FROST: “You mean, similar to Roosevelt’s radio reports known as fireside chats.”
NIXON: “Well, yes, I think they were a good idea, but I may do some from California, so they might be more seaside chats than fireside chats.”
In addition to the Frost interview, Ailes pitched a network film special “to air late in 1971 just prior to the 1972 election campaign, which would show a human, working President with an incredible schedule.” If the networks balked at a White House–produced movie, Ailes suggested getting his friend, CBS correspondent Mike Wallace, on-board “and myself maintaining production control using the correspondent just to introduce the program and do a little narration where necessary, letting the film speak for itself.”
The memo rattled off a list of ideas big and small. Better celebrity guests at White House events (“I know the talent business very well and can be useful here”). More physical contact between the president and Pat Nixon (“If he put his arm around her in public or held hands with her when walking once in a while, it would do much to endear him to women all over the country”). More religion at the Christmas tree lighting ceremony (“I suggested they drop Santa Claus and big name stars all together”). More jokes (“If a reporter keeps pressing him on something the President should smile and say something like, ‘I believe I’ve answered that and if you ask me again I’m going to give your home phone number to Martha Mitchell’ ”).
Ailes concluded the memo by reiterating he wanted to remain an outside consultant. “By signing a large yearly PR contract with the RNC or a ‘fat cat’ firm, I can include the full time man from my DC office and produce the major things myself.… Per diem work doesn’t allow the flexibility we both need.”
Haldeman ultimately sided with those who felt Ailes brought too much baggage to the job. He hired Carruthers and a young assistant named Mark Goode instead. The White House worried that Ailes would react unpredictably to the news. “I have a gut feeling that we are bordering on disaster if we do not get Roger Ailes in and squared away soon,” Dwight Chapin wrote to Haldeman two days before Christmas. “If we handle Roger in the proper way and quickly, I think we can avoid any bad feelings.”
“Get Roger down,” Haldeman scrawled on Chapin’s memo. A meeting was scheduled for December 28, 1970.
A talking paper outlined scripts that Haldeman could use. “Roger,” one suggestion read, “I want to be completely honest with you. As you know, we have felt the need for a full-time man here at the White House for a long time—to supervise our TV on a daily basis—and our efforts here have met with little success. I don’t see anything developing on this need in the near future.” Another script called for Haldeman to talk about Ailes’s outside conflicts. “You and your operation have developed into a TV political consulting business. It is obviously successful, but it is a different animal than what we need here.” It was also suggested he comment on Ailes’s relationship with Nixon. “We have not been able to build the relationship between you and the President which we had hoped to see. It is no one’s fault. We face this sort of thing every day. There are different directions that we can go which I think you can explore and which will continue to reap you rewards.”
A few weeks later, Ailes sent Haldeman a confidential letter bragging about his performance advising campaigns in the 1970 midterms. He attached glowing notes from eight GOP politicians and operatives praising his performance. The White House clearly wasn’t interested. “No need for H. to see FYI,” an aide wrote to Haldeman’s assistant, Larry Higby.
Ailes needed to retool his image. “I have been getting a lot of calls in the business about my being out at the White House,” he wrote to Larry Higby in February 1971. “If I can say that I am working with the National Committee and am still with the White House, it will be very helpful to me professionally.” Ailes’s television career was sputtering, too. The Real Tom Kennedy Show had been canceled. In March, Ailes issued a press release announcing he was changing the name of his company from REA Productions to Roger Ailes & Associates, Incorporated. An article in Backstage headlined “Ailes Business Is Not Ailing” helped to quiet the rumors of his professional struggles. Ailes announced that his renamed company was launching “an expansion program” and would focus on “radio and TV production; TV counseling services to business and industry; and a division to handle personal management for talent.”
On June 8, 1971, Ailes delivered a speech before Los Angeles business and civic leaders at the Town Hall of California. Ailes used the opportunity to offer a full-throated rebuttal to the criticisms that had dogged him since the publication of McGinniss’s book. Principally, Ailes sought to put to rest the charge that shady media manipulators were distorting politics through television. “Like many technological advances, the impact of political television has preceded the understanding of its meaning or its uses,” he wrote. “The natural human reaction to this lack of understanding is fear, and this single emotion—fear—overrides much of American life today and has brought about a national negativism which has wrapped around us like a shroud!”
Much of the speech, however, sounded like a sales pitch: “The biggest problem today, I believe, is communication on all levels,” Ailes declared. It was corporate America’s fault, Ailes said, for not marshaling a response to consumer advocates like Ralph Nader who spread the notion that “all large companies are greedy monolithic monsters determined to squash the little man.” To the businessmen sitting in the crowd, who controlled their companies’ marketing budgets, it would have been an incredibly seductive message. Ailes was declaring that slick public relations, the very kind he was selling, could reset the relationship of business to the American people. “America has a cancer. Cancer is usually fatal, but it doesn’t have to be if it is discovered and treated in time,” he wrote. “Our national life depends on our ability to use our technical knowledge to cure the ills in our country and upon our refusal to be caught up in this negative attitude about our system.” His formulation was not unlike the words of his father about the struggle for survival. “We must exhibit and communicate an unbending will to live,” Ailes stated. Unless the country changed its attitude, it might not make it out of the next thirty years. “Without these things,” he asserted, “America will be nothing more than a history lesson in a student-run college of the twenty-first century.”
That month, Ailes planned to move into a new office on Seventh Avenue, a few blocks south of Central Park. He told White House photographer Oliver Atkins that his interior designers were working up plans for the space, which he wanted to decorate with eleven-by-fourteen photographs of his memorable work for Nixon and other clients. “I would love to have a shot of that split screen to the moon,” Ailes wrote to Atkins in mid-May 1971. Even as he projected the image of a rapidly expanding concern, the well-hidden truth was that Ailes was largely on his own. Cast out of the White House, Ailes would have to come up with a new act. “Roger got caught up in the politics he didn’t yet understand,” his brother later said. “In retrospect, he learned some lessons and he got out before the rest went to shit.”