Near the end of his book, You Are the Message, Ailes described an encounter he had with Judy Garland shortly before she died, in 1969. Ailes was not yet thirty. “In her twilight days, Judy was so ill that she often couldn’t complete a show.… Her voice was almost gone, and she had trouble controlling her vibrato. When I met her, I was so shaken by her voice in rehearsal and her appearance that I couldn’t understand why she had such a loyal following,” he wrote. “But anyone who saw her in concert understood her magic. The audience identified with her ‘humanness.’ They identified with her frailties. They understood her vulnerability. When she sang at Carnegie Hall and tried to hit the high notes in ‘Over the Rainbow,’ twenty-eight hundred people were praying for her to make it.”
It was a lesson that applied to his own life. “If you can get the audience to pull for you, you’ll always win,” Ailes wrote. “After all, audiences are just like you. They’re human. They care. They’re sympathetic. They’re supportive. The audience wants you to succeed.… An awareness of your own vulnerability and the vulnerability of others will make you a better and more human communicator. And only a human communicator can become a master communicator.”
Roger Ailes was still out on the stage. He had two million Americans rooting for his network. They grew older every day, as he did. Fox News was his best show on his biggest stage yet, but every show has its run.
For my parents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
One of the paradoxes of publishing a book is that while my byline is on the cover, every word on the page is the product of many hands. Without the generosity of my sources, editors, fact-checkers, family, and friends, I would not be writing this expression of gratitude now.
My principal collaborator was my wife, Jennifer Stahl. In the winter of 2012, after spending five years in the fact-checking department of The New Yorker, she left the magazine to work with me full-time on the book. She played a variety of roles as the manuscript took shape, all of which were crucial. As a researcher, she helped track down important interview subjects and documents, and studied thousands of pages of primary source material that detailed formative periods of Roger Ailes’s life. She was my closest editor, who helped me conceive the story and the structure of the book. She line-edited the first and subsequent drafts. This book is as much hers as it is mine.
John Homans, my editor at New York magazine, did a sophisticated and generous edit to the manuscript over eighteen months, refining the ideas and sharpening the narrative. His gifts as a writer have improved my writing immeasurably, and I can’t thank him enough for all his hard work and forbearance. I am also grateful to Adam Moss, New York’s editor in chief, for giving me a journalistic home for the past six years and for publishing four cover stories that became the foundation of several chapters of this book. I’ve learned a lot about reporting and writing from my colleagues at the magazine, who continually inspire me with their journalism.
During the three years it took to report and write this book, my agent, Gail Ross, provided me with intelligent counsel and support. Years before that, she encouraged me to move beyond long-form magazine journalism and pursue book writing. One of her best decisions was steering me to Jonathan Jao, my editor at Random House, who has shared my enthusiasm for the project from the moment he acquired it to the hours we spent working together on the final edits. His incisive notes and cuts were invaluable. I also want to thank Jonathan’s colleagues at Random House for their contributions: president Gina Centrello; publisher Susan Kamil; deputy publisher Tom Perry; London King and Barbara Fillon in Publicity; associate general counsel Laura Goldin; production editor Steve Messina; and Jonathan’s assistant, Molly Turpin.
Without my team of fact-checkers, Cynthia Cotts and Rob Liguori, this book would not have moved through Random House’s publishing system on such a tight deadline. They brought their top credentials to the project, having worked at publications including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times Magazine. Cynthia and Rob were dogged reporters in their own right, adding nuance and context to every piece of text they handled.
This book builds on the groundbreaking journalism about Roger Ailes and the News Corporation produced by writers including Kurt Andersen, Julia Angwin, Tim Arango, Ken Auletta, Donald Baer, David Bauder, David Brock, Bryan Burrough, Michael Calderone, John Carmody, David Carr, Bill Carter, John Cassidy, Scott Collins, John Cook, Rebecca Dana, Sarah Ellison, James Ellroy, Steve Fishman, David Folkenflik, Jason Gay, Vanessa Grigoriadis, Lloyd Grove, Joe Hagan, Nancy Hass, Tom Junod, Andrew Neil, Frank Rich, Marshall Sella, Brian Stelter, and Michael Wolff. Tom Junod, of Esquire, deserves special thanks for publishing an extended transcript of his 2011 interview with Roger Ailes, which informed the chapter on Ailes’s childhood experience. I also want to thank my mentor, Peter Kaplan, the longtime editor in chief of The New York Observer who passed away in November 2013 at age fifty-nine. When I was a young reporter covering media at the Observer, Peter told me to approach the beat as a New York Times reporter would cover the State Department. It’s a message I will hold on to. I wrote this book imagining Peter as my reader and I will miss him very much.
Since September 2012, I have been fortunate to be a fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. Steve Coll, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Rachel White, Andrés Martinez, Becky Shafer, Kirsten Berg, and Casey Scharf provided generous support and institutional backing for this book.
I am grateful to my friends and family for their patience as I worked to complete this project, including my brother Todd and his wife, Claire, and my sister-in-law Christine and her husband, David. My in-laws, Kermit and Deborah Stahl, were a wellspring of comfort and support, reminding me once again that they have welcomed me into their family like a son. More than anything, this book is a product of the love of my parents, Leonard and Raechelle Sherman. The sacrifices they have made on my behalf, which continued through the writing of this book, have left me with debts I will never repay.
A NOTE ON SOURCES
This book is based on interviews with 614 people who have worked with Roger Ailes and observed him at close range at various points in his five decades in public life. In addition, I have relied on contemporaneous notes, emails, calendars, letters, court filings, deposition transcripts, corporate documents, White House memoranda, and secondary sources, including videotapes, newspaper clippings, magazine articles, and books. Wherever possible, I have confirmed the facts with a minimum of two sources. Dialogue, as the Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist James B. Stewart has written, is a type of fact, like the color of a wall or the make of a shirt. Where I have detailed the emotional states or thoughts of characters, the descriptions are based on interviews with either the principals themselves or people who had conversations with them about what they thought or felt. Before this book went to press, a team of two fact-checkers, Cynthia Cotts and Rob Liguori, spent a combined 2,098 hours vetting the manuscript for accuracy and context. They did a phenomenal job. Any errors or omissions that remain are my responsibility alone.