By the end of July, Ailes was realizing that balancing the Douglas show and the campaign was too much. A few days before the 1968 Republican National Convention opened in Miami Beach, Ailes asked Douglas for a leave of absence from his job. Douglas balked. “Mike turned me down. He was very upset, because we were about to go into the fall rating period,” Ailes said. Politics was thrilling and he wanted more of it. “I said I would go anyway,” Ailes said, “so permission was grudgingly granted.” But it was a risk. “When I started out, I had my own personal career on the line,” he later said. “It heightened the excitement. It’s sort of like chicken-racing with yourself. If I hadn’t, I’d probably be back in Ohio as a prop boy.” Douglas felt betrayed. “I think Mike was hurt,” Bob LaPorta said. “Mike wanted loyalty. That was one of Mike’s big things.” Ailes never returned to the show. He and Douglas did not speak for years afterward.
In the wake of Ailes’s departure, the show struggled, partly because the culture had become much more complicated in the seven years since the show started, and it was near impossible for an essentially light-hearted show like Mike Douglas to strike the right tone in those chaotic times. The show limped along for another decade to declining ratings and assorted reinventions. In the early 1980s, the show was canceled and Douglas retired to Florida. He died on August 11, 2006—his eighty-first birthday. Ailes had drifted apart from his colleagues, but reconnected with many of them at Douglas’s memorial service in North Hollywood. Ailes tried small talk with Debbie Miller and Larry Rosen, who had left television altogether and worked as a certified physician assistant, but it was evident the years had not eased the tensions.
“I have an admission to make,” Ailes said to Rosen. “You were always a better producer than I was.” Miller, standing next to Rosen, noticed how Ailes’s remark stung Rosen.
Other colleagues retained fonder memories. When Douglas died, Bob LaPorta was on an Amtrak train in California when his son called and broke the news. LaPorta’s first impulse was to call Ailes. “I just got his secretary. I said, ‘Just ask the boss what he wants us to do.’ ”
FOUR
SELLING THE TRICK
THE 1968 REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION was Roger Ailes’s baptism in national politics, a chance to see the full spectacle of a presidential campaign—the media, the costumed delegates—at close range. On his first full day in town, he had an expensive dinner with Barbara Walters at the Fontainebleau Hotel. The rest of the week he was busy networking with some of the biggest names in broadcast journalism. Mainly, though, Ailes was a minor player among the heavy hitters, with few official responsibilities. Instead, he played campaign gofer, on one occasion taking a cab out to the airport to pick up Nixon’s daughters. The candidate himself was not scheduled to arrive in Miami until the convention officially opened on Monday afternoon. Until then, he would be sequestered in a rented house on Long Island, furiously working on his acceptance speech.
After quelling a last-minute surge by Ronald Reagan, Nixon strode to the podium on August 8 to address the convention and accept the party’s nomination. The speech would become a cornerstone of the campaign’s television advertising. For the rest of the month, Harry Treleaven broadcast excerpts in thirty-second spots. “We are going to win because our cause is right,” Nixon told the audience, to thunderous applause. “We see cities enveloped in smoke and flame.… We hear sirens in the night. We see Americans dying on distant battlefields abroad. We see Americans hating each other; fighting each other; killing each other at home. And as we see and hear these things, millions of Americans cry out in anguish. Did we come all this way for this?”
Ailes must have recognized the lament. Nixon was speaking of the everyday folks who tuned in to the Douglas show. They wanted to be entertained, not bludgeoned with daily reminders of the country’s ills. “Did American boys die in Normandy, and Korea, and in Valley Forge for this?” Nixon asked. “Listen to the answer to those questions. It is another voice. It is the quiet voice in the tumult and the shouting. It is the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans—the non-shouters; the non-demonstrators. They are not racists or sick; they are not guilty of the crime that plagues the land.” Nixon promised them absolution: “This I say to you tonight is the real voice of America. In this year 1968, this is the message it will broadcast to America and to the world.”
Shortly after the convention, Ailes ran into Joe McGinniss at the Manhattan offices of Fuller & Smith & Ross. “Holy shit, what are you doing here?” McGinniss recalled saying.
“The question is, what are you doing here?” Ailes replied.
“I’m writing a book about this.”
“The fuck you are? Who’s letting you do that?”
“Well, Harry and Len—”
“—Jesus Christ. Don’t they even read?”
McGinniss suddenly got nervous that Ailes could alert the campaign about his politics. “Every day I wrote columns, most of which appeared on the front page, saying, ‘Boy, Nixon is an asshole. This is disgusting,’ ” McGinniss recalled. “All they had to do was to pick up the Inquirer and see, holy shit, this guy is not a friend of ours. But they didn’t bother, because no one had ever heard of me.” To write the book, McGinniss had quit his job at the newspaper. Without access to the Nixon campaign, the entire project would implode.
“Roger, don’t rat me out.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Ailes said. “But I can’t believe this, Jesus. But hey, no one is asking me for approval.”
A strategic alliance was forged—one that would make both young men into stars.
The first of the Nixon campaign’s panel shows was scheduled for September 4, at the Chicago studios of WBBM, the local CBS affiliate, six days after the Democrats nominated Hubert Humphrey at their chaotic convention. For Richard Nixon, WBBM had painful history: it was the site of his disastrous 1960 presidential debate against Kennedy. McGinniss followed Ailes to Chicago to chronicle the production. A few hours before Nixon was due to arrive in the studio, McGinniss watched Ailes putting out fires. “Those stupid bastards on the set designing crew put turquoise curtains in the background. Nixon wouldn’t look right unless he was carrying a pocketbook,” Ailes said. He had the curtains pulled down and three wood-paneled columns with “clean, solid, masculine lines” wheeled onto the set. The stage was designed to engender sympathy: Nixon would face his inquisitors alone standing on a circular blue platform eight inches high and six feet in diameter, as Mike Douglas producer Bob LaPorta envisioned for the Dorothy Fuldheim pilot he had worked on with Ailes. “The subliminal message of the ‘arena’ works,” Ailes wrote in a memo to Garment and Shakespeare. “Even if a viewer is not in favor of Richard Nixon, by 15 minutes into the program he almost subconsiously begins to root for him.” In the audience, Nixon’s family, political allies, and three hundred supporters recruited by local Republican groups would clap and cheer whenever Nixon delivered an answer.
The citizens on the panel were a part of the set, too. Garment, Shakespeare, and Treleaven combed through lists of names to come up with a “balanced” group. The program’s authenticity depended on Nixon appearing to engage with a diverse cross-section of potential voters. The question of race was an especially delicate matter. It was decided that the panel should include exactly one black participant. “Two would be offensive to whites,” McGinniss later wrote, describing their thinking, “perhaps to Negroes as well. Two would be trying too hard. One was necessary and safe.” To that end, the campaign recruited a black former Chicago public schoolteacher named Warner Saunders. To represent Chicago’s other major demographic blocs, there was a Jewish lawyer, a Polish community leader, a sandy-haired businessman, a round-cheeked farmer, a demure housewife, and two newspapermen.