Price argued that Nixon could win if the campaign made the audience feel differently about their candidate. “Politics is much more emotional than it is rational, and this is particularly true of presidential politics,” Price wrote, adding, “Potential presidents are measured against an ideal that’s a combination of leading man, God, father, hero, pope, king, with maybe just a touch of the avenging Furies thrown in.” As Treleaven had done for Bush, Price drew up a character sketch for Nixon. The campaign would cast him as “the kind of man proud parents would ideally want their sons to grow up to be: a man who embodies the national ideal, its aspirations, its dreams, a man whose image the people want in their homes as a source of inspiration, and whose voice they want as the representative of their nation in the councils of the world, and of their generation in the pages of history.” Pulling this off would require some deception. “The TV medium itself introduces an element of distortion, in terms both of its effect on the candidate and of the often subliminal ways in which the image is received,” Price wrote. “And it inevitably is going to convey a partial image—thus ours is the task of finding how to control its use so the part that gets across is the part we want to have gotten across.”
Roger Ailes would be responsible for executing this vision, transplanting his talk show techniques to the business of electing a president.
The legend of Roger Ailes has it that he almost single-handedly transformed Nixon from a schlump to a president with his talk-show alchemy. But the truth was more complicated. In many ways, Ailes was more student than teacher. Garment, Treleaven, and Price—and Nixon himself—had an incalculable influence on Ailes’s thinking. Together, they provided a toolbox of concepts and linkages and techniques that Ailes would use throughout his career. But ironically, it was a member of what’s now called the mainstream media—and a liberal—who provided the most crucial boost to Ailes’s curriculum vitae. One morning in June 1968, a few months after Ailes signed on to the campaign, his friend from Philadelphia, Joe McGinniss, met with the ABC sportscaster Howard Cosell, about whom he was writing an article.
It turned out to be the biggest break of McGinniss’s career. While shadowing Cosell, McGinniss shared a ride to the Stamford, Connecticut, train station with a friend of Cosell’s, Edward Russell, an executive vice president at the Madison Avenue agency Doyle Dane Bernbach. McGinniss listened intently from the backseat of the car as Russell excitedly told Cosell that the agency had landed the account for Hubert Humphrey’s presidential campaign. McGinniss possessed a reporter’s antenna for news. The idea that presidential campaigns were being packaged and sold like cars and toothpaste to unsuspecting voters struck him as deeply cynical—and one hell of a story.
As it happened, McGinniss was scheduled to have lunch with Eugene Prakapas, an editor at Simon & Schuster, later that day. Over lunch, McGinniss related the conversation he had overheard. Prakapas agreed that political advertising was a potentially major unexplored subject. Theodore White, who had invented the modern campaign narrative with his landmark book The Making of the President 1960, was already under contract to write the definitive campaign book of 1968. McGinniss told Prakapas he wanted to focus strictly on the advertising efforts of the Humphrey and Nixon campaigns. “You wouldn’t call it The Making of the President,” McGinniss told him. “You’d call it The Selling of the President.”
Prakapas liked his idea. “I’ll have them cut you a check for five hundred dollars so you can pursue this a little further,” he said.
After the lunch, McGinniss walked to a phone booth on Fifth Avenue, outside Rockefeller Center, and called Russell. His pitch was summarily rejected.
“No, no, that was off the record,” Russell told McGinniss.
“So you won’t cooperate?”
“Cooperate? What, you think we’re crazy? No. And I don’t want to hear from you again and I don’t want to read anything about this.”
Dispirited but undeterred, McGinniss called Harry Treleaven and delivered the same pitch he had presented to Humphrey’s team. Astonishingly, Treleaven was receptive to McGinniss’s idea. Treleaven’s openness may have been due to the fact he had once been a writer himself, penning plays for radio shows in California. He told McGinniss to stop by his office at the agency Fuller & Smith & Ross. Len Garment professed no objections except to ensure that McGinniss would not publish the book until the campaign’s conclusion in November, whatever the outcome. “We were intrigued with the idea of having him follow us,” Garment later said. It was a decision he would later regret.
In late June, Nixon was in a New York television studio answering questions from Illinois voters, who had been flown in to film more advertising spots. The thirty-minute program was called The Nixon Answer. The campaign would air them in a half dozen markets in Illinois and Michigan and eight markets in Ohio. It was the latest experiment in the campaign’s use of staged interviews. The campaign gave selected participants the full treatment, providing each with round-trip first-class airfare, two nights in a Manhattan hotel, and money for meals.
Ailes did not attend the broadcast, but he reviewed the sessions on tape. The show was a bust. The camera placements were off and the pacing was slow. Ailes noticed that the candidate continued to be stiff and unmodulated. There were no peaks and valleys, no surprises, little drama—no payoffs at the end of a segment. On July 6, he wrote Garment and Shakespeare a six-page memo that addressed his concerns about Nixon’s performance. “If you were to time each of Mr. Nixon’s answers, they probably would all fall within 45 seconds of each other,” he wrote. “It gives the impression that his answers on all of the issues are ‘pat’ and thus he appears not to be responding to the specific question. The next logical step in the viewer’s mind is maybe the questions are ‘pat’ or ‘set up,’ too.”
Of course, the entire program was set up. The potential impact of the show was based on convincing the audience it was real.
Ailes echoed the concepts he had learned from Woody Fraser on the Mike Douglas set. Specifically, Nixon needed “more descriptive visual phrases” that would wrap his comments in memorable “kickers.” “Television is a ‘hit and run’ medium,” Ailes wrote. “The general public is just not sophisticated enough to wade through answers. Therefore, at least some of Mr. Nixon’s answers should end with a … specific, graphic, succinct, memorable comment.”
The memo showed early signs that Ailes wanted to influence not just television, but the underlying politics as well. Although he had no political experience and was just a part-time television adviser to the campaign, he offered some two dozen suggested responses for Nixon to deliver to questions—sound bites, as they’re now called. Ailes’s first efforts in this genre were catchy, but often too bombastic to be presidential, reflecting his father’s gnomic voice. His memo offered answers on Vietnam (“This country is almost 200 years old—two hundred years from now we won’t just be 200 years older—but 200 years greater!”), the United Nations (“The problem with war is that it is seldom discussed ahead of time. Too often one side is not clear why the other is fighting”), NATO (“outdated”), inflation (“If you make $10,000 a year and spend $15,000, it won’t be long before you are in trouble”), taxes (“I sometimes hear people say ‘America is going to the dogs.’ These people pay their hard earned money to support a country and then spend their time running the country down”), poverty (“We cannot win these people by sharing government wealth. Our healing gift is the capacity for self-help. They feel generosity as oppression”). The phrases represented Ailes’s drive to simplify complex issues to emotionally resonant one-liners. The skills would find their flowering in cable news.