As the fall campaign revved into high gear, Ailes was a constant presence at Bush’s side. “He didn’t give a significant speech without Roger,” Sheila Tate, Bush’s campaign spokesperson, recalled. “Roger had an uncanny ability to buck up a candidate,” campaign chief James Baker recalled. “He made them feel good about themselves. He gave them some confidence, and some great zingers. He always had good zingers.” Bush enjoyed Ailes’s dirty jokes and mordant asides. He called Dukakis “Shorty,” and “Grapeleaf,” a dig at his Greek ancestry, as well as a “Heartless Little Robot,” for spouting policy positions and arcane statistics. Bush played along. One day when his dog walked into a campaign meeting, he joked about Ailes’s bestiality ad pitch. “You’re the reason I’m running,” he said. “We’ve got to keep those people away from you.”
On September 21, four days before the first presidential debate, a shadowy outfit called Americans for Bush, an arm of the National Security Political Action Committee, aired an attack spot titled “Weekend Passes.” The ad’s centerpiece was a grainy mug shot of Willie Horton. As Horton’s bearded, black visage hovered on the screen, a male narrator intoned: “Bush and Dukakis on crime. Bush supports the death penalty for first degree murderers. Dukakis not only opposes the death penalty, he allowed first degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison. One was Willie Horton, who murdered a boy in a robbery, stabbing him nineteen times. Despite a life sentence, Horton received 10 weekend passes from prison. Horton fled, kidnapped a young couple, stabbing the man and repeatedly raping his girlfriend. Weekend prison passes. Dukakis on crime.” The words “Kidnapping … Stabbing … Raping” were displayed under Horton’s picture, explicitly calibrated to stoke the racial fears of white Reagan Democrats.
The ad created blowback for Bush. Federal election law barred campaigns from coordinating their media strategy with independent groups. Ailes denied any involvement in the ad’s creation, but there were suspicious signs. In August, Ailes had boasted to the press, “The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it.” And the Horton ad was created by two former employees of Ailes Communications: Larry McCarthy, who had left the company the previous year, and Jesse Raiford, a thirty-year-old director, who had spent six years at Ailes Communications.
Roger Stone said that, while he did not think Ailes was involved in the Horton spot, Lee Atwater was. Atwater played it for Stone before it aired, an act that Stone called “an admission of illegality.” When Stone told him, “You don’t need to do this. You got this issue,” Atwater called him “a pussy.” Whether or not Ailes had any direct role in putting Horton’s picture on millions of television screens, his style had clearly inspired the ad. “I know Roger very well,” Larry McCarthy told the press. “I just tried to [make] it as if I were Roger.”
In the hours leading up to the debate, Bush studied an array of briefing books. “Roger detected that the most important thing for Bush was to be relaxed,” Sheila Tate said. “Roger said to him, ‘Now what are you going to do if Mike Dukakis rips off his microphone and walks over to you and says, ‘Iran-Contra! Iran-Contra!’ Bush goes to look at his briefing book. Roger slams it closed. He said, ‘No! That’s when you say, ‘Get out of my face, you little shit!’ And Bush started laughing. Roger was just trying to get him to loosen up. That’s one of his techniques.”
That night, Ailes kept up his guerrilla tactics. He stood with Bush offstage as Jim Lehrer, the moderator, prepared to call the candidates out. When Dukakis looked over at Ailes, he pointed down to a riser that was installed behind Dukakis’s podium and started to laugh. “That was his idea of getting inside Dukakis’s head,” Tate said.
As Election Day approached, Ailes behaved like a defensive lineman preparing for a game, his aggression spilling over into all of his relationships. In August, he walked into Bush headquarters and flipped a conference table over. He was verbally abusive to Janet Mullins, who was in charge of the campaign’s ad budgets. “He threatened to kill me—twice—because I had the audacity to question some of his expenditures,” Mullins recalled. “He was getting paid in a lot of different ways and earned every bit of it. But if you’re in charge of the media budget, you want to make sure you’re not spending it on the Ritz or the Four Seasons when Roger came to town.” Staffers noted that Lee Atwater seemed afraid of Ailes. He told the press that Ailes had two speeds: “attack and destroy.”
Ailes’s appetite seemed to be a barometer of his ego. His weight ballooned to 240 pounds. Craig Fuller recalled one hotel stop when Ailes declared, “ ‘Dammit, I’m hungry! Can’t we get some room service?’ We said, ‘Sure.’ Well, Roger grabs the room service menu. He was kind of agitated and he said, ‘I want page three, I want page four and I want page five and I want it now.’ ” He was also known to inhale Häagen-Dazs ice cream and donuts. During one commercial shoot, Tom Messner recalled, Ailes was “sitting there with a donut, and there’s this frosting on it, and the frosting is dripping down his shirt.” Ailes could turn donuts into projectiles. “When he would have his emotional moments, he’d throw his donuts across the room,” Sig Rogich said. “I’d ask him if it was a one or two donut day.”
Leaks sent Ailes into fits. “A donut throwing moment” occurred, according to Rogich, when the trade journal Advertising Age sent a reporter to write about one of Ailes’s commercials. After The New York Times wrote a column about Tom Messner’s contributions to the campaign, he received a heated phone call from Ailes. “How did you get this Bush assignment?” Messner recalled Ailes saying. He did not appreciate his subordinate getting press.
Bush marched toward Election Day along the low road paved by Ailes. A week and a half after the debate, Rogich’s “Revolving Door” ad aired. Although Horton’s name never appeared in the spot, the linkage between it and Horton was obvious. Television news producers were mostly interested in pictures, attacks, and gaffes, which was why Ailes’s attack spots were discussed so widely in the press. “It was a hard ad to do without appearing to be racist,” Janet Mullins said.
By mid-October, Ailes green-lighted an ad that showed Dukakis wearing a helmet and grinning while he rode around in a tank as an announcer ticked off various weapons systems he opposed. The visual said it all. As Mike Douglas had once told Woody Fraser: never wear a funny hat.
From the time Dukakis clinched the nomination in early June, his unfavorability standing among voters doubled, from 20 percent to 43 percent. Meanwhile, Bush held steady at around 40 percent unfavorable. Even Bush’s positive spots were devastating to Dukakis’s image. In the campaign’s most memorable ad, titled “Family/Children,” Ailes filmed Bush on the lawn in Kennebunkport surrounded by his adorable, flaxen-haired grandchildren—a Kennedyesque tableau that made Dukakis seem foreign by comparison. The force of Bush’s ad war was met by Dukakis’s inept response. “I sat there mute, which is one of the dumbest decisions I’ve ever made,” Dukakis said years later. “I made a decision early on that I was simply not gonna respond to this stuff.… I blew it.”
Roger Stone—no stranger to dirty tricks—said he felt Ailes ran an insignificant campaign. “Wedge issues can still be about big ideas,” he said. “My problem was that the wedge issues in ’88 were all confections.”