Authors: Gabriel Sherman
Tags: #Business & Economics, #Corporate & Business History, #Political Science, #General, #Social Science, #Media Studies
As it turned out, Ailes and Price had a kind of generational bond—they were the original TV babies, with an intuitive sense of the medium’s potential to transform politics. Since the summer, Price had strategized how to revolutionize the emerging craft of image making.
The campaign’s television production was being headed up by Al Scott, a former NBC sound technician. But the fifty-three-year-old Scott was a product of the radio age. They needed someone young, who grasped the subtleties of modern television production and had the metabolism to get the job done. At twenty-seven, Ailes already seemed to have a career’s experience handling talent.
“Roger was not at all awed to be in the presence of power,” Nixon adviser Fred Malek said. “He could look at the vice president and the rest of us and tell him he was full of baloney and he has to get his act together on something.”
Ailes was hired as a part-time consultant in February 1968. The project
of transforming Nixon, a political has-been, into a winner, was one for which Ailes had relevant experience. After all, he had helped transform Mike Douglas, whose career had been in a death spiral when the show debuted, into a national celebrity. Price wanted Ailes to do the same for Nixon, and for the same kind of audience. Nixon had a famously conflicted relationship with TV, having exploited the medium brilliantly with the Checkers speech, but having been destroyed by it in the 1960 Kennedy debates.
Ailes fit seamlessly into the culture of the Nixon campaign, partly because his life story had an uncanny symmetry with Nixon’s: both grew up poor and both took from childhood an indefatigable drive to acquire power.
“He’s got guts, he’s tough,” Ailes later said of Nixon. “He picked himself up by the bootstraps two or three times and came back and won the prize.” Perhaps more than anything else, Nixon and Ailes both thought of themselves as men who got things done.
“Nixon’s a doer, not a talker,” Ailes said.
Ailes would later tell a
Washington Post
reporter that there was no other politician in the twentieth century he would have wanted to work for more than Nixon. When Price and Ailes met for lunch, the soft launch of Nixon’s new media strategy had already begun.
In New Hampshire, the campaign was airing five-minute television advertisements, in which Nixon conversed naturally with state voters in schoolrooms, firehouses, and community centers. The traveling press pool was barred from attending these staged events. When reporters howled, Garment and his team simply ignored them. Nixon crushed his opponents in New Hampshire,
winning the primary with a seven-to-one margin over Nelson Rockefeller, then a write-in candidate.
Ailes’s main assignment would begin in the fall and it would be far more audacious than the five-minute New Hampshire experiment. Garment and Price tasked him with producing a series of one-hour town halls in cities across the country—meetings designed to showcase Nixon engaging with a panel of citizen interviewers. They were also designed to blow the padlocks off the gates to the national media. To the viewer at home, it would seem like Nixon was risking it all by answering difficult questions on live television when in fact,
as Garment later wrote, “the chances of a case-hardened politician like Nixon stumbling seriously over any question was near zero.” The black and white world of newspapers was the past. And Nixon, with a much better makeup team, was going to be a man of his time.
I
t still stunned many that Nixon was attempting another run. Less than six years earlier, he had been left for dead, after an embarrassing failed run for governor of California, his home state. For this injustice Nixon blamed the national press.
“For sixteen years, ever since the [Alger] Hiss case, you’ve had a lot of fun,” the former vice president said in his self-pitying concession speech at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in November 1962. He concluded his remarks with a challenge to the assembled journalists: “If they’re against a candidate, give him the shaft,” he said, “but also recognize if they give him the shaft, put one lonely reporter on the campaign who will report what the candidate says now and then.”
Five days after the election, ABC broadcast a thirty-minute documentary titled
The Political Obituary of Richard M. Nixon
.
But Nixon—who joined Mudge, Rose as a consultant in February 1963, soon became a partner, and toyed with the notion of becoming commissioner of baseball—wasn’t quite dead.
The man who revived him was Len Garment. A Brooklyn-born trial lawyer, Democrat, and jazz saxophonist, Garment became Nixon’s all-purpose adviser and fixer, and helped smooth Nixon’s entry into the cloistered halls of Manhattan society. His main task was to assemble a crop of fresh faces for Nixon’s new political team.
“This game is all about youth,” Dwight Chapin said. In addition to Ray Price, there was a fast-talking New York publicist named Bill Safire, and a young
Fortune
writer named Dick Whalen. Garment brought experienced hands on-deck, too, convincing municipal bond lawyer John Mitchell to sign on as campaign manager.
Nixon himself grasped how to channel his bitterness at his treatment by the media and the wider culture into the wellspring of his political strength. In the mid-1960s, many Americans believed that the culture was out of control, that it had lost touch with traditional values, that it had stopped listening to the wisest among them—men like Nixon himself. To counteract the excesses of the youth movement, the culture needed a dose of adulthood. Nixon called his sober prescription “law and order”—a triangulation between Lyndon Johnson’s coddling liberalism and Barry Goldwater’s reactionary conservatism. Nixon wagered that, having put ideological purity ahead of reason, the Republican Party would return to its senses and see value in his familiar visage.
After he campaigned for eighty-six Republican candidates in thirty-five states during the 1966 election, nearly two thirds of them won.
Though Len Garment eagerly talked up a Nixon resurrection—
“The man and the times have finally come together,” he said—few believed him. In the wider public imagination, Dick Nixon was still a sad joke. A paradox struck Garment: in person, Nixon came across as confident and jocular. On television, Americans saw a diffident, humorless pol. Garment realized that all the talk about the “New Nixon” and the “Old Nixon” missed the point entirely. There was only one Nixon. But a hostile press establishment and the unforgiving lens of the television camera had prevented the voters from seeing the real man. His mission in 1968 was to highlight the positive aspects of Nixon’s personality that had been obscured. Television, therefore, was not just a tactical consideration. It was a matter of strategic importance.
The hardest part of the job may have been convincing Nixon himself of this truth. Television was at the top of Nixon’s list of resentments. To him, the Big Three networks were another tool the liberals on the East Coast had at their disposal to punish deserving men like himself. Nevertheless, he was determined to master the medium as he had mastered every other challenge in his life: with sedulous work and brute force.
Harry Robbins Haldeman, the former J. Walter Thompson ad man with a famous buzz cut and athletic good looks, articulated the way forward. Bob, as he was known to friends, reasoned that one report on the nightly news would reach more people in an instant than the campaign could reach in ten months of stump speeches.
“The time has come for political campaigning, its techniques and strategies, to move out of the dark ages and into the brave new world of the omnipresent eye,” he wrote.
In the summer of 1967, Nixon sought out television advice from all over. Ed McMahon went to his office at 810 Fifth Avenue to help him prepare for his appearance on the Johnny Carson show, where the question of his presidential intentions was bound to be asked.
In July, Nixon also took a meeting with Frank Shakespeare, the president of CBS Television. During a ninety-minute meeting at Nixon’s office, Shakespeare evangelized for the new religion of television.
An ardent conservative, Shakespeare first considered working for Ronald Reagan until deciding that Reagan was too inexperienced. After the meeting, Nixon told Garment to hire him.
Several weeks later, Garment ran into his summer neighbor Harry Treleaven, who would also become an important Ailes teacher, on the beach near his cottage in Amagansett, on Long Island. Treleaven had spent eighteen years at J. Walter Thompson and was the creative mind behind the
campaigns for such mid-century icons as Ford, Pan Am, and Singer.
In 1966, Treleaven took a leave from J. Walter Thompson to go to Texas, where he produced advertising for the long-shot campaign of George H. W. Bush, a forty-two-year-old Republican running for Congress in a Houston district that had only elected Democrats. Treleaven theorized that persuading voters depended more on a candidate’s image than articulating positions on particular issues.
“Political candidates are celebrities … and today with television taking them into everybody’s home right along with Johnny Carson and Batman, they’re more of a public attraction than ever,” he wrote in a report. Interviewing Texas voters, Treleaven discovered that they liked Bush personally, even if they were vague on where he stood politically. So he created a character for Bush to inhabit: the hardworking underdog.
In his TV spots, Treleaven presented Bush—the pedigreed product of Greenwich, Andover, and Yale—as a homespun Texan amiably strolling dusty streets with his blazer slung casually over his shoulder and his shirtsleeves rolled up. It worked. Bush won comfortably, and Treleaven came aboard the Nixon campaign.
Price acted as Garment’s media theoretician, deepening and enriching his concepts. In late November 1967, Price circulated a strategy memo drawing on the ideas of
Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 book
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
. In his chapter “Television: The Timid Giant,” McLuhan commented on Nixon’s 1963 appearance on
The Jack Paar Show
, in which he performed a work he had composed for the piano. “Instead of the slick, glib, legal Nixon, we saw the doggedly creative and modest performer,” McLuhan wrote. “A few timely touches like this would have quite altered the result of the Kennedy-Nixon campaign.”
Price’s assumption was that in the age of television, humans inhabited multiple realities—the two most salient being the reality that actually existed and the reality burned onto a cathode ray tube. Since 99 percent of voters would never meet the candidate in person, Price was convinced that the only reality they would ever know was the one on their television screens. “It’s not what’s
there
that counts,” Price wrote. “It’s what’s projected—and, carrying it one step further, it’s not what
he
projects but rather what the voter receives.” Television was the only reality that mattered to swaying the minds of millions of voters. “It’s not the man we have to change, but rather the
received impression
.”
Price argued that Nixon could win if the campaign made the audience
feel
differently about their candidate. “Politics is much more emotional than it is rational, and this is particularly true of presidential
politics,” Price wrote, adding, “Potential presidents are measured against an ideal that’s a combination of leading man, God, father, hero, pope, king, with maybe just a touch of the avenging Furies thrown in.” As Treleaven had done for Bush, Price drew up a character sketch for Nixon. The campaign would cast him as “the kind of man proud parents would ideally want their sons to grow up to be: a man who embodies the national ideal, its aspirations, its dreams, a man whose
image
the people want in their homes as a source of inspiration, and whose voice they want as the representative of their nation in the councils of the world, and of their generation in the pages of history.” Pulling this off would require some deception. “The TV medium itself introduces an element of distortion, in terms both of its effect on the candidate and of the often subliminal ways in which the image is received,” Price wrote. “And it inevitably is going to convey a partial image—thus ours is the task of finding how to control its use so the part that gets across is the part we want to have gotten across.”
Roger Ailes would be responsible for executing this vision, transplanting his talk show techniques to the business of electing a president.
T
he legend of Roger Ailes has it that he almost single-handedly transformed Nixon from a schlump to a president with his talk-show alchemy. But the truth was more complicated. In many ways, Ailes was more student than teacher. Garment, Treleaven, and Price—and Nixon himself—had an incalculable influence on Ailes’s thinking. Together, they provided a toolbox of concepts and linkages and techniques that Ailes would use throughout his career. But ironically, it was a member of what’s now called the mainstream media—and a liberal—who provided the most crucial boost to Ailes’s curriculum vitae.
One morning in June 1968, a few months after Ailes signed on to the campaign, his friend from Philadelphia, Joe McGinniss, met with the ABC sportscaster Howard Cosell, about whom he was writing an article.
It turned out to be the biggest break of McGinniss’s career. While shadowing Cosell, McGinniss shared a ride to the Stamford, Connecticut, train station with a friend of Cosell’s, Edward Russell, an executive vice president at the Madison Avenue agency Doyle Dane Bernbach. McGinniss listened intently from the backseat of the car as Russell excitedly told Cosell that the agency had landed the account for Hubert Humphrey’s presidential campaign. McGinniss possessed a reporter’s antenna
for news. The idea that presidential campaigns were being packaged and sold like cars and toothpaste to unsuspecting voters struck him as deeply cynical—and one hell of a story.
As it happened, McGinniss was scheduled to have lunch with Eugene Prakapas, an editor at Simon & Schuster, later that day. Over lunch, McGinniss related the conversation he had overheard. Prakapas agreed that political advertising was a potentially major unexplored subject. Theodore White, who had invented the modern campaign narrative with his landmark book
The Making of the President 1960
, was already under contract to write the definitive campaign book of 1968. McGinniss told Prakapas he wanted to focus strictly on the advertising efforts of the Humphrey and Nixon campaigns. “You wouldn’t call it
The Making of the President
,” McGinniss told him. “You’d call it
The Selling of the President
.”