The Philadelphia taping was scheduled to begin at 7:30 the next evening. Ailes showed up at the studio at 2:00 in a fighting mood. “I’m going to fire this fucking director!” he snarled. The camera placements were all off. He needed close-ups of individual audience members. Having multiple people in every shot was dated 1940s direction. “I want to see faces,” he said. “I want to see pores. That’s what people are. That’s what television is.”
The director protested. “I don’t want to hear that shit!” Ailes said. “I told you what I wanted, and it’s your job to give it to me.”
“He’s crazy,” the director later told McGinniss. “He says he wants close-ups, it’s like saying he wants to go to the moon.” (After the show, Ailes fired him.)
The evening show would be the fourth panel Nixon had done, on top of the thirty-minute “Nixon Answer” specials. But Roger Ailes was about to teach Nixon a lesson: the best television is unpredictable television.
Jack McKinney set the tone for the evening. His demeanor was decidedly unfriendly. He questioned why Nixon was being so evasive on his Vietnam position, noting that in 1952 the candidate had made partisan remarks about the political situation in Korea. Nixon winced.
“It was really a question, I think, of the timing,” he replied defensively. “As a potential president of the United States, anything that I say would be interpreted by the enemy in Hanoi as an indication they would wait for me rather than discuss with the man we have as president.”
The camera captured a woman wearing a gold dress glowering at McKinney.
Twenty minutes later, the floor returned to him. McKinney repeated a charge made by Humphrey: why had Nixon refused to appear on national political programs like Face the Nation where he would be interviewed by professionals and not by amateurs in a room full of Republicans ready to intimidate any questioner who sought to ask a tough question?
In the control room, Ailes’s experiment was playing poorly. “The guy’s making a speech!” Frank Shakespeare yelled. Ailes reached for the phone to tell Wilkinson to cut McKinney off, but he stopped before that was necessary.
Nixon stared down his accuser. “You talk about these quiz shows that take place on Sundays. I’ve done Meet the Press and Face the Nation until they were running out of my ears.”
It was the exact image that Ailes wanted to create: Nixon was taking it and fighting back.
“That socks it to him, Dickie Baby!” Shakespeare said.
Later in the taping, another guest asked Nixon why, in 1965, he had called for the ouster of a Marxist professor at Rutgers. Insisting that he knew the facts, Nixon explained that on campus the professor had called for the victory of the Vietcong over American troops in Vietnam. When the questioning returned to McKinney, he went at Nixon one more time.
Referring to the Rutgers professor, he said, “When you said you knew the story, you did not give it in full context. He did not call for a victory of the Vietcong, he referred to what he recognized as the impending victory—”
Nixon cut him off abruptly. “And he said—and I quote him exactly—‘I welcome that victory.’ He used that word.”
The crowd broke into applause.
McKinney replied, “I think there’s a critical difference—”
And got cut off again by the candidate: “You think there’s a difference between welcome or calling for?”
McKinney did not get it. That kind of nuance mattered in print journalism, not television. Television was about emotion. The audience did not care that Nixon had fudged a few words. What they saw was the candidate telling a sanctimonious newsman that some Commie professor had no right to say nice things about the enemy killing American teenagers.
After the taping, McKinney complained to reporters, “I don’t think you can finalize a question with an applause-getting technique.”
The Philadelphia panel was a step forward in political communication. “Mr. Nixon came off the undisputed winner in the McKinney questioning,” Ailes later wrote in a memo to Garment and Shakespeare. “The audience sympathy was with him (McKinney was not likeable) … and when he ‘turned it over to the television audience’ to decide the semantics of ‘call for’ or ‘welcome’ victory by the Vietcong, it showed the strongest use of and confidence in television I’ve ever seen.” In a way, Ailes had manipulated Nixon into delivering the performance he wanted. “Boy, is he going to be pissed,” he told McGinniss. “He’ll think we really tried to screw him.”
On his way out that evening, Ailes bumped into Pat Nixon in the elevator. She greeted him with pursed lips.
“Everyone seems to think it was by far the best,” Ailes declared. Mrs. Nixon did not say a word.
After Philadelphia, Ailes found himself working under a Nixon team that was increasingly reluctant to indulge his freewheeling vision. He was a television risk taker among political operatives who were becoming risk-averse. The ground was moving beneath their feet. On September 30, Humphrey called for a unilateral halt to bombing as “an acceptable risk for peace,” and the antiwar tides flowed in his direction. Nixon’s team responded to the tightening polls by blaming Ailes. Shakespeare in particular second-guessed Ailes’s directing.
Ailes attributed Nixon’s declining numbers to the fact that Nixon had been in front of television audiences nonstop since the primaries. “My honest opinion was that it did peak too early,” Ailes later said. “It’s such a highly sophisticated technical problem to keep a thing hyped for a whole bloody year.” The press caught on to Ailes’s frustration. During a stop in New York on October 8, where he was editing five hours of panel footage into a thirty-minute television special, Ailes gave a candid interview to The New York Times, which stated that his strength was growing up in an age of TV and that his “candidate’s weakness might be that he didn’t.” Ailes noted: “Nixon is not a child of TV and he may be the last candidate who couldn’t make it on the Johnny Carson show who could make it in an election.… He’s a communicator and a personality on television, but not at his best when they say on the talk shows, ‘Now here he is … Dick.’ ” If nothing else, Ailes would at least make a name for himself with these comments.
Ten days later, Nixon’s political advisers pinned Nixon’s poor performance at a Boston panel show on Ailes’s choice of questioners. In truth, the campaign’s only swing through Massachusetts was an all-around mess that had nothing to do with Ailes. But a week later, the campaign stripped Ailes of the task of selecting panelists. On October 25, the final taping at the CBS studio in New York was turned over in part to a young demographer named Kevin Phillips, who would later write a book about the campaign titled The Emerging Republican Majority. In the control booth shortly before the broadcast, Phillips proudly proclaimed that his panel was “perfectly ethnically weighted.” Ailes groused that it was “the worst panel we’ve had,” and complained to McGinniss that if Shakespeare knocked him again for his directing, he would walk out.
The Nixon campaign spent the final days of the race lurching from one self-inflicted crisis to the next. Ailes believed they were panicking. On Sunday, Nixon reversed himself and did what Jack McKinney had asked him to do: he appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation. It was a middling performance. Nonetheless he agreed to do Meet the Press the next week.
On Sunday, November 3, Ailes met with Nixon to prep for his Meet the Press appearance. Still in a foul mood about being second-guessed, Ailes later told a reporter that “too many people were bugging” him. To blow off steam, he drove an hour and a half north to a rural airstrip and went skydiving. On the second jump, he took a hard landing. The impact shredded ligaments in his ankle.