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

by Sherman, Gabriel

  Ailes experienced the traumatic day of 9/11 as a new father. On New Year’s Day 2000, Beth had given birth to a son, Zachary Joseph Jackson Ailes. “He told me having a kid changed his life completely,” former Fox anchor Bob Sellers later recalled. Ailes took measures to protect himself and his family. At the time, Judith Regan, host of That Regan Woman, was having an affair with New York police commissioner Bernard Kerik. On the night of September 11, Kerik even made a stop at Regan’s apartment. Seeking security advice in the days after 9/11, Ailes called Regan’s producer, Joel Kaufman, to arrange a private meeting with Kerik for him and Murdoch. Later, an internal New York Police Department memo surfaced that revealed Ailes asked for police protection with “a request for counter surveillance from [the] Threats Desk.” The memo also detailed his elaborate security protocol. “Mr. Ailes employs a retired Detective NYPD as a personal escort. He arrives via private Car and is dropped off in front of 1211 Avenue of the Americas [Fox News headquarters] daily.… He is escorted into the building by his security and is met by building security.”

  The sense of lockdown pervaded the office. “After 9/11, it got really fucked up,” a senior staffer said. On the second floor, a glass door with a key code would be installed in the hallway leading to Ailes’s executive suite. That was in addition to the locked door that stood before visitors outside the elevator bank.

  His private statements about the conflict were shocking. About a year after the attacks, Bill Clinton went for lunch at News Corp with Murdoch and his top executives. Murdoch’s communications chief, Gary Ginsberg, who was a former lawyer in the Clinton White House and a key Murdoch emissary to powerful Democrats, brokered the meeting. Talk turned to Ground Zero and plans for reconstruction. The executives around the room offered ideas. When it was Ailes’s turn, the conversation halted. “Roger said this insane thing,” one person in the room recalled. “He was talking about rebuilding the towers and he said, ‘We should fill the last ten floors with Muslims so they never do it again.’ ”

  Ailes’s sense of the drama, and Fox’s own role in it, brought him into conflict with powerful forces at News Corp. On the evening of October 18, 2001, Ailes was a guest at the annual Al Smith dinner at the Waldorf Astoria, where Dick Cheney was delivering the keynote address. As the evening wound down, Ailes got a tip from Mayor Giuliani’s office: the New York Post was the latest media organization hit with an anthrax-laced letter. Earlier that day, a Post mailroom employee had come down with symptoms of anthrax exposure, but no one knew where the letter was. Ailes raced back to the office. On the tenth floor, in the newsroom of the Post, Murdoch’s oldest son, Lachlan, the tabloid’s spiky-haired publisher, was handling the response. Workers in hazmat suits from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scanned the office. Lachlan wanted to keep the incident under wraps. News Corp had thousands of employees who were possibly at risk. There were human resources protocols to follow and certainly questions about the company’s legal exposure if more employees got sick. Lachlan and Ian Moore, News Corp’s head of HR, huddled together, strategizing options for alerting the staff in the morning.

  Suddenly, someone told Lachlan that Ailes had burst into the Fox News newsroom shouting, “We’re under attack! We’re under attack!” To Lachlan, that was precisely the wrong message to be sending at that moment, and he decided to do something about it. He took the elevator to the basement and found Ailes in his white-tie tuxedo giving directions to the crew of overnight producers. Lachlan told Ailes he needed to settle down. Ailes did not take his advice well. “You could see him getting aggravated. He’d been taken down in front of his people,” one executive said. The producers watching the confrontation were startled at what they were witnessing—Ailes was openly challenging the chairman’s kid, who was the deputy chief operating officer of the entire corporation.

  The gravity of the situation was not lost on Ailes. Fate could be cruel to News Corp executives who crossed the Murdoch children. In London, Sam Chisholm, the profane, New Zealand–born CEO of BSkyB, was forced out in part because he tangled with Rupert’s daughter Liz, who worked for him (he had called her a “management trainee”). “On one level, Roger was very scared. No one had had a conflict with the children and survived. He didn’t want to be Sam Chisholm,” one executive close to Ailes explained.

  Ailes needed to do something to turn the situation to his advantage. Several months earlier he had already come close to overstepping his bounds when he decided to get rid of Fox News executive and longtime Murdoch ally Ian Rae. “Don’t ever fucking fire a mate of mine again,” Murdoch told Ailes. Within days of his confrontation with Lachlan, Ailes made an appointment to see Rupert. In the meeting, Ailes threatened to resign as a preemptive strike. Ailes told Murdoch that his kids were aligned against him. “Rupert is not the hardest person to manipulate,” a family intimate said. It was an effective move—Murdoch offered him a new contract. Ailes had secured his place at the company. Dealing with Lachlan could wait.

  SEVENTEEN

  QUAGMIRE DOESN’T RATE

  PROGRAMMING WAS ONLY ONE ARM of Ailes’s effort to shape events. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, he sent a confidential memo to Karl Rove with advice for George Bush. “The only thing America won’t forgive you for is under-reaching,” Ailes wrote. His missive expressed his view that the country was facing an epochal conflict against a ruthless adversary. “I wrote that letter as an American,” he told a Fox colleague. He knew that Americans craved revenge. That’s why, he’d say, Americans still loved John Wayne, even though he had been dead for two decades. The country had some basic rules.

  Rove made sure Bush received Ailes’s letter. Copies were also circulated to senior White House staff, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley, communications director Dan Bartlett, and press secretary Ari Fleischer. Fox News was a crucial ally. In the wake of the divisive recount, the White House recognized Fox’s power to drive the debate and rally the faithful. On a personal level, Rove was said to be intimidated by Ailes, who antedated him on the national stage. “Roger was the bigger figure,” recalled Bush aides who observed the power dynamic between the men. When Ailes complained that Fox was not getting enough access to White House officials, Rove leaned on White House communications director Dan Bartlett to rectify the issue. “Ailes would call Karl and say, ‘we’re not getting enough guests during the daytime,’ ” a Bush official said. “Ailes’s message was: ‘You better fucking do something about it.’ So Karl would then call the press office and be like, ‘Why isn’t [Attorney General John] Ashcroft getting out there?’ ”

  To help Bush build his image as a war president, Ailes continued to feed Rove strategic advice. “It focused on how to use the presidential role and rally morale,” a senior Bush official said. “Roger’s reference point was Reagan. He would point out where he saw similarities to use the presidential pulpit. He would say, ‘The president has to be out there more.’ It was macro level advice, as opposed to tactical.”

  Ailes also made it clear he would leapfrog Rove if he felt particularly displeased. Around the time he sent the military strategy memo, Ailes discovered that the administration was filling a crucial vacancy in the press office—the White House’s liaison to the television networks—with a former MSNBC producer named Adam Levine. Levine had worked for Chris Matthews on the staff of Hardball and was once a registered Democrat who worked in the office of New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Ailes complained directly to Dick Cheney about the appointment. “Roger was afraid it would favor NBC. He wanted to make sure Brit Hume and Tony Snow got the interviews,” another Bush official said. Cheney’s aide Mary Matalin, Ailes’s friend, instructed Levine to go to New York to clear the air. During a meeting in Ailes’s office, Levine pledged his loyalty. “Mr. Ailes,” he said, “having worked for MSNBC and having been a Democrat, I can tell you I have more reasons than you could imagine to hate both organizations.”

  Ailes’s produce
rs clearly understood Fox’s role. “Someone has to speak for the White House,” one said. Though much of the media credulously amplified the Bush administration’s case for the Iraq War, Fox News was its chief cheerleader, stoking passions born in the collapse of the towers and turning them to a new end. Three days after 9/11, Bill O’Reilly hosted foreign policy analyst Laurie Mylroie to make the argument for hitting Saddam Hussein. A year earlier, Mylroie—whom terrorism expert Peter Bergen would dub “the Neocons’ favorite conspiracy theorist”—had published the controversial book Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War Against America, which argued that Iraq was responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. O’Reilly wanted to know if she had “any evidence” that Saddam Hussein was involved with 9/11.

  “No,” she said. “But I think there are things that suggest it.”

  Later in the interview, O’Reilly surmised, “You sound like you’re a person who says, ‘Hey, Saddam Hussein should be on the destruction death card, along with Osama bin Laden.’ He should be target number two, maybe.”

  “I’d even say target number one,” she said. “The direction and the expertise for these attacks are coming from Iraq. It would be good to get rid of bin Laden, I agree completely, but it won’t solve the problem. It wouldn’t be as meaningful as getting rid of Saddam Hussein’s regime.”

  Given the president’s approval ratings—87 percent in November 2001, according to Gallup—cleaving closely to the Bush administration’s views was smart programming. In Iraq’s mustachioed dictator, Ailes had a perfectly cast enemy and a ready-made narrative of conflict. “Every story needs a beginning, a middle, and an end,” a senior Fox producer said.

  Television networks roll out new series in the fall. The Bush administration did the same with its war plan. “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August,” Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, told The New York Times on September 7, 2002. Fox helped close the deal with the public, with Ailes personally directing the effort. Twice each day—first at 8:00 a.m. and again at 2:30 p.m.—Ailes assembled his senior leadership for strategy sessions. The morning meeting took place in his office and focused on news; the afternoon gathering was held in a second-floor conference room and dealt with operations and financial issues. Ailes ran tough meetings. His authoritarian management style could terrorize his inner circle into silence. Executives sat around the table hoping he would not call on them. “It’s not easy to be in that room. He looks around and points at people. If you talked, you’re fucking dead,” one executive recalled. “You’re supposed to take it until your face turns bright red, and you’re thinking, if you move, will the T. rex see you?”

  The meetings were highly secretive, in keeping with Ailes’s background in political campaigns. In the network’s early days, Ailes created a secret group of senior executives—he called it the “G-8”—to centralize authority. (During George H. W. Bush’s 1988 campaign, Ailes had been a member of the “G-6” along with Lee Atwater and others.) Like George H. W. Bush, Ailes did not attend these meetings; he expected his team to get along without him. “Fox never went corporate,” one of Ailes’s executives said. Ailes was determined to keep the inner workings of his operation shrouded in mystery. He rarely communicated by email with his coterie of advisers, and when he did he usually used a pseudonymous account, “James Arlie,” a variant spelling of his maternal grandfather’s name. “Roger is very good about giving himself plausible deniability for everything,” a senior producer said. When emails went out under his official “Roger Ailes” account, they were “generally to announce company-wide things.” Otherwise, the producer said, “he prefers face-to-face meetings in his office.”

  In the newsroom, producers would hear senior executives whisper the phrase “the Second Floor says” or “the Second Floor wants.” “You can’t say Roger’s name,” an executive explained. “It reminded me of the scene in The Godfather II where Al Pacino is talking to Johnny Ola, and they’re talking about Hyman Roth, except they never say his name. He was just ‘the Man in Miami.’ That’s Roger. He’s ‘the Man from Fox News.’ ”

  Ailes policed leaks, especially those about his political agenda, with ruthless determination. Judy Laterza, Ailes’s longtime assistant from his Ailes Communications days, sat in on every meeting, writing detailed notes on yellow legal pads. She developed a system to help Ailes speak freely. “When Roger said something controversial, she just rolled her eyes,” a meeting-goer said. “But then she wrote it down. Then she wrote down everyone else who was in that room. So if it leaked, then Roger would know who was there.” Laterza’s mysteriousness made her powerful. Fox seemed to be her life, and she was said to be one of Ailes’s highest-paid employees. One producer joked to people that he wanted to follow her home to see how she lived.

  Bill Shine, who had been promoted to head of prime time after Chet Collier’s retirement, became the main conduit for Ailes’s directives. To low-level Fox producers, Shine was an intimidating presence. Across his cheek was a large scar of unknown provenance. After serving as Hannity’s producer, Shine moved into Chet Collier’s position because he was willing to be Ailes’s mouthpiece. When Ailes had a message to get on the air, he often turned to Shine. Where Collier was gruff, Shine was cryptic. He rarely put anything in email. “Call me,” he would write to his colleagues. Or he would pop into producers’ offices unannounced to pass along instructions from Ailes, although he rarely dropped his name; “We’re not doing that,” he’d coyly explain. Because Shine could not challenge Ailes as Collier sometimes did, he complicated Brian Lewis’s PR mission to uphold Fox as a “fair and balanced” news network. As payback, Lewis would attach Shine’s name on statements to the press when Fox had to disown programming embarrassments. Lewis had a nickname for Shine: around the office he called him “Toadie.”

  Colleagues did not think of Shine as a deeply political person. They saw his devotion to Ailes and Fox in more pragmatic terms. Like Fox’s prime-time stars O’Reilly and Hannity, Shine was from Long Island. He was “a blue-collar kind of guy, not a Harvard-Columbia guy,” a colleague said. From his modest roots as a son of a cop, he had become a well-compensated TV executive who bought his wife, Darla, a Land Rover and built a luxurious vacation home.

  John Moody was another surrogate through whom Ailes expressed his agenda. He wrote a daily editorial note to the staff, which appeared in the newsroom’s computer system, offering guidelines about major stories to cover. “We looked at them every day,” a former senior Washington bureau staffer said. “They were supposed to be mandatory reading.” In addition to story lineups, the memos crackled with partisan gibes that overtly signaled how Fox should frame the news. “When Ashcroft was being confirmed as Bush’s attorney general, one of the issues that came up at the time was his opposition to abortion rights,” recalled producer Adam Sank, who spent six years at the network. “Moody’s memo that day said something like, ‘As we cover the Ashcroft hearings and the subject about his beliefs on abortion, I want you all to remember what this issue is really about: it’s about killing babies.’ ” In October 2003, a Fox News producer named Charles Reina publicized Moody’s memos to the press. Media critics railed that the memos proved Ailes’s “fair and balanced” mantra was a sham.

  But Moody’s missives were probably unnecessary. “People know who’s running things. People know who the audience is. If you drink the Kool-Aid things can go very well,” recalled former Fox anchor Bob Sellers. “When I interviewed for the job, I had a script in mind for how I would negotiate the interview. It was: ‘I was liberal when I was younger, conservative as I got older, and after 9/11, how can you not be conservative?’ ” Ailes built a campaign culture that was defined by staffers’ need to prove their loyalty. “Watch out for the enemy within,” he told Fox’s staff during a company-wide pep talk. Adam Sank remembered the “little things you could do to win favor with people in power.” On the one-year anniversary of 9/11, he happened to wear a red,
white, and blue tie to work. “Every single executive stopped me and said, ‘I really like that tie,’ ” he said.

  Ailes cultivated the idea that he was everywhere. “Look, I know everything I need to know about you,” he told one producer. “I talk to the people above you. I talk to the people below you. And I talk to the people on either side of you.” Executives never knew Ailes’s schedule. Sometimes he showed up for the morning editorial meeting, sometimes he didn’t. If he wasn’t there, chances were he was listening in on the speakerphone, although he would not announce himself. Suddenly his voice would crackle over the line. Ailes also put eyes in every department. One executive called it “the invasion of the secretaries.” When Suzanne Scott, Collier’s former assistant, sent directions to producers, the staff knew whom she was speaking for. “She had rules of what you could wear,” a female producer recalled. “No jeans. If you went out to the field, no dyed hair. The camera people couldn’t wear shorts unless it was over 90 degrees. All of us understood it.” Brigette Boyle was another secretary promoted into Fox’s HR department. “She had no HR qualifications, except to screen people who would be fit for Fox,” a senior producer said. “Roger every so often had her do a task that was bizarre. Once, he asked for a list of every employee who went to Brown. He said it was because he never knew a conservative who came from Brown.” Another time, he asked her to check for any employees who had played field hockey.

  Ailes’s most powerful tool of control was Media Relations. Brian Lewis’s department not only had veto power over which guests could appear on Fox shows, but the department made Fox employees feel like the channel was a surveillance state. Lewis and his assistants berated employees for speaking to the press without authorization. They also used laptops with untraceable IP addresses to leak embarrassing stories about wayward Fox hosts and executives (“No fingerprints” was a favorite Lewis-ism). Fox employees worried their conversations were being recorded. After one former producer joked to a friend he was thinking about writing a book about Fox, he got an accusatory phone call from a senior Fox executive about it. The producer stammered he was only kidding. Lewis became feared for the perceived pleasure he took in trafficking in smears. “Look, I know you can kill me,” an employee said to him once, asking him to hold his fire. “I don’t wanna wake up tomorrow to read I’m gay and fucking sheep.”