When Taft debated Rhodes in Akron in late April, Ailes walked onstage thirty seconds before airtime and handed Taft a note with one word written on it: “Kill.”
“Rhodes got shook up,” Ailes bragged afterward to a Boston Globe reporter. “I gave Taft the note, partly facetiously, partly for a laugh—just to try to get Bob to be a little tougher in his answers.”
The gambit worked: the Toledo Blade noted that “the usually placid Mr. Taft accused the governor of lying about his record and told him he should be ashamed of himself.” A few days after the debate, Rhodes flew to Kent State University, which was engulfed in student unrest. At a press conference on the morning of May 3, Rhodes lashed into protesters who had burned the ROTC building the previous night and declaimed that the demonstrators were “worse than the Brown Shirts and the Communist element.”
Rhodes’s inflammatory speech intensified the conflict in Kent. In the chaos, National Guardsmen fired into a group of marchers. The volley of more than sixty shots in thirteen seconds left four dead and nine wounded. Kent State, Bob Haldeman later wrote in his book The Ends of Power, “marked a turning point for Nixon, a beginning of his downward slide towards Watergate.”
As the Nixon administration began to circle the wagons, Ailes was increasingly left on the outside—in hindsight, a fortunate development. Unable to get the White House to make a decision on his television memo, Ailes headed west, taking a room at the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood. He was back into the zany world of daytime TV with a new variety program starring the game show host Tom Kennedy, who had a hit with You Don’t Say! on NBC.
It was the type of producing work Ailes seemed to enjoy most—having the blank canvas, being in charge. He hired Kelly Garrett, a beautiful cabaret singer whom he had met on the set of Mike Douglas, to be Tom Kennedy’s musical talent. Even though he was still married to Marjorie (they would not get divorced until 1977), he never spoke of his wife around the set. “All I knew was that he was single,” Tom Kennedy said.
The taping of the premiere episode of The Real Tom Kennedy Show, as the new show was called, took place on March 31, 1970, at the KTLA studios in Hollywood. Ailes employed many of the Douglas elements, filling the episode with pranks and stunts. He was learning how television could harness the liberal culture even as it was critiquing it, a technique he would later apply to Fox News. Near the end of the debut, Kennedy interviewed the sexploitation movie director Russ Meyer, who was promoting his surprise hit Vixen! Kennedy chatted with Meyer about the controversy, then turned to the audience for their reaction, which was decidedly critical. When a middle-aged man in a dark suit vowed he would never watch one of Meyer’s films, Kennedy called him on stage to appear in an improv skit with Edy Williams, the curvy star of a Meyer soft-core porn movie. Kennedy gave each of them cue cards to recite through a “scene.” Williams playfully purred that her reading partner was “very sexy” and slowly positioned his right arm over her bare shoulder. His wife watched pensively from the audience as he stuttered and giggled, mangling his lines.
In late May, Ailes learned he was fired from the Republican National Committee. A White House memo later stated that Ailes had been “released by Jim Allison, Deputy Chairman of the Republican National Committee in February 1970, following statement made by Roger Ailes that REA would offer its services to Democrat as well as Republican candidates.” There were competitive factors at play as welclass="underline" Allison had a political consulting firm with his friend and former Ailes colleague Harry Treleaven. A Boston Globe profile noted that Ailes was aggressively signing up Republican clients, and was involved in half a dozen races that year. In the interview, Ailes boasted that one day television could replace the party itself: “The skeletons of political parties will remain. But television will accelerate the breaking down of mass registration by party. The figures show this already. Youth are independent.”
After an unsuccessful attempt to get the White House to intervene to save his RNC contract, Ailes fired off an angry letter to Allison, copying Haldeman and Nixon hand Murray Chotiner:
Once again it has been brought to my attention that you have been rapping me with certain campaign people around the country. Recently I have had two playbacks from states that I am involved in. There is always the possibility, of course, that these are erroneous reports and if they are, please ignore this letter and accept my apology. However, if they are not erroneous, please do not ignore this letter. If the reports are true, I can only assume that since you know nothing of my work, you are simply stating that our company is “over-priced” to protect your own financial game.
Business is business, but I would hate to see you and me get into a shoving match since the only loser would be the GOP. Frankly, Jim, I am tired of being on defense in this matter. I’m instinctively better at offense.
Ailes, who had just turned thirty, was unafraid to step over men nearly twice his age. The letter revealed not only ferocious competitiveness, but also a palpable belief that enemies sought to harm him.
From the earliest days of the administration, Nixon had transformed the White House into a laboratory to incubate ideas that would strip the establishment media of its power, ideas that would inform Fox News decades later. New fault lines over civil rights, Vietnam, and the women’s movement had cleaved the culture. Nixon intended to exploit this rift, turning his Silent Majority against the big-city newspapers and the broadcast networks, whom he saw as being on the side of liberals. “The press is the enemy,” Nixon told his aides. “They are all against us.”
On June 3, 1969, Haldeman had ordered Herb Klein to prepare a report on the political biases of the network anchors covering the White House. “The President is very concerned about the general attitude of a number of the television newscasters and commentators who are deliberately slanting their reports against the Administration’s position,” he wrote. A few hours later, Klein responded with a memo categorizing more than two dozen commentators and reporters. (“Bill Gill—a sensationalist who is more negative than positive.… Dan Rather—more favorable than he was prior to the election.… John Chancellor—sometimes negative.… The most vindictive is Sander Vanocur. You know him. He is in Saigon.”)
The idea of “balance” took hold inside the White House. “I have discussed television balance with Reuven Frank, president of NBC News, and Dick Salant, president of CBS News,” Klein told Nixon in a memo on October 17, 1969. “I have made them aware of the fact that we are watching this closely,” he wrote, referring to the networks’ perceived political bias. Klein mentioned that the White House could deploy the power of the FCC to revoke their broadcast licenses if they did not change.
Ailes volunteered for Nixon’s war with the media, offering his services for some of the administration’s most brazen propaganda campaigns. In June 1970, he participated in an aborted project to produce a covert White House–directed documentary, secretly financed by the Tell It to Hanoi Committee, to rebut a CBS program critical of the Vietnam War. The idea was abandoned when it became clear that any leak of the White House’s involvement in the project would embarrass the administration. Ailes told Nixon aide Jeb Magruder to keep him in mind for such films in the future. “If you decide to go ahead with something like this at a later time,” he wrote, “be sure to let me know as far in advance as you can and we’ll try to put it together.”