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

by Sherman, Gabriel

  Television critic Marvin Kitman concluded the Times review by raising the prospect that Ailes had irreparably damaged his relationship with Nixon. “When this book, filled with Ailes’s colorful vocabulary, becomes a bestseller, Nixon-watchers will see a major test for the Administration,” Kitman wrote. “It has been said that Nixon shares one attribute with the Kennedys and LBJ: ruthlessness. Ailes may become the John Peter Zenger of the Nixon administration,” Zenger being the eighteenth-century German-American publisher who was a defendant in a legal case that helped establish printing the truth as a defense against libel. A few days later, Haldeman returned an icy, two-sentence reply: “Thank you for writing your note of October 2. I’ve been aware of McGinniss’s book and statements for quite some time, and there’s really nothing much that we can do about it at this point except hope that something like this doesn’t happen again.”

  Despite the tensions caused by The Selling of the President, the book, which immediately shot to the top of the bestseller list, supercharged his reputation as a television impresario. McGinniss’s contention that presidential politics was really the realm of hidden behind-the-camera forces seemed perfectly calibrated to the conspiratorial zeitgeist of the late 1960s—and in this universe, a wizard like Ailes was a crucial figure. McGinniss’s ensemble cast of cynical characters were prime specimens of an altogether new archetype: the mercenary campaign operative. They constituted a vastly different breed from the public-spirited heroes who populated Theodore White’s Making of the President 1968, which had been published earlier that year. White’s elegant prose suddenly seemed dated.

  Of all of McGinniss’s characters, Ailes emerged as the most vivid—the prime manipulator. He was the expletive-spouting antihero—the private dialogue was diametrically opposed to the public—who was willing to push himself to exhaustion to get the job done. Even those who despised Richard Nixon could find an alluring, likable quality to Ailes’s roguish antics. “That was the thing. These other guys were ciphers and Roger was in Technicolor,” McGinniss said. “Of course he’s going to become the star of the book. All the quips and everything, that’s the way he was all the time.”

  And, as a coup of image making, it far outdistanced anything he had done for Richard Nixon. Although he professed outrage to his bosses at the White House, Ailes lapped up the attention in other spheres. When McGinniss appeared on the Today show to promote the book, Barbara Walters berated him off-camera about how he portrayed her friend. “Roger isn’t offended at all,” McGinniss replied. “In fact, he likes the book.”

  Only a few weeks later, Ailes was back to joking about the whole thing. He sent a letter to Jack Rourke reveling in all the salty quotes McGinniss included in the book. “It’s disgraceful,” he wrote in mock indignation. “I don’t know who the fuck he thinks he is.”

  The book was a boon for Ailes’s consulting business. Republican politicians all over the country clamored for Ailes to do for them what McGinniss had shown him doing for Nixon. “His career was started not by Richard Nixon but by Joe McGinniss,” Ailes’s brother observed. And the upcoming midterm elections in 1970 would offer many opportunities. The week before McGinniss’s book hit the stores, Ailes quit The Dennis Wholey Show. Ailes claimed that Taft Broadcasting had “breached” a deal to give him “creative control of the show and final decisions with regard to staff assignments.”

  And ultimately, even the White House was somewhat swayed by McGinniss’s portrayal. Television was a strategic priority, and Ailes was a master of the medium. By the end of 1969, the administration finally turned its attention to developing a comprehensive TV plan at a time when Nixon was increasingly insecure about the public’s perception of his leadership. The massing antiwar movement had heightened Nixon’s paranoia that his adversaries were fomenting violent insurrection. Even the upsurge in support generated by his November 3 “Silent Majority” speech failed to erase his unshakable feeling that he lacked “mystique.”

  The renewed focus on television provided Ailes with another chance to secure an official place in the administration. A few days before Christmas, Haldeman wrote Ailes requesting a pitch for how Nixon could use television. Ailes worked through the holidays crafting a confidential seven-page proposal, which he sent to Haldeman on December 30. Ailes wanted to retain flexibility to build his business, so he proposed having the White House hire an assistant to work inside the administration, while Ailes remained on the outside, managing the staff person remotely. “I am proposing that you use me in this capacity because you know my work, I know your problems, I’m dedicated to the President on a personal and political basis, and I realize that in this type of work there is no margin for error,” he wrote.

  Access was important. Ailes explained to Haldeman that he wanted to report directly to him, “so television doesn’t again slip to a secondary position of importance, given the President’s feelings about it.” He proposed that Nixon host a series of “fireside chats” and “person-to-person programs.” He wanted Nixon’s speechwriters to use language best suited to the medium. “Having spent a great deal of time studying audiences and writing introductions and interviews for TV, I know quite a bit about the ‘effect’ of words and phrases on people,” he wrote. “My feeling is in keeping with the President’s sincere style, sometimes more emotional words could be used to our advantage. ‘Kickers’ and memorable phrases need to be used more.” The proposal reflected Ailes’s earnest side, too. Under an idea he called the “Challenge of the 70s,” Ailes advised Nixon to “make a major address on this and state publicly that poverty, air and water pollution will be eliminated in America totally by 1980.” It was a strategy designed to burnish Nixon’s legacy. “This is similar to Kennedy’s challenge for the moon. It isn’t met in his administration but when it’s reached he gets the credit,” Ailes wrote. “If done well it will markedly counterbalance his pragmatic image with that of an idealist and dreamer.”

  On January 7, Haldeman forwarded Ailes’s memo to Nixon. “I think Ailes is probably the best man for this job, at least for the present time,” he wrote. Nixon signed his initials in the box marked “Approve” and Ailes was hired at the consultant’s rate of $100 per day, the equivalent of $600 in 2013.

  Not everyone in the West Wing was on-board with the decision. “If he is hired,” Dwight Chapin, who handled TV matters at the White House, wrote in a memo, “I think that the message should be made extremely clear that there is nothing permanent about the job.” Ailes recognized that he faced bureaucratic rivals in the press office. Ailes told Chapin he wanted Haldeman to have a meeting with communications director Herb Klein and press secretary Ron Ziegler to “make sure everyone understands the setup.”

  A Nixon insider, Ziegler had known Chapin from their days together at the University of Southern California, and had been with Nixon since ’62. After the failed gubernatorial campaign, he worked alongside Haldeman at J. Walter Thompson. At thirty, he was the youngest presidential press secretary in history and he wasn’t going to cede ground easily to an outsider like Ailes.

  On February 4, Ailes wrote an urgent memo to Haldeman raising concerns about the design of the new press briefing room that was being built in the space of the White House swimming pool. Ailes had spoken with a lighting designer who had told him that “the present plans seem to [be] lacking for TV.” The comments must have embarrassed Ziegler, whom Ailes copied on the letter. That same day, Ziegler fired off a two-page memo defending the press room’s design. “We have not looked at, nor do I think we should look at this facility as a television studio with highly sophisticated lighting capabilities,” he wrote. Haldeman backed Ziegler and the press room blueprints remained unchanged. A few weeks later, when the press room was completed, Ziegler wrote a sarcastic memo to Chapin about Ailes. “I would like to test the lighting on the President in the new Press Room sometime in the very near future.… If you can give me an idea as to when we can do this, I will work it out with Roger Ailes. Of course, we would want to have
our T.V. consultant Roger on the scene.”

  In late February, Ailes was subverted by Ziegler again. Haldeman had asked Ailes to recommend producers for the position of White House TV assistant. Ailes submitted three candidates, with Bob LaPorta, his former Mike Douglas colleague, at the top of his list. “Roger wanted me to be his eyes down there,” LaPorta recalled. The White House brought LaPorta in for an interview, but he was passed over for the position.

  After another candidate, a thirty-five-year-old news director named Bob Knott, was also resisted, Ailes vented about being frozen out. “I would very much like to get things arranged according to my original memo of some months ago since I cannot afford to drop everything for four days and lose large sums of money very frequently,” Ailes wrote to Haldeman.

  It may not have been the right message to convey. Nor did Nixon’s advisers appreciate Ailes’s bold self-promotion, even as he used interviews to spin the damage done by the McGinniss book. In mid-March, Ziegler wrote a terse memo to Haldeman titled “Roger Ailes appearance in CBS morning news show.” Ziegler complained to Haldeman that Ailes was talking too much about his behind-the-scenes work for Nixon. “I have no objection to Ailes discussing from time to time the President’s preparation for TV appearances. However, I think we should approach this extremely cautiously,” he wrote.

  Ailes’s political work on behalf of Republican candidates caused problems, too. In Florida, drugstore magnate Jack Eckerd had hired Ailes to help him mount a challenge to incumbent governor Claude Kirk. Eckerd’s move immediately prompted speculation that the Nixon administration was punishing Kirk for having supported Nelson Rockefeller at the 1968 GOP convention. “Ailes is involving himself professionally in Republican primary contests and too close of a public association between Ailes and the President could lead to problems,” Ziegler wrote Haldeman.

  Ziegler’s concerns were well founded. In the spring of 1970, Ailes was in the middle of another contentious GOP primary race for an open Senate seat in Ohio, one that would have spillover effects for Nixon’s presidency, and the country. Ailes was advising the Ohio congressman Robert Taft Jr. against the “law and order” candidate, Governor James Rhodes, who had been considered as a possible Nixon running mate in ’68. The race was pushing Rhodes even further to the right.

  When Taft debated Rhodes in Akron in late April, Ailes walked onstage thirty seconds before airtime and handed Taft a note with one word written on it: “Kill.”

  “Rhodes got shook up,” Ailes bragged afterward to a Boston Globe reporter. “I gave Taft the note, partly facetiously, partly for a laugh—just to try to get Bob to be a little tougher in his answers.”

  The gambit worked: the Toledo Blade noted that “the usually placid Mr. Taft accused the governor of lying about his record and told him he should be ashamed of himself.” A few days after the debate, Rhodes flew to Kent State University, which was engulfed in student unrest. At a press conference on the morning of May 3, Rhodes lashed into protesters who had burned the ROTC building the previous night and declaimed that the demonstrators were “worse than the Brown Shirts and the Communist element.”

  Rhodes’s inflammatory speech intensified the conflict in Kent. In the chaos, National Guardsmen fired into a group of marchers. The volley of more than sixty shots in thirteen seconds left four dead and nine wounded. Kent State, Bob Haldeman later wrote in his book The Ends of Power, “marked a turning point for Nixon, a beginning of his downward slide towards Watergate.”

  As the Nixon administration began to circle the wagons, Ailes was increasingly left on the outside—in hindsight, a fortunate development. Unable to get the White House to make a decision on his television memo, Ailes headed west, taking a room at the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood. He was back into the zany world of daytime TV with a new variety program starring the game show host Tom Kennedy, who had a hit with You Don’t Say! on NBC.

  It was the type of producing work Ailes seemed to enjoy most—having the blank canvas, being in charge. He hired Kelly Garrett, a beautiful cabaret singer whom he had met on the set of Mike Douglas, to be Tom Kennedy’s musical talent. Even though he was still married to Marjorie (they would not get divorced until 1977), he never spoke of his wife around the set. “All I knew was that he was single,” Tom Kennedy said.

  The taping of the premiere episode of The Real Tom Kennedy Show, as the new show was called, took place on March 31, 1970, at the KTLA studios in Hollywood. Ailes employed many of the Douglas elements, filling the episode with pranks and stunts. He was learning how television could harness the liberal culture even as it was critiquing it, a technique he would later apply to Fox News. Near the end of the debut, Kennedy interviewed the sexploitation movie director Russ Meyer, who was promoting his surprise hit Vixen! Kennedy chatted with Meyer about the controversy, then turned to the audience for their reaction, which was decidedly critical. When a middle-aged man in a dark suit vowed he would never watch one of Meyer’s films, Kennedy called him on stage to appear in an improv skit with Edy Williams, the curvy star of a Meyer soft-core porn movie. Kennedy gave each of them cue cards to recite through a “scene.” Williams playfully purred that her reading partner was “very sexy” and slowly positioned his right arm over her bare shoulder. His wife watched pensively from the audience as he stuttered and giggled, mangling his lines.

  In late May, Ailes learned he was fired from the Republican National Committee. A White House memo later stated that Ailes had been “released by Jim Allison, Deputy Chairman of the Republican National Committee in February 1970, following statement made by Roger Ailes that REA would offer its services to Democrat as well as Republican candidates.” There were competitive factors at play as well: Allison had a political consulting firm with his friend and former Ailes colleague Harry Treleaven. A Boston Globe profile noted that Ailes was aggressively signing up Republican clients, and was involved in half a dozen races that year. In the interview, Ailes boasted that one day television could replace the party itself: “The skeletons of political parties will remain. But television will accelerate the breaking down of mass registration by party. The figures show this already. Youth are independent.”

  After an unsuccessful attempt to get the White House to intervene to save his RNC contract, Ailes fired off an angry letter to Allison, copying Haldeman and Nixon hand Murray Chotiner:

  Once again it has been brought to my attention that you have been rapping me with certain campaign people around the country. Recently I have had two playbacks from states that I am involved in. There is always the possibility, of course, that these are erroneous reports and if they are, please ignore this letter and accept my apology. However, if they are not erroneous, please do not ignore this letter. If the reports are true, I can only assume that since you know nothing of my work, you are simply stating that our company is “over-priced” to protect your own financial game.

  Business is business, but I would hate to see you and me get into a shoving match since the only loser would be the GOP. Frankly, Jim, I am tired of being on defense in this matter. I’m instinctively better at offense.

  Ailes, who had just turned thirty, was unafraid to step over men nearly twice his age. The letter revealed not only ferocious competitiveness, but also a palpable belief that enemies sought to harm him.

  From the earliest days of the administration, Nixon had transformed the White House into a laboratory to incubate ideas that would strip the establishment media of its power, ideas that would inform Fox News decades later. New fault lines over civil rights, Vietnam, and the women’s movement had cleaved the culture. Nixon intended to exploit this rift, turning his Silent Majority against the big-city newspapers and the broadcast networks, whom he saw as being on the side of liberals. “The press is the enemy,” Nixon told his aides. “They are all against us.”

  On June 3, 1969, Haldeman had ordered Herb Klein to prepare a report on the political biases of the network anchors covering the White House. “The President is very concerned a
bout the general attitude of a number of the television newscasters and commentators who are deliberately slanting their reports against the Administration’s position,” he wrote. A few hours later, Klein responded with a memo categorizing more than two dozen commentators and reporters. (“Bill Gill—a sensationalist who is more negative than positive.… Dan Rather—more favorable than he was prior to the election.… John Chancellor—sometimes negative.… The most vindictive is Sander Vanocur. You know him. He is in Saigon.”)

  The idea of “balance” took hold inside the White House. “I have discussed television balance with Reuven Frank, president of NBC News, and Dick Salant, president of CBS News,” Klein told Nixon in a memo on October 17, 1969. “I have made them aware of the fact that we are watching this closely,” he wrote, referring to the networks’ perceived political bias. Klein mentioned that the White House could deploy the power of the FCC to revoke their broadcast licenses if they did not change.

  Ailes volunteered for Nixon’s war with the media, offering his services for some of the administration’s most brazen propaganda campaigns. In June 1970, he participated in an aborted project to produce a covert White House–directed documentary, secretly financed by the Tell It to Hanoi Committee, to rebut a CBS program critical of the Vietnam War. The idea was abandoned when it became clear that any leak of the White House’s involvement in the project would embarrass the administration. Ailes told Nixon aide Jeb Magruder to keep him in mind for such films in the future. “If you decide to go ahead with something like this at a later time,” he wrote, “be sure to let me know as far in advance as you can and we’ll try to put it together.”