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

by Sherman, Gabriel

  With Bush on board, Ailes got to work on his search-and-destroy battle plan for television. Ignoring the slick Madison Avenue creative types, he recruited lesser knowns who would be loyal to him. Dennis Frankenberry was one. He ran a small agency out of Milwaukee that produced commercials for Sentry Insurance and Leinenkugel Beer. He had done only one political race—a campaign for district attorney in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Ailes also tapped some loyalists from the ’84 Reagan campaign: Tom Messner and Sig Rogich.

  In his multiple roles of grand strategist, speech coach, and television guru, Ailes set the creative tone of the campaign. While only fifteen of the campaign’s forty spots were negative, such bald appeals to race, patriotism, and class had rarely been displayed on the national stage. To attack Dukakis on the furlough issue, Rogich came up with the idea to film actors dressed as prisoners walking through a revolving door. The ad’s centerpiece was a black man who gazed menacingly at the camera the moment he walked through. To hammer Dukakis’s reputation as an environmentalist, Rogich captured footage of the Boston Harbor on a drizzly, gray day, brazenly filming a bright orange sign that read “DANGER RADIATION HAZARD NO SWIMMING.” The warning was an artifact from a decommissioned nuclear submarine base, and had nothing to do with Dukakis.

  At least one of Ailes’s own contributions was rejected for going out of bounds. The proposed ad, titled “Bestiality,” featureed simple text scrolling across a black screen: “In 1970, Governor Michael Dukakis introduced legislation in Massachusetts to repeal the ban on sodomy and bestiality.” As the word “bestiality” appeared, a soundtrack of bleating barnyard animals would play. Ailes told his team that ads like “Bestiality” weren’t actually “negative.” They were “comparative.”

  As the fall campaign revved into high gear, Ailes was a constant presence at Bush’s side. “He didn’t give a significant speech without Roger,” Sheila Tate, Bush’s campaign spokesperson, recalled. “Roger had an uncanny ability to buck up a candidate,” campaign chief James Baker recalled. “He made them feel good about themselves. He gave them some confidence, and some great zingers. He always had good zingers.” Bush enjoyed Ailes’s dirty jokes and mordant asides. He called Dukakis “Shorty,” and “Grapeleaf,” a dig at his Greek ancestry, as well as a “Heartless Little Robot,” for spouting policy positions and arcane statistics. Bush played along. One day when his dog walked into a campaign meeting, he joked about Ailes’s bestiality ad pitch. “You’re the reason I’m running,” he said. “We’ve got to keep those people away from you.”

  On September 21, four days before the first presidential debate, a shadowy outfit called Americans for Bush, an arm of the National Security Political Action Committee, aired an attack spot titled “Weekend Passes.” The ad’s centerpiece was a grainy mug shot of Willie Horton. As Horton’s bearded, black visage hovered on the screen, a male narrator intoned: “Bush and Dukakis on crime. Bush supports the death penalty for first degree murderers. Dukakis not only opposes the death penalty, he allowed first degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison. One was Willie Horton, who murdered a boy in a robbery, stabbing him nineteen times. Despite a life sentence, Horton received 10 weekend passes from prison. Horton fled, kidnapped a young couple, stabbing the man and repeatedly raping his girlfriend. Weekend prison passes. Dukakis on crime.” The words “Kidnapping … Stabbing … Raping” were displayed under Horton’s picture, explicitly calibrated to stoke the racial fears of white Reagan Democrats.

  The ad created blowback for Bush. Federal election law barred campaigns from coordinating their media strategy with independent groups. Ailes denied any involvement in the ad’s creation, but there were suspicious signs. In August, Ailes had boasted to the press, “The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it.” And the Horton ad was created by two former employees of Ailes Communications: Larry McCarthy, who had left the company the previous year, and Jesse Raiford, a thirty-year-old director, who had spent six years at Ailes Communications.

  Roger Stone said that, while he did not think Ailes was involved in the Horton spot, Lee Atwater was. Atwater played it for Stone before it aired, an act that Stone called “an admission of illegality.” When Stone told him, “You don’t need to do this. You got this issue,” Atwater called him “a pussy.” Whether or not Ailes had any direct role in putting Horton’s picture on millions of television screens, his style had clearly inspired the ad. “I know Roger very well,” Larry McCarthy told the press. “I just tried to [make] it as if I were Roger.”

  In the hours leading up to the debate, Bush studied an array of briefing books. “Roger detected that the most important thing for Bush was to be relaxed,” Sheila Tate said. “Roger said to him, ‘Now what are you going to do if Mike Dukakis rips off his microphone and walks over to you and says, ‘Iran-Contra! Iran-Contra!’ Bush goes to look at his briefing book. Roger slams it closed. He said, ‘No! That’s when you say, ‘Get out of my face, you little shit!’ And Bush started laughing. Roger was just trying to get him to loosen up. That’s one of his techniques.”

  That night, Ailes kept up his guerrilla tactics. He stood with Bush offstage as Jim Lehrer, the moderator, prepared to call the candidates out. When Dukakis looked over at Ailes, he pointed down to a riser that was installed behind Dukakis’s podium and started to laugh. “That was his idea of getting inside Dukakis’s head,” Tate said.

  As Election Day approached, Ailes behaved like a defensive lineman preparing for a game, his aggression spilling over into all of his relationships. In August, he walked into Bush headquarters and flipped a conference table over. He was verbally abusive to Janet Mullins, who was in charge of the campaign’s ad budgets. “He threatened to kill me—twice—because I had the audacity to question some of his expenditures,” Mullins recalled. “He was getting paid in a lot of different ways and earned every bit of it. But if you’re in charge of the media budget, you want to make sure you’re not spending it on the Ritz or the Four Seasons when Roger came to town.” Staffers noted that Lee Atwater seemed afraid of Ailes. He told the press that Ailes had two speeds: “attack and destroy.”

  Ailes’s appetite seemed to be a barometer of his ego. His weight ballooned to 240 pounds. Craig Fuller recalled one hotel stop when Ailes declared, “ ‘Dammit, I’m hungry! Can’t we get some room service?’ We said, ‘Sure.’ Well, Roger grabs the room service menu. He was kind of agitated and he said, ‘I want page three, I want page four and I want page five and I want it now.’ ” He was also known to inhale Häagen-Dazs ice cream and donuts. During one commercial shoot, Tom Messner recalled, Ailes was “sitting there with a donut, and there’s this frosting on it, and the frosting is dripping down his shirt.” Ailes could turn donuts into projectiles. “When he would have his emotional moments, he’d throw his donuts across the room,” Sig Rogich said. “I’d ask him if it was a one or two donut day.”

  Leaks sent Ailes into fits. “A donut throwing moment” occurred, according to Rogich, when the trade journal Advertising Age sent a reporter to write about one of Ailes’s commercials. After The New York Times wrote a column about Tom Messner’s contributions to the campaign, he received a heated phone call from Ailes. “How did you get this Bush assignment?” Messner recalled Ailes saying. He did not appreciate his subordinate getting press.

  Bush marched toward Election Day along the low road paved by Ailes. A week and a half after the debate, Rogich’s “Revolving Door” ad aired. Although Horton’s name never appeared in the spot, the linkage between it and Horton was obvious. Television news producers were mostly interested in pictures, attacks, and gaffes, which was why Ailes’s attack spots were discussed so widely in the press. “It was a hard ad to do without appearing to be racist,” Janet Mullins said.

  By mid-October, Ailes green-lighted an ad that showed Dukakis wearing a helmet and grinning while he rode around in a tank as an announcer ticked off various weapons systems he opposed. The visual said it all. As Mike Douglas had once
told Woody Fraser: never wear a funny hat.

  From the time Dukakis clinched the nomination in early June, his unfavorability standing among voters doubled, from 20 percent to 43 percent. Meanwhile, Bush held steady at around 40 percent unfavorable. Even Bush’s positive spots were devastating to Dukakis’s image. In the campaign’s most memorable ad, titled “Family/Children,” Ailes filmed Bush on the lawn in Kennebunkport surrounded by his adorable, flaxen-haired grandchildren—a Kennedyesque tableau that made Dukakis seem foreign by comparison. The force of Bush’s ad war was met by Dukakis’s inept response. “I sat there mute, which is one of the dumbest decisions I’ve ever made,” Dukakis said years later. “I made a decision early on that I was simply not gonna respond to this stuff.… I blew it.”

  Roger Stone—no stranger to dirty tricks—said he felt Ailes ran an insignificant campaign. “Wedge issues can still be about big ideas,” he said. “My problem was that the wedge issues in ’88 were all confections.”

  Even the candidate himself recoiled at trafficking in race baiting. “Here’s a man who has an exemplary record on civil rights,” Craig Fuller recalled. “The Bush family hated it. None of us liked it, we knew it was a problem.” In late October, Bush called Ailes and complained about his slash-and-burn stump speeches.

  “I want to get back on the issues and quit talking about him,” Bush said.

  “We plan to do that November ninth”—the morning after election day—Ailes said. Bush won by a commanding eight-point margin. It was validation that Ailes’s brand of divisive politics could win national majorities.

  Despite the professional success, it had been a difficult few years. Ailes’s marriage to Norma, strained by the stress of the Bush campaign, was on the verge of ending. “My wife has made the case that I will be destroyed eventually,” he told Newsweek around this time. In 1983, Ailes’s father had succumbed to complications from severe Alzheimer’s. His decline was painful for Roger and his siblings. “It hit Roger hard, very hard,” his brother said. “He broke down, he couldn’t think of Dad being dead. He was sobbing on the way to the cemetery.” And after Bush’s victory, Ailes was forced to defend his reputation. As Democrats and journalists singled Ailes out for the divisive, racially charged tone of Bush’s media message, calling him “New York’s master of the slick and sleazy” and a practitioner of “political terrorism,” he had his assistants at Ailes Communications release a survey showing that 80 percent of ads he produced in his career were, in fact, positive. He offered a $100,000 reward to anyone who could prove he created the Horton ad and told the press that he did not even know that two of his former employees made the Horton ad. In April 1989, he blasted out a press release that read: “TO IMPLY COLLUSION BETWEEN ROGER AILES OR THE BUSH ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN AND THE POLITICAL ACTION COMMITTEE INVOLVED IN THIS AD IS TO ACCUSE US OF A FELONY.”

  In July 1989, Ailes welcomed the journalist Donald Baer to his home in Westchester County for lunch with his wife, Norma, and his mother, Donna, who was in town visiting. Over hamburgers and hot dogs, Ailes’s family provided Baer with glowing testimonials. They spoke of his childhood struggle with hemophilia and how he once slept on the floor to comfort a sick dog. “Underneath that exterior, he’s really soft inside,” Donna told Baer.

  “Yeah,” Ailes chimed in, “that’s what Mrs. Manson said.”

  Baer’s profile, which was published in the business magazine Manhattan Inc., was an attempt to dispel what Baer described as Ailes’s “Jabba the Hutt” image. But Ailes’s campaign for absolution was complicated by the fact that he showed no signs of modulating his explosive style. If anything, he was giving freer rein to his impulses.

  In the fall of 1989, he went to war for his friend, former federal prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani, who was locked in a struggling campaign for New York City mayor against the popular black Manhattan borough president, David Dinkins. Ailes continued to stoke racial fears, running a spot on television that linked Dinkins to black community organizer Robert “Sonny” Carson, who was convicted in 1974 of kidnapping. At another point in the campaign, Ailes ran a print ad in a Jewish newspaper that featured a photograph of Dinkins standing next to Jesse Jackson (five years earlier, Jackson had called New York “Hymietown”). Dinkins attacked Ailes’s charges as “gutter politics.”

  On the night of October 23, 1989, Ailes displayed the violence his father once unleashed in Warren. He charged at a group of AIDS activists who had infiltrated a Giuliani fundraiser in the ballroom of the Sheraton in Midtown Manhattan. As security guards escorted the protesters out of the room, Ailes plunged into the melee. “We were screaming, and I’m being hit in the hands and in the head. That’s when Ailes started hitting me,” recalled Kathy Ottersten, one of the activists, who at the time was a man known as Kevin. “I recognized him. I’d seen him before in the papers with the Bush campaign with the Willie Horton stuff.” Ottersten said that Ailes was in a group that dragged her down the hotel stairs as her head slammed against each step. “I wound up having to be taken to St. Vincent’s,” she said, recalling the incident years later. “I’m at the point now where I’m suffering from early stages of brain issues most likely related to all the concussions I got. I’m slowly losing nerve functions in my hands and legs.”

  At the time, Sergeant Raymond O’Donnell told reporters that Ailes could face a third-degree assault charge, a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail. But in the end, no charges were filed. “I attempted to file charges,” Ottersten said, “but was told by cops there wasn’t enough evidence.” On the Sunday before Election Day, Ailes got into another scuffle with a news photographer during the final debate at NBC’s Manhattan studios.

  No matter how hard Ailes tried, he could not get the yoke of Willie Horton off his neck. Giuliani lost by 47,000 votes. Ailes’s candidate for New Jersey governor, James Courter, was also defeated handily that Election Day by Democrat James Florio. In the fall of 1989, Ohio Democrats protested outside a conference in Columbus where Ailes was giving a speech. Ailes responded in typical fashion: he hit back harder. “They’re trying to make me the issue. Screw ’em!” he told a reporter around this time.

  One thing was certain: Willie Horton was bad for business. Lee Atwater’s sudden diagnosis of brain cancer in March 1990 left Ailes as the GOP’s prime exemplar of scorched-earth politics. Sensing partisan advantage, Democrats turned Ailes’s attack ad strategy on him. In May 1990, the Ohio Democratic Party filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission calling for an investigation into Ailes’s ties to the PAC that produced the Horton spot. The inquiry proved that Ailes did speak with Larry McCarthy during the campaign, but the FEC was deadlocked 3–3 along party lines on whether to bring formal charges against the Bush campaign and the National Security PAC. Ailes denied any wrongdoing. “I’m not the candidate,” Ailes complained to a reporter. “If I wanted to run for public office, I would.”

  By the fall of 1990, his political career was confronting a branding crisis. The constant fire from Democrats had taken a toll. On Tuesday, October 9, Ailes reached his snapping point in Chicago, where he was trying to rescue his client, Congresswoman Lynn Martin, from an imploding Senate campaign against the incumbent, Democrat Paul Simon. In front of a pack of reporters, Ailes delivered a surly news conference, as self-pitying as Nixon’s 1962 gubernatorial concession speech. “People like Paul ‘Slimon’ Simon are the ones who are hurting America,” Ailes moaned. “The truth isn’t getting out there, so now we’re going to have to let people know about him,” he said. “There won’t be anything in our ads that’s not true. It will all be there—but it will hurt.” He went on to call Simon a “weenie.”

  The slew of schoolyard insults backfired. Martin lost by thirty points.

  After a decade in politics, his brand sullied, Ailes was ready to change course again. In 1988, Ailes published the book You Are the Message: Getting What You Want by Being Who You Are with his business partner Jon Kraushar. Ailes filled the slim title with self-glorifying anecdo
tes from his adventures in television and politics. But it offered more than mere PR tips. It was a manifesto that revealed Ailes’s view that communication was a kind of spiritual life force. “When you control the atmosphere, you’re not operating on other people’s time,” he wrote. “You can learn to control the time and space you move through, if you really believe in yourself and understand what your mission is in every situation.” You Are the Message was a seductive product, published at a time when middle managers all over the country were awakening to the notion of “personal branding.”

  But the real money was in the boardroom, not on the bookshelf. The cultural and class resentments that Ailes harnessed for his Republican candidates could also be channeled for corporations. In the summer of 1988, he had signed a contract with Big Tobacco, beginning a relationship that would last at least for five years. His first assignment was running media strategy for a lobbying group called Californians Against Unfair Tax Increases, which was opposing Proposition 99, a referendum on a 25-cent cigarette tax increase. At the time, it represented the largest cigarette tax increase in history. In one memo, Ailes wrote: “Usually, in a referendum, if people are confused, anxious, or doubtful, they will vote ‘NO.’ ” Ailes noted how deception was central to his mission. “We have no obligation to tell the viewer anything not to our advantage,” he wrote.

  His ads were designed to stoke these emotions and spread misinformation about Prop 99. One ad portrayed Prop 99 supporters—which included the American Cancer Society and the American Heart Association—as out-of-touch elitists who wanted to fleece the little guy. “If you went to medical school … you’ll probably love Proposition 99,” one script read. “But if you didn’t, make sure you don’t get fooled. You see, 99 directs that hundreds of millions of our tax dollars will end up in the hands of doctors and the medical industry. And guess what? They sponsored Prop 99. Prop 99 is simply a smokescreen; it raises taxes and doctors get richer. Vote no on Proposition 99. Doctors are already rich enough.”