The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--And Divided a Country (66 page)

A
few days after the 2013 Independence Day parade in Cold Spring, Ailes called Richard Shea to a meeting at
PCN&R
headquarters. He had business to discuss.
In June, the conservative Bradley Foundation had awarded Ailes a $250,000 prize for being a “visionary of American journalism” at a gala at the Kennedy Center in Washington.
His acceptance speech electrified the faithful with gibes at Obama and the shadowy forces who sought to harm the country. Armed IRS agents, he said, would enforce Obama’s health care law at gunpoint. “We must stop waving our extended arms in an effort to balance ourselves as we tiptoe along the edges of the Constitution, in an effort not to upset weak-kneed appeasers with our unflinching belief in the ideas and principles that made our country different and, yes,
better
,” Ailes said. Onstage later that evening, he sang “God Bless America” with a shiny gold medal around his neck and danced.

Ailes told Shea he would donate the prize money to build a
senior center in Philipstown. In the conference room at the
PCN&R
, Shea quickly realized that Ailes had other things on his mind besides charitable
giving. Shea listened as Roger unloaded a stream-of-consciousness speech about the troubled state of the world, a kind of life reckoning. Ailes said that if he were president, he would solve the immigration problem by sitting the president of Mexico down and giving him a stern talking-to: “Your country is corrupt. You can now only take thirty percent of what the people earn instead of seventy percent. If you don’t do that, I’ll send the CIA down there to kill you.” He had been careful to moderate his immigration position in public.
“If I’m going to risk my life to run over the fence to get into America, I want to win. I think Fox News will articulate that,” he told
The New Republic
a few months earlier. But Ailes told Shea that as president he would send Navy SEAL trainees to the border as part of a certification program: “I would make it a requirement that you would have to personally kill an illegal immigrant coming into the country. They would have to bring home a dead body.”

When Shea brought up Ailes’s past, he erupted. “I had nothing to do with Richard Nixon!” Ailes claimed it was Ronald Reagan whom he had been close to.

“Why don’t people like me?” Ailes asked Shea. The Navy SEALs loved him. Couldn’t people in Philipstown see all that he and Beth had done?
Throughout his career, Ailes had wielded generosity as a form of power—he recently said he gave away 10 percent of his annual income—and yet it failed him in his community.

His strongest venom was reserved for Gordon Stewart. “Why do people like him?” Ailes complained to Shea. “He’s trying to drive me out of town!” Since Stewart had launched Philipstown.info on July 4, 2010, their feud had escalated.
In June 2012, Stewart started a weekly print newspaper, which he slyly called
The Philipstown Paper
. The new
PCN&R
editor asked Stewart if there was a liberal conspiracy behind the venture involving the Hudson Highlands Land Trust or “the Facebook guys,” referring to Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes and his husband, Sean Eldridge, who owned an estate in the area. Stewart said no one was backing the paper but himself.

In March 2013, Beth rejected a “Business Person of the Year” award from the Cold Spring Chamber of Commerce because the group asked her to share it with Stewart.
“Due to scheduling conflicts and the fact that Gordon Stewart has behaved in an unethical manner toward me, my family and my business, I decided to decline,” she said.
A few months later, Roger and Beth paid $30,000 to the village of Cold Spring to sponsor the July Fourth fireworks exclusively for three years, out-bidding
Stewart, who had sponsored them the previous year. Stewart instead funded the music.
When the
PCN&R
published a town advertisement thanking the sponsors of the day’s festivities, the paper failed to credit Stewart for his contribution. “He’s trying to drive my wife’s paper out of business!” Ailes told Shea. (As turmoil inside the newsroom intensified, Ailes had transferred ownership of the paper to Beth.) What about competition? Shea asked. Ailes waved off the question. He was engaged in a zero-sum game. “Stewart is doing everything!” Ailes said, even claiming that Stewart was behind
a parody website
The Pretend Putnam County News & Recorder
. (
“I have nothing to do with it,” Stewart later said.) Shea was shaken by Ailes’s state. “I have never experienced such expressions of spitting hate,” Shea told Stewart a few days later. “I have to tell you that if Roger could kill you, he would do that. The hatred is that deep.”

As the conversation ebbed, Ailes warned Shea that there could be consequences if he continued to associate with Stewart.
Shea was up for reelection in November. He was popular in town. Republicans had yet to field a challenger. Ailes was running out of patience. “The last time I backed that half-wit,” he said, referring to Lee Erickson. “If I go after you this time, I’ll knock you out. I’ll run for supervisor myself.”

R
oger Ailes did not jump into the race.
Richard Shea won the November election handily, running unopposed. But while Ailes sat it out, he was still stumping to be remembered as a friendly civic father of Philipstown, which was a microcosm, however currently imperfect, of the America he loved. For a man in his business, Ailes is surprisingly sensitive.
“He doesn’t want to be hated,” said a Republican who knows him well. “It really bothers him.”

Ailes’s campaign to be liked was at odds with his uncompromising vision.
“All progress is made by irrational people,” he told a journalist in 1989. The statement could well be turned back on Ailes, because he embodied a number of contradictions. He accommodated naive idealism about American life and history alongside profound cynicism about many Americans, from presidents on down. He justified the use of smash-mouth political tactics in the service of protecting his sentimentalized notion of picket-fenced America. He bullied real and perceived enemies, but played the victim when criticized. He could be the most menacing or the funniest, most engaging conversationalist. He decried Manhattan
elites, but was one. He entered the journalistic trade, whose practitioners he regularly expresses contempt for. And the starkest contradiction, the one of lasting consequence, is his creation of a “fair and balanced” news network that effectively functioned as an arm of one political party.

In interviews in recent years, Ailes reflected a politician’s sense of winning and losing, that the moment is today, and that tomorrow may belong to another.
“I don’t care about my legacy. It’s too late. My enemies will create it and they’ll push it,” he said a week after the 2012 election.
“Right now, everybody thinks I’m the greatest guy in the world,” he told another journalist. “The eulogies will be great, but people will be stepping over my body before it gets cold. Within a day or two, everybody will be complaining about what a prick I was and all the things I didn’t do for them.”

It’s a surprisingly open-eyed assessment, both humble and grandiose, but it omits a larger truth. Ailes made his career in a winner-take-all world of 50.1 percent majorities measured by the pull of levers and click of remotes: thumbs up, thumbs down; in or out; like him or hate him. But his career, unlike a campaign, will be judged by both the good and the bad. There are no referenda on a man’s legacy.

For four and a half decades, Roger Ailes had directed his candidates from the wings, even if they were half-wits. He played tougher and said the inconvenient truths that no one wanted to hear. He knew it made him hated.
“Most of the media in this country would prefer Roger went away,” his brother, Robert, said. “Fox News is the beacon of conservatism in the American media. There are an awful lot of people who would like to see Fox News collapse.” But it was Ailes’s burden to carry, and he was never going to quit:
“I can’t walk away until I think enough people understand how valuable and how important being an American is.”

Near the end of his book,
You Are the Message
, Ailes described an encounter he had with Judy Garland shortly before she died, in 1969. Ailes was not yet thirty. “In her twilight days, Judy was so ill that she often couldn’t complete a show.… Her voice was almost gone, and she had trouble controlling her vibrato. When I met her, I was so shaken by her voice in rehearsal and her appearance that I couldn’t understand why she had such a loyal following,” he wrote. “But anyone who saw her in concert understood her magic. The audience identified with her ‘humanness.’ They identified with her frailties. They understood her vulnerability. When she sang at Carnegie Hall and tried to hit the high notes in ‘Over the Rainbow,’ twenty-eight hundred people were praying for her to make it.”

It was a lesson that applied to his own life.
“If you can get the audience to pull for you, you’ll always win,” Ailes wrote. “After all, audiences are just like you. They’re human. They care. They’re sympathetic. They’re supportive. The audience wants you to succeed.… An awareness of your own vulnerability and the vulnerability of others will make you a better and more human communicator. And only a human communicator can become a master communicator.”

Roger Ailes was still out on the stage.
He had two million Americans rooting for his network. They grew older every day, as he did. Fox News was his best show on his biggest stage yet, but every show has its run.

One of the paradoxes of publishing a book is that while my byline is on the cover, every word on the page is the product of many hands. Without the generosity of my sources, editors, fact-checkers, family, and friends, I would not be writing this expression of gratitude now.

My principal collaborator was my wife, Jennifer Stahl. In the winter of 2012, after spending five years in the fact-checking department of
The New Yorker
, she left the magazine to work with me full-time on the book. She played a variety of roles as the manuscript took shape, all of which were crucial. As a researcher, she helped track down important interview subjects and documents, and studied thousands of pages of primary source material that detailed formative periods of Roger Ailes’s life. She was my closest editor, who helped me conceive the story and the structure of the book. She line-edited the first and subsequent drafts. This book is as much hers as it is mine.

John Homans, my editor at
New York
magazine, did a sophisticated and generous edit to the manuscript over eighteen months, refining the ideas and sharpening the narrative. His gifts as a writer have improved my writing immeasurably, and I can’t thank him enough for all his hard work and forbearance. I am also grateful to Adam Moss,
New York
’s editor in chief, for giving me a journalistic home for the past six years and for publishing four cover stories that became the foundation of several chapters of this book. I’ve learned a lot about reporting and writing from my colleagues at the magazine, who continually inspire me with their journalism.

During the three years it took to report and write this book, my agent, Gail Ross, provided me with intelligent counsel and support. Years
before that, she encouraged me to move beyond long-form magazine journalism and pursue book writing. One of her best decisions was steering me to Jonathan Jao, my editor at Random House, who has shared my enthusiasm for the project from the moment he acquired it to the hours we spent working together on the final edits. His incisive notes and cuts were invaluable. I also want to thank Jonathan’s colleagues at Random House for their contributions: president Gina Centrello; publisher Susan Kamil; deputy publisher Tom Perry; London King and Barbara Fillon in Publicity; associate general counsel Laura Goldin; production editor Steve Messina; and Jonathan’s assistant, Molly Turpin.

Without my team of fact-checkers, Cynthia Cotts and Rob Liguori, this book would not have moved through Random House’s publishing system on such a tight deadline. They brought their top credentials to the project, having worked at publications including
The New Yorker
,
Vanity Fair
, and
The New York Times Magazine
. Cynthia and Rob were dogged reporters in their own right, adding nuance and context to every piece of text they handled.

This book builds on the groundbreaking journalism about Roger Ailes and the News Corporation produced by writers including Kurt Andersen, Julia Angwin, Tim Arango, Ken Auletta, Donald Baer, David Bauder, David Brock, Bryan Burrough, Michael Calderone, John Carmody, David Carr, Bill Carter, John Cassidy, Scott Collins, John Cook, Rebecca Dana, Sarah Ellison, James Ellroy, Steve Fishman, David Folkenflik, Jason Gay, Vanessa Grigoriadis, Lloyd Grove, Joe Hagan, Nancy Hass, Tom Junod, Andrew Neil, Frank Rich, Marshall Sella, Brian Stelter, and Michael Wolff. Tom Junod, of
Esquire
, deserves special thanks for publishing an extended transcript of his 2011 interview with Roger Ailes, which informed the chapter on Ailes’s childhood experience. I also want to thank my mentor, Peter Kaplan, the longtime editor in chief of
The New York Observer
who passed away in November 2013 at age fifty-nine. When I was a young reporter covering media at the
Observer
, Peter told me to approach the beat as a
New York Times
reporter would cover the State Department. It’s a message I will hold on to. I wrote this book imagining Peter as my reader and I will miss him very much.

Since September 2012, I have been fortunate to be a fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. Steve Coll, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Rachel White, Andrés Martinez, Becky Shafer, Kirsten Berg, and Casey Scharf provided generous support and institutional backing for this book.

I am grateful to my friends and family for their patience as I worked to complete this project, including my brother Todd and his wife, Claire, and my sister-in-law Christine and her husband, David. My in-laws, Kermit and Deborah Stahl, were a wellspring of comfort and support, reminding me once again that they have welcomed me into their family like a son. More than anything, this book is a product of the love of my parents, Leonard and Raechelle Sherman. The sacrifices they have made on my behalf, which continued through the writing of this book, have left me with debts I will never repay.