Copyright © 2014 by Gabriel Sherman
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to St. Martin’s Press for permission to reprint excerpts from The Man Who Would Not Shut Up: The Rise of Bill O’Reilly by Marvin Kitman, copyright © 2007 by Marvin Kitman. Reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press. All rights reserved.
ISBN 978-0-8129-9285-4
eBook ISBN 978-0-679-64409-5
www.atrandom.com
Jacket design: Gregg Kulick
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigrams
PROLOGUE “THE MOST POWERFUL MAN IN THE WORLD”
ACT I
ONE “JUMP ROGER, JUMP”
TWO “YOU CAN TALK YOUR WAY OUT OF ANYTHING”
THREE THE PHILADELPHIA STORY
ACT II
FOUR SELLING THE TRICK
FIVE REA PRODUCTIONS
SIX A NEW STAGE
SEVEN THOUGHT PATTERN REVOLUTION
EIGHT RISKY STRATEGY
ACT III
NINE AMERICA’S TALKING
TEN “A VERY, VERY DANGEROUS MAN”
ELEVEN THE AUSSIE AND THE MIDWESTERNER
TWELVE OCTOBER SURPRISE
THIRTEEN THE RIGHT KIND OF FRIENDS
ACT IV
FOURTEEN ANTI-CLINTON NEWS NETWORK
FIFTEEN THE CALL
SIXTEEN HOLY WAR
SEVENTEEN QUAGMIRE DOESN’T RATE
EIGHTEEN “WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH ALL THIS POWER?”
ACT V
NINETEEN SEARCHING FOR A NEW CAST
TWENTY COMEBACK
TWENTY-ONE TROUBLE ON MAIN STREET
TWENTY-TWO THE LAST CAMPAIGN
DEDICATION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A NOTE ON SOURCES
NOTES
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
“An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.”
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
“Television rarely, if ever, tells the whole story.”
—ROGER AILES
PROLOGUE
“The Most Powerful Man in the World”
On the evening of December 7, 2011, Roger Ailes found himself in enemy territory: mingling with journalists in the East Room of the White House at a holiday party hosted by the Obama administration. As the chairman and CEO of Fox News, Ailes was effectively the most powerful opposition figure in the country, with a wide swath of the Republican establishment on his payroll. The reception was studded with East Coast news anchors, Ivy League journalists, and Democrats—the kinds of people Ailes had built his career by attacking, and the kinds of people who Ailes believed had it in for him, too. Though Ailes had spent more than four decades in Washington, D.C., and New York City, he still saw himself as a scrapper from a small town in a flyover state who’d had to fight for everything he had. When asked by one reporter what his antagonists thought of him, he replied, “I can pretty much pick the words for you: paranoid, right-wing, fat.”
But Roger Ailes believed in the importance of American institutions, and in the sacredness of the presidency, which was why he’d brought his eleven-year-old son, Zachary, along to meet the president. And the White House was a place where Ailes had long been comfortable. He had been going there since he was a twenty-eight-year-old television adviser who’d helped Richard Nixon become president by making the famously stiff, dour man seem warmer and more human on screen.
Ailes and Nixon met in Philadelphia in January 1968. Nixon, about to embark on his second presidential campaign, was in town to appear on The Mike Douglas Show, an afternoon variety program watched by seven million housewives across America. Ailes, who was the show’s executive producer, understood the revolutionary power of the medium in ways that the politician did not. “It’s a shame a man has to use gimmicks like this to get elected,” Nixon told Ailes off-camera. “Television is not a gimmick,” Ailes shot back, “and if you think it is, you’ll lose again.” Ailes would help to re-create Nixon, and Nixon, in turn, re-created Ailes. “I never had a political thought,” Ailes recalled, “until they asked me to join the Richard Nixon presidential campaign.” He imbibed Nixon’s worldview, learning how to connect to the many Americans who felt left behind by the upheavals of the 1960s, an insight Ailes would deploy for political advantage, and, later, at Fox News, for record ratings and profits.
“Roger was born for television. The growth of television paralleled his whole life,” said the journalist Joe McGinniss, whose landmark book about the 1968 election, The Selling of the President, turned Ailes into a star political operative. As a pugnacious television adviser to Presidents Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush and then as the progenitor of Fox News, Ailes remade both American politics and media. More than anyone of his generation, he helped transform politics into mass entertainment—monetizing the politics while making entertainment a potent organizing force. “Politics is power, and communications is power,” he said after the 1968 election. Through Fox, Ailes helped polarize the American electorate, drawing sharp, with-us-or-against-us lines, demonizing foes, preaching against compromise.
At the prescribed time, Ailes hobbled with Zachary to the rope line to see the president. At seventy-one, his body was failing him. The proximate problem was arthritis, but it was his hemophilia that had accelerated it. He had suffered from the debilitating condition since he was a little boy. Over time, the disease caused blood to pool in his knees, hips, and ankles. Though the swelling ravaged his joints, he was stoic about the problem—on occasion he’d sit through a meeting, his shoe filling up with blood from a cut. His pain became a kind of badge. “The difference between pros and amateurs is that pros play hurt,” he once said. Ailes displayed a certain fatalism, perhaps a result of his medical history. A couple of weeks before his thirtieth birthday, he told a reporter, “Most people think I’ll be dead before I’m 35.”
As a young man, Ailes had the striking features of an actor, with dark eyebrows over wide-set eyes and a sly, confident smile. But these days he looked more like Alfred Hitchcock. He was resigned to his girth, rationalizing it as beyond his control. “It’s not that I eat too much,” Ailes would say. “It’s that I can’t move.” Which wasn’t strictly true. During the 1988 presidential campaign, when his weight was ballooning, colleagues observed Ailes inhaling Häagen-Dazs ice cream. At rare moments, Ailes expressed vulnerability about his body image. “Photo editors are sadistic bastards,” he told a journalist around this time. “And photographers always make me look heavy.”