A few days after the 2013 Independence Day parade in Cold Spring, Ailes called Richard Shea to a meeting at PCN&R headquarters. He had business to discuss. In June, the conservative Bradley Foundation had awarded Ailes a $250,000 prize for being a “visionary of American journalism” at a gala at the Kennedy Center in Washington. His acceptance speech electrified the faithful with gibes at Obama and the shadowy forces who sought to harm the country. Armed IRS agents, he said, would enforce Obama’s health care law at gunpoint. “We must stop waving our extended arms in an effort to balance ourselves as we tiptoe along the edges of the Constitution, in an effort not to upset weak-kneed appeasers with our unflinching belief in the ideas and principles that made our country different and, yes, better,” Ailes said. Onstage later that evening, he sang “God Bless America” with a shiny gold medal around his neck and danced.
Ailes told Shea he would donate the prize money to build a senior center in Philipstown. In the conference room at the PCN&R, Shea quickly realized that Ailes had other things on his mind besides charitable giving. Shea listened as Roger unloaded a stream-of-consciousness speech about the troubled state of the world, a kind of life reckoning. Ailes said that if he were president, he would solve the immigration problem by sitting the president of Mexico down and giving him a stern talking-to: “Your country is corrupt. You can now only take thirty percent of what the people earn instead of seventy percent. If you don’t do that, I’ll send the CIA down there to kill you.” He had been careful to moderate his immigration position in public. “If I’m going to risk my life to run over the fence to get into America, I want to win. I think Fox News will articulate that,” he told The New Republic a few months earlier. But Ailes told Shea that as president he would send Navy SEAL trainees to the border as part of a certification program: “I would make it a requirement that you would have to personally kill an illegal immigrant coming into the country. They would have to bring home a dead body.”
When Shea brought up Ailes’s past, he erupted. “I had nothing to do with Richard Nixon!” Ailes claimed it was Ronald Reagan whom he had been close to.
“Why don’t people like me?” Ailes asked Shea. The Navy SEALs loved him. Couldn’t people in Philipstown see all that he and Beth had done? Throughout his career, Ailes had wielded generosity as a form of power—he recently said he gave away 10 percent of his annual income—and yet it failed him in his community.
His strongest venom was reserved for Gordon Stewart. “Why do people like him?” Ailes complained to Shea. “He’s trying to drive me out of town!” Since Stewart had launched Philipstown.info on July 4, 2010, their feud had escalated. In June 2012, Stewart started a weekly print newspaper, which he slyly called The Philipstown Paper. The new PCN&R editor asked Stewart if there was a liberal conspiracy behind the venture involving the Hudson Highlands Land Trust or “the Facebook guys,” referring to Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes and his husband, Sean Eldridge, who owned an estate in the area. Stewart said no one was backing the paper but himself.
In March 2013, Beth rejected a “Business Person of the Year” award from the Cold Spring Chamber of Commerce because the group asked her to share it with Stewart. “Due to scheduling conflicts and the fact that Gordon Stewart has behaved in an unethical manner toward me, my family and my business, I decided to decline,” she said. A few months later, Roger and Beth paid $30,000 to the village of Cold Spring to sponsor the July Fourth fireworks exclusively for three years, out-bidding Stewart, who had sponsored them the previous year. Stewart instead funded the music. When the PCN&R published a town advertisement thanking the sponsors of the day’s festivities, the paper failed to credit Stewart for his contribution. “He’s trying to drive my wife’s paper out of business!” Ailes told Shea. (As turmoil inside the newsroom intensified, Ailes had transferred ownership of the paper to Beth.) What about competition? Shea asked. Ailes waved off the question. He was engaged in a zero-sum game. “Stewart is doing everything!” Ailes said, even claiming that Stewart was behind a parody website The Pretend Putnam County News & Recorder. (“I have nothing to do with it,” Stewart later said.) Shea was shaken by Ailes’s state. “I have never experienced such expressions of spitting hate,” Shea told Stewart a few days later. “I have to tell you that if Roger could kill you, he would do that. The hatred is that deep.”
As the conversation ebbed, Ailes warned Shea that there could be consequences if he continued to associate with Stewart. Shea was up for reelection in November. He was popular in town. Republicans had yet to field a challenger. Ailes was running out of patience. “The last time I backed that half-wit,” he said, referring to Lee Erickson. “If I go after you this time, I’ll knock you out. I’ll run for supervisor myself.”
Roger Ailes did not jump into the race. Richard Shea won the November election handily, running unopposed. But while Ailes sat it out, he was still stumping to be remembered as a friendly civic father of Philipstown, which was a microcosm, however currently imperfect, of the America he loved. For a man in his business, Ailes is surprisingly sensitive. “He doesn’t want to be hated,” said a Republican who knows him well. “It really bothers him.”
Ailes’s campaign to be liked was at odds with his uncompromising vision. “All progress is made by irrational people,” he told a journalist in 1989. The statement could well be turned back on Ailes, because he embodied a number of contradictions. He accommodated naive idealism about American life and history alongside profound cynicism about many Americans, from presidents on down. He justified the use of smash-mouth political tactics in the service of protecting his sentimentalized notion of picket-fenced America. He bullied real and perceived enemies, but played the victim when criticized. He could be the most menacing or the funniest, most engaging conversationalist. He decried Manhattan elites, but was one. He entered the journalistic trade, whose practitioners he regularly expresses contempt for. And the starkest contradiction, the one of lasting consequence, is his creation of a “fair and balanced” news network that effectively functioned as an arm of one political party.
In interviews in recent years, Ailes reflected a politician’s sense of winning and losing, that the moment is today, and that tomorrow may belong to another. “I don’t care about my legacy. It’s too late. My enemies will create it and they’ll push it,” he said a week after the 2012 election. “Right now, everybody thinks I’m the greatest guy in the world,” he told another journalist. “The eulogies will be great, but people will be stepping over my body before it gets cold. Within a day or two, everybody will be complaining about what a prick I was and all the things I didn’t do for them.”
It’s a surprisingly open-eyed assessment, both humble and grandiose, but it omits a larger truth. Ailes made his career in a winner-take-all world of 50.1 percent majorities measured by the pull of levers and click of remotes: thumbs up, thumbs down; in or out; like him or hate him. But his career, unlike a campaign, will be judged by both the good and the bad. There are no referenda on a man’s legacy.
For four and a half decades, Roger Ailes had directed his candidates from the wings, even if they were half-wits. He played tougher and said the inconvenient truths that no one wanted to hear. He knew it made him hated. “Most of the media in this country would prefer Roger went away,” his brother, Robert, said. “Fox News is the beacon of conservatism in the American media. There are an awful lot of people who would like to see Fox News collapse.” But it was Ailes’s burden to carry, and he was never going to quit: “I can’t walk away until I think enough people understand how valuable and how important being an American is.”