As an adult, Robert joined Freemasonry, a fraternal organization that also stood up against the city’s changing character. Robert devoted himself to the Masons. He became a 32nd-degree master and served for twenty-five years as chaplain of the Carroll F. Clapp Lodge in Warren. As a Master Mason, he was given entrée into an affiliated body called the Mystic Order of Veiled Prophets, for which he served as Shriner and Past Monarch. The organizations were the pride of his career. They gave him the titles and the respect he was denied at Packard. His wife complained that he spent far too many hours at the lodge. “One of his disappointments in life was that Roger and I didn’t become Masons,” Robert Jr. recalled.
Robert Sr. and his wife, Donna, met at church. She was a famous beauty, lithe, nine years younger than he, with brown hair and wide-set eyes. She had come to Warren from Parkersburg, West Virginia, when she was less than a year old. Her father, James Arley Cunningham, who lacked a high school diploma, sought work in the local steel industry. He was a religious man, who took his family to the fervent Evangelical United Brethren Church every Sunday. “They didn’t believe in movies or dancing,” Roger said. Robert and Donna had a swift courtship, and less than a year into their marriage she became pregnant with Robert Jr.
When Roger Ailes spoke of Warren, he invoked a small-town idyll, a lost American dream, but those images were only part of his childhood story, one in which tenebrous parts were edited out. The difficulties started with his illness. At the age of two, not long after learning to walk, Roger fell and bit his tongue. His parents couldn’t stop the bleeding. Terrified, they rushed him to Trumbull Memorial Hospital. A doctor diagnosed their child with hemophilia, a genetic disorder that hinders the ability of the body’s blood to clot. There was no cure for the little-understood condition. “Well, you died. That’s what you knew about it,” Roger later recalled. “I was told many times I wasn’t going to make it.” “The treatment for hemophilia back then was terribly crude,” remembered Robert Jr., who would become a doctor. Their parents did what they could to keep Roger out of trouble, protecting him from uneven stretches of sidewalk where he could trip and scrape his knee, and from getting into backyard scuffles. The average life expectancy of a severe hemophiliac at the time was eleven years.
Notwithstanding his hemophilia, or perhaps in angry defiance of it, Roger had an incongruous physical boldness, with sometimes dire consequences. In grade school, when his parents weren’t looking, Roger sneaked up onto the roof of his family’s garage. He jumped to the ground and bit his tongue on impact. His father rushed him to Trumbull Memorial. This time the doctors there were unable to help him. “I heard the doctor say—I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I heard him say, ‘We really can’t do anything,’ ” Roger said. His father, a short, obstinate man, pugnacious by nature, refused to give up. Robert Jr. remembered the incident vividly: “My dad bundled Roger in a blanket and put him in the family Chevy and drove to the Cleveland Clinic.” Driving eighty miles an hour down Route 422, they were soon stopped by a state police car.
“Look, my son’s bleeding. We’ve got to get to the hospital,” Robert pleaded to a man in a Mountie hat standing outside his window.
The trooper looked at the boy wrapped in a blood-stained blanket in the backseat. “Get behind me,” he said and escorted them, his lights flashing the rest of the way to Cleveland.
A whole crew of Robert’s work friends, who had names like “Dirty Neck Watson,” went to the hospital to donate their blood. Many were so filthy that the doctors had to scrub them down before they gave Roger a direct blood transfusion from their arms to his. “Well, son,” his father said after he pulled through. “You have a lot of blue-collar blood in you. Never forget that.”
The hospital traumatized the young boy, and the threat of returning there denied him many of the pleasures of childhood. “Roger told me one time, when he was really young, he was suspended upside down for hours at the hospital to keep the blood from pooling in dangerous ways,” Launa Newman said. During recess, Roger often sat at his desk as the other kids played outside. But after school hours, his teacher could not stop him from playing touch football and sandlot baseball. “He participated until he got so black-and-blue he couldn’t move,” his brother said.
Simply walking to and from school was hazardous. A passing car clipped him once when he was in the second grade, an accident that landed him back in the hospital. “What saved me was a little square lunch box that I had,” Roger said. “He hit the lunchbox and I flew into the air and into the curb.” On another occasion, some neighborhood boys roughed him up on his walk home. “My dad, I saw tears in his eyes for the first time,” Roger recalled. “I’d never seen it. And he said, ‘That’s never going to happen to you again.’ ”
Robert Sr. inculcated in his son a kind of Warren catechism, a blue-collar ethos summed up in epigrams: violence never solves anything, but the threat of violence can be very useful; if you have to take two, disarm one; if you have no options, then remember, son: for them, it’s a fight. For you, it’s life and death. “Roger and my dad were very, very close,” Robert Jr. said. “It’s all because of his handicap, his physical problem. He was very protective of Roger. He taught him a lot. My dad was a tough guy. He was built like a brick shithouse. He was quite the scrapper in his day. Sometimes, he had to fight. He was the low man on the totem pole. At work, you can’t fight back. But his feeling was, don’t take it if you don’t have to.” One time, Donna and Robert Sr. were out driving. She was behind the wheel and a man in a pickup truck yelled at her. Robert leapt out of the car and ran to the truck. “He stood on the running board and reached through the window and grabbed him and pulled him through the window, had him hanging out in the street,” Roger recalled.
In spite of his protectiveness, Robert Sr. didn’t believe his son’s hemophilia should be an obstacle. “When I was thirteen, he allowed me to go to the Canadian north woods with the YMCA, a bunch of guys with an Indian guide,” Roger said. “We were up there for three weeks. Now I remember my parents arguing about it but my dad said, ‘Let him go, he’ll be alright. He’s a tough guy.’ So they sent me. And I went up there and we went down the rapids of the Montreal River—we did a lot of stuff. And I got through it and it gave me a lot of confidence. And my dad said, ‘You’re going to lead a perfectly normal life, don’t ever back out, don’t ever back away. Don’t ever be afraid.’ So that set the course, and I think that had a big impact on me.”
Robert Sr.’s lessons sometimes had a cruel edge. When Roger was recovering from the car accident, his father took him to a running track to help him practice walking again. One day, Roger fell into some manure that lay on the ground. “Don’t fall down and you won’t get that crap on you!” Robert snapped. The cruelest lesson Roger would speak of occurred in the bedroom Roger shared with his brother. Roger was standing on the top bunk. His father opened his arms wide and smiled.
“Jump Roger, jump,” he told him.
Roger leapt off the bed into the air toward his arms. But Robert took a step back. His son fell flat onto the floor. As he looked up, Robert leaned down and picked him up. “Don’t ever trust anybody,” he said.
Stephen Rosenfield, who worked for Roger’s consulting company in the 1970s, considered the episode “his Rosebud story,” a moment that defined and haunted his boss. Ailes told it to him on several occasions with pain in his voice. “He was upset by it, but also felt his father was teaching him an important lesson,” Rosenfield recalled. “Which is why I think you’re describing a guy who doesn’t have a lot of close friends. The people Roger works with become his close family. Roger feels way safer knowing he’s in control.”