“Roger, I want to incorporate your point of view,” I replied.
“No!” Ailes snapped. He pointed to Rhodes. “You’re witnessing this! You’re a witness! This is not an interview.”
Ailes spun around and headed off toward his table. “You don’t think if I wanted to I couldn’t get back into politics?” he said, looking back. He stopped in the middle of the room, where I caught up with him. “And what’s it with you going to Warren? I left there in 1958. Anything that anyone says there about me is wrong. They don’t know me.”
“I went to Warren because I wanted to figure out where you came from. You talk a lot about how you program Fox for all the small towns that have been left behind by the media.”
“That’s right. Well, you can write whatever you want. It’s because of people like me that you have the freedom to do what you do. You have freedom of the press because I defend it every day.”
He took a few more steps. “Okay, kid, that’s all I got. You’re a good reporter, but you’re wrong. You don’t get me.”
I decided to leave. Bill O’Reilly was standing alone near the way out. I walked up to him. His air was as frosty as his boss’s. “I know who you are. I have nothing to say to you,” he said.
At the coat check, I bumped into Roger and Beth. “Mr. Ailes, thank you for speaking with me. I’ll see you down in North Carolina.” As it happened, I was flying there the next morning to see Ailes give a speech at the University of North Carolina. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “I’ve been trying to figure out a way to have you barred. But it’s a public event.”
Ailes did not speak to me in North Carolina, but I encountered him briefly fourteen months later, on the evening of June 12, 2013, in Washington, D.C. I was invited as a member of the press to attend a ceremony at the Kennedy Center, where Ailes was being celebrated by the conservative Bradley Foundation. When I arrived, a young man wearing a blue blazer and a bow tie offered to show me into the reception. He asked me my name as we walked down a long corridor. When I answered, his demeanor changed. “I know who you are,” he said. I asked him his, but he did not respond. Instead, he quickened his pace.
In the reception hall, I saw the young man slalom through the crowd to the far side of the room. He approached Ailes, who was standing with his bodyguard. Ailes’s face tightened. His head turned left and right as he scanned his surroundings.
After a few moments, Ailes, the young man, and the bodyguard walked in my direction. I asked Ailes if he would have time to speak. His bodyguard pushed me aside. Ailes was several steps ahead of me when I regained my balance. He spun around and said, “I don’t mean to be rude, but this is a family night!” He turned to the young man in the bow tie. “Zachary, where’s your mother?”
Despite Ailes’s concerted efforts at obstruction, many of his closest colleagues, friends, family members, and business rivals did speak to me at length and offered candid accounts of their firsthand experiences with Ailes. A large number of these people spoke on the record. Many others, however, asked to speak with me on a not-for-attribution background basis. I granted sources anonymity in instances where they expressed credible fear for their professional livelihood. It was not an uncommon occurrence for me to hear things from sources like the following remark one prominent Fox personality made: “It would totally destroy my life if it gets out that I’m talking to you. If he even thought I knew you, he’d see it as a personal betrayal.” Other sources expressed concern that Ailes might be having me followed by private investigators and that my phone might be bugged and my computer hacked.
While Roger Ailes did not grant me a sit-down interview, I strove to reflect his point of view throughout this book. I relied on the thousands of quotes he has given to the press over the years on a wide array of subjects, from his childhood to his thoughts on religion, politics, and culture. Although he may not have intended it, Ailes’s confrontational response to the reporting of this book was as revealing as any comment he would have made in the course of an extended interview. It confirmed one of the defining aspects of his career: he had amassed power by harnessing television to control the images of politicians and media personalities. And so it made sense that he would seek the same degree of influence over the story he cared about most: his own.
NOTES
EPIGRAMS
1. “An institution” Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay “Self-Reliance.”
2. “Television rarely, if ever” Roger Ailes, “Candidate + Money + Media = Votes” (transcript of speech), Town Hall of California, June 8, 1971, Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.
PROLOGUE: “THE MOST POWERFUL MAN IN THE WORLD”
1. On the evening of December 7 A government official familiar with the guest list. See also http://www.whitehouse.gov/files/docs/Holidays-at-the-White-House-2011.pdf.
2. When asked by Tom Junod, “Why Does Roger Ailes Hate America?,” Esquire, Feb. 2011.
3. “It’s a shame a man” Joe McGinniss, The Selling of the President: The Classic Account of the Packaging of a Candidate, reprint edition (New York: Penguin, 1988), 63. See also Tim Dickinson, “How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory,” Rolling Stone, May 25, 2011.
4. “I never had” Hoover Institution, “Fox and More with Roger Ailes” (video interview), Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, Feb. 5, 2010, http://www.hoover.org/multimedia/uncommon-knowledge/26681.
5. “Roger was born for television” Author interview with author Joe McGinniss.
6. More than anyone In his interview on Uncommon Knowledge, Ailes said that he spotted this trend early in his career, as he worked for a wildly popular television variety program. At the 5:07 mark, he notes, “I produced The Mike Douglas Show back in the sixties, so I had a sense of audience. In fact, we began in that show to use politicians’ wives. We filmed in Hubert Humphrey’s home. We had his wife, Muriel, on as a co-host. So I had a sense of what was going to happen in television. That there would be a mixture of entertainment, information, politics. It’s all one now.”
7. “Politics is power” David Nyhan, “Roger Ailes: He Doctors a Politician’s TV Image,” Boston Globe, May 3, 1970.
8. “The difference between” Lloyd Grove, “The Image Shaker; Roger Ailes, the Bush Team’s Wily Media Man,” Washington Post, June 20, 1988.
9. “A couple of weeks” Nyhan, “Roger Ailes: He Doctors a Politician’s TV Image.”
10. “It’s not that I eat” Junod, “Why Does Roger Ailes Hate America?”
11. During the 1988 Tom Mathews and Peter Goldman, The Quest for the Presidency: The 1988 Campaign (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 191.
12. “Photo editors are sadistic” Grove, “The Image Shaker; Roger Ailes, the Bush Team’s Wily Media Man.”
13. “I’m never going” Author interview with former Ailes deputy and comedy teacher Stephen Rosenfield.
14. “I think I’ll lead” Nyhan, “Roger Ailes: He Doctors a Politician’s TV Image.”
15. “Revolutionaries” Ibid.