Ailes’s brooding moods seemed to consume him. “Roger was very unhappy at that time. He was physically sick,” McGinniss said. Doherty recalled Ailes frequently coming down with strep throat. “After a visit from Roger, you’d count on getting sick, basically,” she said. His whole body underwent a change. He gained weight and grew a beard. “He was eating to ease his pain,” McGinniss said. It was hard for McGinniss to understand what, besides Kelly, was causing his friend so much agony. “He talked about his blue-collar father. He talked about hemophilia,” McGinniss said. “But he wasn’t telling terrible stories about being mistreated as a child or how he hated his father. He had a lot of respect for his father. His father had taught him these hard-core values.”
McGinniss vividly recalled a conversation with Ailes around this time that would stay with him for years to come. “He told me he was worried about all this pent-up anger he had inside of him. He didn’t know what was going to happen.”
McGinniss tried to buck up his friend, reminding him of all the things that were going right in his life. The Hot l Baltimore was still running strong, and the Kennedy TV special was moving forward. “You should be feeling great right now,” he said. “Look, it’s not that way,” Ailes replied. “I’m walking around, and I feel just all this anger. I can’t figure out where it’s coming from.”
McGinniss told Ailes he was seeing a therapist and asked Ailes to consider going. “It’s helping me,” he said.
“I don’t know,” Ailes replied, his voice trailing off.
On August 9, 1974, Nixon resigned from the presidency. Watergate hit Ailes like a stomach punch. “He took Watergate really, really personally,” Stephen Rosenfield said. At a party Rosenfield hosted not long after Nixon’s resignation, Ailes fiercely defended the disgraced president when a guest expressed delight at his downfall.
“What should we do?” Ailes said, “be like some banana republic and drag him through the streets?”
Needing work, Ailes took on all manner of projects. In the fall of 1974, he went back to Pennsylvania to manage the gubernatorial campaign of Drew Lewis, a wealthy business executive. Lewis spent lavishly to oust the Democratic incumbent, Milton Shapp, but Nixon’s disgrace had damaged Republican fortunes nationwide; Lewis lost by nearly 300,000 votes. After the defeat in Pennsylvania, Ailes confided in Rosenfield a rare expression of self-doubt. “Everything I touch turns to shit,” he said.
Ailes was once again adrift. The prospects for signing up new candidates seemed grim. Nixon’s undoing had scorched the national landscape for Republicans. It had been four years since Ailes had helmed a national television show, and the theater, which thrilled him for a while, was proving to be a hit-or-miss way to make a living, especially with so many misses. Indeed, the fall of 1974 was a fulcrum for Ailes, the moment the trajectory of his career might have vectored away from politics if his theatrical pursuits had panned out.
Years later at Fox News, Ailes would talk fondly about his theatrical experience. “Whenever he can, he gets into the conversation that he produced Hot l Baltimore,” a senior Fox executive said. Creating the Fox News afternoon show The Five, Ailes found his inspiration on the stage. “He said, ‘I’ve always wanted to do an ensemble concept,’ ” a close friend said. “He said, ‘I wanted a Falstaff, and that’s Bob Beckel. I need a leading man, and it’s Eric Bolling. I need a serious lead and that’s Dana Perino. I need a court jester and it’s Greg [Gutfeld], and I need the leg. That’s Andrea Tantaros.’ ”
As much as he loved New York—its loose, liberal culture seemed to bother him not a bit—the next opportunity came from a very different quarter, with very different values. The American right reached out and pulled him back in, and it marked his career ever since.
SEVEN
THOUGHT PATTERN REVOLUTION
IN MAY 1974, AILES RECEIVED A CALL from a sandy-haired former Denver TV newsman named Jack Wilson, an emissary from a fledgling broadcasting start-up called Television News, Inc. At the time, TVN, as it was known, was beset by numerous problems, riven by staff struggles and failing to attract viewers and advertisers. But in essence, TVN was what Fox News became: a conservative news network, one that aspired to cut through the liberal cant of the Big Three to provide what even then was called a “fair” and “balanced” account of the news. It bridged Nixon’s secret television propaganda efforts with the rise of right-wing media in the 1980s.
TVN was the brainchild of Robert Reinhold Pauley, a waspish broadcast executive with a Harvard MBA. As the president of ABC Radio, Pauley had given Ted Koppel and Howard Cosell their starts. Despite this success, or perhaps because of it, he had become a fierce critic of the network way of producing news. Pauley was an enthusiastic Goldwater supporter and a John Bircher. In his hometown of New Canaan, Connecticut, he denounced a local plan to fluoridate the water as a Communist plot to poison Americans. But in time, his vision would take hold. After being pushed out of ABC in 1967—for reasons he said he never understood—the forty-three-year-old Pauley gave up trying to reform the networks from within and set out to disrupt the existing media order.
Pauley had developed an innovative business plan to sell taped television news stories to local broadcast affiliates. At the time, United Press International Television News was the country’s sole provider of non-network TV news, air-shipping film clips to stations for their evening newscasts. The cumbersome, costly method forestalled competitors, including Nixon’s scrapped Capitol News Service. Pauley instead wanted to send news stories to local affiliates over AT&T phone lines. In an era before cable television, Pauley’s distribution system was a step forward.
In 1972, after four years searching for funding, Pauley heard from Joseph Coors, the ultraconservative beer magnate from Golden, Colorado. By the 1960s, Coors held a dark view of America. Inspired by books like Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, Coors was one of a handful of right-wing millionaires who sought to reverse the left’s advances. Fearing the damage wrought by the counterculture, they believed the news media, as the transmitter of its pathogens, bore special responsibility. “All three networks slant the news with innuendos, accents, the sneers they make,” Coors complained. Coors certainly shared Russell Kirk’s lament that “radical thinkers have won the day. For a century and a half, conservatives have yielded ground in a manner, which, except for occasionally successful rearguard actions, must be described as a rout.”
Coors represented a new breed of conservative philanthropist—ideologically rigid, religiously fervent, immensely wealthy—who poured millions into bringing about a right-wing revival that braided the strands of Christianity, nationalism, and free market economics into a political force. He committed $800,000 to Pauley’s venture and pledged up to $2.4 million more. Coors was also funding such conservative causes as the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, the National Federation of Independent Business, the House of Representatives’ Republican Study Committee, and a new think tank called the Heritage Foundation. Of all these investments, TVN was central to Coors’s mission to save America. “We were discussing how we could tell the truth and have news that would not be so lopsided,” Jack Wilson later said. Television had the power to spread conservative values unlike any policy paper. Their goal was to launch with upward of seventy employees in four domestic bureaus by April 1973.