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

by Sherman, Gabriel

  Ailes played upon racial fears by linking the tax to inner-city crime. One commercial portrayed a man identified as an undercover cop warning that raising cigarette taxes would increase cigarette smuggling by gangs. The ad sparked outrage by Ailes’s opponents. California’s Democratic attorney general, John Van de Kamp, called the spot “a scare tactic of the worst and baldest kind.” Prop 99 supporters’ hackles were raised when they discovered that the man was not an undercover cop, but a deskbound Los Angeles Police Department officer named Jack Hoar who moonlighted as an actor. (His biggest role at the time was a bit part playing a cop-killing henchman in the film To Live and Die in L.A. starring Willem Dafoe.)

  In November 1988, voters agreed to the new tax, passing Prop 99 57.8 percent to 42.2 percent. Even so, Ailes Communications earned $1 million off the campaign and Ailes was defiant. “The antismoking zealots tried first to throw water in everybody’s face,” Ailes told the press. “Now, they’re throwing legislation.”

  Ailes’s populist bluster echoed that of another corpulent conservative in New York: Rush Limbaugh. It was only a matter of time until the two joined forces. In 1987, Reagan’s FCC repealed the so-called Fairness Doctrine, the rule that mandated broadcasters give equal time to opposing political viewpoints on the airwaves. The change spurred the growth of right-wing talk radio, with Limbaugh as the medium’s most successful practitioner. More than seven million fans listened to his radio show each week. In 1991, after bumping into each other at the 21 Club, Ailes put together a deal to launch a syndicated television show.

  But Ailes had not completely left politics. The GOP paid him a $9,500 retainer to consult on media strategy. In August 1990, a few days after the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Ailes sent an urgent memo to Bush’s chief of staff, John Sununu. “I have had at least half a dozen calls very recently from the press trying to lead me into discussions like, ‘fiddling while Rome burns,’ ‘golfing while Americans are being taken hostage,’ ” he wrote. “The only reason this is of concern to me is that I notice the networks beginning to show more and more footage of the president in the golf cart.… I know first hand what a megatonnage dose of media hammering the same message can do.” He went on: “Do a little more fishing and less golfing.” In November, as Bush planned to travel to the Middle East to meet with U.S. military commanders and Arab leaders, Ailes advised the president on his wardrobe. “In the field he should wear khaki slacks, open shirts, long sleeves with the sleeves rolled up,” he wrote. “It is my judgment that he should not wear hats or helmets. A fatigue jacket would be fine in the field with soldiers on Thanksgiving Day.”

  Bushworld put out feelers to Ailes about running media for the 1992 campaign. This forced Ailes’s hand. He told colleagues he’d had enough. A few nights before Thanksgiving, he took his aide, Scott Ehrlich, to dinner at Goldberg’s Pizza on Manhattan’s East Side to discuss his decision to quit politics. Ailes expressed concern about the harm it might cause to his reputation. “He was thinking about the press reaction, about the spin and what the message was,” a person familiar with the conversation recalled.

  On December 6, 1991, Ailes announced that he was walking away from politics to focus on entertainment ventures. To quell any suspicion his business was suffering, he projected a hyperactive image. He was busy launching Limbaugh’s TV show and consulting for Paramount Television on tabloid shows like Inside Edition. At the 1992 Democratic convention, he ran into Bob LaPorta, his old friend from The Mike Douglas Show. LaPorta recalled Ailes saying, “I really miss show business, I love it.” Around this time, Ailes was taking meetings in Hollywood. One writer who ran into Ailes at the Century Plaza hotel marveled at Ailes’s snap judgments about television. “We were meeting in the lobby,” he recalled, and “there was a TV running and Wheel of Fortune was on with no sound. Roger was staring at it, he said, ‘Do you know why the show works?’ I said, ‘I don’t watch the show.’ And he said, ‘It works because of Vanna White. You gotta look at this girl and her clothes. It just works!’ ”

  Ailes was even branching out into board games. In 1992, he lined up the makers of Pictionary to market a $19.95 campaign-themed game called Risky Strategy. In August, he traveled to the GOP convention in Houston to promote the game, which was created by his thirty-year-old assistant, Judy Laterza, who had joined him in 1987. To advance around the board, players rolled dice and drew from cards that featured political punch lines. (“Your opponent accuses you of removing the tags from your mattresses. You counter that was done in the privacy of your own home: Win all the states in TOO CLOSE TO CALL,” one card read.) His political career had come full circle. “Politics was a 20-year habit, but somehow I decided I would walk away from it and go back to the entertainment business,” he told the press.

  He maintained his ties to Bush and other prominent Republicans in a quieter way, serving as a go-to surrogate, image consultant, and source of media intelligence. “By that time, he was in the media business, so it was hard for him to be overtly political,” Jim Baker said. “It’s not to say he didn’t help us where he could. We felt free to call him and talk to him. But he couldn’t take a public role in the campaign.”

  Ailes gave interviews attacking Bill Clinton as a “saxophone player” and Ross Perot as “loony toons.” On the night of June 2, 1992, Ailes orchestrated a crucial summit between Bush and Limbaugh. The right-wing talker had been a vocal Bush critic, and Bush needed to mollify him to shore up support from his populist base. That night, Ailes, Limbaugh, and Bush attended the musical Buddy at the Kennedy Center and then retired to the White House for the night. Bush personally carried Limbaugh’s luggage up to his assigned quarters: the Lincoln Bedroom (Ailes got the Queen’s Room across the hall). Ailes’s backchannel diplomacy paid off. Five days later, Limbaugh appeared on the Today show and gushed to Katie Couric about his visit, calling the president a “genuinely nice guy.”

  But Limbaugh’s blessing was not enough to save Bush’s ailing reelection campaign, which was buffeted by the post–Gulf War recession and a hapless message. Bush also faced another challenge: an emboldened opposition. The Democrats, stung by Dukakis’s defeat, had learned valuable lessons, an ironic legacy of Ailes’s success. Bill Clinton’s campaign was, in many ways, an Ailes-inspired operation, with its famous “War Room” staffed by operatives, chief among them the wily attack dog James Carville, who characterized Bush as an aloof elitist who did not feel America’s pain.

  Ailes was coming around to the breakthrough insight: the media industry was a much more powerful platform to spread a political message. During the 1988 GOP convention, he got into an argument with NBC executive producer Joe Angotti, who was producing the convention broadcast. Ailes wanted NBC to air the seventeen-minute documentary he had filmed in its entirety, but Angotti refused: “We weren’t going to devote all this time to a propaganda video,” he later said. Ailes called Angotti three times in a day to lobby him to air the movie. “He said, ‘What if it were ten minutes, would you carry it then?’ I said, ‘I’m not going to negotiate over the phone.’ ”

  Ailes discovered he could achieve his political goals by changing roles. Instead of being at the mercy of the networks that controlled the airtime, he could control the message by joining the media. In the spring of 1990, he had formed a company, Belmont Street Broadcasting—a reference to his childhood address in Warren—and made his first exploratory moves. In May, Ailes spent $325,000 to buy WPSL, an AM radio station in Port St. Lucie, Florida, close to where he owned a condo. “It was an oldies station. Roger brought in a lot of talk,” recalled Greg Wyatt, who would later buy the station from Ailes. Ailes came up with a new slogan, “The Talk of the Treasure Coast,” and added Rush Limbaugh to the lineup. Publicly, Ailes downplayed any political agenda. “It’s just a fun thing. It’s just something I wanted to do,” he told The Miami Herald.

  But those who worked with Ailes knew he was looking ahead to the future. Cable news was a thriving new industry. CNN had exploded onto th
e scene with its twenty-four-hour coverage of the Gulf War. Sig Rogich, Ailes’s colleague on the Bush campaign, recalled conversations: “He wanted to do a conservative news network forever. I heard him talk about it for a long time. He said, ‘The networks were biased. We need to have balance in America and we’re not getting it and all these others are anti-Republican and anti-anything that’s conservative.’ He talked about it constantly.”

  NINE

  AMERICA’S TALKING

  IN EARLY 1993, AILES PAID A VISIT TO Robert Wright, the raspy-voiced chairman and CEO of NBC. Ailes’s friend Jack Welch, the CEO of General Electric, NBC’s parent company, had set up the meeting. A client of Ailes was interested in purchasing a TV station and Ailes wanted to see if Wright would sell him an NBC affiliate. As the conversation progressed, Wright had a brainstorm. “We were talking a lot about his background. We spent a lot of time talking about The Mike Douglas Show,” Wright recalled. “I got the sense that this was the romantic period of Roger’s career. He was out in Cleveland as a native Ohioan. As I listened, I said to myself, ‘This guy is a producer. The advertising stuff is production. The political stuff is about producing.’ So I said to him, ‘You could buy a TV station. But it’s a rocky road. You sound like you like to program the shows on the air. At a local station, you won’t produce entertainment shows. Why don’t you come over here and run CNBC?’ ”

  Al Barber, the head of NBC’s struggling Consumer News and Business Channel, had recently told colleagues he wanted to resign, and Wright was quietly putting out feelers for his replacement. CNBC was deep in the red. After NBC launched the channel in 1989, it had been plagued by anemic ratings and weak distribution, available only in some 17 million homes, which was less than half of that of its rival, the Los Angeles–based Financial News Network. Two years after the launch, NBC gambled on a merger, paying $154.3 million to acquire FNN. CNBC’s ratings remained stalled. The channel suffered from a confused, hybrid identity: uninterrupted blocks of bland stock market reports by day and middlebrow talk shows by night. Wright realized that CNBC needed an executive with programming instincts to fix the ratings problem. “Al was a great guy, but programming wasn’t his long suit,” Wright said. When Wright spoke to Ailes, he seemed intrigued.

  It’s an irony that Ailes came into his own as a television executive at the network that is most currently identified with liberal ideas. But at NBC, where his tenure would last just twenty-eight months, his talents as an executive and his personality—his bold impulsiveness, his paranoia and aggression, his conservative instincts, his megalomania, and his huge gift for television programming, reached their maturity. His ambition had never been to fit in, to be just another executive—he wanted to dominate. It was a credit to his television talents that his inflammatory conservative rhetoric did not derail his campaign to get the job. Though Ailes had never run a channel, he knew a thing or two more about television than Barber, a numbers guy who had spent most of his career at General Electric. Moreover, NBC was planning to launch an all-talk cable channel that would be called America’s Talking, and Ailes, the guru of the talk genre, would be well suited to run it. Wright was especially intrigued by Ailes’s relationship with Rush Limbaugh, the king of talk radio. “One of the things I hoped he was going to do was bring in Rush Limbaugh,” Wright recalled.

  But when Ailes’s name circulated at NBC as a serious contender to run CNBC and America’s Talking, producers were incredulous. It was inconceivable to them that a man who was living out his so-called retirement from politics as executive producer of Rush Limbaugh’s television show would be put in charge of a nonpartisan business news channel. And political associations aside, they worried about the things that Ailes was spouting on national television. It wasn’t just an occasional slip of the tongue. In interviews, he called Clinton a “hippie president,” and White House spokesperson George Stephanopoulos “a sociopath,” and played the role of full-on Republican battering ram even as he was interviewing with NBC.

  Ailes wanted the CNBC job badly. “He always craved a big stage, and the move to CNBC was about moving to a bigger one,” said a colleague of Ailes at the time. On July 8, Ailes sent a confidential letter to Tom Rogers, president of NBC’s cable division, lobbying for the job. “I continue to be very interested in the CNBC situation,” Ailes wrote. “I believe the opportunities and problems are neither easy nor simple. However, I do believe they are exciting and solvable and that my creative background in programming, marketing and communications strategy are suited to the challenge.” Ailes copied Bob Wright on the letter—if Ailes was going to become a network suit, he would only report to the top.

  Much as he had indicated to the Nixon White House twenty-five years earlier, Ailes signaled that he was not willing to give up his independence. He told Rogers that he needed to retain his role as executive producer of the Limbaugh television show. He had also just renewed a consulting contract with Paramount Pictures—where he advised on The Maury Povich Show, among other projects, and would continue to advise Paramount’s syndicated television programs. Most important, Ailes stipulated that if he took the CNBC job, he would “need to maintain Ailes Communications Inc. as a viable entity.”

  Ailes saw in the position an opportunity to secure new business for his consulting firm with CNBC. “Obviously I want to avoid any conflict of interest or perception of conflict of interest, however, I trust Ailes Communications research and production capabilities so we need to discuss this,” he told Rogers. Ailes hinted that he had designs to rise into senior management at the network. He wanted to know if the new president would “be included in all meetings, and have a voice in the future of NBC cable operations.”

  Despite his ardor for the job, he played it cool in public. Over the next few weeks, as negotiations with NBC continued, Ailes projected an image in the press of a very busy man. On July 25, he appeared on Comedy Central in the debut of Bill Maher’s new series, Politically Incorrect. Later that week, he popped up in USA Today defending his friend Joe McGinniss and his controversial biography of Ted Kennedy, The Last Brother. “It’s important to remember who the scoundrel is,” Ailes said. “There’s not a lot to be proud of in Ted Kennedy’s life.”

  Ailes’s bid to reinvent himself as a news executive was complicated on July 21 as news broke that Christine Todd Whitman, the moderate Republican running for governor in New Jersey against incumbent Democrat Jim Florio, had hired Larry McCarthy, Ailes’s former colleague. McCarthy’s presence on the campaign sparked an outcry from Democrats and black leaders, ultimately leading to his departure.

  In an interview a few days later, Whitman defended the hire, saying that she believed it was Ailes who had created the Horton spot. Ailes, who had been trying to undo the stain of Willie Horton for five years, was outraged. He tried reaching Whitman, but found she was on vacation in Idaho. He then tracked down her brother, Webster Todd, who was helping manage her campaign. “Ailes went off like a Roman candle,” said Whitman’s press secretary, Carl Golden, who was subsequently dispatched to handle Ailes. “He was screaming into the phone at me. He was almost irrational, screaming ‘My kids are seeing this!’ ” referring to the children of his wife, Norma, from a previous marriage. “He kept demanding an apology. He wanted a written apology released to newspapers.”

  On the afternoon of July 27, Ailes blasted out a press release attacking Whitman as “Slick Christie.” “When Christie Whitman hired McCarthy she was fully aware that he had produced the ‘Willie Horton’ commercial,” the statement quoted Ailes as saying. The quote went on: “If Christie Whitman can’t get the facts straight, isn’t courageous enough to admit when she’s in error, tries to sneak her misjudgments past the press corps and can’t tell the truth, she’ll end up like Bill Clinton—a joke.”

  Whitman’s apology, released July 28, made news for the next several days. “There was no intention to disparage Mr. Ailes or his reputation,” her statement said.

  After putting out the fires in New Jersey,
Ailes was close to clinching the NBC deal. He flew to Nantucket to meet with Jack Welch. “Roger had a really good relationship with Jack,” an Ailes colleague said. In turn, Welch championed Ailes. “I was all for it. I became Roger’s biggest supporter. He’s creative. He’s crazy passionate. He gets in there and goes after it. He’s exciting to be around—he’s incredibly fun,” he said.

  In the last days of negotiations, Ailes downplayed his interest in the NBC job. “There have been some conversations, but nothing concrete,” USA Today quoted him saying on August 16. “I have a top priority right now and that is to be the executive producer of The Rush Limbaugh Show.” The article suggested that Ailes would need a bit more money. “Limbaugh is one of the hottest properties in syndication and Ailes might be hard-pressed to leave that lucrative field,” it read.

  A week later, Ailes signed a three-year contract with NBC that satisfied nearly all his demands. He was given the title of president and a base salary of $550,000 with a guaranteed $25,000 raise in the second year and a final year salary of “no less than $600,000.” If ratings jumped, he could earn a bonus of up to $1.7 million annually. Remarkably, NBC allowed Ailes to continue as Limbaugh’s executive producer and remain as a board member at Ailes Communications, but the contract stipulated that he not do any “formal” advising of, or consulting for, Ailes Communications clients. Significantly, in a move that would have future consequences, his contract stated that Bob Wright, not Tom Rogers, would be his direct boss.