Authors: Gabriel Sherman
Tags: #Business & Economics, #Corporate & Business History, #Political Science, #General, #Social Science, #Media Studies
In February 2009, Ailes met Joe Lindsley, a twenty-five-year-old journalist, for lunch in his private third-floor dining room at Fox News. A fast-rising star in the conservative movement,
Lindsley came on the recommendation of Martin Singerman, a former News Corp executive who had worked with Lindsley at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, an organization that funds right-leaning student newspapers on college campuses. When he was a student at Notre Dame, Lindsley completed the rigorous Great Books program and launched
The Irish Rover
to combat the liberal bias of the
Notre Dame News
. A fervent Catholic with a low, booming voice and a certain likeness to Ailes, Lindsley inspired his classmates with his earnest sense of mission, once leading a pilgrimage to northern Michigan to visit the home of conservative historian Russell Kirk. After graduating, he worked for
The Weekly Standard
, assisting executive editor (and Fox News contributor) Fred Barnes, before moving over to the magazine’s culture section.
After they spoke, Ailes offered Lindsley the position of editor in chief, asking him to start right away. Ailes was in the process of buying a second paper,
The Putnam County Courier
, out of bankruptcy and needed a committed journalist to run the newsrooms of his budding publishing enterprise.
Lindsley jumped at the opportunity to work directly for an icon of the cause. Without time to line up an apartment, Lindsley moved into the pool house on the north end of Roger and Beth’s property. It was silent and near freezing the day he stepped out of his Jeep Wrangler on the circular driveway atop the mountain. It was an isolated environment for a recent college grad. He later told friends that he drifted off to sleep that night full of doubt.
“What am I doing here?”
he thought.
W
hen Lindsley moved to Philipstown in the winter of 2009, Ailes’s mountain was a topic of intense conversation on Cold Spring’s Main Street.
“[Ailes] was said to have ordered the removal of all trees around his house so that he … had a 360-degree view of any leftist assault teams preparing to rush the house,” Leonora Burton recalled. Roger and Beth also bought up as many surrounding houses as they could.
“I don’t think he has all of them yet,” Roger’s brother said. “He probably only has 80
percent of them. He is a strong believer in the security of real estate. He thinks they don’t make any more of it.” Security cameras were installed throughout the property.
“A team of landscapers was, in the absence of the Ailes family, working on the grounds of the compound,” Burton later recounted. “They were planting a tree when the boss’s cell phone rang. It was the absent Beth. ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘That’s not where I want the tree. I insist that you move it.’ She directed them to the correct site. The landscapers were puzzled until they realized that the many security cameras on the grounds had captured them at work. Beth had been watching them from wherever she was and called to correct the tree planting.” Other local contractors helped install a bunker that could weather a terrorist attack underneath their mansion.
“He can live in there for more than six months,” a friend who has visited it said. “There are bedrooms, a couple of TVs, water and freeze-dried food.”
“I’m not allowed to talk about it,” Robert Ailes said. “I think the proper term is a ‘panic room.’ ”
Most of all, it was the
PCN&R
that inspired a deepening sense of panic among the town’s liberals. The signs were impossible to miss.
As Lindsley began to redesign the papers, his bosses suggested that he place the Cold Spring
Recorder
’s original motto—“By the grace of God, free and independent”—on the masthead. Articles were sharper-edged. Overt religiosity crept into the pages, evidence, they suspected, of the growing influence of Father McSweeney, the priest of Our Lady of Loretto. Patriotic paeans, including to Medal of Honor recipients, and excerpts from the Federalist Papers filled the weekly.
In May 2009, readers opened the paper to find something they had never seen before: an editorial.
The unsigned attack on Obama’s stimulus titled “Debt, Decisions, and Destiny” called the plan “reckless” and said “rich people should be shown some respect.” Lindsley was the editorial’s author, and he quoted from
Atlas Shrugged:
“We either see ourselves as a nation of people who want to achieve, produce, succeed, and contribute to society or else we see ourselves as a people who want to rely on the producers to create ‘free money’ and support us with grants and federal spending.”
This was too much for some.
Leonora Burton stopped selling the paper in the Country Goose. “After Beth learned of my decision, she boycotted the store,” she recalled. Individual subscribers also expressed their outrage.
Elizabeth Anderson later decided not to renew her subscription. In an email to the paper, she questioned the relevance of publishing the names of Medal of Honor recipients who did not live in the area. A few
minutes after sending the note, she received a phone call. It was Lindsley. Why was she canceling her paper?
“I think I said so in my email,” she said.
“Aren’t you an
American
?” Lindsley shot back.
A few days later, she opened the paper to find her comments mocked in an editorial. In response, she wrote a letter detailing her family’s long involvement with the Navy. “I do not require lectures from the
PCN&R
on patriotism, nor on the valor and bravery of the military, nor on the sacrifices made by military families,” she wrote. Lindsley and Beth declined to publish the letter.
Lindsley relished the partisan combat. With the intensity of a bulldozer, he devoted upward of eighty hours a week to the Aileses’ papers. He moved into a nearby apartment on the Hudson River so he could be close to the newsroom. He had no time to meet anyone his own age in town or to pursue outside interests. A state-ranked track star in high school, Lindsley gave up running. He put on weight, forty pounds at the peak, adding to his resemblance of Ailes. During the first part of the week, he worked out of the
PCN&R
’s newsroom editing articles and handling production. On Thursdays and Fridays, he often accompanied Ailes to Fox News, where he wrote speeches for him and attended to other personal matters. On Sunday mornings, Lindsley sat with Roger and Beth at Mass. He was up on the mountain at all hours, watching the Fighting Irish games with Ailes or joining the family for dinner with the likes of John Bolton and Glenn Beck. He joined Ailes in the News Corp box at Yankee Stadium and he traveled with the family on News Corp’s private plane to visit prominent Republicans across the country. “You know you can’t tell anyone about this, right?” Beth said to him before their first trip on the jet.
W
ith his trusted editor in place, Ailes used the paper to muscle local pols.
James Borkowski, a lawyer and town justice in Putnam County from 1998 to 2009, learned the danger of crossing the
PCN&R
when he decided to run for Putnam County sheriff in the 2009 election, challenging Ailes’s close ally, the incumbent Don Smith. A few months before the Republican primary election, Lindsley invited Borkowski to meet with him and Beth for breakfast at a restaurant across the street from the
PCN&R
offices. At one point in the conversation, Beth turned to Borkowski.
“
So
,” Beth said, leaning in close, “you are pro-life, aren’t you?”
Borkowski hesitated. “Personally I am pro-life. But I’m of the position that reasonable people with genuine belief can disagree.”
Wrong answer. “It cast a pall over the whole meeting,” Borkowski said later. “I remembered thinking, what does that have to do with running for sheriff?”
A few weeks later, Borkowski got another call from Lindsley. Roger wanted to see him this time. They met in the
PCN&R
’s conference room.
“Why are you running against him?” Ailes asked, referring to his friend Smith. “This guy is a West Point grad, a religious guy, a family guy.”
“He might be a nice guy, but he’s not doing a good job,” Borkowski countered. Ailes was unswayed.
Ailes spent an hour pumping Borkowski for information about local political players, in particular New York state senator Vincent Leibell III. “What do you know about charitable organizations? Does Vinnie Leibell make money off of them?” “It kept coming back to Leibell,” Borkowski recalled. At the end of the conversation, Lindsley and Beth escorted Borkowski to the front door.
Borkowski lost to Smith several months later.
Richard Shea was also one of the politicians Roger asked about. A moderate Democrat who served on the town board, Shea was running in the 2009 election for Philipstown supervisor, the title given to the town’s senior elected official. He was a fifth-generation Cold Springer. He owned a successful local contracting business and fashioned himself as a fiscal conservative and a social moderate. There was one issue, however, on which he was progressive: the environment. Shea was campaigning on reforming the town’s decades-old zoning codes to preserve open space. This brought him into conflict with Ailes.
The notion of zoning was abhorrent to Ailes. The more he studied the issue, the more he disliked what he found.
“Jesus, wait a minute,” he told a reporter, describing his thought process. “They’re starting to try and tell you how much glass you can have in your window, what color you can paint your house, and they’re saying, well, you can’t cut down any trees.” He added, “God made trees so you can build houses and have baseball bats.” He felt that he had a right to chop down any tree, and that the legal implications were obvious: “They’re going around to old ladies and telling them if they have a mud puddle they’re in a wetland and stealing their farm and stuff.”
It was a risk for Shea to take Ailes on over zoning. For decades, ever
since the Storm King saga, it had been the third rail of Philipstown politics, the one issue that brought all the various cultural and economic resentments into stark relief.
The first time Shea met Ailes was at a town forum, sponsored by the
PCN&R
and moderated by Joe Lindsley, in October 2009. Afterward, Ailes went up to Shea and told him that he was dodging Lindsley’s questions about zoning. “What are you trying to hide from me?” Ailes said. “I
own
the newspaper.” (Ailes claimed that he simply asked for Shea’s phone number and complained about the local environmentalist “zealots.”)
The next month, Shea won the election. Immediately, he set about making good on his campaign promise to push through a rezoning plan.
A few weeks later, Shea discovered just what life with Roger Ailes as a constituent would mean. On Sunday morning, January 10, he received a string of frantic phone calls from friends in town. Ailes had been calling around ranting about a front-page
New York Times
profile of him that appeared in that morning’s paper. “My takeaway was that this guy is pretty much threatening me,” Shea was quoted saying about the town forum. Friends told Shea he had made a big mistake.
“You can’t mention Ailes’s name in the press,” they said. Later that day, his phone rang.
“You have no fucking idea what you’ve done!”
Shea immediately recognized the voice. “You have no idea what you’re up against. If you want a war you’ll have a battle, but it won’t be a long battle.”
“It was an accurate portrayal of the exchange,” Shea said calmly. “If you’re offended I’m sorry about that, but it was accurate.”
“Listen,” Ailes seethed, “don’t be naive about these things. I will destroy your life.”
Throughout the winter, the
PCN&R
filled with stories and editorials questioning Shea’s zoning plan as avidly as Fox attacked Obama’s policies. According to the
PCN&R
, an out-of-control band of tree-huggers and Manhattan elites was overrunning the town, dictating to the little guy how he could use his land. The paper framed the debate as a skirmish on a much wider battlefield. It was another case of government trampling the rights of the individual. Readers chose sides and hardened their positions.
Jeannette Yannitelli, a Fox News fan whose son ran a liquor store near Main Street, saw linkages to forces threatening her way of life. Half the town did not pay property taxes just as she heard on Fox that half of all Americans didn’t pay any federal income tax. “Thomas Edison wasn’t told to invent the lightbulb. It was
his
idea. You can’t take things and give
it to others,” she told her grandkids. “Look at what is happening to Greece. They give everything away. It’s just not right!”
The emotions stirred up in part by the
PCN&R
’s crusade drew extreme elements into the debate. Anti-zoning factions had begun making posters displaying photos of guns and the slogan “They’re Taking Away Your Property Rights.” To lower the temperature, Shea decided to call a town-wide meeting at Haldane High School. It would be a chance for all the citizens to get in a room together and clear the air.
S
hortly before 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 7, 2010, Ailes walked across the parking lot of the high school with a white-haired lawyer from Poughkeepsie named Scott Volkman. Hundreds of townspeople were streaming into the school’s gymnasium. Joe Lindsley arrived and readied himself to write up the proceedings for the next edition of the paper. That morning, the
PCN&R
ran a front-page article by Lindsley, headlined “Residential Re-Zoning: Will Property Owners Weigh In?” Mimicking Fox’s wall-to-wall promotion of the Tea Party rallies, the article noted that special interest groups on both sides of the debate had “strongly encouraged attendance” at the event.
And the locals turned out in force. Inside the gym, the mood had the electric energy of a political rally. Ailes and Volkman, seemingly the only two men in suits, sat in the middle of the main floor as Shea brought the meeting to order.
“Let us observe civility above all,” he said, instructing citizens to keep their remarks to two minutes.
It was a futile request. Jeannette Yannitelli took to the mic. “Fifty-two percent of this town is now tax exempt!” she said, sounding like a Fox pundit.