The astronaut dinner was essentially a one-off, which freed Ailes to take on entertainment projects. In the months since Election Day, Ailes looked to re-create Mike Douglas on his own. Living out of the Sheraton Gibson Hotel in downtown Cincinnati, he launched a new syndicated talk program, The Dennis Wholey Show, starring a thirty-one-year-old former game show host for Taft Broadcasting, the Ohio-based media conglomerate. For the debut on September 22, 1969, Muhammad Ali appeared alongside the old-time comic Irwin Corey, and an infantry officer back from Vietnam. The press panned the show. The problem was that the square Douglas style, with its roots in the placid American consensus, had fallen out of step. “Yesterday’s premiere was embarrassingly ordinary,” a Washington Post critic wrote, adding that it had a “total lack of novelty or entertainment or inspiration.” It also lacked a fully dedicated producer. “Roger would say, ‘I have to leave for a couple of days and go to Washington. Or I have to go to wherever Nixon is,’ ” Dennis Wholey recalled. “You could tell there was a little bit of a tug of war going on.” Where possible, Ailes fused his two roles. “Early on, he booked Julie and David Eisenhower. That was a huge get,” Wholey said.
As it turned out, the White House was more interested in Ailes’s foothold in the world of celebrity than in his political ideas. “Your new show is most exciting, for lots of reasons,” Lucy Winchester wrote Ailes. “One of them is that it is a real boon to the Administration having an intelligent intelligence agent in the talent field who can tell us who is a good performer-cum-Republican. I would welcome your suggestions and advice.” She included a handwritten note at the bottom of the letter. “Will you even have time for D.C.? We hope so!”
Ailes proved a shrewd promoter of his own image. When Nixon addressed the United Nations General Assembly several days before the Wholey debut, Ailes detailed for The New York Times all the advice he provided (even though the extent of it was a two-minute briefing with Nixon). “He told the President to be careful not to touch the button on the lectern in the Assembly hall, because it activated a hydraulic lift that caused a platform behind the lectern to rise or descend,” the paper reported.
At the time Ailes was still an obscure figure on the national stage, his work for Nixon known mainly to political and entertainment insiders. But Joe McGinniss’s Selling of the President, which would be published in October 1969, was about to change all that. McGinniss had shared a prepublication copy of the book with Ailes, and he was all too happy to help promote it. In July, Ailes appeared on a radio show with McGinniss to hype a fifteen-page excerpt of the book in Harper’s Magazine. Then, a few weeks before the title hit the stores, Ailes traveled to New York to join McGinniss for a panel discussion on presidential image making. McGinniss was critical of the Nixon effort, telling the audience that the Man in the Arena panelists were too timid to challenge Nixon on substance. Ailes contended that television revealed its own truth. “I don’t think you can be dishonest for any length of time,” he told the audience.
But by the time Ailes realized that his cutting and indiscreet remarks that McGinniss had recorded in the book might antagonize the White House, it was too late. Four days before the book was released, he wrote a face-saving, back-pedaling letter to Nixon advisers John Ehrlichman and Bob Haldeman. “I am sending this letter to you and to Bob Haldeman to inform you of a situation which I just became aware of,” he wrote. “Talking to a friend of mine in the newspaper business, I found out that the New York Times is publishing a book review of ‘The Selling of The President 1968’ in this weekend’s book section. I’m sure you are aware of this book. My friend thought I should be aware of it since I was mentioned prominently, and I had it read to me over the phone. I was upset to find that quotes by me, which are inaccurate in the first place, have been lifted out and featured. I regret that the New York Times has decided to use me as a tool to embarrass the President. If you have any comments or suggestions on the handling of this, please advise.”
Television critic Marvin Kitman concluded the Times review by raising the prospect that Ailes had irreparably damaged his relationship with Nixon. “When this book, filled with Ailes’s colorful vocabulary, becomes a bestseller, Nixon-watchers will see a major test for the Administration,” Kitman wrote. “It has been said that Nixon shares one attribute with the Kennedys and LBJ: ruthlessness. Ailes may become the John Peter Zenger of the Nixon administration,” Zenger being the eighteenth-century German-American publisher who was a defendant in a legal case that helped establish printing the truth as a defense against libel. A few days later, Haldeman returned an icy, two-sentence reply: “Thank you for writing your note of October 2. I’ve been aware of McGinniss’s book and statements for quite some time, and there’s really nothing much that we can do about it at this point except hope that something like this doesn’t happen again.”
Despite the tensions caused by The Selling of the President, the book, which immediately shot to the top of the bestseller list, supercharged his reputation as a television impresario. McGinniss’s contention that presidential politics was really the realm of hidden behind-the-camera forces seemed perfectly calibrated to the conspiratorial zeitgeist of the late 1960s—and in this universe, a wizard like Ailes was a crucial figure. McGinniss’s ensemble cast of cynical characters were prime specimens of an altogether new archetype: the mercenary campaign operative. They constituted a vastly different breed from the public-spirited heroes who populated Theodore White’s Making of the President 1968, which had been published earlier that year. White’s elegant prose suddenly seemed dated.
Of all of McGinniss’s characters, Ailes emerged as the most vivid—the prime manipulator. He was the expletive-spouting antihero—the private dialogue was diametrically opposed to the public—who was willing to push himself to exhaustion to get the job done. Even those who despised Richard Nixon could find an alluring, likable quality to Ailes’s roguish antics. “That was the thing. These other guys were ciphers and Roger was in Technicolor,” McGinniss said. “Of course he’s going to become the star of the book. All the quips and everything, that’s the way he was all the time.”
And, as a coup of image making, it far outdistanced anything he had done for Richard Nixon. Although he professed outrage to his bosses at the White House, Ailes lapped up the attention in other spheres. When McGinniss appeared on the Today show to promote the book, Barbara Walters berated him off-camera about how he portrayed her friend. “Roger isn’t offended at all,” McGinniss replied. “In fact, he likes the book.”
Only a few weeks later, Ailes was back to joking about the whole thing. He sent a letter to Jack Rourke reveling in all the salty quotes McGinniss included in the book. “It’s disgraceful,” he wrote in mock indignation. “I don’t know who the fuck he thinks he is.”