The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--and Divided a Country

by Sherman, Gabriel

  The director switched to a camera positioned at the back of the studio. From this perspective, the room resembled an arena. Even though every member of the audience was on Nixon’s team, the image suggested a candidate bravely facing threats from all sides without a podium or teleprompter to defend him. The viewers at home could sympathize with his position.

  The director panned to the next questioner. It was Morris Leibman, the Jewish lawyer, and a Democrat to boot. The camera filmed Leibman from the front. Almost entirely bald and wearing thick plastic frame glasses, he had to tilt his head back to make eye contact with Nixon. It looked as if Leibman was gazing up in admiration.

  “Mr. Nixon, would you comment on the accusation that’s been made from time to time that your views have shifted, and that they’re based on expediencies?”

  Nixon showed no discomfort. The camera captured him looking down at Leibman, arms clasped loosely behind his back. More comedy: “Well, I suppose, Mr. Leibman, that what you’re referring to in more the vernacular is, is there a ‘New Nixon’ or is there an ‘Old Nixon’? I suppose I could counter by saying, which Humphrey should we listen to today?”

  Nixon laughed. The audience laughed. Even Leibman was chuckling.

  The game was fun for everyone except the panelists: set ’em up, knock ’em down. The cheers from the crowd revealed that the real prey was the panel, not Nixon. Every time the citizen questioners opened their mouths, they could surely feel the stares of six hundred Republican eyes on their backs.

  Ailes had spent days perfecting it all. Treleaven, Shakespeare, and Price had come up with the controlled television concept but Ailes fine-tuned the camera placements and the staging. Filming Nixon below his eye level made him appear taller, a commanding leader.

  Midway through the broadcast, Warner Saunders, the black community leader and former schoolteacher, sat at the microphone with his arms crossed, signaling confrontation. “I’d like to step out of the box of an educator and talk about communications. A communications gap that is basically a color gap,” Saunders began in a voice steady with resolve. “I would like to explain to you that the black community feels the term ‘law and order’ means violence, destruction inside of our community on the part of a recalcitrant police department, on the part of recalcitrant mayors and other officials inside of our community. What does ‘law and order’ mean to you?”

  If anyone at home had grown bored by the proceedings, they surely snapped to attention now.

  Nixon leaned back and took a deep breath. “Well, first, Mr. Saunders,” he said, “I’m quite aware of this fact that law and order, I think the term that I’ve heard used, is a code word, a code word for basically racism.” Then he pivoted to one of his prepared points: past injustices never justified lawbreaking. “I have often said you cannot have order unless you have justice. You cannot have order unless you have progress. Because order without progress, if you just stifle the dissent, if you just stifle the progress, you’re going to have an explosion, and you’re going to have disorder. On the other hand, you can’t have progress without order because when you have disorder—revolution—what you do is you destroy all the progress.”

  The director caught a reaction shot from Ed Brooke, the black Massachusetts senator, who was seated in the front row next to Pat Nixon. Then it was back to the candidate: “The greatness of America, with few exceptions, over the period of our history, is that we have had the combination of having a system in which we could have peaceful change, peaceful progress, with order. Now that’s what I want for America.”

  The virtually all-white audience responded with ecstatic applause. This well-run talk show was a microcosm of the civil society Nixon and his team were trying to sell.

  Nixon sailed through the rest of the broadcast. He spoke of ending the war and building “bridges to human dignity” and getting “this country on a sound basis again.”

  At the fifty-five-minute mark, Wilkinson spoke up. “I’m very sorry I have to interrupt this very interesting discussion, but our time is running short.”

  Nixon asked Wilkinson if Mary Frances Squires, the housewife, could have one more question.

  “I never like to cut off a lady, you know,” Nixon said. On cue: more laughs.

  Squires wanted to know if Nixon favored releasing the names of POWs held in Vietnam. “If it doesn’t involve the security of the country, there’s no excuse whatever for that kind of retention of information,” he said. “I will certainly look into it.”

  The final question of the night came from Wilkinson. “I wonder if definite plans have been set for Julie and David’s wedding?”

  The camera held on Julie Nixon and David Eisenhower grinning and squirming in their seats.

  “That is confidential information,” Nixon replied, with mock conspiracy.

  The audience tittered. It was the payoff, just like one on The Mike Douglas Show.

  The next morning, Ailes reviewed tape of Nixon’s performance. On the Douglas set, Ailes’s perfectionist streak would often cause him to feel down immediately after the taping. But watching the footage of Nixon in Chicago reassured him that Nixon had delivered. “Mr. Nixon is strong now on television and has good control of the situation,” Ailes wrote in a memo to Garment and Shakespeare. “He looks good on his feet and shooting ‘in the round’ gives dimension to him.… The ‘arena effect’ is excellent and he plays well to all areas. The look has ‘guts.’ ”

  Nixon would tape three more panels that month. The next stops were Cleveland and Los Angeles, where Nixon made a four-second taped appearance on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. (“Sock it to me?” he deadpanned.) Ailes had already developed more than two dozen ideas to improve the Man in the Arena shows, which he delivered to Garment and Shakespeare. To play to the home audience, Nixon had to speak more directly into the camera. Because he would sweat under the hot studio lights, the air-conditioning needed to be turned up to the max at least four hours before his arrival. His deep-set eyes benefited from slightly whiter makeup applied to his upper eyelids. Ailes had timed all twenty of Nixon’s answers: “Some … are still too long and over half tended to be the same length,” he explained. Nixon needed “memorable phrases to use in wrapping up certain points.” Ailes also recommended more applause and more music, perhaps a Connie Francis soundtrack. “It might give us a classy ‘standard’ opening to use,” he wrote.

  On September 18, McGinniss and Ailes arrived in Philadelphia two days ahead of the candidate. Ailes loved to ham it up for McGinniss’s notebook. “He never forgot I was writing,” McGinniss later said. Ailes’s mordant one-liners about Nixon’s running mate, Spiro Agnew, were especially bold: “We’re doing all right,” he told McGinniss. “If we could only get someone to play Hide The Greek.”

  Although his home in the suburbs was just ten miles from the studio, Ailes was staying at the Marriott Motor Hotel. Things were not going well with Marjorie. He had been on the road for six weeks working eighteen hours a day and the pace of the campaign was naturally pulling them apart. In Philadelphia, Ailes wanted to push the envelope. The previous taping in California had been flat—the panelists asked stale questions. Ailes wanted to scramble the cast. “Nixon gets bored by the same kind of people,” he said. “We’ve got to screw around with this one a little bit.” Dan Buser, an assistant from the local Republican Party, recommended the head of a black community group as a panelist.

  “And he is black,” Buser added.

  “What do you mean, he’s black?” Ailes asked.

  “I mean he’s dark. It will be obvious on television that he’s not white.”

  “You mean we won’t have to put a sign around him that says, ‘This is our Negro’?”

  Ailes booked him. McGinniss suggested the name of a political reporter, who Ailes found out was also black.

  “Oh, shit, we can’t have two. Even in Philadelphia.”

  The panel was almost complete. He had secured an Italian lawyer from Pittsburgh, a suburban housewife, a Whar
ton student, a Camden newsman, and a raspy-voiced radio and TV commentator named Jack McKinney. That left one open slot. As Ailes sat with McGinniss eating room service, Ailes told his friend just what he wanted. “A good, mean, Wallaceite cab driver. Wouldn’t that be great? Some guy to sit there and say, ‘Awright, mac, what about these niggers?’ ” Ailes went on: “A lot of people think Nixon is dull. They think he’s a bore, a pain in the ass. They look at him as the kind of kid who always carried a bookbag. Who was forty-two years old the day he was born.… Now you put him on television, 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.’ I mean this is how he strikes some people. That’s why these shows are important. To make them forget all that.”

  The Philadelphia taping was scheduled to begin at 7:30 the next evening. Ailes showed up at the studio at 2:00 in a fighting mood. “I’m going to fire this fucking director!” he snarled. The camera placements were all off. He needed close-ups of individual audience members. Having multiple people in every shot was dated 1940s direction. “I want to see faces,” he said. “I want to see pores. That’s what people are. That’s what television is.”

  The director protested. “I don’t want to hear that shit!” Ailes said. “I told you what I wanted, and it’s your job to give it to me.”

  “He’s crazy,” the director later told McGinniss. “He says he wants close-ups, it’s like saying he wants to go to the moon.” (After the show, Ailes fired him.)

  The evening show would be the fourth panel Nixon had done, on top of the thirty-minute “Nixon Answer” specials. But Roger Ailes was about to teach Nixon a lesson: the best television is unpredictable television.

  Jack McKinney set the tone for the evening. His demeanor was decidedly unfriendly. He questioned why Nixon was being so evasive on his Vietnam position, noting that in 1952 the candidate had made partisan remarks about the political situation in Korea. Nixon winced.

  “It was really a question, I think, of the timing,” he replied defensively. “As a potential president of the United States, anything that I say would be interpreted by the enemy in Hanoi as an indication they would wait for me rather than discuss with the man we have as president.”

  The camera captured a woman wearing a gold dress glowering at McKinney.

  Twenty minutes later, the floor returned to him. McKinney repeated a charge made by Humphrey: why had Nixon refused to appear on national political programs like Face the Nation where he would be interviewed by professionals and not by amateurs in a room full of Republicans ready to intimidate any questioner who sought to ask a tough question?

  In the control room, Ailes’s experiment was playing poorly. “The guy’s making a speech!” Frank Shakespeare yelled. Ailes reached for the phone to tell Wilkinson to cut McKinney off, but he stopped before that was necessary.

  Nixon stared down his accuser. “You talk about these quiz shows that take place on Sundays. I’ve done Meet the Press and Face the Nation until they were running out of my ears.”

  It was the exact image that Ailes wanted to create: Nixon was taking it and fighting back.

  “That socks it to him, Dickie Baby!” Shakespeare said.

  Later in the taping, another guest asked Nixon why, in 1965, he had called for the ouster of a Marxist professor at Rutgers. Insisting that he knew the facts, Nixon explained that on campus the professor had called for the victory of the Vietcong over American troops in Vietnam. When the questioning returned to McKinney, he went at Nixon one more time.

  Referring to the Rutgers professor, he said, “When you said you knew the story, you did not give it in full context. He did not call for a victory of the Vietcong, he referred to what he recognized as the impending victory—”

  Nixon cut him off abruptly. “And he said—and I quote him exactly—‘I welcome that victory.’ He used that word.”

  The crowd broke into applause.

  McKinney replied, “I think there’s a critical difference—”

  And got cut off again by the candidate: “You think there’s a difference between welcome or calling for?”

  McKinney did not get it. That kind of nuance mattered in print journalism, not television. Television was about emotion. The audience did not care that Nixon had fudged a few words. What they saw was the candidate telling a sanctimonious newsman that some Commie professor had no right to say nice things about the enemy killing American teenagers.

  After the taping, McKinney complained to reporters, “I don’t think you can finalize a question with an applause-getting technique.”

  The Philadelphia panel was a step forward in political communication. “Mr. Nixon came off the undisputed winner in the McKinney questioning,” Ailes later wrote in a memo to Garment and Shakespeare. “The audience sympathy was with him (McKinney was not likeable) … and when he ‘turned it over to the television audience’ to decide the semantics of ‘call for’ or ‘welcome’ victory by the Vietcong, it showed the strongest use of and confidence in television I’ve ever seen.” In a way, Ailes had manipulated Nixon into delivering the performance he wanted. “Boy, is he going to be pissed,” he told McGinniss. “He’ll think we really tried to screw him.”

  On his way out that evening, Ailes bumped into Pat Nixon in the elevator. She greeted him with pursed lips.

  “Everyone seems to think it was by far the best,” Ailes declared. Mrs. Nixon did not say a word.

  After Philadelphia, Ailes found himself working under a Nixon team that was increasingly reluctant to indulge his freewheeling vision. He was a television risk taker among political operatives who were becoming risk-averse. The ground was moving beneath their feet. On September 30, Humphrey called for a unilateral halt to bombing as “an acceptable risk for peace,” and the antiwar tides flowed in his direction. Nixon’s team responded to the tightening polls by blaming Ailes. Shakespeare in particular second-guessed Ailes’s directing.

  Ailes attributed Nixon’s declining numbers to the fact that Nixon had been in front of television audiences nonstop since the primaries. “My honest opinion was that it did peak too early,” Ailes later said. “It’s such a highly sophisticated technical problem to keep a thing hyped for a whole bloody year.” The press caught on to Ailes’s frustration. During a stop in New York on October 8, where he was editing five hours of panel footage into a thirty-minute television special, Ailes gave a candid interview to The New York Times, which stated that his strength was growing up in an age of TV and that his “candidate’s weakness might be that he didn’t.” Ailes noted: “Nixon is not a child of TV and he may be the last candidate who couldn’t make it on the Johnny Carson show who could make it in an election.… He’s a communicator and a personality on television, but not at his best when they say on the talk shows, ‘Now here he is … Dick.’ ” If nothing else, Ailes would at least make a name for himself with these comments.

  Ten days later, Nixon’s political advisers pinned Nixon’s poor performance at a Boston panel show on Ailes’s choice of questioners. In truth, the campaign’s only swing through Massachusetts was an all-around mess that had nothing to do with Ailes. But a week later, the campaign stripped Ailes of the task of selecting panelists. On October 25, the final taping at the CBS studio in New York was turned over in part to a young demographer named Kevin Phillips, who would later write a book about the campaign titled The Emerging Republican Majority. In the control booth shortly before the broadcast, Phillips proudly proclaimed that his panel was “perfectly ethnically weighted.” Ailes groused that it was “the worst panel we’ve had,” and complained to McGinniss that if Shakespeare knocked him again for his directing, he would walk out.

  The Nixon campaign spent the final days of the race lurching from one self-inflicted crisis to the next. Ailes believed they were panicking. On Sunday, Nixon reversed himself and did what Jack McKinney had asked h
im to do: he appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation. It was a middling performance. Nonetheless he agreed to do Meet the Press the next week.

  On Sunday, November 3, Ailes met with Nixon to prep for his Meet the Press appearance. Still in a foul mood about being second-guessed, Ailes later told a reporter that “too many people were bugging” him. To blow off steam, he drove an hour and a half north to a rural airstrip and went skydiving. On the second jump, he took a hard landing. The impact shredded ligaments in his ankle.

  The next morning, his ankle wrapped but hardly usable, he rode in a rented yellow Ford Thunderbird over to NBC’s Burbank studios, where 125 telephones had been installed for a pre-election live telethon. He hobbled around the set on crutches, taking painkillers and barking orders to the staff. The injury seemed to draw out Ailes’s cynicism. “It’s going to be a dull fucking two hours,” Ailes told McGinniss.

  Indeed, the telethon was a polite and restrained affair—a celebration of square chic. Nixon trotted out a taped endorsement from Jackie Gleason. David Eisenhower earnestly read a letter from his grandfather that hoped for a Nixon victory.

  The Humphrey telethon, by contrast, tacked hip. The candidate surrounded himself with celebrities including Paul Newman, fresh off his Oscar-nominated role in Cool Hand Luke, and the Brooklyn-born singer Abbe Lane, who offended many Americans with her frank sex talk.

  “That’s crazy,” Al Scott said when he saw that Humphrey was taking live, unscripted phone calls. “They’ve got no control.”

  That was the point. Rick Rosner, Humphrey’s television adviser and a former colleague of Ailes’s from Mike Douglas, was counterprogramming against Nixon’s controlled image. Throughout the evening, Humphrey roamed freely across the set, stepping over tangled electrical wires and discarded coffee cups, as he conversed with callers directly. The messy scene was deliberate: advisers wanted the stage to have an authentic feel. In its self-conscious messiness, the show attempted to tap into the deep vein of antiauthority running through America. To the millions of Americans tuning in, Hubert Humphrey’s closing argument was that he was real; Richard Nixon was a television construct.