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

by Sherman, Gabriel

  Ailes’s blunt talk encouraged Reagan. Afterward, Ailes demanded that Deaver and Baker give him access. “If you give me that, he’ll win. If you don’t, he’ll probably lose,” Ailes said. The ultimatum worked: he was invited to help Reagan rehearse for the second debate. During a final run-through at the White House, Ailes ignored prior warnings about broaching the age issue. As Ailes walked with Reagan to the elevator, he said, “Mr. President, what are you going to do when they say you’re too old for the job?” Reagan, according to Ailes, “stopped cold and blinked.” Ailes went on: “It’s critical that you get by that issue successfully.”

  It was the push Reagan needed. At the second debate, Reagan delivered the iconic one-liner: “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” Ailes observed Mondale’s reaction. “Even he broke into a smile, but I could see in his eyes that he knew it was over,” Ailes recalled. “… I could almost hear him thinking, ‘Son of a gun, the old man got away with it!’ ”

  When Democrats and even Republicans criticized Ailes, he played the victim. He claimed that attack politics was an issue of free speech. “It’s a question of whether or not you have a right to discuss your opponent’s record,” he told The New York Times. “The essential thing is that you have to be fair. The public has a sense of when you’re out of bounds.”

  But Ailes tested boundaries and sometimes crossed them. In 1986, he produced an incendiary thirty-second commercial for Wisconsin Republican senator Robert Kasten, who was locked in a tight reelection fight against Edward Garvey. Ailes’s spot implied that Garvey, formerly the head of the National Football League Players Association, may have stolen $750,000 from the union fund. A few days before the election, Garvey named Kasten and Ailes in a $2 million libel suit. “There are limits to what you can say, even in a political campaign,” Garvey told the press. But it was too late. Kasten won by three points. Seven months later, Kasten settled Garvey’s suit out of court.

  Ailes’s behavior became legend in Republican circles. In October 1984, Ailes exploded when Ronald Reagan forgot to mention Mitch McConnell’s name in his remarks at a rally for the Senate candidate. “We had to restrain him from trying to beat someone up,” McConnell’s campaign manager, Janet Mullins, recalled. On occasion, Ailes even made frightening jokes about killing his clients. During a strategy session in Manhattan with Al D’Amato for his 1986 reelection bid, Ailes stopped the conversation after D’Amato lit into one of Ailes’s staffers. He turned to the candidate.

  “Can you fly?”

  “Why?” D’Amato returned.

  “Because we’re forty-two stories up, and you’re going to go out that window if you say one more word.”

  Republicans tolerated his volcanic eruptions because Ailes won. “We used to joke that Roger always needed a crisis,” a former Ailes Communications staffer said. “But it was not a joke. He actually did. He performed better when his back was against the wall.”

  Ailes’s power became such that he could choose his clients. As the 1988 presidential campaign approached, Ailes was courted by every serious Republican candidate. Ailes saw a lot to like in Bob Dole and Jack Kemp. But in the end, after two private meetings, he settled on his man: Vice President George H. W. Bush.

  Like Richard Nixon, George Bush was a candidate with heavy baggage, and who was bedeviled by the medium of television. “Everybody tells me there’s a problem,” Bush remarked to his chief of staff, Craig Fuller. The problem was that George Bush couldn’t give a speech. He did not project the commanding stature of a White House occupant. His eyes had the distracting tendency to dart left and right. He mangled syntax with embarrassing frequency. When he wanted to stress a particular point, his voice climbed several octaves. Added to that, he was diminished by the nature of his office. Martin Van Buren was the last sitting vice president to ascend to the Oval Office through the ballot box, an achievement nearly 150 years in the past.

  Bush envied Ronald Reagan’s talent for performance “He didn’t know how he could get as good as Reagan but he knew he had to,” Fuller recalled. “But one of the things about George Bush was he didn’t like handlers.” Fuller played to Bush’s self-image as an athlete. “If you were a professional tennis player, you would play a really good game of tennis a good part of the time. But sometimes you’re off,” Fuller told him. “A tennis coach would come in and improve your game so that the frequency of the outstanding games is up in the 90 percentile area. The same is true with your speaking.”

  Bush planned to officially declare his candidacy in October 1987, and Ailes used the year leading up to the announcement to whip him into fighting shape. He took an apartment across the Potomac River in Arlington, Virginia, and huddled with Bush up to ten times a week. Bush was a quiet man, but Ailes sussed out an inner intensity. After all, during World War II, he survived being shot down in the Pacific.

  “Why didn’t you bail out?” Ailes once asked.

  “I hadn’t completed my mission,” Bush said without a pause.

  Ailes suggested a character for Bush to play: Gary Cooper. The stoicism and grit that Cooper brought to his roles such as in High Noon would connect with wide swaths of the electorate. He taught Bush to slow down his speaking style and lower his voice. He instructed him how to focus his gaze into the camera and control his wild arm movements. He put him through so-called pepper drills, firing questions at him to sharpen his verbal reflexes. Ailes won Bush over even as he berated him. “Don’t ever wear that shirt again! You look like a fucking clerk!” he roared when Bush sported a short-sleeved shirt during a speech. “Roger was the only guy strong enough to say to George Bush, ‘Jesus Christ, you look like a pansy on TV,’ ” recalled political operative Roger Stone, who worked on the ’88 campaign with Ailes.

  As the Bush campaign structure took shape, Ailes joined an elite group of decision makers collectively known as the G-6. The team included longtime Bush loyalists Nicholas Brady, Robert Mosbacher, and the veteran pollster Bob Teeter. In this genteel bunch, Roger Ailes and campaign manager Lee Atwater, the motor-mouthed dark prince of attack politics from South Carolina, were outliers. Together, they formed the campaign’s angry id.

  Bush gave Ailes responsibility for media strategy. He would be crafting the message, overseeing the advertising, and running debate prep. In 1968, Ailes had focused exclusively on making his candidate likable. Twenty years later, Ailes trained his creative talents on the opponents. The campaign’s ads would permanently tarnish Ailes’s reputation but would make him rich. In addition to his Pete St. John–sized $25,000-a-month retainer, Ailes would earn more than $2 million during the primary alone. And he did not give up his outside commitments running other campaigns. “He had other business to attend to, so he wasn’t there full time,” Sig Rogich, a member of the Bush ad team, recalled.

  The Bush campaign turbocharged Ailes’s conviction that politics was war. This reality was confirmed on October 13, the day Bush was due to announce his candidacy. That morning, Newsweek put an unflattering image of Bush on its cover. The picture showed him in a banana yellow rain slicker steering his powerboat off the Maine coast and was accompanied by the headline “GEORGE BUSH: FIGHTING THE ‘WIMP FACTOR.’ ”

  The press response clouded over Bush’s announcement. From that moment, Ailes locked into his mission, proving to the world that George Herbert Walker Bush was not a wimp.

  He got his opportunity three months later when Dan Rather requested a taped interview with Bush for the CBS Evening News.

  “Ab-so-lute-ly no!” Ailes said during a meeting at Bush headquarters in Washington.

  CBS proposed a counteroffer: a live interview. The date was set for January 25, two weeks before the Iowa caucuses.

  A few days before the interview, the campaign got a tip from a source at CBS: Rather was planning to sandbag Bush with pointed questions about Iran-Contra and even planned to lead the interview with a five-minute segment about t
he scandal. Bush was campaigning in New Hampshire the day of the interview and only had a brief window to prepare for the showdown. “I knew if we were gonna get through this we needed Roger,” Craig Fuller recalled.

  Ailes met with Bush and Fuller in Bush’s office on Capitol Hill, where the interview would take place. He warned Bush that Rather was going to screw him. “All they have to do is press you on dates and bullshit that you haven’t had time to review, and you’re gonna look like you don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “If somebody asked me what I had for lunch last Thursday, I wouldn’t know, but I’d look guilty trying to think about it.”

  Bush downplayed the risk. “Dan Rather is a good newsman.”

  “Hey, his job is to get ratings,” Ailes retorted. “His ass is on the line. He doesn’t care about you. If he thought he could get away with it, he’d shoot you.”

  Ailes gave Bush a playbook. “Don’t accept anything Rather says to you. Don’t accept the premise of any question—I don’t even care if it’s right. Stay on the offense the whole time and wear him out.”

  Fuller proposed a zinger. “Look, if he really just trashes you on Iran-Contra, why don’t you tell him, ‘How would you like to be judged your whole career on the seven minutes you walked off the set?’ ” It was a reference to Rather’s recent on-air meltdown over CBS’s decision to interrupt his newscast to broadcast a tennis match. Because Rather had stalked off the set, CBS had to air a blank screen when the match ended.

  Ailes loved Fuller’s suggestion. He repeated it over and over. Later he would claim it was his idea, a fiction that Fuller never challenged publicly.

  As he got wired up for the interview, Bush was uncertain about using Fuller’s line. Ailes, reprising his role as a prop boy on the Mike Douglas set, directed Bush from the sidelines. He scrawled “WALKED OFF THE AIR” in block letters on a cue card and stood just off-camera.

  Rather, who was in New York conducting the interview remotely, began on the attack. Bush countered, accusing CBS of luring him into a trap. “I find this to be a rehash and a little bit, if you’ll excuse me, a misrepresentation on the part of CBS, who said you’re doing political profiles on all the candidates,” he said. The line landed like an uppercut.

  Each time Rather asked a question, Bush cut him off. Neither were comfortable performers, and they had the awkward habit of talking at the same time. Rather, increasingly flustered by Bush’s filibustering, raced through his questions as if producers might pull the plug at any moment.

  “I don’t want to be argumentative, Mr. Vice President,” Rather said at one point.

  “You do, Dan,” Bush taunted.

  “Go! Go! Just kick his ass!” Ailes mouthed and waved his cue card excitedly. It was time for the knockout. “It’s not fair to judge my whole career by a rehash on Iran,” Bush told Rather. “How would you like it if I judged your career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set in New York? Would you like that?”

  He got the time and place wrong—Rather’s tantrum had taken place during a broadcast from Miami and the screen was blank for six minutes—but details did not matter. The interview was over and Bush was euphoric. “Well, I had my say,” he howled, yanking out his earpiece. “He makes Lesley Stahl look like a pussy,” he continued, referring to the CBS news-woman. Ailes desperately tried to remind Bush that his mic was still hot. “But it’s going to help me. Because that bastard didn’t lay a glove on me.” (Bush later apologized to Stahl.)

  The CBS switchboard lit up with calls from irate Republicans. On the campaign trail, Republicans began displaying anti-Rather signs and buttons. “Lee Atwater said, ‘There are only a few defining moments in a campaign and this was one of them,’ ” recalled Craig Fuller. Though he had not meaningfully answered questions about Iran-Contra, George Bush answered the most important question of all: he was not a wimp.

  Ailes had helped Bush slay the media, but to win, Bush would also need to slay his own kind. On February 8, 1988, Bush placed a dismal third in the Iowa caucuses. If he failed to win the Granite State on February 16, it was game over. On Tuesday morning—a week before the New Hampshire primary—Ailes was holed up in the Clarion Hotel, outside Nashua, with the Bush high command. He was racked with pneumonia and a temperature of 102, but Ailes refused to bow to his feverish state. Bush needed to hit Bob Dole, who was rising in the polls, hard. Ailes pitched the campaign on an attack ad that his friend Tom Messner had suggested. “I said, look, you gotta do something with taxes,” Messner recalled. “That’s what seemed to win or lose in New Hampshire. Even Reagan got beaten in New Hampshire because someone concocted an argument that the federal tax cuts he was proposing in ’76 would result in higher state taxes in New Hampshire.”

  With laughably poor production values, Ailes’s “Straddle Ad” would show two faces of Dole on a split screen as a voice-over stated that Dole “straddled” the issue of raising taxes. Bush rejected it, but Ailes ignored him. He called his wife, Norma, who worked at Ailes Communications, and told her to produce the ad.

  “Do we have authorization?”

  “They don’t air it, I’ll eat it. We’re gonna need it.”

  Ailes read his script over the phone. “Bob Dole straddles, and he just won’t promise not to raise taxes. And you know what that means,” he told her. The tape arrived the following morning. By Thursday, five days before the primary, Dole was even with Bush in the polls. That night, Ailes played the Straddle Ad for the veep.

  “God. That’s awful,” Bush said. The word “Straddle” flashed across the screen in garish type. The ad concluded with the tagline: “Taxes—He can’t say no.”

  Over the next two days, the campaign lobbied Bush to go up with the Straddle Ad. “We gotta, uh, kick ’em in the nuts!” Atwater told Ailes. George W. Bush, campaigning for his father, also supported it. On Saturday morning, Atwater and Ailes went to Bush’s suite to make a final pitch. New polls showed Bush trailing Dole by five points. “The press is gonna say we’re desperate. Have we checked those facts?” Bush asked. He did not want to win dirty. Atwater said the campaign’s opposition research guru, Jim Pinkerton, had the figures to back up the claims. “This is your business,” Bush muttered in a resigned tone, “not mine.”

  It was the acquiescence they needed. The campaign put big money behind the spot. New Hampshire voters would see it an average of eighteen times over the next sixty hours. On Tuesday, February 16, Bush won New Hampshire by nine points. The true impact of the Straddle Ad was not the doubt it sowed about Dole’s tax policy; it exposed Dole’s temper and mean-spiritedness, which had dogged his candidacy from the beginning. On primary night, Tom Brokaw hosted Bush and Dole for a joint appearance on NBC. Bush was on-set, Dole was on remote from his hotel. Brokaw asked Dole if he had a message for Bush. “Yeah,” he sneered into the camera. “Stop lying about my record.”

  In an instant, Dole was laid bare on national television. “He responded with a Nixon-like scowl,” recalled Janet Mullins, who was then on the Bush campaign. “There was always that talk of Dole not being a nice person, and of course that was opposite of George Bush’s public persona.” Five weeks later, Dole dropped out of the race.

  On Thursday, May 26, the day before Memorial Day weekend, Ailes arrived at a nondescript office park in Paramus, New Jersey, to observe a focus group of likely voters. Massachusetts Democratic governor Michael Dukakis was all but certain to be Bush’s opponent. Around the table sat white, middle-class Reagan Democrats who didn’t know much about Dukakis but found his qualities attractive. The son of Greek immigrants, Dukakis was a Harvard-trained lawyer who had served in the military. His brand was technocratic and moderate. As governor, he had helped turn around his state—the “Massachusetts Miracle,” as his campaign called it.

  If Bush did not take back these voters, he would lose. Ailes watched from behind a one-way mirror, as a moderator asked the group questions based on Jim Pinkerton’s oppo research. “If you learned the following things about Dukakis, w
ould it change your mind about him?” the moderator asked. Willie Horton, a black convicted murderer from Massachusetts, had been given a “weekend pass” to get out of jail as part of a prison furlough program Governor Dukakis had approved. While on leave, Horton brutally raped a white woman and stabbed her boyfriend. Furthermore, Dukakis was also against the death penalty and prayer in school. “I didn’t realize all these things when I said I was for Dukakis,” one woman said. By the end of the session, half the room switched their support to George Bush.

  Ailes maintained that focus groups were a waste of time and money. But the New Jersey session confirmed what he felt in his gut: Dukakis was impressive on paper but weak in person. Ailes had consulted a psychiatrist to get a read on Dukakis. Word came back that he was a narcissist. Ailes thought of him as the annoying kid in school who raised his hand at the end of class to remind the teacher she had forgotten to assign homework.

  At a campaign retreat in Kennebunkport that weekend, Ailes and Atwater planned to tag-team Bush to convince him to go negative. “We’re gonna have to destroy the littler fucker,” one Bush official recalled Ailes saying. Polls showed Bush trailing Dukakis by as much as seventeen points. Before going to bed the first night, Atwater and Ailes left tapes of the New Jersey focus group with Bush. The next morning, they never had to make a sales pitch. “Well, you guys are the experts,” Bush said quietly.

  The assault started a week later. On June 9, in a speech at the Texas state GOP convention, Bush attacked Dukakis as a tax-hiking, U.N.-appeasing Cambridge hippie. “Michael Dukakis on crime is standard old-style sixties liberalism!” Bush crowed. “He has steadfastly opposed the death penalty … he supported the only state program in the whole country—the only one—that gives unsupervised weekend furloughs to first degree murderers!”