Nixon was scheduled to appear on October 31, 1967. But a few weeks before the taping, his team got cold feet. Philadelphia was becoming hostile terrain for Republicans, with Arlen Specter, the Republican candidate for mayor, locked in a tight race, so the meeting was postponed until January 9. The day before the interview, Clint Wheeler, an outside PR consultant to the campaign, went to Philadelphia to prep with Ailes. They discussed the topics for the interview, which included questions like “What’s Bob Hope really like? Did David [Eisenhower] ask you for [your daughter] Julie’s hand? What do you think of the demonstrators/LBJ situation? What about women in politics? Will you play the piano?”
At 9:45 the next morning, Nixon left his Fifth Avenue apartment and headed with his aide Dwight Chapin for LaGuardia Airport, where the Reader’s Digest Gulfstream was waiting for the thirty-five-minute flight to Philadelphia. Ailes would retell the story of their conversation at the studio repeatedly. It was the moment that altered the trajectory of his career. The earliest account of their meeting was Joe McGinniss’s, in The Selling of the President. McGinniss wrote that while waiting to go on-air, Nixon complained to Ailes about television, eliciting Ailes’s retort that television was not a “gimmick.”
In later years, Ailes would recast their first encounter, downplaying his ambition. In magazine profiles and speeches, Ailes said he spoke to Nixon about his campaign because he had booked him on the same show as a belly dancer and, wanting to spare Nixon an awkward encounter, let him wait in his office until the interview started. “I remember being 27 working for Mike Douglas,” he told The New York Times in 2001. “The guests were Richard Nixon and a dancer called Little Egypt—with her boa constrictor. I didn’t wanna scare Nixon and I didn’t wanna scare the snake, so I stuck Nixon in my office for 15 minutes. If I’d put Little Egypt in there, I’d be managing belly dancers right now.”
According to several of Ailes’s colleagues who were present and the show logs, there was no belly dancer named Little Egypt booked that day. The guests during the Nixon taping were the singer Margaret Whiting, the actress Stella Stevens, the Philadelphia Brass Ensemble, and Tony Sandler’s children. Mike Douglas later told an interviewer it was his idea to have Nixon wait in Ailes’s office, and because Ailes wanted to get into politics, he seized the opportunity to have a private conversation with Nixon. “He wanted so to get into that area,” Douglas recalled. Kenny Johnson was standing in the hallway and saw Ailes enter his office with Nixon and shut the door. The meeting lasted an hour. Afterward, Johnson saw Ailes emerge shaking his head and flashing a raffish grin. “I may have just shot myself in the foot or gotten myself another job,” Ailes told Johnson, saying he repeated Launa Newman’s advice:
“Mr. Nixon, you need a media adviser.”
“What’s a media adviser?”
“I am.”
The taping began. As it happened, it was Nixon’s fifty-fifth birthday, and the producers arranged for a cake. “We went to commercial,” Douglas later recounted, “and he turned to me and said, ‘Ask me anything you’d like, Mike.’ ”
After the broadcast, Nixon and Dwight Chapin headed to a luncheon with Philadelphia businessmen. Chapin could sense that Nixon had been impressed with Ailes. A few days later, Ailes got the call from Nixon headquarters. “The name of the game was to get Roger up to New York immediately,” Chapin recalled.
Soon after, on an afternoon in January, Ailes was in New York City for lunch at the Plaza Hotel with Raymond Price, a thirty-seven-year-old speechwriter and Nixon aide with novel ideas about how television could be used to power Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign. Leonard Garment, who was heading up the campaign’s media strategy, had arranged for Ailes to meet Price at Nixon’s urging. Ailes and Price seemed to come from different realms. Ailes was a state school graduate immersed in the world of daytime television. Price was a Yale-educated writer who had once been the editorial page editor of the pro-Nixon New York Herald Tribune. A rare moderate in the Nixon orbit, Price had collaborated with Nixon on “Asia After Viet Nam,” an essay that had been published in Foreign Affairs a few months before.
As it turned out, Ailes and Price had a kind of generational bond—they were the original TV babies, with an intuitive sense of the medium’s potential to transform politics. Since the summer, Price had strategized how to revolutionize the emerging craft of image making. The campaign’s television production was being headed up by Al Scott, a former NBC sound technician. But the fifty-three-year-old Scott was a product of the radio age. They needed someone young, who grasped the subtleties of modern television production and had the metabolism to get the job done. At twenty-seven, Ailes already seemed to have a career’s experience handling talent. “Roger was not at all awed to be in the presence of power,” Nixon adviser Fred Malek said. “He could look at the vice president and the rest of us and tell him he was full of baloney and he has to get his act together on something.”
Ailes was hired as a part-time consultant in February 1968. The project of transforming Nixon, a political has-been, into a winner, was one for which Ailes had relevant experience. After all, he had helped transform Mike Douglas, whose career had been in a death spiral when the show debuted, into a national celebrity. Price wanted Ailes to do the same for Nixon, and for the same kind of audience. Nixon had a famously conflicted relationship with TV, having exploited the medium brilliantly with the Checkers speech, but having been destroyed by it in the 1960 Kennedy debates.
Ailes fit seamlessly into the culture of the Nixon campaign, partly because his life story had an uncanny symmetry with Nixon’s: both grew up poor and both took from childhood an indefatigable drive to acquire power. “He’s got guts, he’s tough,” Ailes later said of Nixon. “He picked himself up by the bootstraps two or three times and came back and won the prize.” Perhaps more than anything else, Nixon and Ailes both thought of themselves as men who got things done. “Nixon’s a doer, not a talker,” Ailes said.
Ailes would later tell a Washington Post reporter that there was no other politician in the twentieth century he would have wanted to work for more than Nixon. When Price and Ailes met for lunch, the soft launch of Nixon’s new media strategy had already begun. In New Hampshire, the campaign was airing five-minute television advertisements, in which Nixon conversed naturally with state voters in schoolrooms, firehouses, and community centers. The traveling press pool was barred from attending these staged events. When reporters howled, Garment and his team simply ignored them. Nixon crushed his opponents in New Hampshire, winning the primary with a seven-to-one margin over Nelson Rockefeller, then a write-in candidate.
Ailes’s main assignment would begin in the fall and it would be far more audacious than the five-minute New Hampshire experiment. Garment and Price tasked him with producing a series of one-hour town halls in cities across the country—meetings designed to showcase Nixon engaging with a panel of citizen interviewers. They were also designed to blow the padlocks off the gates to the national media. To the viewer at home, it would seem like Nixon was risking it all by answering difficult questions on live television when in fact, as Garment later wrote, “the chances of a case-hardened politician like Nixon stumbling seriously over any question was near zero.” The black and white world of newspapers was the past. And Nixon, with a much better makeup team, was going to be a man of his time.