Roger Ailes: Off Camera Read online

  Ailes wasn’t especially excited to meet Nixon. He may have spoken eloquently for Eisenhower in Miss Irwin’s civics class, but he wasn’t interested in politics. “I don’t even know if I was registered to vote back then,” he says. “We had Nixon on because we booked everybody. We had Little Egypt on the show that day. She was an exotic dancer who performed with a boa constrictor. I figured I better not put her and Nixon in the same greenroom. I didn’t want to scare him, or the snake. So I stuck him in my office. If I had done it the other way around, I’d probably be managing snake dancers today.”

  It is also very possible that if Hubert Humphrey had turned up in the Douglas greenroom instead of Nixon, Ailes would have ended up working on the Democratic campaign in 1968. Ailes was far less political in those days than he was professionally ambitious.

  The conversation between Ailes and Nixon has become a part of modern political lore. Nixon said that it was a shame a man couldn’t get elected president without a gimmick like TV. Ailes assured him that the medium was here to stay. If Nixon didn’t grasp that, and figure out how to turn it to his advantage, he would never get to the White House.

  It was a cheeky thing for a guy in his midtwenties to tell a two-term vice president of the United States. Nixon was, after all, making television history when Ailes was still in grade school. In the presidential campaign of 1952, a scandal over an alleged political slush fund threatened to cause Eisenhower to dump his running mate from the ticket. Nixon went on TV, still a new medium, and delivered a corny, emotional, and highly effective self-defense invoking his wife’s “respectable Republican cloth coat” and his daughter’s love for Checkers, the family dog. Another memorable moment came in 1959, when Nixon toured the American National Exhibition in Moscow and, standing in a model American kitchen with TV cameras running, debated Soviet ruler Nikita Khrushchev on the respective merits of communism and capitalism.

  The 1960 presidential debates were what soured Nixon on TV. Nixon went into the first debate unprepared and without makeup. Kennedy was tanned, rested, and ready. People who heard the debate on the radio thought Nixon won, but television viewers saw the charismatic Kennedy completely outshine the untelegenic vice president. TV went from being a form of communication he manipulated to one he dreaded. Ailes was a cocky young guy who knew, he said, how to make Nixon shine on the screen. A few days after their meeting in Philadelphia, Leonard Garment, Nixon’s law partner and confidant, invited Ailes to come up to New York for a meeting with the Nixon media team. “It was a Sunday morning,” says Ailes. “We had breakfast at the Plaza Hotel and they grilled me for four hours. I guess they liked what they heard. They offered me a job producing Nixon’s TV.” Ailes took it. Mike Douglas was furious about losing his executive producer. Friends in the business thought Ailes was crazy to abandon a promising career for a flier with Tricky Dick. But he had a vision of what he could accomplish.

  The result was the Man in the Arena campaign. Nixon wouldn’t debate his Democratic opponent, Hubert Humphrey, or Alabama governor George Wallace, who was running as a third-party candidate. He would also keep his spontaneous public appearances to a minimum. Instead, Ailes staged a series of town meetings with selected audiences and prescreened citizen questioners who lacked the guile (and, in many cases, hostility) of the political press. Man in the Arena made it possible for Nixon to control his media environment. Ailes’s role as a profane, skydiving, hard-charging producer was documented in The Selling of the President, a bestseller by Philadelphia columnist (and Ailes pal) Joe McGinniss.

  Contrary to myth, Ailes did not win the election for Nixon. The country was in turmoil over Vietnam; there was racial violence in cities across America; Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were murdered. President Lyndon Johnson was so unpopular that he decided not to run for reelection. It would have taken a much more compelling candidate than Vice President Hubert Humphrey to salvage the situation for the Democrats.

  History recalls the 1968 campaign as the start of the Republican “Southern Strategy” of wooing conservative white Democrats below the Mason-Dixon Line. But it didn’t quite work at the time, although it would when Ronald Reagan came along. Nixon carried only five Southern states that had traditionally gone Democratic (South Carolina, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee). Humphrey got Texas. Wallace won the rest of the old Confederacy. Even if Humphrey had won Nixon’s Southern states, he wouldn’t have had a sufficient margin for election. George Wallace, running well to the right of Nixon, got forty-six electoral votes in the Deep South.

  Ailes downplays his role in the Nixon victory. “People think I invented strategy or ads,” he says. “Really, I was just the TV producer. I was in charge of making sure the backlights worked.” It is an overly modest assessment. Ailes didn’t win the election, but his careful handling and attention to detail in the staging of the Man in the Arena format helped make sure that Nixon didn’t blow another election on TV.

  After the victory, Ailes was hired as an outside adviser to the president. He was too young to be personally close to Nixon, and his advice could be abrasive. He once told Nixon not to ditch his wife when he left Air Force One and greeted reception committees. “Leaving her on the steps of the plane doesn’t look too good on TV,” he said.

  Ailes wasn’t really trusted by the Nixon inner circle. Some Nixonites blamed Ailes for the access McGinniss got and the unflattering observations Ailes made about the candidate. “Let’s face it, a lot of people think Nixon is dull,” McGinniss quoted Ailes as saying. “Think he’s a bore, a pain in the ass. They look at him as the kind of kid who always carried a book bag. Who was forty-two years old the day he was born. They figure other kids got footballs for Christmas, Nixon got a briefcase and he loved it. He’d always have his homework done and he’d never let you copy. . . . Now you put him on television and you’ve got a problem right away. He’s a funny-looking guy . . . [he] looks like somebody hung him in a closet overnight and he jumps out in the morning with his suit all bunched up and starts running around saying, ‘I want to be president.’”

  Bob Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, was especially inflamed by what he saw as Ailes’s treachery, and saw to it that there was no real job for him at the White House. From time to time he was summoned by the White House to undertake special assignments, such as producing Nixon’s chat with Neil Armstrong during the moon landing, or helping with the media strategy after the crippled flight of Apollo 13—but he did these things pro bono. “I never even took a per diem, let alone payment,” Ailes told me. “I didn’t want to have to tell my kid someday that I had been on the government payroll.” This may be sour grapes, but Ailes was indeed lucky that he didn’t get drawn into the political side of the Nixon operation. “I was completely out of it in 1972,” he says. “When the Watergate guys were going to jail, I was in Africa making a wildlife documentary with Bobby Kennedy Jr. Some people called me Houdini, but I was never even questioned. Not getting a job was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  Looking back, Ailes has mixed emotions about Nixon. He admires his dogged persistence—his willingness to be the worst player on his college football team, a guy who got hammered every day at practice but kept coming back until he won a letter; and his insistence, as a candidate, on keeping every speaking commitment, no matter how trivial or logistically difficult (Nixon’s insistence on going to Alaska on the last weekend before Election Day in 1960, while Kennedy campaigned in swing states, may have cost him the presidency). But he also sees Nixon’s flaws, one of which was indulging in tough talk he didn’t really mean. “Nixon thought that the 1960 election was stolen by the Daley machine in Chicago,” Ailes told me, “and he had a lasting fear that the Kennedys would do it again in 1972. He believed the Democratic National Committee might be planning to replace George McGovern with Teddy. I wasn’t at the White House but I heard that Nixon said that somebody should look into it. Nixon was always saying things like that, and people around him understood that he didn’t necessarily mean them literally. But Gordon Liddy was there, and he may have taken it as a marching order. With a guy like that, who burns his fingers for fun, you have to be careful about what you say and how you say it.”

  In 1969, Ailes left Washington. “I drove up to Manhattan in an old Pontiac and hit a snowstorm where I got stuck for about ten hours,” he recalls. “I got into town about 2:00 a.m. Next day I rented an apartment on Eighth Avenue.” He started his own company, Ailes Production, later changed to Ailes Communications.

  Marjorie stayed in Philadelphia. They weren’t officially divorced for five more years, and they saw each other occasionally, but the marriage was over. “We just grew apart,” Ailes says. “She was into art and literature, and she had a lot of local interests. I was after a national career, and I was selfish. We had no kids, and it ended amicably. We shared a divorce lawyer and parted as friends.”

  In the meantime, Ailes Communications was building quite a multifaceted operation. Over the years, Ailes produced commercial television documentaries as well as off-Broadway plays. He consulted for local television stations around the country. He even tried his hand at talent management. His best-known clients were Kelly Garrett, a beautiful actress with whom Ailes had a close personal relationship, and satirist Mort Sahl, whose career was in decline when Ailes picked him up. “Mort was still brilliant but he was unreliable,” Ailes says. “One time he came to Buffalo for a gig and refused to leave the airport because the limo was the wrong color.” That experience inspired Ailes to leave the talent management game.

  Ailes Communications did a lot of corporate and commercial work for a list of clients that ranged from Polaroid and the Texas Energy Commission to the American Kennel Club. Ailes
did issue ads for the American Bankers Association, consulted on messaging and positioning for Philip Morris, and provided executive training to American Express, General Electric, and others. His clients knew that he had Washington connections, which were bolstered by his growing reputation as a major factor in Republican politics.

  “Roger Ailes was the first independent political consultant,” says political consultant Dick Morris, now a commentator on Fox News. “Before him, candidates hired advertising agencies or executives to do their media, or turned it over to the party. Roger was the first guy to hang out his own shingle and take clients. It would be fair to say that he invented the modern profession of political consulting.” This isn’t strictly true: There have been professional campaign consultants going back at least to the early 1930s, when a pair of Californians, Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter, founded Campaigns, Inc. But Ailes was among the first, and certainly the most successful, in the era of televised national politics. He was always a Republican, but from the start he approached his campaigns with a nonideological detachment. One of his early clients was Jim Holshouser Jr., a young attorney who, in 1972, was running to become the first Republican governor in the history of North Carolina. At the time, one of the hottest issues was school busing to achieve racial integration. It was extremely unpopular, not just in the South but in liberal bastions like Boston; in my hometown, Pontiac, a Democratic stronghold, crowds overturned and burned school buses. Holshouser’s Democratic opponent was opposed to busing, so it didn’t seem like a problem until the candidate told Ailes that it was. “We are going to support busing,” he told his consultant.

  “When a candidate begins saying ‘we’ it usually means that his wife is involved,” says Ailes. Sure enough, Mrs. Holshouser turned out to be a staunch supporter of school busing, and she convinced her husband that he should be, too.

  Ailes had a heart-to-heart with Holshouser. “I have no fucking idea if busing will work or not,” he said. “I haven’t seen any data on it, I don’t know the issue. I don’t know if it is a good thing, or a bad one. But here is what I do know. If you don’t do an antibusing spot on TV, you will lose the election. Now, if I were you I’d do the fucking spot, win the election, and then, once you’re in office, do whatever you think is right. Or, you can not do the fucking spot, make your wife feel better, and not be governor, in which case you won’t be able to do anything about the issue one way or the other. But that’s not my problem. I’m going to cash my check before Election Day and be back on a plane for New York before the votes are counted. You have to live here. It’s your life and your decision.”

  I asked Ailes what happened.

  “He did the spot and won.”

  “And what did he do about busing?”

  Ailes seemed surprised by the question. “I have no idea,” he said.

  For the next decade, Ailes kept up a frenetic schedule. He produced Broadway shows, including Mother Earth, a short-lived environmental musical, as well as The Hot l Baltimore. He traveled to Africa to shoot a wildlife documentary starring Bobby Kennedy Jr. He and John Huddy (and, typically, two of Huddy’s children now work for him) made a TV special on Federico Fellini, Fellini: Wizards, Clowns and Honest Liars. He consulted for local television stations around New York and the country, and he took on corporate clients as an expert in image making and damage control. He also made his first venture into conservative television. In 1973, Joseph Coors, a right-wing multimillionaire, sought to combat the ideological tilt of the networks by establishing his own TV news provider, Television News, Inc. (TVN). Ailes served as a consultant who had a license to fire, and he used it to get rid of some thirty employees. One he kept was Charlie Gibson, who went on to a distinguished network career. But no amount of hiring and firing could save TVN. Conservative television news was an idea whose time had not yet come. It closed in 1975 and Ailes busied himself with his filmmaking and his commercial and political clients.

  In 1980, a Long Island machine politician named Al D’Amato came to see Ailes. He had unseated the venerable incumbent senator, liberal Republican Jacob Javits, in a nasty primary in which D’Amato illustrated Javits’s old age and precarious health by showing a kid popping a balloon. Javits, who was in the early stages of Lou Gehrig’s disease, responded by running against D’Amato in the general election on the Liberal Party ticket. The Democrats fielded Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman.

  “I went from ‘Al who?’ to a nasty guy,” says D’Amato. “People hated those ads and I don’t blame them.” He realized that he had no chance unless he could change his image in a hurry. He went to see Roger Ailes.

  Ailes looked at the situation and came to a simple conclusion: D’Amato was perceived as a jerk. “Jesus, nobody likes you. Your own mother wouldn’t vote for you. Do you even have a mother?” D’Amato assured him that he did, in fact, have one, and Ailes proceeded to turn her into a television star. In what became known as the “mama” ad, he showed an elderly woman, returning from the market with an armful of groceries, talking about how hard it was these days (of Carter-era inflation) for the middle class to make ends meet. Then she turned to the camera, introduced herself, and told viewers that if they wanted things to change they should vote for her son, Al D’Amato.

  “That ad was stupendous,” says D’Amato. “Everybody loved her. [Liberal columnist] Jimmy Breslin wrote, ‘I’d never vote for Al D’Amato, but I’d vote for his mother.’ That one spot turned the election around, and made my victory possible.” It was a narrow victory—he got fewer than half the votes in the three-way race—but a win is a win and he spent the next eighteen years in the Senate.

  By 1998, Ailes was out of the consulting business and running Fox News, but he is not the kind of guy who loses touch with old friends and clients, and he agreed to meet with D’Amato for a friendly chat about the senator’s political future. D’Amato wanted a fourth term. Ailes advised against it. “You’ve had three. What do you need another one for?” he asked. He told D’Amato he would probably lose, and he did, defeated by Representative Chuck Schumer. Without Ailes, D’Amato ran a tasteless campaign whose low point came when he called Schumer a putz-head. Today, he says he should have listened to Ailes. “The thing about Roger is, he doesn’t tell you something he doesn’t believe. If he tells you something, take it to the bank. But he tells you and that’s that. He doesn’t insist that you agree with him.”

  Ailes’s early successes with D’Amato secured him a place as a New York Republican power broker. He became one of the de facto leaders of the GOP in the Empire State. Tim Carey, a longtime Republican operative, worked on New York campaigns for Javits, Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, and George Pataki, and served as a consultant to the Republican National Committee. Carey also worked for Lew Lehrman, the drugstore magnate who ran against Mario Cuomo in the 1982 New York gubernatorial race. “Lehrman was stiff,” recalls Carey. “I took him to Roger to learn how to communicate.” Lehrman improved, but not enough to defeat Cuomo, who didn’t need lessons to connect with the public.

  That same year, the job of Westchester county executive became vacant. Tony Colavita, the outgoing incumbent, needed to pick a successor from a roster of aspiring candidates, including future governor George Pataki, who was then mayor of Peekskill. Colavita brought his potential successors down to Ailes Communications one at a time and Ailes checked them out, taping and assessing speeches. He settled on Andy O’Rourke of Yonkers. “Let’s just say Andy was the kind of guy who would wear two different plaids,” says Carey. “But Ailes saw past that. To him, O’Rourke was like a guy from GQ, a winner. And Roger was right about him—he was reelected three times and then went on to be a state judge.” Pataki didn’t get the job, but there were no hard feelings. “Roger thought he was too young,” says Carey.