The Aileses were in town for just one night and had a lot of ground to cover. There was a gathering of Roger’s high school friends at the Avalon Inn, the hotel where they were staying on Warren’s East Side, followed by a downtown reception for civic leaders and memorial donors at the Huntington National Bank and an interview with a reporter from the Warren Tribune Chronicle. The morning would bring the monument unveiling and a celebratory luncheon at the Trumbull Country Club. But before all that, Ailes had a promise to keep. He had told Zachary that they would eat at the Hot Dog Shoppe, a favored watering hole for high school kids in his father’s time.
On the drive from the airport, Roger could see how Warren was now a very different city from the one he had grown up in. The giant aluminum hot dog that blinked as it rotated on a fifteen-foot red pole mounted on the Shoppe’s roof was still in working order, but many of the restaurants from his day were gone. Warren’s decline was no less precipitous than that of Rust Belt emblems like Detroit or Flint, Michigan. The financial crisis of 2008 visited its own kind of apocalypse. During one eighteen-day period after Lehman filed for bankruptcy, Warren’s then-mayor, Michael O’Brien, received ten letters from local companies announcing mass layoffs or closures. Severstal Steel, one of Warren’s few remaining employers, announced it was cutting its workforce from one thousand to thirty-five. Packard’s employment fell to nine hundred, about 5 percent of its peak.
Once a city that worked, Warren had become a city that was broken, sick with the all-too-familiar symptoms. Drug addicts robbed homes in broad daylight, running off with flat-screen TVs or video game consoles to pawn. Prostitutes leaning against shady oak trees worked the streets. Scavengers stripped foreclosed houses of their guts—copper plumbing and electrical wiring—to sell to local scrap dealers. The municipal government cut social services and laid off 30 percent of its police force. To keep cops on the street, Mayor O’Brien—himself a former officer—dismantled the department’s detective bureau and put a dozen veteran detectives back into uniform.
After checking into the Avalon Hotel, Ailes went to a private room with a dozen former schoolmates from Warren G. Harding High School’s class of 1958. They chatted for an hour about their youth, with Ailes speaking warmly about his time acting in high school plays. But when the conversation moved toward current events, the mood darkened. Ailes had a specific diagnosis for his hometown’s decline. “We have fed more people and freed more people than any country in history. Obama needs to focus Americans on personal responsibility,” Ailes said. He recounted his summertime encounter with the president-elect at the Waldorf Astoria. “If he wants to bring the nation together, as he says, now is the time to reach out,” Ailes explained. He told his classmates that he had hoped McCain would win, but that the “unbelievable” financial crisis had eliminated the Republicans’ chance.
Then Ailes talked about his own role in the struggle, and the stakes. “I defend the United States, Israel, and the Constitution. That’s when I get my death threats,” he told them. “I stand up for what I believe. I don’t back off. I’ve been that way for forty years. That’s the secret to my success. I have thick skin. I don’t care what people say about me.… We’re not a perfect nation. But the question is, if the U.S. is destroyed, what would the world be like?” Later that afternoon, he told a local newspaper reporter that his hometown could learn a thing or two from the lesson his father had taught him as a boy. “If you want a helping hand, look at the end of your arm,” Ailes said. It was the same lesson he imparted at Fox News. He liked to tell people how, several years earlier, he launched a job-training program for minorities called “The Ailes Apprentice Program.” It was one of his genuine sources of pride. “If every company did this, could you imagine what they’d do to minority unemployment?” he later said.
It was cold and damp the next morning when Ailes and his family arrived at the dedication ceremony in Monument Park. Hundreds of people had gathered. It was the largest crowd Warren had seen downtown in many years.
As Ailes took to the microphone, he saw visions of his past. “You see that fountain pool right around there?” he told the audience, pointing toward a Victorian-era sculpture of a crane in flight with water shooting from its beak. “My mother and grandmother would bring me there, and I used to feed the squirrels.” He motioned at the YMCA across the street from the courthouse. “I used to go there every Saturday and take swim lessons.”
He told the audience that he was moved to speak at the dedication ceremony because his best childhood friend, Doug Webster, was killed in the Vietnam War. Webster was a grade behind Roger in school, but they were like brothers. Webster grew up on Edgewood Street, a mile away from the Ailes house.
Webster’s life exerted a palpable pull on Roger. In many ways, he was the man Ailes wanted to be: a star athlete, vice president of his high school class, co-captain of the Ohio State gymnastics team, and a Navy fighter pilot. Ailes went to the military recruiting office with Webster to enlist together. “He got in, I didn’t,” Ailes said. But Webster died in a freak accident three months into his first deployment to the Pacific, when his Navy A-4 Skyhawk slid off the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga. His body was never recovered. “I guess there is a certain amount of survivor guilt there,” Ailes said.
After the crowd dispersed, Ailes headed to the Trumbull Country Club for lunch. An hour later, he motioned to his wife.
“Hurry up, we gotta go.”
“What do you mean?” Beth said.
“We gotta go back to the Hot Dog Shoppe so we can load up.”
On the way, Ailes made a detour onto Belmont Street. He wanted to show Zachary the house he grew up in. The two-story home had not changed much since his parents had sold it following their divorce. Ailes would have noticed only slight alterations to it. Now it had gray siding and navy blue shutters on the upstairs windows. The other houses on the block were in varying states of disrepair. Ailes knocked on the door. A young man named Chris Monsman answered. He was not yet thirty, a former high school baseball star, and now worked at a cabinet manufacturer.
“I grew up in this house,” Ailes said. “My son is here today, and I wonder if I could just show him the living room. Do you mind?”
“No, come on in.”
The house had one bath and five other low-ceilinged rooms. Roger pointed upstairs toward the cramped bedroom that he shared with his brother. Zachary looked around the small interior. “Dad, this living room is only as big as our car.”
“Well, three of us grew up in here, son,” Ailes said.
Ailes told the Monsmans that he ran Fox News. Did they ever watch it? Chris did not, but his wife, Danella, a home health aide, liked the channel. Danella thought the hosts seemed friendlier and were having more fun than those on the other news channels. Ailes complimented them on the condition of their home. They visited for ten minutes. Before Ailes left, he gave Chris his Fox business card. What he could offer the young man was not clear.
Three years later, the Warren Tribune Chronicle publisher Charles Jarvis invited Ailes to return to Warren to deliver a speech. Ailes would not commit to a date and did not return. Although he wrapped his identity in his hometown’s blue-collar history, there was only so much of Warren that Ailes likely wanted to see. “I left there in 1958,” Ailes said in 2012. “Anything that anyone says there about me is wrong. They don’t know me.” Everywhere he looked, he was confronted with the vanishing America he had known as a boy. He had come to fear it might not return. “We are in a storm, our mast is broken, our compass is off, and there is a damned big hole in the boat,” he often said. For Ailes, Fox News had a purpose higher than profits and ratings.