In August, when Romney introduced his vice presidential pick, Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan, Fox anchor Megyn Kelly giddily compared Ryan to Ronald Reagan. On her program, a montage of video clips showed Ryan and the Gipper inveighing against government spending with similar language. Kelly then welcomed Reagan’s son Michael to make the comparison himself on camera.
Behind the scenes, Ailes helped prep Ryan for the race. “Ryan met with Roger,” a person close to Ailes said. Ailes told Ryan he needed to work on his television skills and referred him to speech coach Jon Kraushar, who had worked at his consulting company Ailes Communications in the 1980s and coauthored with Ailes the book You Are the Message. “I know a guy who can teach you to read off a prompter,” Ailes said.
That a news executive was essentially running the Republican Party was a remarkable development in American politics. But it was an outcome Ailes foretold. After the 1968 campaign, Ailes spoke of a time when television would replace the political party, that other mass organizer of the twentieth century. With Fox News, that reality was arguably established.
Ailes owes his power to a long tradition. The media mobilizers of an earlier era—Father Charles Coughlin, Walter Winchell—paved the way for Fox News, building followings that, in their time, vectored the country toward their goals. But these firebrands were limited by the reach of their own voices. At Fox News, Ailes commands a whole platoon of firebrands, multiplying his force.
Ailes built Fox into an entire political universe. But ultimately, it’s the expression of one man, with all his obsessions and idiosyncrasies, everything he’d absorbed. “Roger is Fox News, without him you don’t have it,” Christopher Ruddy, the editor in chief of Newsmax, the conservative monthly, said. Ed Rollins, Ronald Reagan’s campaign director and Fox News contributor, agreed. “Every single element of the network is his design,” he explained. “He’s not just an executive, he understands how to drive a message.”
Not long before the 2012 election, Ailes told a reporter, “If Richard Nixon was alive today, he’d be on the couch with Oprah, talking about how he was poor, his brother died, his mother didn’t love him, and his father beat the shit out of him. And everybody would say, Oh, poor guy, he’s doing the best he can. See, every human being has stuff—stuff they have to carry around, stuff they have to deal with. And Richard Nixon had a lot of stuff. He did the best he could with it, but it got him in the end.”
Ailes’s own stuff is what has transformed Fox News from a news channel into a national phenomenon. “I built this channel from my life experience,” he told an interviewer. And it was true. At his daily 8:00 a.m. editorial meeting, Ailes regularly lectures his closest advisers, about a dozen men and women, on his experience of American postwar history, which they use to program the channel. As the producer of The Mike Douglas Show, he had soaked up the chatty commercialism of 1960s daytime television, learning countless techniques to hold viewers’ attention. As a consultant to Nixon, he adopted a sense of political victimhood, and a paranoia about enemies that has marked his career ever since. In the 1970s, he honed his theatrical instincts as a Broadway producer and ran a fledgling conservative television news service bankrolled by the right-wing beer magnate Joseph Coors—in essence, a dry run for Fox News. And in the 1980s, Ailes mastered the dark art of attack politics as a mercenary campaign strategist, skills he would soon put to use in turning a television news network into an unprecedented political force. At Fox, Ailes speaks frequently of his father, a factory foreman who lived a frustrated life. Fox News launched on October 7, 1996, but it truly began a half century earlier, out of a small frame house on a shady street in Warren, Ohio.
ONE
“JUMP ROGER, JUMP”
THE RAW MATERIALS FOR ROGER AILES’S MYTH of an America in danger of being lost come from his hometown of Warren, in the northeastern corner of Ohio. In the late 1800s, Warren became a center of trade and manufacturing, a city that worked. The town of six thousand boasted five newspapers, seven churches, and three banks. In 1890, two sons of Warren founded the Packard Electric Company, which would one day employ Roger’s father. They produced the first Packard motorcar in their Warren factory in 1899, and made Warren’s streets the first in America to be illuminated by incandescent light. Through the twentieth century, the company’s growth was spurred by deposits of coal and iron ore in the Mahoning Valley. The region became one of the largest steel manufacturers in the country.
In 1932, the General Motors Corporation acquired Packard Electric to manufacture cables for its automobiles. Roger’s father, who had been working at the plant since around the time of the 1929 stock market crash, held on to his job under the new management. Packard continued to thrive, as did the rest of Warren. In 1936, Neil Armstrong, age five, went for his first airplane ride in Warren in a Ford Tri-Motor. After World War II, Warren’s industries boomed, and throughout the middle part of the last century it was a seat of limitless American potential.
That was the world into which Roger Eugene Ailes was born, on May 15, 1940. Warren residents earned incomes that were nearly 30 percent above the national average, redefining the middle class in ways that still have painful resonance today. “There were no slums,” recalled Ailes’s childhood friend Launa Newman. Warren, like blue-collar towns across postwar America, had been built on a benevolent compact between management and labor, which spread prosperity widely, as long as profits were growing. Packard, which employed six thousand workers in 1953, was like a city unto itself. It had its own newspaper, the Cablegram, and sponsored annual picnics for tens of thousands, where kids competed in pie-eating contests and lucky penny scrambles. The career of Roger’s father, Robert Sr., who rose to the rank of foreman in the maintenance department, benefited from this arrangement. He raised his children in a tidy home on Belmont Street, with enough yard for his prized tomato garden and the family beagle hound, Tip. He worked for forty years at the company, retired in 1969 in his early sixties, and lived the last years of his life on a company pension.
Warren was a labor stronghold, but there were conservative currents coursing through the city’s politics. Growing up in the 1920s, Robert Ailes Sr. was drawn toward them. He recoiled from unions. To him, they were arbitrary, often rewarding people who were undeserving. At the Packard plant, Robert was considered management, and thus excluded from the benefits of joining the union. But without a college degree he had no chance to advance into the corporate hierarchy. “I never could understand why he’d ever be a Republican. Ninety-nine percent of the people who came up through the school of hard knocks were Democrats,” his son Robert Jr. said. His conservatism was a reaction against those who got breaks he never did, and his resentments consumed him.
Robert Sr. came of age at a time in which Warren was engaged in a culture war brought on by increasing ethnic and racial discord. Rapid industrialization brought waves of immigrants—Hungarians, Romanians, Italians, Yugoslavians, Greeks—to northeast Ohio. They came in search of work in the mills. In Warren, the immigrants lived in the Flats, a scruffy neighborhood by the rail depot. It was the Prohibition era, and corruption bloomed. The foreigners operated betting parlors and speakeasies—“vice dens”—in the back rooms of social clubs in the Flats. The city’s Protestants blamed the newcomers, many of whom were Catholics and Orthodox Christians, for subverting their efforts to curtail bootlegging. One minister complained to the Dry Enforcement League that the county was “rich enough to lock up every bootlegger,” but refused to do so.