The next morning, his ankle wrapped but hardly usable, he rode in a rented yellow Ford Thunderbird over to NBC’s Burbank studios, where 125 telephones had been installed for a pre-election live telethon. He hobbled around the set on crutches, taking painkillers and barking orders to the staff. The injury seemed to draw out Ailes’s cynicism. “It’s going to be a dull fucking two hours,” Ailes told McGinniss.
Indeed, the telethon was a polite and restrained affair—a celebration of square chic. Nixon trotted out a taped endorsement from Jackie Gleason. David Eisenhower earnestly read a letter from his grandfather that hoped for a Nixon victory.
The Humphrey telethon, by contrast, tacked hip. The candidate surrounded himself with celebrities including Paul Newman, fresh off his Oscar-nominated role in Cool Hand Luke, and the Brooklyn-born singer Abbe Lane, who offended many Americans with her frank sex talk.
“That’s crazy,” Al Scott said when he saw that Humphrey was taking live, unscripted phone calls. “They’ve got no control.”
That was the point. Rick Rosner, Humphrey’s television adviser and a former colleague of Ailes’s from Mike Douglas, was counterprogramming against Nixon’s controlled image. Throughout the evening, Humphrey roamed freely across the set, stepping over tangled electrical wires and discarded coffee cups, as he conversed with callers directly. The messy scene was deliberate: advisers wanted the stage to have an authentic feel. In its self-conscious messiness, the show attempted to tap into the deep vein of antiauthority running through America. To the millions of Americans tuning in, Hubert Humphrey’s closing argument was that he was real; Richard Nixon was a television construct.
The next day, the country would issue its verdict. After breakfast, Ailes, McGinniss, and the rest of the campaign staff drove to the airport for the cross-country journey to New York. Ailes had arranged for Marje to meet him at his room at the New York Hilton, near Nixon campaign headquarters at the Waldorf Astoria. They would only see each other for a few hours, but a night in a luxury Manhattan hotel was a small gesture to make up for months of separation. Ailes spent the night watching the returns come in and talking to McGinniss, who had checked into a room four floors below. It was a long wait. A slew of eastern states went early for Humphrey. But California, Illinois, Ohio, and Texas were too close to call for most of the evening. Commentators proclaimed the race a toss-up.
Then, triumph: in the early hours of November 6, 1968, Ohio and Texas broke Nixon’s way. At 12:30 p.m. that day, an hour after Humphrey had called to concede, Nixon addressed the nation from the Waldorf ballroom. Ailes watched the victory speech from the balcony as Nixon spoke of a desire to mend the country’s divisions. “I saw many signs in this campaign, some of them were not friendly; some were very friendly,” Nixon said. “But the one that touched me the most was one that I saw in Deshler, Ohio, at the end of a long day of whistle-stopping. A little town. I suppose five times the population was there in the dusk. It was almost impossible to see, but a teenager held up a sign, BRING US TOGETHER. And that will be the great objective of this administration at the outset, to bring the American people together.”
Ailes surely knew Deshler. It was a farm town at the intersection of the B&O Railroad, less than a hundred miles from his grandfather Melville’s birthplace in Shelby County. In 1948, Ailes’s father had taken him to see Harry Truman wave from the back of a train that had brought him through towns like Deshler and Warren during his whistle-stop tour of the state. “I remember my dad holding me up and waving to the President,” Ailes recalled. “Everybody went home and thought they knew Harry Truman.”
Ailes had come a long way since then. The Nixon television experiment convinced him there was a vast new market to tap. “This is it. This is the way they’ll be elected forevermore,” he had told McGinniss the night before the election. “The next guys up will have to be performers.” But he had doubts, too. “The interesting question is, how sincere is a TV set? If you take a cold guy and stage him warm, can you get away with it?”
The Nixon victory was evidence that you could get away with it. In his victory speech, Nixon projected himself as a humble conciliator pledging to heal a fractured electorate. It did not matter that Nixon’s friend Dick Moore, who told the campaign about the Deshler girl with the sign, “may have made that up,” as Bill Safire later wrote. The words were true in the sense that they were spoken by the president-elect of the United States and transmitted into living rooms across the country.
No matter what happened on Election Day, Ailes had made up his mind to strike out on his own. Going back to Philadelphia felt like the minor leagues. “I decided that after the campaign was over I didn’t want to go back to the studio and figure out what to have a comedian talk about,” Ailes said.
But politics, too, had its drawbacks. After watching Nixon’s acceptance speech, Ailes and McGinniss went out to dinner. McGinniss asked Ailes about his plans.
“Are you going to move to Washington and become press secretary?”
“I wouldn’t take that job with a million a year salary,” Ailes said. “Whatever I do, and I haven’t even discussed it, but it would be behind the scenes.” Ailes told McGinniss he was burned out by politics. “TV is my business.” Plus he was intrigued by his first passion—the theater. “I’m really interested in Broadway shows,” he added.
He wanted to move to New York. Even before the campaign was over, he’d begun laying the groundwork, meeting with Ronald Kidd, a young associate at the Philadelphia law firm Duane Morris, to fill out paperwork to incorporate an entertainment company. He called it REA Productions. Then, shortly after Nixon’s victory, Ailes looked for funding. At a Pennsylvania Society dinner at the Waldorf, he was introduced to a wealthy investment banker named Howard Butcher IV, who agreed to meet with him. In Philadelphia, Ailes pitched himself to a group of investors who asked him about his track record. “Well, my track record is actually pretty good,” Ailes later recalled telling them. “I was the youngest producer of a national television show.… I took it to 182 markets. Tremendous success. And I took over a very difficult job when everybody said Richard Nixon couldn’t win an election and he won it by television. So I think my track record is fine.” They asked him about his business experience. “Let me tell you my business experience. My business experience is that you’ve got two columns. One’s called ‘in’ and one’s called ‘out.’ And if you’ve got more going out than you’ve got coming in, you’re going to go belly-up.”
Ailes cast it as yet another triumph of Midwest common sense over Ivy League frippery. One of the men asked Ailes to go outside for a few minutes. When he returned to the room, the men announced they were going to make an investment. “You know how many Harvard guys will get in here?” Ailes recalled one of the investors saying. “They’ve got charts, matrixes, and every other goddamn thing.… They don’t know that if you got more going out than you got coming in, you can’t make it.”
It wasn’t only Ailes’s bottom-line approach that made an impression on Butcher. He could see his instincts as a campaigner. “Roger was very determined, very smart. He’s the guy who understood the dark side better than I do,” Butcher recalled. “When I say dark side, I mean the dark side of politics and human nature.”