54. On the morning Excerpts from the Fox & Friends retrospective can be found on YouTube. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cq26qtY8Muo and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmVXmO7RomI.
55. The video was Ailes’s brainchild Author interview with a person familiar with the matter.
56. Fox pulled the clip “What the Fox,” Hotline, May 31, 2012.
57. “Roger was not aware” Brian Stelter, “Obama Video on Fox Criticized as Attack Ad,” “Media Decoder” (blog), New York Times, May 30, 2012, http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/obama-video-on-fox-news-criticized-as-attack-ad/.
58. Senior adviser David Axelrod Author interview with a person familiar with the matter.
59. “Fox is watched” Michael D. Shear, “Aides Play Down Romney’s Talk on Taxes for Wealthy,” New York Times, April 17, 2012.
60. In the year after Jeremy W. Peters, “Enemies and Allies for ‘Friends,’ ” New York Times, June 21, 2012.
61. So when Gretchen Carlson Fox News interview with Mitt Romney (transcript), Federal News Service, May 24, 2012.
62. In August Solange Uwimana, “Fox Runs Montage Splicing Together Quotes from Paul Ryan and Ronald Reagan,” Media Matters for America, Aug. 14, 2012, http://mediamatters.org/blog/2012/08/14/fox-runs-montage-splicing-together-quotes-from/189345.
63. Behind the scenes Author interview with a person familiar with the matter. In an email, a spokesperson for Ryan said, “Congressman Ryan has known Jon Kraushar for a couple of years but he didn’t recall Mr. Ailes introducing the two of them.”
64. After the 1968 campaign Nyan, “Roger Ailes: He Doctors a Politician’s TV Image.”
65. “Roger is Fox News” Author interview with Newsmax editor in chief Christopher Ruddy.
66. “Every single element” Author interview with consultant Ed Rollins.
67. Not long before the 2012 Junod, “Why Does Roger Ailes Hate America?”
68. “I built this channel” Carr and Arango, “A Fox Chief at the Pinnacle of Media and Politics.”
69. “At his daily 8:00 a.m.” Author interview with an executive who has attended the meetings.
ACT I
ONE: “JUMP ROGER, JUMP”
1. The town Henry Howe, Historical Collections of Ohio: An Encyclopedia of the State, Vol. 2, (Cincinnati: C. J. Krehbiel and Company, 1908), 669–70.
2. In 1890, two sons Dennis Adler, Packard (St. Paul, Minn.: Motorbooks International, 2004), 11–15. Also: http://packardmuseum.org/ed1.aspx.
3. In 1932, the General Motors “A. Wolcott Dies, Auto Parts Maker; Head of Packard Electric Co., Manufacturers of Cables,” New York Times, Oct. 14, 1933.
4. Roger’s father, who had been Entry for Robert Eugene Ailes, created by his son, Robert Ailes Jr., on Findagrave.com.
5. In 1936, Neil Armstrong James R. Hansen, First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 45–46.
6. That was the world Roger’s birth date is given in his parents’ divorce papers: Donna M. Ailes v. Robert E. Ailes, Trumbull County (Ohio) Court of Common Pleas, Division of Domestic Relations, Case 5396, Oct. 7, 1959.
7. Warren residents Warren (Ohio) Tribune Chronicle, April 20, 1954.
8. “There were no slums” Author interview with television executive Launa Newman-Minson. At the time she went to school and worked with Ailes, she went by her maiden name, Launa Newman.
9. Packard “Employment Hits New High of 6000: All-Time Mark Exceeds Both War-Time and Post-War Peaks, Further Growth Expected,” Cablegram, March 23, 1953, National Packard Museum.
10. sponsored annual picnics See, for instance, “Packard Family Picnic Program” and “18,000 Attend Picnic; Ruth Drenski Wins Top Prize,” Cablegram, July 1955, National Packard Museum.
11. The career of Roger’s father Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr. Cablegram also identifies Robert Ailes as “foreman, Maintenance Dept” in an article mentioning Roger Ailes, “Employes’ [sic] Sons Get Collegiate Honors,” ca. 1959–1960.
12. He raised his children Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.
13. He worked for forty years Entry for Robert Eugene Ailes, created by his son, Robert Ailes Jr., on Findagrave.com.
14. Growing up in the 1920s Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.
15. “I never could understand” Ibid.
16. Rapid industrialization William D. Jenkins, Steel Valley Klan: The Ku Klux Klan in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1990), 57–58.
17. One minister Ibid., 58.
18. As an adult Entry for Robert Eugene Ailes, created by his son Robert Ailes Jr., on Findagrave.com.
19. As a Master Mason The full title of the affiliated body is Mystic Order of Veiled Prophets of Enchanted Realm, Ali Baba Grotto.
20. His wife complained Donna M. Ailes v. Robert E. Ailes, Trumbull County (Ohio) Court of Common Pleas, Division of Domestic Relations, Case 5396, March 18, 1960.
21. “One of his disappointments” Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.
22. Robert Sr. and his wife Ibid.
23. She had come to Warren Entry for Donna Marie Cunningham [Ailes] Urban, created by her son, Robert Ailes Jr., on Findagrave.com.
24. Her father Entry for James Arley Cunningham, created by his grandson Robert Ailes Jr., on Findagrave.com.
25. He was a religious man Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.
26. “They didn’t believe in movies or dancing” Deroy Murdock, “This Is the Most Powerful Man in News,” Newsmax, Nov. 2011.
27. Robert and Donna had a swift Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.
28. At the age of two Ibid.
29. “Well, you died” Junod, “Why Does Roger Ailes Hate America?”
30. “The treatment” Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.
31. The average life Robert A. Zaiden, MD, “Hemophilia A,” http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/779322-overview#aw2aab6b2b6aa.
32. In grade school Tom Junod, “Roger Ailes on Roger Ailes: The Interview Transcripts, Part 2,” The Politics Blog, Esquire, Jan. 27, 2011, http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/roger-ailes-quotes-5072437.
33. His father rushed him Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.
34. “I heard the doctor say” Ibid.
35. Robert Jr. Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.
36. “Look, my son’s bleeding” Junod, “Roger Ailes on Roger Ailes: The Interview Transcripts, Part 2.”
37. “Get behind me” Ibid.
38. Dirty Neck Watson Ibid.
39. “Well, son” Ibid.
40. “Roger told me” Author interview with Launa Newman-Minson.
41. During recess Junod, “Why Does Roger Ailes Hate America?”
42. “He participated” Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.
43. “What saved me” Junod, “Roger Ailes on Roger Ailes: The Interview Transcripts, Part 2.”
44. “My dad, I saw” Ibid.
45. “violence never solves” Lloyd Grove, “The Image Shaker; Roger Ailes, the Bush Team’s Wily Media Man,” Washington Post, June 20, 1988.
46. “if you have to” Ibid.
47. if you have no options Junod, “Why Does Roger Ailes Hate America?”
48. “Roger and my dad” Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.
49. One time Junod, “Roger Ailes on Roger Ailes: The Interview Transcripts, Part 2.”
50. “When I was thirteen” Ibid.
51. When Roger was recovering Ken Auletta, “Vox Fox: How Roger Ailes and Fox News Are Changing Cable News,” New Yorker, May 26, 2003.
52. The cruelest lesson Author interview with Stephen Rosenfield.
53. Robert Sr. demanded quiet Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.
54. “I was terrified” Junod, “Roger Ailes on Roger Ailes: The Interview Transcripts, Part 2.”
55. Years later the brothers learned Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.
56. On the 1930 census “United States Censu
s, 1930,” index and images, Sadie H. Ailes (Warren, Trumbull, Ohio), FamilySearch. In reality, her husband, Melville, had married another woman on July 24, 1922. See “Michigan Marriages, 1868–1925,” index and images, Melville Ailes (1922), FamilySearch.
57. When Robert Jr. In college, Robert Ailes Jr. went by himself to meet his grandfather for the first time. Melville was living in Sidney, Ohio, suffering from Alzheimer’s. “We had dinner,” Robert recalled. “He wasn’t alert then. When I met him, he didn’t realize who I was.” After the meal, Robert went to the house of his great-aunt Helen, a history teacher, who told him family stories at the kitchen table late into the night. The experience instilled in Robert a lifelong interest in genealogy. He would go on to write an unpublished family history. “The first Ailes came to this country in 1700. Brothers William and Stephen Ailes. They were the first Ailes in America,” Robert said. “They settled in Pennsylvania. They were farmers, and the funny part was, they married two sisters by the name of Underwood. William’s first child was William Underwood Jr. Roger and I are descended from him.” The Aileses participated in many of the founding myths of America: escaping religious persecution in Europe, living the frontier log cabin life in the Midwest, serving valorously in the military, helping to build the country. William Jr.'s son, Moses Hoffman Ailes, was the first Ailes in Ohio. A veteran of the War of 1812, Moses brought his family to Shelby County, Ohio, forty miles from the Indiana border in 1842. There they bought a farm from a hunchbacked man named Daniel Baldwin. (Neighbors gave him the nickname Sassafras because, according to a local history, he carried a basket of the medicinal root from house to house to “purify and thin the blood of our people grown thick and sluggish by too substantial food and lack of exercise.”) They lived on the farm for seven years before Montra, the nearest settlement, was surveyed. In August 1862, Moses’s youngest surviving son, Hezekiah, went off to fight for the Union. Two years later, he was shot in the shoulder at the Battle of Resaca, Georgia, where 112 out of 220 men in his regiment were killed or wounded in a five-minute salvo. Because of his bravery in the battle, he was promoted from the rank of sergeant to sergeant major. After the war, he returned to Shelby County and lived out his years teaching and holding political offices. He was a justice of the peace, a county auditor, and a three-term mayor of Sidney, Ohio. A history of the area remarked that “few can look back upon a busier and more blissful domestic and public life replete with honors.” His older brother Alfred Ailes—Roger’s great-great-grandfather—was a successful farmer and businessman. In April 1852, Alfred married Melissa Jane Young, the daughter of a Methodist Episcopal revivalist, a month before her seventeenth birthday. They worked on a farm for fifteen years—the dirt lane that winds by it is still known as Ailes Road. In 1868, they moved into Montra, where Alfred bought a half interest in a steam sawmill. By this time, Montra was a growing frontier outpost. It had a hotel, a liquor store, and a blacksmith shop. Like Hezekiah, Alfred was a civic leader and a member of the Democratic Party. From 1870 until his death in 1882, he served as a justice of the peace. A chronicle of the area noted that Alfred “was a man of importance.” On May 19, 1858, Alfred’s oldest son, John Forsythe Ailes, was born in Franklin Township, in the center of Shelby County. John continued the upward trajectory of the Ailes family in America. A bright man, he was the first in his family to attend college. He enrolled at Southern Ohio University. He married a schoolteacher named Rebecca Lovina Drumm who hailed from Hardin County. John taught school for thirty-two years and oversaw the remaining eighty acres of his family’s farm. John, like his father, was a prominent, politically active member of his community. “In politics he is democrat,” an area history noted, “of that school which prefers the doctrines of the fathers, based on the experience of the ages, to the untried theories of innovators.” John served for three years as deputy auditor for the county and for one year as deputy probate judge. For eight years, he was clerk of Jackson Township and also served as a board member of the county school examiners. For two decades, John frequented the local Odd Fellows hall and rose to leadership in the fraternal organization. He represented Ohio’s thirty-seventh district for four years. John and Rebecca raised three boys and a girl. Two became teachers, and two became doctors. Their first son, Melville Darwin Ailes—Roger’s grandfather—was born on April 17, 1883. Melville earned three advanced degrees, the highest level of education of any member of the Ailes family. He first studied at Ohio Northern University, graduating around 1905 with a bachelor’s degree and a law degree. Around this time, Melville married Sarah Hortense McMurray, a schoolteacher and Ohio Northern graduate, whom friends called Sadie. She was seven years his senior. Melville and Sadie had three children in quick succession. Roger’s father, Robert Eugene, was the middle child. He was born in 1907 in Springfield, Ohio. The primary sources for this genealogy are interviews with Robert Ailes Jr., A. B. C. Hitchcock’s History of Shelby County, Ohio, and Representative Citizens (Chicago: Richmond-Arnold Publishing, 1913), History of Shelby County, Ohio with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Some of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers (Philadelphia: R. Sutton & Co., 1883), as well as birth, death, and marriage records on Ancestry.com.
58. Robert Jr. did not tell Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.
59. died, after suffering Entry for Melville Darwin Ailes, created by his grandson Robert Ailes Jr., on Findagrave.com.
60. Donna was a competitive Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.
61. Roger remembered her hugging him Junod, “Roger Ailes on Roger Ailes: The Interview Transcripts, Part 2.”
62. There was not much Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.
63. “It was clear” Junod, “Roger Ailes on Roger Ailes: The Interview Transcripts, Part 2.”
64. “The more she’d hound” Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.
65. “He analyzed it” Ibid.
66. In 1940, the year Roger O.E.D. Jr., “Mr. Hoover Televiewed,” New York Times, June 30, 1940.
67. Seven years later Samuel A. Tower, “Truman Calls on Nation to Forego Meat Tuesdays, Poultry, Eggs Thursdays,” New York Times, Oct. 6, 1947.
68. Between 1950 and 1951 Richard Sutch and Susan B. Carter, eds., Historical Statistics of the United States: Millennial Edition (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Vol. 4, 977–98. The statistic appears in “Communications,” a contribution by economist Alexander J. Field.
69. Gunsmoke Nancy Hass, “Embracing the Enemy,” New York Times Magazine, Jan. 8, 1995.
70. “I liked to get” William Alcorn, “Fox News Chairman Ailes Comes Home, Discusses Obama’s Tasks,” Vindicator, Nov. 11, 2008.
71. One of those fellow actors Author interview with Robert Ailes, Jr.
72. “He sat down” Author interview with Warren resident Kent Fusselman.
73. Launa Newman developed an instant connection Author interview with Launa Newman-Minson.
74. Before graduating, Roger Author interview with Warren resident Bernice Marino.
75. “Father did not encourage” Ibid.
76. Once, when Roger Auletta, “Vox Fox.”
77. During his prime earning years Donna M. Ailes v. Robert E. Ailes, Trumbull County (Ohio) Court of Common Pleas, Division of Domestic Relations, Case 5396, Oct. 7, 1959.
78. To make some extra money Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.
79. “The poor guy” Grove, “The Image Shaker; Roger Ailes, the Bush Team’s Wily Media Man.”
80. When it came time to buy Donna M. Ailes v. Robert E. Ailes, Trumbull County (Ohio) Court of Common Pleas, Division of Domestic Relations, Case 5396, March 18, 1960.
81. “He tried hard” Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.
82. “All I wanted to do” Grove, “The Image Shaker; Roger Ailes, the Bush Team’s Wily Media Man.”
83. After landing a job Donald Baer, “Roger Rabid,” Manhattan, Inc., Sept. 1989.
84. One day, in the spring Junod, “Roger Ailes on Roger Ailes: The Interv
iew Transcripts, Part 2.”
85. “It felt like a picture-perfect” Author interview with Ohio University alumnus Arthur Nolletti.
86. Students went for hayrides See, for instance, Athena, 1959 (Ohio University yearbook), 32.
87. During Ailes’s sophomore year The Post (Ohio University), May 19, 1960.
88. The handbook 1958–1959 Student Handbook, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio.
89. A caption Athena, 1959 (Ohio University yearbook), 9.
90. In December 1959 Wesley M. Stevens, “Beatniks Protested at Fireside Group,” Athens Messenger, Dec. 30, 1959.
91. He wanted to join the military Tom Hodson, Conversations from Studio B (interview with Roger Ailes at 4:18), WOUB Public Media, Ohio University, May 20, 2012. http://woub.org/2012/05/20/fox-news-chairman-and-ceo-roger-ailes.
92. In a certain sense Playbill, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio.
93. “I was hammered all the time” Marshall Sella, “The Red-State Network,” New York Times, June 24, 2001.
94. “I skipped a lot of classes” Roger Ailes interview with Brian Lamb on C-Span, Dec. 19, 2004.
95. Ailes’s starting position Hodson, Conversations from Studio B (interview with Roger Ailes, at 4:40).
96. He then hosted Author interview with Ohio University alumnus Donald Hylkema. (On-air, Hylkema used the pseudonym Don Mathews.) See also Hodson, Conversations from Studio B (interview with Roger Ailes, at 7:42, 8:10).
97. Vincent Jukes, a stout Author interview with former WOUB station manager Frank Youngwerth.
98. One day, he concocted Author interview with Donald Hylkema.
99. Archie Greer Jaine Wyatt, “Archie Greer,” Athens (Ohio) News, Jan. 4, 2010.
100. Unlike Jukes Author interviews with WOUB students.
101. “Archie was probably the first person” Roger Ailes remarks at dedication of Roger E. Ailes Newsroom, Ohio University, April 24, 2008.
102. By the end Author interviews with WOUB students. Cablegram noted in an article titled “Employes’ [sic] Sons Get Collegiate Honors” that “Roger Ailes, a sophomore at Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, was named station manager of WOUB, the university’s radio station. It was reported that this is the first time a sophomore student has been named to the position.”
The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--and Divided a Country Page 53