Ailes began to doubt Palin’s political instincts. He thought she was getting bad advice from her kitchen cabinet and saw her erratic behavior as a sign that she was a “loose cannon.” A turning point in their relationship came in the midst of the national debate over the Tucson shooting massacre, which left Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords almost fatally wounded. As the media pounced on Palin’s violent rhetoric—her website had put the image of a target on Giffords’s congressional district months earlier to mobilize her voters to defeat Giffords at the polls—Palin wanted to fight back, angry that commentators were singling her out. Ailes agreed but told her to stay out of it. He thought if she stayed quiet, she would score a victory.
“Lie low,” he told her. “If you want to respond later, fine, but do not interfere with the memorial service.”
Palin ignored Ailes’s advice and went ahead and released her controversial “blood libel” video the morning Obama traveled to Tucson. For Ailes, her decision was further evidence that she was flailing around off-message. “Why did you call me for advice?” he wondered aloud to colleagues. “He thinks Palin is an idiot,” a Republican close to Ailes said. “He thinks she’s stupid. He helped boost her up. People like Sarah Palin haven’t elevated the conservative movement.”
What had been an effort to boost ratings became a complication. Employing potential presidential candidates and Glenn Beck opened the network up to criticism that it was too politicized. Ailes also got an earful from leaders in the GOP establishment who were apoplectic that Beck, Palin, and Christine “I’m not a witch” O’Donnell, the Tea Party–backed candidate running for the Senate in Delaware, were becoming the face of Fox News and, by extension, the Republican party. “Why are you letting Palin have the profile?” Karl Rove said to Ailes in one meeting. “Why are you letting her go on your network and say the things she’s saying? And Glenn Beck? These are alternative people who will never be elected, and they’ll kill us.”
Ailes was inclined to listen. After Fox News gave the inaugural Tea Party rallies wall-to-wall coverage in the spring of 2009, Ailes told executives to dial back the promotion. His message, according to one executive, was: “Let’s not abandon them, because their audience is driving the ratings, but we’re not going to have that umbilical cord connection to them. They’re on their own. So the next big iconic event that happened, there was no planned coverage. It was just planned news coverage.”
Although Ailes valued the ratings, he had a grander goal. One afternoon not long before the midterms, Ailes told executives who sat in his office, “the network’s a success. We’re making a lot of money—that’s fine. But I want to elect the next president.”
TWENTY-ONE
TROUBLE ON MAIN STREET
AS AILES TOLD Fox EXECUTIVES of his desire to install a Republican in the White House, he found himself caught up in a conflict of a much more personal sort: small-town politics. It was an imbroglio that Ailes would later say he did not want. At Fox News, the steel security doors, the public relations apparatus, and the discretion of generously paid confidants kept the full measure of Roger Ailes’s paranoia and rage from the world. In his hometown, Roger Ailes was exposed.
From the outset, Ailes spoke of his residence in Garrison, forty-six miles north of Manhattan in Putnam County, New York, as an escape from the partisan front lines at Fox News. “All I ever wanted was a nice place to live, a great family, and to die peacefully in my sleep,” he said around the time of his move. Garrison, a few other hamlets, and the neighboring villages Nelsonville and Cold Spring formed the larger town of Philipstown, although it was not very large at alclass="underline" fewer than ten thousand citizens. It seemed, on the surface at least, to be an ideal place to instill in Zachary the Eisenhower values Ailes had known as a boy. Putnam County even had a Republican bent: while voters tended to vote Democratic at the state level, the last Democratic presidential candidates to carry the county were Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon B. Johnson.
Cold Spring’s downtown held on to everything Warren, Ohio, had let go. It was a vibrant civic space, dotted with well-maintained Victorian homes, quaint storefronts, and stately churches. The area appealed to Ailes’s sentimental ideas about America. From his mountaintop aerie, an impressive nine-thousand-square-foot mansion constructed of Adirondack river stone, he overlooked triumphal reminders of the country’s might. To the west was the spot where Continental Army troops strung a 185-ton iron chain across the Hudson to block British ships advancing upriver. To the north were shuttered ironworks that had produced vital armaments and steam engines in the nineteenth century. Across the river stood West Point military academy. The grand interior of his house also bore witness to American greatness. Photographs of Generals George Patton, Ulysses Grant, Robert E. Lee, and Dwight Eisenhower lined the walls.
Roger and Beth were good neighbors. They attended the local Catholic church, Our Lady of Loretto, where on Sundays, Beth sometimes played the organ. They got to know the contractors who built their house, hosted a cookout for members of the volunteer fire department, and bought locally. Leonora Burton, the proprietor of the Country Goose, a gift shop on Cold Spring’s Main Street, considered Beth “a first-rate customer who spent freely.” “I liked her and, being a hugger, sometimes gave her one,” the chatty Brit recalled. Stories circulated of Roger’s generosity. One was that, upon hearing about a store owner who had fallen on hard times, he extended a personal loan.
Buying The Putnam County News & Recorder, in the summer of 2008, was Roger and Beth’s first public endeavor in their adopted town. Founded in the mid-nineteenth century as the Cold Spring Recorder, the weekly newspaper was like the community itself: an artifact from a bygone age. The previous owner and publisher, Brian O’Donnell, kept production methods antique. In a one-room office, housed in a former barbershop on Main Street, staffers laid out the paper with scissors and glue. Under O’Donnell’s steady ownership, the PCN&R, or simply “the paper,” as it was affectionately known by residents, was a quirky, if reserved, information source. “It covered the 4-H Club and the kids’ activities at the school,” said Elizabeth Anderson, the founder and managing director of the investment firm Beekman Wealth Advisory, and a part-time resident of Philipstown. Letters to the editor—the paper’s liveliest section by far—were welcomed, but there were no editorials. When citizens complained that the paper ignored divergent points of view, O’Donnell responded that it was their job to express them at public meetings, not for him to stir them up.
Ailes described Philipstown as a bastion of traditional America. In a certain sense, he was right. Many of the town’s contractors and restaurant owners were the descendants of nineteenth-century Irish and Italian immigrants who had found work in the local foundries. Other residents had ancestors living in the area since before the nation’s birth. But that was only part of the town. In the second half of the twentieth century, a different kind of settler had arrived: the college-educated urbanite who idealized country life.
In the 1960s, when Consolidated Edison, the electric utility, proposed building a power station on the face of Storm King, a 1,340-foot domed mountain that rose like a carapace above the banks of the Hudson River, a coalition of newcomers filed a lawsuit, forming a counterweight against local businesses that supported the development. The ensuing legal battle played out in the courts until Con Ed settled and abandoned the project in 1980. The landmark victory, coming at a time when the Reagan administration was seeking to dismantle environmental regulation, emboldened citizens across the country to speak up in local development matters and helped spawn the modern environmental movement. In Philipstown, a host of preservation groups took root. They fought to preserve the community’s bucolic character and acquired land in trust from Gilded Era estates that had fallen into disrepair.