After they spoke, Ailes offered Lindsley the position of editor in chief, asking him to start right away. Ailes was in the process of buying a second paper, The Putnam County Courier, out of bankruptcy and needed a committed journalist to run the newsrooms of his budding publishing enterprise. Lindsley jumped at the opportunity to work directly for an icon of the cause. Without time to line up an apartment, Lindsley moved into the pool house on the north end of Roger and Beth’s property. It was silent and near freezing the day he stepped out of his Jeep Wrangler on the circular driveway atop the mountain. It was an isolated environment for a recent college grad. He later told friends that he drifted off to sleep that night full of doubt. “What am I doing here?” he thought.
When Lindsley moved to Philipstown in the winter of 2009, Ailes’s mountain was a topic of intense conversation on Cold Spring’s Main Street. “[Ailes] was said to have ordered the removal of all trees around his house so that he … had a 360-degree view of any leftist assault teams preparing to rush the house,” Leonora Burton recalled. Roger and Beth also bought up as many surrounding houses as they could. “I don’t think he has all of them yet,” Roger’s brother said. “He probably only has 80 percent of them. He is a strong believer in the security of real estate. He thinks they don’t make any more of it.” Security cameras were installed throughout the property. “A team of landscapers was, in the absence of the Ailes family, working on the grounds of the compound,” Burton later recounted. “They were planting a tree when the boss’s cell phone rang. It was the absent Beth. ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘That’s not where I want the tree. I insist that you move it.’ She directed them to the correct site. The landscapers were puzzled until they realized that the many security cameras on the grounds had captured them at work. Beth had been watching them from wherever she was and called to correct the tree planting.” Other local contractors helped install a bunker that could weather a terrorist attack underneath their mansion. “He can live in there for more than six months,” a friend who has visited it said. “There are bedrooms, a couple of TVs, water and freeze-dried food.” “I’m not allowed to talk about it,” Robert Ailes said. “I think the proper term is a ‘panic room.’ ”
Most of all, it was the PCN&R that inspired a deepening sense of panic among the town’s liberals. The signs were impossible to miss. As Lindsley began to redesign the papers, his bosses suggested that he place the Cold Spring Recorder’s original motto—“By the grace of God, free and independent”—on the masthead. Articles were sharper-edged. Overt religiosity crept into the pages, evidence, they suspected, of the growing influence of Father McSweeney, the priest of Our Lady of Loretto. Patriotic paeans, including to Medal of Honor recipients, and excerpts from the Federalist Papers filled the weekly.
In May 2009, readers opened the paper to find something they had never seen before: an editorial. The unsigned attack on Obama’s stimulus titled “Debt, Decisions, and Destiny” called the plan “reckless” and said “rich people should be shown some respect.” Lindsley was the editorial’s author, and he quoted from Atlas Shrugged: “We either see ourselves as a nation of people who want to achieve, produce, succeed, and contribute to society or else we see ourselves as a people who want to rely on the producers to create ‘free money’ and support us with grants and federal spending.”
This was too much for some. Leonora Burton stopped selling the paper in the Country Goose. “After Beth learned of my decision, she boycotted the store,” she recalled. Individual subscribers also expressed their outrage. Elizabeth Anderson later decided not to renew her subscription. In an email to the paper, she questioned the relevance of publishing the names of Medal of Honor recipients who did not live in the area. A few minutes after sending the note, she received a phone call. It was Lindsley. Why was she canceling her paper?
“I think I said so in my email,” she said.
“Aren’t you an American?” Lindsley shot back.
A few days later, she opened the paper to find her comments mocked in an editorial. In response, she wrote a letter detailing her family’s long involvement with the Navy. “I do not require lectures from the PCN&R on patriotism, nor on the valor and bravery of the military, nor on the sacrifices made by military families,” she wrote. Lindsley and Beth declined to publish the letter.
Lindsley relished the partisan combat. With the intensity of a bulldozer, he devoted upward of eighty hours a week to the Aileses’ papers. He moved into a nearby apartment on the Hudson River so he could be close to the newsroom. He had no time to meet anyone his own age in town or to pursue outside interests. A state-ranked track star in high school, Lindsley gave up running. He put on weight, forty pounds at the peak, adding to his resemblance of Ailes. During the first part of the week, he worked out of the PCN&R’s newsroom editing articles and handling production. On Thursdays and Fridays, he often accompanied Ailes to Fox News, where he wrote speeches for him and attended to other personal matters. On Sunday mornings, Lindsley sat with Roger and Beth at Mass. He was up on the mountain at all hours, watching the Fighting Irish games with Ailes or joining the family for dinner with the likes of John Bolton and Glenn Beck. He joined Ailes in the News Corp box at Yankee Stadium and he traveled with the family on News Corp’s private plane to visit prominent Republicans across the country. “You know you can’t tell anyone about this, right?” Beth said to him before their first trip on the jet.
With his trusted editor in place, Ailes used the paper to muscle local pols. James Borkowski, a lawyer and town justice in Putnam County from 1998 to 2009, learned the danger of crossing the PCN&R when he decided to run for Putnam County sheriff in the 2009 election, challenging Ailes’s close ally, the incumbent Don Smith. A few months before the Republican primary election, Lindsley invited Borkowski to meet with him and Beth for breakfast at a restaurant across the street from the PCN&R offices. At one point in the conversation, Beth turned to Borkowski.
“So,” Beth said, leaning in close, “you are pro-life, aren’t you?”
Borkowski hesitated. “Personally I am pro-life. But I’m of the position that reasonable people with genuine belief can disagree.”
Wrong answer. “It cast a pall over the whole meeting,” Borkowski said later. “I remembered thinking, what does that have to do with running for sheriff?”
A few weeks later, Borkowski got another call from Lindsley. Roger wanted to see him this time. They met in the PCN&R’s conference room.
“Why are you running against him?” Ailes asked, referring to his friend Smith. “This guy is a West Point grad, a religious guy, a family guy.”
“He might be a nice guy, but he’s not doing a good job,” Borkowski countered. Ailes was unswayed.
Ailes spent an hour pumping Borkowski for information about local political players, in particular New York state senator Vincent Leibell III. “What do you know about charitable organizations? Does Vinnie Leibell make money off of them?” “It kept coming back to Leibell,” Borkowski recalled. At the end of the conversation, Lindsley and Beth escorted Borkowski to the front door. Borkowski lost to Smith several months later.