Suddenly, someone told Lachlan that Ailes had burst into the Fox News newsroom shouting, “We’re under attack! We’re under attack!” To Lachlan, that was precisely the wrong message to be sending at that moment, and he decided to do something about it. He took the elevator to the basement and found Ailes in his white-tie tuxedo giving directions to the crew of overnight producers. Lachlan told Ailes he needed to settle down. Ailes did not take his advice well. “You could see him getting aggravated. He’d been taken down in front of his people,” one executive said. The producers watching the confrontation were startled at what they were witnessing—Ailes was openly challenging the chairman’s kid, who was the deputy chief operating officer of the entire corporation.
The gravity of the situation was not lost on Ailes. Fate could be cruel to News Corp executives who crossed the Murdoch children. In London, Sam Chisholm, the profane, New Zealand–born CEO of BSkyB, was forced out in part because he tangled with Rupert’s daughter Liz, who worked for him (he had called her a “management trainee”). “On one level, Roger was very scared. No one had had a conflict with the children and survived. He didn’t want to be Sam Chisholm,” one executive close to Ailes explained.
Ailes needed to do something to turn the situation to his advantage. Several months earlier he had already come close to overstepping his bounds when he decided to get rid of Fox News executive and longtime Murdoch ally Ian Rae. “Don’t ever fucking fire a mate of mine again,” Murdoch told Ailes. Within days of his confrontation with Lachlan, Ailes made an appointment to see Rupert. In the meeting, Ailes threatened to resign as a preemptive strike. Ailes told Murdoch that his kids were aligned against him. “Rupert is not the hardest person to manipulate,” a family intimate said. It was an effective move—Murdoch offered him a new contract. Ailes had secured his place at the company. Dealing with Lachlan could wait.
SEVENTEEN
QUAGMIRE DOESN’T RATE
PROGRAMMING WAS ONLY ONE ARM of Ailes’s effort to shape events. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, he sent a confidential memo to Karl Rove with advice for George Bush. “The only thing America won’t forgive you for is under-reaching,” Ailes wrote. His missive expressed his view that the country was facing an epochal conflict against a ruthless adversary. “I wrote that letter as an American,” he told a Fox colleague. He knew that Americans craved revenge. That’s why, he’d say, Americans still loved John Wayne, even though he had been dead for two decades. The country had some basic rules.
Rove made sure Bush received Ailes’s letter. Copies were also circulated to senior White House staff, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley, communications director Dan Bartlett, and press secretary Ari Fleischer. Fox News was a crucial ally. In the wake of the divisive recount, the White House recognized Fox’s power to drive the debate and rally the faithful. On a personal level, Rove was said to be intimidated by Ailes, who antedated him on the national stage. “Roger was the bigger figure,” recalled Bush aides who observed the power dynamic between the men. When Ailes complained that Fox was not getting enough access to White House officials, Rove leaned on White House communications director Dan Bartlett to rectify the issue. “Ailes would call Karl and say, ‘we’re not getting enough guests during the daytime,’ ” a Bush official said. “Ailes’s message was: ‘You better fucking do something about it.’ So Karl would then call the press office and be like, ‘Why isn’t [Attorney General John] Ashcroft getting out there?’ ”
To help Bush build his image as a war president, Ailes continued to feed Rove strategic advice. “It focused on how to use the presidential role and rally morale,” a senior Bush official said. “Roger’s reference point was Reagan. He would point out where he saw similarities to use the presidential pulpit. He would say, ‘The president has to be out there more.’ It was macro level advice, as opposed to tactical.”
Ailes also made it clear he would leapfrog Rove if he felt particularly displeased. Around the time he sent the military strategy memo, Ailes discovered that the administration was filling a crucial vacancy in the press office—the White House’s liaison to the television networks—with a former MSNBC producer named Adam Levine. Levine had worked for Chris Matthews on the staff of Hardball and was once a registered Democrat who worked in the office of New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Ailes complained directly to Dick Cheney about the appointment. “Roger was afraid it would favor NBC. He wanted to make sure Brit Hume and Tony Snow got the interviews,” another Bush official said. Cheney’s aide Mary Matalin, Ailes’s friend, instructed Levine to go to New York to clear the air. During a meeting in Ailes’s office, Levine pledged his loyalty. “Mr. Ailes,” he said, “having worked for MSNBC and having been a Democrat, I can tell you I have more reasons than you could imagine to hate both organizations.”
Ailes’s producers clearly understood Fox’s role. “Someone has to speak for the White House,” one said. Though much of the media credulously amplified the Bush administration’s case for the Iraq War, Fox News was its chief cheerleader, stoking passions born in the collapse of the towers and turning them to a new end. Three days after 9/11, Bill O’Reilly hosted foreign policy analyst Laurie Mylroie to make the argument for hitting Saddam Hussein. A year earlier, Mylroie—whom terrorism expert Peter Bergen would dub “the Neocons’ favorite conspiracy theorist”—had published the controversial book Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War Against America, which argued that Iraq was responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. O’Reilly wanted to know if she had “any evidence” that Saddam Hussein was involved with 9/11.
“No,” she said. “But I think there are things that suggest it.”
Later in the interview, O’Reilly surmised, “You sound like you’re a person who says, ‘Hey, Saddam Hussein should be on the destruction death card, along with Osama bin Laden.’ He should be target number two, maybe.”
“I’d even say target number one,” she said. “The direction and the expertise for these attacks are coming from Iraq. It would be good to get rid of bin Laden, I agree completely, but it won’t solve the problem. It wouldn’t be as meaningful as getting rid of Saddam Hussein’s regime.”
Given the president’s approval ratings—87 percent in November 2001, according to Gallup—cleaving closely to the Bush administration’s views was smart programming. In Iraq’s mustachioed dictator, Ailes had a perfectly cast enemy and a ready-made narrative of conflict. “Every story needs a beginning, a middle, and an end,” a senior Fox producer said.
Television networks roll out new series in the fall. The Bush administration did the same with its war plan. “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August,” Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, told The New York Times on September 7, 2002. Fox helped close the deal with the public, with Ailes personally directing the effort. Twice each day—first at 8:00 a.m. and again at 2:30 p.m.—Ailes assembled his senior leadership for strategy sessions. The morning meeting took place in his office and focused on news; the afternoon gathering was held in a second-floor conference room and dealt with operations and financial issues. Ailes ran tough meetings. His authoritarian management style could terrorize his inner circle into silence. Executives sat around the table hoping he would not call on them. “It’s not easy to be in that room. He looks around and points at people. If you talked, you’re fucking dead,” one executive recalled. “You’re supposed to take it until your face turns bright red, and you’re thinking, if you move, will the T. rex see you?”