Roger Ailes: Off Camera (14 page)

Ailes was yawning again, and twiddling his thumbs as the various vice presidents discussed their activities. But he perked up again when Magee reported that NPR was retracting a story it had run on Apple’s allegedly inhumane treatment of Chinese workers. Ailes does not like National Public Radio, which he considers the epitome of political correctness—and worse, correctness underwritten, at least in part, by his taxes.

Ailes had a chance to strike back at NPR in 2010. Juan Williams was a correspondent for National Public Radio; in fact, it later emerged, he was the only black male on the air. He was also a commentator on Fox News. It was in that capacity that he appeared one night on
The Factor
. “I’m not a bigot,” he told Bill O’Reilly. “You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

Williams had gone on to say that this sort of concern should not be a reason to discriminate against Muslims. But NPR didn’t pause to listen to that part. He was a respected author, an Emmy winner, a former
Washington Post
columnist, and a contributor to prestigious publications like the
New Republic
, the
Atlantic Monthly,
and
Ebony
. But he worked for Fox News, which made him, in the eyes of a certain kind of liberal, a heretic. Many at NPR had been longing to settle accounts with him. He was fired over the phone without an explanation or a chance to defend himself. NPR issued a statement saying that Williams’s remarks were inconsistent with its editorial policy. Two days later, NPR president Vivian Schiller told an audience in Atlanta that Williams’s feelings about Muslims should be between him “and his psychiatrist, or his publicist—take your pick.” In other words, Juan Williams was either a bigoted paranoiac or a money-grubbing opportunist.

Schiller’s statement was hard to defend, and NPR didn’t try. She apologized to Williams, but the NPR board vetoed her annual bonus and pressured her lieutenant, Ellen Weiss, a close friend of Hillary Clinton, to resign. A few months later Schiller was fired after another NPR senior executive was caught on video, by the right-wing videographer and activist James O’Keefe, disparaging Christians and Republicans to a prospective donor from a fictional Islamic organization. Schiller was subsequently hired by NBC as its chief digital officer. Juan Williams, meanwhile, was bailed out by Roger Ailes.

The firing of Juan Williams was a public scandal, but it was also a personal crisis. “Let’s say I had a sleepless night,” Williams told me. The next night on his show, Sean Hannity noticed that Williams was not his usual self. Williams told Hannity what had happened. Hannity called Bill Shine at home, and Shine took it to Ailes. The following day Ailes invited Williams to come to his office. “When I walked in, Roger was sitting in a chair in the corner, and he said, ‘We can’t have you working here, can we?’ And then he laughed.” Ailes offered Williams a contract that would compensate him fully for the money he had been making at NPR. “I don’t want you to have to go home and tell your wife you lost something,” said Ailes.

The banter and the generosity were part of a relationship that went back to the days when Williams was a young correspondent during the Reagan administration; Ed Rollins (who now works for Ailes as a commentator at Fox) made the introduction and they hit it off. “Roger was a source during the first Bush administration,” Williams says. “He paid attention to me, this young, skinny black kid, and made sure I was in the loop. It would have been easy for him to ignore me or mislead me, but he didn’t.” Of course, Ailes had a good reason to get on good terms with a reporter, regardless of how young, who was covering politics for the
Washington Post
. But Ailes understood that young journalists need to feel validation. “People like Larry Speakes [the White House spokesman] preferred to deal with more senior correspondents. Roger had a different attitude. It was like, ‘You and I are fellow underdogs. If you can’t find something out, give me a holler.’ I felt like, at some level, the connection was personal.”

In 1996, Ailes called Williams, who was a substitute host at CNN’s
Crossfire
, and offered him a job as a commentator. “My wife was against it. Leave the brand name? But I believed in Roger and in 1997 I went over. I knew that Fox leaned to the right. It was clearly antagonistic to Clinton during the impeachment trial, and in the 2000 election it was closer to Bush than Gore. But there I was, on the air, voicing contrary opinions to Hannity and O’Reilly. A black man who works for Fox is suspect. I was disrespected for it at NPR, even though I was working for Fox when they hired me. But there are a lot more blacks at Fox than there are at NPR. I was the only black man on the air, along with maybe four women. MSNBC and CNN are very short on black talent. Under Roger, at Fox, there is more opportunity.”

When Williams came aboard full time in 2010, Ailes was delighted. Not only did he have himself a first-rate full-time commentator going into election season, he also got a chance to call the NPR’s leaders “the left wing of Nazism.” It was a phrase too far, and it engendered a rebuke from the Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman. Ailes “apologized” for using the term “Nazi” to describe the leaders of NPR “when in my now considered opinion ‘nasty, inflexible bigot[s]’ would have worked better. . . . Juan Williams is a good man and like you, a friend. And my friends never have to worry about me sticking up for them—even if I’m occasionally politically incorrect, I never leave any doubts about my loyalty.”

THE GIFT OF FRIENDSHIP

One of the first people Roger Ailes hired at Fox News was a young reporter named Douglas Kennedy. It raised eyebrows: He was the youngest son of Bobby Kennedy, born a year before his father was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination. The Kennedy family business is politics, but Doug decided to go into journalism. He started out at the
Boston Herald
and then came to New York as a crime reporter for the
New York Post
. Although he didn’t have much television experience, he put together a reel of appearances and sent it to Chet Collier at Fox. Kennedy came on board as a reporter a month before Fox launched.

“Some people at the network resented it and some still do,” he said. “I’ve had epic battles at Fox where my name was an undercurrent,” he says. He was protected, then and now, by Roger Ailes.

“Some people find their own humanity overwhelming. Roger doesn’t. He knows you when he is talking to you. You walk by Roger in the hallway and he’s happy to see you—not the fake TV executive happy, but genuinely. He grabs you by the shoulders and there you are, wrestling with him in the corporate office building.”

Kennedy is a lifelong Democrat. “I was terribly moved by the election of the first black president,” he says. Ailes was less moved, but it doesn’t matter. “What people don’t understand is that Roger is very comfortable with others who don’t agree with him. He knows what he believes and says it—Roger never talks for effect—and we go out to lunch and really go at it. All he asks is that you be real with him in return.”

After Kennedy went to work at Fox, liberal friends suggested that Ailes was using him for public relations, to demonstrate Fox’s fairness and balance. “That’s never happened,” he said. His family stood behind his decision to work for Ailes. In the midseventies, “Roger took my brother Bobby to Kenya and made a wildlife documentary,” he says. “It was a kind gesture on his part. In my family, Roger is held in high regard. We don’t think of him the same way others in the Democratic Party do.”

The African excursion came up at lunch with Austin Pendleton. Ailes’s version was far different from Doug Kennedy’s account of Roger as an avuncular benefactor. He said that he had a client with $100,000 in hard currency that the Kenyan government wouldn’t allow out of the country. The client came to Ailes and asked if he could use his political contacts. Ailes had a better idea: He offered to produce a documentary film with the money and then sell it to American television. That way, everybody came out ahead.

The question was, Who would buy a nature travelogue? What would the hook be? “I needed an automatic sale,” Ailes told Pendleton. “At the time, there was no name more commercial than Kennedy. And I knew Bobby Jr. was a wildlife guy.” Ailes took the proposal to Lem Billings, an intimate of JFK and after the assassination of Bobby Kennedy a mentor to his sons. Billings wasn’t sure it was a good idea, especially given Ailes’s Republican credentials and his work for Nixon, but he promised to raise it with Ethel Kennedy. Ailes waited several months while he was vetted, and finally got a yes. “We can’t find anyone who says you are untalented or a liar,” Billings told him, “so you can go ahead if you promise to protect Bobby.” They shook on the deal, traveled to Kenya, and made the film, which recouped the client’s money with a tidy profit.

Sometime later, I informed Doug Kennedy that Ailes’s motive for making the documentary had been financial, not humanitarian. He just laughed. “Roger always wants people to think he is worse than he is,” Kennedy said. “He hates admitting that he’s softhearted.”

I had noticed this myself. He often talks about epic fights that, on closer examination, turn out to be more like scuffles, and he usually explains his motivations and behavior in the most cynical way. When I asked him why, he began by denying it.

“What I told you and Austin was the truth. I did want to find a way to get the money out of Kenya. And it worked. But, yeah, there was more to it than that. Bobby was a troubled kid. He was obnoxious at the beginning of the trip, too. He borrowed a comb from the cameraman and then tossed it on the ground. I took him aside and said, ‘Pick up the comb and hand it to the cameraman. He’s going to be filming you for the next month and if you act like a prick, he’s going to make you look like one.’”

Over the course of the trip, though, Ailes took a liking to Kennedy. “One night Lem Billings and I were sitting around the campfire—we were the last ones awake—and he said to me that Bobby would be running for office eventually and he wanted my promise that I would help him. I told Lem I couldn’t guarantee that—I didn’t know what the political situation might be in the future. But I did promise that I would never work against him, for a candidate who was running against him. And I promised I would always look out for Bobby.”

The Kenyan expedition resulted in a decadeslong connection between the Kennedy clan and Ailes. Ailes is especially close to Ethel, whose charities he has supported over the years. He was also friendly with John Jr. They had several meetings in Ailes’s office to explore joint marketing strategies for Fox News and Kennedy’s magazine,
George
. After one of those meetings, Ailes walked JFK Jr. through the Fox newsroom so he could say hello to Doug. “The girls down there were practically fainting,” Ailes recalls. He offered Kennedy his own talk show on Fox. Kennedy was considering it when his plane went down.

After the birth of Doug Kennedy’s fifth child in the winter of 2012, he tried to take his infant son out of the hospital to get some fresh air. Two nurses intervened, and they got into a scuffle. Since it involved a Kennedy, the incident became a sensational story. Reporters flocked to the hospital in northern Westchester; news helicopters flew to the scene. “In my family the reflex in a situation like this is to shut up,” Kennedy told me. “But Roger said, hell no. Fight! Nobody touches your baby. Stick up for yourself. You did nothing wrong.”

Ailes instructed Kennedy to leave the hospital and come to his house in Garrison. Beth cooked him dinner. Ailes told the press that Kennedy had been right to do what he did. “You don’t grab a baby out of the arms of a loving father,” he said. (A Westchester court subsequently acquitted Kennedy of all charges.) He was, needless to say, grateful for Ailes’s support. “There is no other television executive in the business who would do something like that,” he says. “No one.”

In the winter of 2012, Ailes, Beth, and Zac took a short vacation to Palm Beach. One night Ethel Kennedy invited them to a small party at her estate, where he found himself surrounded by friendly Kennedys and other liberals. The next day he took Zac to hang out with Rush Limbaugh in his studio. “I doubt if too many people have had a weekend like that one,” he says.

Chris Cuomo is another scion of a liberal Democratic dynasty, the son of former New York governor Mario Cuomo and brother of the incumbent, Andrew Cuomo. He considers Roger Ailes one of his close friends. They lunch often, and discuss personal problems and professional issues. “I was at CNBC when Roger began staffing Fox News,” he told me. “I was twenty-eight, just starting out. When Roger hired me he said, ‘I don’t care who your father is. Just do your job the right way.’ He’s a guy’s guy, a brilliant teacher, and as good a boss as I’ve ever had. If he wanted me to come to Fox, I’d be tempted.”

The roster of Friends of Roger is long and incongruous. It includes Rudy Giuliani and Gladys Knight, Jack Welch and Jesse Jackson, George H. W. Bush and Dukakis campaign chief Susan Estrich. Dennis Kucinich, the former boy-wonder mayor of Cleveland and longtime darling of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, is a buddy. When he and his wife came to Garrison for dinner, Ailes saw to it that a photo of Kucinich and Elizabeth made the local paper. “I wanted the local commissars to see it,” says Ailes. “I thought it would ruin their day.” He regularly lunches with Henry Kissinger. He was so close to Geraldine Ferraro, the Democratic vice presidential candidate on the Mondale ticket Ailes helped to defeat in 1984, that he produced a film of her marital rededication ceremony. He also hired her as a commentator on Fox and, when she was diagnosed with cancer and couldn’t work, kept her on the payroll at full salary.

It is easy to be cynical about Ailes’s friendships, many of which double as business connections or professional relationships. They undermine the notion, fostered by Ailes himself, that he is hated by the liberal establishment. “There are some who think Roger would love to be the subject of scorn and abuse, but he isn’t,” says Rick Kaplan. “The truth is, in our business he is admired—I love Roger Ailes.” Kaplan doesn’t hold a grudge over Ailes’s disparaging comments about the Clinton News Network. Cable news, Ailes style, promotes itself through controversy and personal feuds, but—like politics or boxing—only suckers believe the contestants actually hate their opponents.

Once Ailes makes friends, he tends to keep them. When he began the second round of his television career, he brought in Chet Collier, his old mentor in Cleveland, as his second-in-command. And he remained close to his first boss at
The Mike Douglas Show
, Woody Fraser.

Douglas died in Los Angeles in 2006 at age eighty-one. His widow called Fraser and asked if he would be willing to put together a memorial show. Fraser wasn’t enthusiastic. A few years earlier he had been asked by the widow of Steve Allen, Jayne Meadows, to stage a similar tribute. It was a flop. “Steve Allen had been a beloved figure in the show-business community in Hollywood,” Fraser told me, “but despite that, almost nobody agreed to show up. Everybody had an excuse—they were out of town, they had a crucial appointment, something. Really, most of them just didn’t want to bother. And Mike Douglas wasn’t Steve Allen. He wasn’t especially well liked in L.A. I got some of the original staff on board and we tried to get some of the guests on the Douglas show to appear, but when we called around, people kept turning us down.”

Fraser called Ailes and told him what was happening. “We need names,” he said.

Ailes saw this as a debt of loyalty. He told Fraser to send him a list of celebrities who had been guests on the show, and he began to work the phones. “Just about everybody on that list, from Tiger Woods to Billy Crystal, showed up,” Fraser said. “Roger came, too, and gave a speech. The show went really well and afterward Roger took me aside and said, ‘I’d forgotten what a good producer you are.”

The job offer came with a caveat. “This may not work,” Ailes said. “I once worked for you. Now this is my ship and it works my way. You can’t break legs here. I have ten executives who have made Fox News number one, and if you don’t get along with them I’ll have to let you go.”

Fraser took the job but the adjustment wasn’t easy. He clashed with some of the Fox brass, especially John Moody, the executive vice president in charge of news. “Moody and I didn’t like each other,” Fraser says. “He told me that I didn’t know anything about news. I told him that I had produced
Nightline
and
Good Morning America
. He wasn’t impressed, and I wasn’t impressed with him.” The antipathy got nasty and it was talked about at the network.

Ailes does not abide internecine warfare. It was a negative situation, and negative situations, according to him, make positive people sick. He called in his old boss and read him the riot act. Fraser promised to be good. “I’m proud of Roger,” he says. “He taught me something important. I wish I had learned before how to work with people without breaking legs.”

Anyone who has any experience with Ailes knows that he prizes loyalty, to him and to the company he runs. Violate it, and you wind up like anchorman Mike Schneider or Jim Cramer, out on the street looking for a new job. But abide by it and you have a supporter of uncommon power and understanding. For example, Ailes recently sent a young reporter from an affiliate, who had had a fistfight in the newsroom, to anger management. “If you run an organization and nobody’s crazy, you never get a full picture of life’s possibilities,” he says.

“Roger taught me that being a great interviewer is a mixture of head, heart, and balls, and even if you have all three, you have to figure out how to use them effectively on the air,” says Chris Cuomo. “A lot of TV journalists are afraid to do that.”

When Geraldo Rivera was expelled from Iraq amid charges that he had endangered American lives in wartime, a lot of news executives would have been glad to see him go. Ailes was different. “Roger totally backed me,” Rivera says. “He stuck up for me with the Pentagon, and he was steady as a rock. We are both smart guys who push back. Roger has a lot of physical courage and it gives him his swagger.” A few weeks after telling me this, Rivera ran into Ailes and repeated the quote, to which Ailes replied, “Damn right.”

“Ours is a perfidious business,” Cuomo told me, “but Roger stands up for his people. When somebody threatens to sue a Fox reporter, Roger comes to that person and says, “‘Are you right on the story?’ If you say you are, he believes you and then the people complaining have to get through him.”

“Roger thinks long and hard about hiring, but once you are in, he’s got your back,” says Chris Wallace. “He’s never told me who to have on the show or what questions to ask. But loyalty is very important to him. I found that out.”

In the spring of 2008, Wallace did a spot on
Fox & Friends
. Barack Obama had just delivered his well-received speech on race relations in the wake of the Jeremiah Wright controversy, and the hosts, including Steve Doocy, spent a good part of the show picking it apart. They invited Wallace to join in, but he declined. “I told them that two hours of Obama bashing was enough,” he recalls. Ailes was furious that Wallace had criticized his colleagues on the air. “You shot inside the tent,” he said, and informed Wallace that he was a “jerk.” Wallace sent Ailes a letter of apology, and he hasn’t forgotten the lesson.

Ailes doesn’t usually allow employees who leave the network for the competition to return. Fox News is a team, and you don’t leave your teammates to play for the other side. But if you show the right kind of attitude, it can be done. Arthel Neville proved that.