Prakapas liked his idea. “I’ll have them cut you a check for five hundred dollars so you can pursue this a little further,” he said.
After the lunch, McGinniss walked to a phone booth on Fifth Avenue, outside Rockefeller Center, and called Russell. His pitch was summarily rejected.
“No, no, that was off the record,” Russell told McGinniss.
“So you won’t cooperate?”
“Cooperate? What, you think we’re crazy? No. And I don’t want to hear from you again and I don’t want to read anything about this.”
Dispirited but undeterred, McGinniss called Harry Treleaven and delivered the same pitch he had presented to Humphrey’s team. Astonishingly, Treleaven was receptive to McGinniss’s idea. Treleaven’s openness may have been due to the fact he had once been a writer himself, penning plays for radio shows in California. He told McGinniss to stop by his office at the agency Fuller & Smith & Ross. Len Garment professed no objections except to ensure that McGinniss would not publish the book until the campaign’s conclusion in November, whatever the outcome. “We were intrigued with the idea of having him follow us,” Garment later said. It was a decision he would later regret.
In late June, Nixon was in a New York television studio answering questions from Illinois voters, who had been flown in to film more advertising spots. The thirty-minute program was called The Nixon Answer. The campaign would air them in a half dozen markets in Illinois and Michigan and eight markets in Ohio. It was the latest experiment in the campaign’s use of staged interviews. The campaign gave selected participants the full treatment, providing each with round-trip first-class airfare, two nights in a Manhattan hotel, and money for meals.
Ailes did not attend the broadcast, but he reviewed the sessions on tape. The show was a bust. The camera placements were off and the pacing was slow. Ailes noticed that the candidate continued to be stiff and unmodulated. There were no peaks and valleys, no surprises, little drama—no payoffs at the end of a segment. On July 6, he wrote Garment and Shakespeare a six-page memo that addressed his concerns about Nixon’s performance. “If you were to time each of Mr. Nixon’s answers, they probably would all fall within 45 seconds of each other,” he wrote. “It gives the impression that his answers on all of the issues are ‘pat’ and thus he appears not to be responding to the specific question. The next logical step in the viewer’s mind is maybe the questions are ‘pat’ or ‘set up,’ too.”
Of course, the entire program was set up. The potential impact of the show was based on convincing the audience it was real.
Ailes echoed the concepts he had learned from Woody Fraser on the Mike Douglas set. Specifically, Nixon needed “more descriptive visual phrases” that would wrap his comments in memorable “kickers.” “Television is a ‘hit and run’ medium,” Ailes wrote. “The general public is just not sophisticated enough to wade through answers. Therefore, at least some of Mr. Nixon’s answers should end with a … specific, graphic, succinct, memorable comment.”
The memo showed early signs that Ailes wanted to influence not just television, but the underlying politics as well. Although he had no political experience and was just a part-time television adviser to the campaign, he offered some two dozen suggested responses for Nixon to deliver to questions—sound bites, as they’re now called. Ailes’s first efforts in this genre were catchy, but often too bombastic to be presidential, reflecting his father’s gnomic voice. His memo offered answers on Vietnam (“This country is almost 200 years old—two hundred years from now we won’t just be 200 years older—but 200 years greater!”), the United Nations (“The problem with war is that it is seldom discussed ahead of time. Too often one side is not clear why the other is fighting”), NATO (“outdated”), inflation (“If you make $10,000 a year and spend $15,000, it won’t be long before you are in trouble”), taxes (“I sometimes hear people say ‘America is going to the dogs.’ These people pay their hard earned money to support a country and then spend their time running the country down”), poverty (“We cannot win these people by sharing government wealth. Our healing gift is the capacity for self-help. They feel generosity as oppression”). The phrases represented Ailes’s drive to simplify complex issues to emotionally resonant one-liners. The skills would find their flowering in cable news.
By the end of July, Ailes was realizing that balancing the Douglas show and the campaign was too much. A few days before the 1968 Republican National Convention opened in Miami Beach, Ailes asked Douglas for a leave of absence from his job. Douglas balked. “Mike turned me down. He was very upset, because we were about to go into the fall rating period,” Ailes said. Politics was thrilling and he wanted more of it. “I said I would go anyway,” Ailes said, “so permission was grudgingly granted.” But it was a risk. “When I started out, I had my own personal career on the line,” he later said. “It heightened the excitement. It’s sort of like chicken-racing with yourself. If I hadn’t, I’d probably be back in Ohio as a prop boy.” Douglas felt betrayed. “I think Mike was hurt,” Bob LaPorta said. “Mike wanted loyalty. That was one of Mike’s big things.” Ailes never returned to the show. He and Douglas did not speak for years afterward.
In the wake of Ailes’s departure, the show struggled, partly because the culture had become much more complicated in the seven years since the show started, and it was near impossible for an essentially light-hearted show like Mike Douglas to strike the right tone in those chaotic times. The show limped along for another decade to declining ratings and assorted reinventions. In the early 1980s, the show was canceled and Douglas retired to Florida. He died on August 11, 2006—his eighty-first birthday. Ailes had drifted apart from his colleagues, but reconnected with many of them at Douglas’s memorial service in North Hollywood. Ailes tried small talk with Debbie Miller and Larry Rosen, who had left television altogether and worked as a certified physician assistant, but it was evident the years had not eased the tensions.
“I have an admission to make,” Ailes said to Rosen. “You were always a better producer than I was.” Miller, standing next to Rosen, noticed how Ailes’s remark stung Rosen.
Other colleagues retained fonder memories. When Douglas died, Bob LaPorta was on an Amtrak train in California when his son called and broke the news. LaPorta’s first impulse was to call Ailes. “I just got his secretary. I said, ‘Just ask the boss what he wants us to do.’ ”
FOUR
SELLING THE TRICK
THE 1968 REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION was Roger Ailes’s baptism in national politics, a chance to see the full spectacle of a presidential campaign—the media, the costumed delegates—at close range. On his first full day in town, he had an expensive dinner with Barbara Walters at the Fontainebleau Hotel. The rest of the week he was busy networking with some of the biggest names in broadcast journalism. Mainly, though, Ailes was a minor player among the heavy hitters, with few official responsibilities. Instead, he played campaign gofer, on one occasion taking a cab out to the airport to pick up Nixon’s daughters. The candidate himself was not scheduled to arrive in Miami until the convention officially opened on Monday afternoon. Until then, he would be sequestered in a rented house on Long Island, furiously working on his acceptance speech.
After quelling a last-minute surge by Ronald Reagan, Nixon strode to the podium on August 8 to address the convention and accept the party’s nomination. The speech would become a cornerstone of the campaign’s television advertising. For the rest of the month, Harry Treleaven broadcast excerpts in thirty-second spots. “We are going to win because our cause is right,” Nixon told the audience, to thunderous applause. “We see cities enveloped in smoke and flame.… We hear sirens in the night. We see Americans dying on distant battlefields abroad. We see Americans hating each other; fighting each other; killing each other at home. And as we see and hear these things, millions of Americans cry out in anguish. Did we come all this way for this?”
Ailes must have recognized the lament. Nixon was speaking of the everyday
folks who tuned in to the Douglas show. They wanted to be entertained, not bludgeoned with daily reminders of the country’s ills. “Did American boys die in Normandy, and Korea, and in Valley Forge for this?” Nixon asked. “Listen to the answer to those questions. It is another voice. It is the quiet voice in the tumult and the shouting. It is the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans—the non-shouters; the non-demonstrators. They are not racists or sick; they are not guilty of the crime that plagues the land.” Nixon promised them absolution: “This I say to you tonight is the real voice of America. In this year 1968, this is the message it will broadcast to America and to the world.”
Shortly after the convention, Ailes ran into Joe McGinniss at the Manhattan offices of Fuller & Smith & Ross. “Holy shit, what are you doing here?” McGinniss recalled saying.
“The question is, what are you doing here?” Ailes replied.
“I’m writing a book about this.”
“The fuck you are? Who’s letting you do that?”
“Well, Harry and Len—”
“—Jesus Christ. Don’t they even read?”
McGinniss suddenly got nervous that Ailes could alert the campaign about his politics. “Every day I wrote columns, most of which appeared on the front page, saying, ‘Boy, Nixon is an asshole. This is disgusting,’ ” McGinniss recalled. “All they had to do was to pick up the Inquirer and see, holy shit, this guy is not a friend of ours. But they didn’t bother, because no one had ever heard of me.” To write the book, McGinniss had quit his job at the newspaper. Without access to the Nixon campaign, the entire project would implode.
“Roger, don’t rat me out.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Ailes said. “But I can’t believe this, Jesus. But hey, no one is asking me for approval.”
A strategic alliance was forged—one that would make both young men into stars.
The first of the Nixon campaign’s panel shows was scheduled for September 4, at the Chicago studios of WBBM, the local CBS affiliate, six days after the Democrats nominated Hubert Humphrey at their chaotic convention. For Richard Nixon, WBBM had painful history: it was the site of his disastrous 1960 presidential debate against Kennedy. McGinniss followed Ailes to Chicago to chronicle the production. A few hours before Nixon was due to arrive in the studio, McGinniss watched Ailes putting out fires. “Those stupid bastards on the set designing crew put turquoise curtains in the background. Nixon wouldn’t look right unless he was carrying a pocketbook,” Ailes said. He had the curtains pulled down and three wood-paneled columns with “clean, solid, masculine lines” wheeled onto the set. The stage was designed to engender sympathy: Nixon would face his inquisitors alone standing on a circular blue platform eight inches high and six feet in diameter, as Mike Douglas producer Bob LaPorta envisioned for the Dorothy Fuldheim pilot he had worked on with Ailes. “The subliminal message of the ‘arena’ works,” Ailes wrote in a memo to Garment and Shakespeare. “Even if a viewer is not in favor of Richard Nixon, by 15 minutes into the program he almost subconsiously begins to root for him.” In the audience, Nixon’s family, political allies, and three hundred supporters recruited by local Republican groups would clap and cheer whenever Nixon delivered an answer.
The citizens on the panel were a part of the set, too. Garment, Shakespeare, and Treleaven combed through lists of names to come up with a “balanced” group. The program’s authenticity depended on Nixon appearing to engage with a diverse cross-section of potential voters. The question of race was an especially delicate matter. It was decided that the panel should include exactly one black participant. “Two would be offensive to whites,” McGinniss later wrote, describing their thinking, “perhaps to Negroes as well. Two would be trying too hard. One was necessary and safe.” To that end, the campaign recruited a black former Chicago public schoolteacher named Warner Saunders. To represent Chicago’s other major demographic blocs, there was a Jewish lawyer, a Polish community leader, a sandy-haired businessman, a round-cheeked farmer, a demure housewife, and two newspapermen.
The reporters covering the campaign would have no role whatsoever. “Let’s face it, Nixon did not have good press,” Ailes later said. “They were still playing, ‘Would you buy a used car from this guy?’ His only hope was to go around the press and go directly to the people.” But Herb Klein, the campaign’s press secretary, had been fielding complaints from journalists and warned that the campaign risked a backlash if they weren’t invited. Treleaven was inclined to listen, but Shakespeare told him that under no circumstances would they be allowed in.
Ailes sided with Shakespeare. “I agree with Frank,” he said. “Fuck ’em. It’s not a press conference.”
At The Mike Douglas Show, colleagues did not hear Ailes express antipathy toward the media. But in the crucible of the ’68 campaign, Ailes adopted a new view: journalists were the enemy. Ailes warned Treleaven that reporters would point out all the crafty television techniques that went into the show. They might reveal for instance that the hopped-up studio audience had been primed by a jowly warm-up man named Jack Rourke. “The audience is part of the show,” Ailes told him. McGinniss stood by listening. “And that’s the whole point. It’s a television show. Our television show.” As McLuhan had theorized, the image on-screen was what mattered. Anything else was a distraction. “The press has no business on the set.… This is an electronic election. The first there’s ever been.… TV has the power now,” Ailes said. Like the voters at home, the press would watch the proceedings from a separate studio.
At 9:00 p.m., viewers tuning in to The Dom DeLuise Show were greeted instead with news footage of Richard Nixon receiving a hero’s welcome on the streets of Chicago. Like a freak summer snow, confetti fluttered down on the thousands of smiling faces in the crowd. The title credits “NIXON IN ILLINOIS” flashed on the screen in bold yellow lettering. A baritone-voiced announcer intoned: “This afternoon, Richard Nixon arrived in Chicago and received one of the warmest and most enthusiastic welcomes in this city’s history.” It was Treleaven’s idea to open the broadcast with clips of Nixon, standing in an open-air limousine, arms thrust victoriously in the air, making his trademark V. For the audience at home, the jubilant scene would contrast starkly with that of a week earlier, when Democrats had brought insurrection to the streets. When Richard Nixon came to town, there was a parade.
Ailes watched the introduction unfold on monitors in the control room as the director cued the next shot: Nixon bounding onto the stage. The studio audience jumped to their feet applauding vigorously, as Jack Rourke had coached them. The director cut back and forth between the candidate and the crowd. Nixon was beaming, seeming in that moment as warm and as human as Mike Douglas. He even had his own gag man onstage with him: former Oklahoma football coach turned ABC announcer Bud Wilkinson, one of the few celebrities backing Nixon in ’68. Moments earlier, Wilkinson had greeted the audience and introduced the panel. “I’d like to stress the point that Mr. Nixon has absolutely no idea what questions will be asked,” he said, sounding like a color commentator before a big game. “There could not have been any prior preparation.”
Except Nixon had done nothing but prepare for this moment. And Ailes had helped him. Before the broadcast, Nixon honed a series of stock answers that he could deploy at will, artfully tailoring the response to whatever question was posed. “If the material he is presenting can be made more succinct and memorable, there is no doubt that he can control this medium in the upcoming election,” Ailes wrote in his July 1968 memo to Garment and Shakespeare. Because the broadcasts would be seen only in their local markets, Nixon could repeat his answers in one city after the next. He could also calibrate his response to the sensibilities of different audiences. Thus he would affirm civil rights in Chicago but hedge on school integration weeks later in Charlotte. (Years later, Ailes would advise his clients to use the same trick: “On an index card you can keep in your wallet, list the key phrases of ten stories that will entertain audiences for the n
ext ten years,” he wrote in his book, You Are the Message, “because you rarely speak to the same audience twice.”)
Nixon followed Wilkinson’s introduction with a monologue—it really was a talk show. “I’m not trying to filibuster before we go to the questions,” he quipped, before turning sincere. “I would like to say a word about the pictures you saw a moment ago of the arrival in Chicago. Those pictures brought back many memories to me.” The camera zoomed in tight: “Sixteen years ago in 1952, I was nominated for vice president in Chicago at the Republican National Convention. And then eight years ago, I was nominated for president of the United States in Chicago at the Republican National Convention. And today, as I begin this campaign tour, I would have to say I’ve received the greatest political reception that I’ve ever received in my life in Chicago.” Over and over, a half dozen times, he repeated that code word for Democratic lawlessness: Chicago.
Jack Sundine, editor of the Moline Dispatch, asked the first question. “Yes, Mr. Nixon, George Wallace has said that, and others I suppose have said this, that there isn’t a thin dime of difference between the two parties nor between the nominees of the two parties. Would you, sir, in specifics, recite what you think the differences are between you and the nominee of the Democratic Party?”
The camera flashed back to Nixon.
“How much time do I have?”
The audience provided the laugh track. Nixon picked up right where his monologue ended. “At the convention last week in Chicago, I think the American people received there a picture of the choice that they have, and I think it’s probably the most decisive choice and the greatest difference you have between two candidates in this century.” He went on for almost two minutes. He spoke of “new leadership” and a “new foreign policy” and “new policies to deal with the domestic economy.” There wasn’t a specific to be had.
The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--and Divided a Country Page 7