire from Democrats had taken a toll.
On Tuesday, October 9, Ailes reached his snapping point in Chicago, where he was trying to rescue his client, Congresswoman Lynn Martin, from an imploding Senate campaign against the incumbent, Democrat Paul Simon. In front of a pack of reporters, Ailes delivered a surly news conference, as self-pitying as Nixon’s 1962 gubernatorial concession speech. “People like Paul ‘Slimon’ Simon are the ones who are hurting America,” Ailes moaned. “The truth isn’t getting out there, so now we’re going to have to let people know about him,” he said. “There won’t be anything in our ads that’s not true. It will all be there—but it will hurt.” He went on to call Simon a “weenie.”
The slew of schoolyard insults backfired.
Martin lost by thirty points.
A
fter a decade in politics, his brand sullied, Ailes was ready to change course again.
In 1988, Ailes published the book
You Are the Message: Getting What You Want by Being Who You Are
with his business partner Jon Kraushar. Ailes filled the slim title with self-glorifying anecdotes from his adventures in television and politics. But it offered more than mere PR tips. It was a manifesto that revealed Ailes’s view that communication was a kind of spiritual life force.
“When you control the atmosphere, you’re not operating on other people’s time,” he wrote.
“You
can
learn to control the time and space you move through, if you really believe in yourself and understand what your mission is in every situation.”
You Are the Message
was a seductive product, published at a time when middle managers all over the country were awakening to the notion of “personal branding.”
But the real money was in the boardroom, not on the bookshelf. The cultural and class resentments that Ailes harnessed for his Republican candidates could also be channeled for corporations.
In the summer of 1988, he had signed a contract with Big Tobacco, beginning a relationship that would
last at least for five years.
His first assignment was running media strategy for a lobbying group called Californians Against Unfair Tax Increases, which was opposing Proposition 99, a referendum on a 25-cent cigarette tax increase.
At the time, it represented the largest cigarette tax increase in history.
In one memo, Ailes wrote: “Usually, in a referendum, if people are confused, anxious, or doubtful, they will vote ‘NO.’ ” Ailes noted how deception was central to his mission.
“We have no obligation to tell the viewer anything not to our advantage,” he wrote.
His ads were designed to stoke these emotions and spread misinformation about Prop 99.
One ad portrayed Prop 99 supporters—which included the American Cancer Society and the American Heart Association—as out-of-touch elitists who wanted to fleece the little guy. “If you went to medical school … you’ll probably love Proposition 99,” one script read. “But if you didn’t, make sure you don’t get fooled. You see, 99 directs that hundreds of millions of our tax dollars will end up in the hands of doctors and the medical industry. And guess what? They sponsored Prop 99. Prop 99 is simply a smokescreen; it raises taxes and doctors get richer. Vote no on Proposition 99. Doctors are already rich enough.”
Ailes played upon racial fears by linking the tax to inner-city crime.
One commercial portrayed a man identified as an undercover cop warning
that raising cigarette taxes would increase cigarette smuggling by gangs. The ad sparked outrage by Ailes’s opponents. California’s Democratic attorney general, John Van de Kamp, called the spot “a scare tactic of the worst and baldest kind.”
Prop 99 supporters’ hackles were raised when they discovered that the man was not an undercover cop, but a deskbound Los Angeles Police Department officer named Jack Hoar who moonlighted as an actor. (
His biggest role at the time was a bit part playing a cop-killing henchman in the film
To Live and Die in L.A
. starring Willem Dafoe.)
In November 1988, voters agreed to the new tax, passing Prop 99 57.8 percent to 42.2 percent. Even so, Ailes Communications earned $1 million off the campaign and Ailes was defiant.
“The antismoking zealots tried first to throw water in everybody’s face,” Ailes told the press. “Now, they’re throwing legislation.”
Ailes’s populist bluster echoed that of another corpulent conservative in New York: Rush Limbaugh. It was only a matter of time until the two joined forces.
In 1987, Reagan’s FCC repealed the so-called Fairness Doctrine, the rule that mandated broadcasters give equal time to opposing political viewpoints on the airwaves. The change spurred the growth of right-wing talk radio, with Limbaugh as the medium’s most successful practitioner.
More than seven million fans listened to his radio show each week.
In 1991, after bumping into each other at the 21 Club, Ailes put together a deal to launch a syndicated television show.
But Ailes had not completely left politics.
The GOP paid him a $9,500 retainer to consult on media strategy.
In August 1990, a few days after the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Ailes sent an urgent memo to Bush’s chief of staff, John Sununu. “I have had at least half a dozen calls very recently from the press trying to lead me into discussions like, ‘fiddling while Rome burns,’ ‘golfing while Americans are being taken hostage,’ ” he wrote. “The only reason this is of concern to me is that I notice the networks beginning to show more and more footage of the president in the golf cart.… I know first hand what a megatonnage dose of media hammering the same message can do.” He went on: “Do a little more fishing and less golfing.” In November, as Bush planned to travel to the Middle East to meet with U.S. military commanders and Arab leaders, Ailes advised the president on his wardrobe.
“In the field he should wear khaki slacks, open shirts, long sleeves with the sleeves rolled up,” he wrote. “It is my judgment that he should not wear hats or helmets.
A fatigue jacket would be fine in the field with soldiers on Thanksgiving Day.”
Bushworld put out feelers to Ailes about running media for the 1992 campaign. This forced Ailes’s hand. He told colleagues he’d had enough. A few nights before Thanksgiving, he took his aide, Scott Ehrlich, to dinner at Goldberg’s Pizza on Manhattan’s East Side to discuss his decision to quit politics. Ailes expressed concern about the harm it might cause to his reputation.
“He was thinking about the press reaction, about the spin and what the message was,” a person familiar with the conversation recalled.
On December 6, 1991, Ailes announced that he was walking away from politics to focus on entertainment ventures. To quell any suspicion his business was suffering, he projected a hyperactive image. He was busy launching Limbaugh’s TV show and
consulting for Paramount Television on tabloid shows like
Inside Edition
.
At the 1992 Democratic convention, he ran into Bob LaPorta, his old friend from
The Mike Douglas Show
. LaPorta recalled Ailes saying, “I really miss show business, I love it.” Around this time, Ailes was taking meetings in Hollywood.
One writer who ran into Ailes at the Century Plaza hotel marveled at Ailes’s snap judgments about television. “We were meeting in the lobby,” he recalled, and “there was a TV running and
Wheel of Fortune
was on with no sound. Roger was staring at it, he said, ‘Do you know why the show works?’ I said, ‘I don’t watch the show.’ And he said, ‘It works because of Vanna White. You gotta look at this girl and her clothes. It just works!’ ”
Ailes was even branching out into board games.
In 1992, he lined up the makers of Pictionary to market a $19.95 campaign-themed game called Risky Strategy.
In August, he traveled to the GOP convention in Houston to promote the game, which was created by his thirty-year-old assistant, Judy Laterza, who had joined him in 1987.
To advance around the board, players rolled dice and drew from cards that featured political punch lines. (“Your opponent accuses you of removing the tags from your mattresses. You counter that was done in the privacy of your own home: Win all the states in TOO CLOSE TO CALL,” one card read.) His political career had come full circle.
“Politics was a 20-year habit, but somehow I decided I would walk away from it and go back to the entertainment business,” he told the press.
He maintained his ties to Bush and other prominent Republicans in a quieter way, serving as a go-to surrogate, image consultant, and source of media intelligence.
“By that time, he was in the media business, so it was
hard for him to be overtly political,” Jim Baker said. “It’s not to say he didn’t help us where he could. We felt free to call him and talk to him. But he couldn’t take a public role in the campaign.”
Ailes gave interviews attacking Bill Clinton as a “saxophone player” and Ross Perot as “loony toons.”
On the night of June 2, 1992, Ailes orchestrated a crucial summit between Bush and Limbaugh. The right-wing talker had been a vocal Bush critic, and Bush needed to mollify him to shore up support from his populist base. That night, Ailes, Limbaugh, and Bush attended the musical
Buddy
at the Kennedy Center and then retired to the White House for the night. Bush personally carried Limbaugh’s luggage up to his assigned quarters: the Lincoln Bedroom (Ailes got the Queen’s Room across the hall). Ailes’s backchannel diplomacy paid off. Five days later, Limbaugh appeared on the
Today
show and gushed to Katie Couric about his visit, calling the president a “genuinely nice guy.”
But Limbaugh’s blessing was not enough to save Bush’s ailing reelection campaign, which was buffeted by the post–Gulf War recession and a hapless message. Bush also faced another challenge: an emboldened opposition. The Democrats, stung by Dukakis’s defeat, had learned valuable lessons, an ironic legacy of Ailes’s success.
Bill Clinton’s campaign was, in many ways, an Ailes-inspired operation, with its famous “War Room” staffed by operatives, chief among them the wily attack dog James Carville, who characterized Bush as an aloof elitist who did not feel America’s pain.