The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--And Divided a Country (7 page)

The show had gone color eight months after Ailes’s promotion, but did not otherwise deviate much from Fraser’s original formula.
Once, when Barbara Walters appeared on the show, Ailes had her perform with acrobats. “When NBC found out about it they were very angry. They felt it lessened the seriousness of my reputation,” Walters recalled. “But the
thing was, Roger was smart enough to know people are going to be interested.”

In September 1967, producers planned a segment featuring
Peyton Place
star and
Mike Douglas
co-host Ryan O’Neal boxing with a famous fighter. They booked Joe Frazier, who would become heavyweight champion the next year, to spar with O’Neal in the ring. Floyd Patterson would referee and Muhammad Ali would do the announcing. But a day before the segment, Frazier canceled.
“Roger got on the phone with him and just laid into him,” LaPorta recalled.
Kenny Johnson, another producer, said, “He just reamed his ass.” Frazier relented, but he was angry. When he showed up at the set, he asked the producers “where’s this Ralph guy? I got a bone to pick with this guy named Ralph.” He had misheard Ailes’s name over the phone. A quick-thinking producer told Frazier that Ralph was out of the office that day.
“We called Roger ‘Ralph’ after that,” LaPorta said.

I
n the fall of 1967, Ailes and Marje paid $41,500 for a house on a wooded cul-de-sac in the aptly named suburb of Media, Pennsylvania. Around this time,
Ailes was making $60,000 a year (more than six times what his father earned at his peak salary at Packard). He even began inviting the producers to the house for dinner, which offered them a glimpse of the tensions at home.
Bob LaPorta was a guest one evening when Marje’s father was visiting. They were in the living room with the television on. Marje’s father told Roger to turn it off. “You’re not going to amount to anything,” LaPorta overheard him telling Ailes. LaPorta sensed Ailes wanted to prove him wrong. “It was an obsession for him to succeed, to pass everybody,” he said.

During this period Ailes met a twenty-four-year-old journalist named Joe McGinniss. A columnist for
The Philadelphia Inquirer
, McGinniss was the youngest writer to have a regular column printed in a major American daily. McGinniss called Ailes about writing a piece on Mike Douglas.
“Roger and I, we found out right away that we shared the same sense of humor,” he said. Ailes showed an instinct for how relationships with reporters could become valuable assets. He invited McGinniss and his wife, a quiet Catholic girl he’d met in Massachusetts at Holy Cross college, for dinner, and, not long afterward, they returned the invitation. “We always had a good time, my wife got along very well with Marje,”
McGinniss recalled. When Ailes would visit, he liked to play with McGinniss’s two young children. “It was like Uncle Roger,” McGinniss said. Their domestic lives had another parallel. By 1967, both men, who had married young, knew their marriages were not working out. They would occasionally get dinner after work in Philadelphia and discuss their woes.

Politically, Ailes seemed like a moderate to McGinniss, and on some issues, like civil rights, a progressive. “I would write columns that would get me called ‘nigger lover’ and Frank Rizzo, the police commissioner, would come after me,” McGinniss said. “Roger was always sending me a note or making a phone call sympathizing and congratulating me and saying we need more of this. He had some incipient commitment to civil rights in Philadelphia.” Ailes’s views on race may have been shaped by an experience he had working on a roadside construction crew one summer in high school.
When a crew member came after Ailes with a shovel and “literally almost took his head off,” a friend recalled, “all of a sudden, this six-foot six-inch black dude stopped him in his tracks. Ailes and the guy had lunch together every day that summer. He said, ‘The guy saved my life.’ ”

By 1968, Ailes and McGinniss saw each other less, as the frenzy of that year consumed them both. As if running the number one show in the country wasn’t enough, Ailes was accelerating his television career.
A year after being named Douglas’s executive producer, he began pitching shows on the side.
He formed two production companies called Bounty Enterprises and Project Five Productions with a group of Douglas producers. “I’m not sure Chet,” Ailes’s boss, “even knew about it,” LaPorta remembered.
“He had so much ambition. You just went along with him.”
Ailes filmed a couple of pilots—one with the mentalist the Amazing Kreskin in Camden, New Jersey, and another starring the singer Hal Frazier at the Hollywood Palace in Los Angeles. He also discussed doing a show with TV personality Dorothy Fuldheim, a onetime Douglas rival from Cleveland. LaPorta envisioned Fuldheim standing in the middle of a circular set in front of a large, glamorous photograph of the host in her twenties. He took as his inspiration the Man in the Arena quote, hanging in Ailes’s office. The show never got off the ground, but Ailes held on to LaPorta’s concept.

Although Ailes had managed to quell rebellion after he was promoted into Fraser’s job, staff members eventually began to chafe at his imperiousness.
For Larry Rosen, the trigger came in 1967 when the show was
nominated for two Emmys in Program and Individual Achievements in
Daytime Television. The nomination for programming achievement cited Rosen, but Ailes wanted the accolade.
“Roger wanted only his name on the nomination. He appealed to the Academy to do so,” Rosen said. The citation did not change, but the day before the awards dinner in New York, Rosen found out that Ailes and Douglas would be the sole representatives of the show. Rosen took the train and showed up at the hotel where the dinner was taking place. “I walked right by the two of them,” he said.
As it happened, Rosen did not win. After the ceremony, Douglas offered Rosen a ride back to Philadelphia with himself and Ailes. In the limo, Rosen vented his anger about his exclusion from the Emmys and the way Fraser had been dumped. “I’m convinced to this day it was all political. I think Woody was put on the block. I think it was Roger who did it,” Rosen recalled.

A few weeks later, Rosen resigned to take a job in Los Angeles as a producer on
The Outcasts
, starring Don Murray and Otis Young.
“When Roger took over, a lot of the warmth and camaraderie that existed with Woody disappeared,” Rosen told an interviewer after he left. “It was all politics and backstabbing. It became very uncomfortable.” Launa Newman upheld her pact to follow him out the door.

I
T WAS ON
The Mike Douglas Show
that Ailes began to develop his ideas about politics as entertainment. Politicians were part of the show, a special subset of celebrity, and colleagues remembered Ailes closely observing the national figures who sat for interviews.
During a 1968 segment with Bobby Kennedy in Washington, Ailes remarked that Kennedy, affable and confident off-camera, turned nervous and cold when the interview began. “Roger was just completely interested and intrigued by the mechanics of the ways these guys presented themselves and talked,” producer Kenny Johnson recalled. “They had a common ability to convince you that you were the most important person in their life.”

Ailes already had an instinct for the wedge issue, and how a clever question could exploit it.
During George Wallace’s appearance in 1967, Ailes prepped Douglas before the interview. He told Douglas to make sure to pin him down on the race issue. When the cameras started rolling, Ailes steered the conversation off camera.
“I’d operate like a third base coach,” Ailes said.
“Roger was really gunning for him,” Johnson recalled. “He really wanted to get Wallace on record in an interview saying he believed in segregation. I still remember Roger standing to one side with cue cards punching his fist and transmitting telepathically to Mike to have Wallace
‘answer the fucking question.’
At that moment in time, if you asked me what Roger’s politics were, I would have said he was a Democrat.”

One morning in the summer of 1967, Ailes received an excited phone call from Launa Newman, shortly before she resigned. At the time, Newman was working out of an office in New York, and she had heard that Richard Nixon was going to be traveling to Philadelphia.
After losing a
run for U.S. president in 1960 and for California governor in 1962, he had moved to Manhattan and set up shop as a lawyer at Mudge, Rose. He was now laying the groundwork for a political comeback in the form of a presidential run, in the 1968 election.

Newman thought Nixon would be a prize get, but as she disliked Nixon, she did not want to call his people herself.

Newman urged Ailes to make the call. “Why don’t you book him?” she recalled asking.

“I don’t do bookings.”

“I don’t like him, you love him,” she teased. “You’re a Republican. I’m not. Why don’t you call him up and invite him on the show?”

As it happened, Ailes had met Nixon briefly in Pittsburgh, but he didn’t want to call. “That’s
your
job.”

“You know, one day you could work for him as his media adviser,” she said and hung up. “There was no such thing as a media adviser,” she later said. “I made it up because I didn’t want to call him.” Ailes took it from there.

By this point, Ailes was soaking up multiple influences.
Kenny Johnson recalled one conversation in Ailes’s office about the power of propaganda. Like Ailes, Johnson loved the theater. He had performed in high school plays and studied directing at Carnegie Tech, where he had become fascinated by the Nazi propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl, especially
Triumph of the Will
and
Olympia
. “I was blown away,” Johnson remembered. “I had an enormous hatred of Hitler, but when I saw
Triumph of the Will
, you find yourself thinking, ‘Wow, he’s pretty cool—no, wait, I hate these guys.’ ” Ailes told Johnson that he too was a big fan of Riefenstahl. “He thought her work was brilliant,” Johnson said. They talked about “how she made different versions of the films for different countries not only to aggrandize the Nazis but to throw a bone to the other folks.” Ailes was especially taken by Riefenstahl’s use of camera angles. “There’s so many subtle things you see in propaganda,” Johnson said. “If you put the camera below a subject’s eye height, it’s the ‘hero shot.’ It gives him dominance. We talked about the psychological impact of the placement of the camera.”

Nixon was scheduled to appear on October 31, 1967. But a few weeks before the taping, his team got cold feet. Philadelphia was becoming hostile terrain for Republicans, with Arlen Specter, the Republican candidate for mayor, locked in a tight race, so the meeting was postponed until January
9.
The day before the interview, Clint Wheeler, an outside PR consultant to the campaign, went to Philadelphia to prep with Ailes. They discussed the topics for the interview, which included questions like “What’s Bob Hope really like? Did David [Eisenhower] ask you for [your daughter] Julie’s hand? What do you think of the demonstrators/LBJ situation? What about women in politics? Will you play the piano?”

At 9:45 the next morning, Nixon left his Fifth Avenue apartment and headed with his aide Dwight Chapin for LaGuardia Airport, where the
Reader’s Digest
Gulfstream was waiting for the thirty-five-minute flight to Philadelphia. Ailes would retell the story of their conversation at the studio repeatedly. It was the moment that altered the trajectory of his career.
The earliest account of their meeting was Joe McGinniss’s, in
The Selling of the President
. McGinniss wrote that while waiting to go on-air, Nixon complained to Ailes about television, eliciting Ailes’s retort that television was not a “gimmick.”

In later years, Ailes would recast their first encounter, downplaying his ambition. In magazine profiles and speeches, Ailes said he spoke to Nixon about his campaign because he had booked him on the same show as a belly dancer and, wanting to spare Nixon an awkward encounter, let him wait in his office until the interview started.
“I remember being 27 working for Mike Douglas,” he told
The New York Times
in 2001. “The guests were Richard Nixon and a dancer called Little Egypt—with her boa constrictor. I didn’t wanna scare Nixon and I didn’t wanna scare the snake, so I stuck Nixon in my office for 15 minutes. If I’d put Little Egypt in there, I’d be managing belly dancers right now.”

According to several of Ailes’s colleagues who were present and the show logs, there was no belly dancer named Little Egypt booked that day.
The guests during the Nixon taping were the singer Margaret Whiting, the actress Stella Stevens, the Philadelphia Brass Ensemble, and Tony Sandler’s children.
Mike Douglas later told an interviewer it was
his
idea to have Nixon wait in Ailes’s office, and because Ailes wanted to get into politics, he seized the opportunity to have a private conversation with Nixon. “He wanted so to get into that area,” Douglas recalled.
Kenny Johnson was standing in the hallway and saw Ailes enter his office with Nixon and shut the door.
The meeting lasted an hour. Afterward, Johnson saw Ailes emerge shaking his head and flashing a raffish grin. “I may have just shot myself in the foot or gotten myself another job,” Ailes told Johnson, saying he repeated Launa Newman’s advice:

“Mr. Nixon, you need a media adviser.”

“What’s a media adviser?”

“I am.”

The taping began.
As it happened, it was Nixon’s fifty-fifth birthday, and the producers arranged for a cake.
“We went to commercial,” Douglas later recounted, “and he turned to me and said, ‘Ask me anything you’d like, Mike.’ ”

After the broadcast, Nixon and Dwight Chapin headed to a luncheon with Philadelphia businessmen. Chapin could sense that Nixon had been impressed with Ailes.
A few days later, Ailes got the call from Nixon headquarters.
“The name of the game was to get Roger up to New York immediately,” Chapin recalled.

Soon after, on an afternoon in January, Ailes was in New York City for lunch at the Plaza Hotel with Raymond Price, a thirty-seven-year-old speechwriter and Nixon aide with novel ideas about how television could be used to power Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign. Leonard Garment, who was heading up the campaign’s media strategy, had arranged for Ailes to meet Price at Nixon’s urging. Ailes and Price seemed to come from different realms. Ailes was a state school graduate immersed in the world of daytime television. Price was a Yale-educated writer who had once been the editorial page editor of the pro-Nixon
New York Herald Tribune
.
A rare moderate in the Nixon orbit, Price had collaborated with Nixon on
“Asia After Viet Nam,” an essay that had been published in
Foreign Affairs
a few months before.