Roger Ailes: Off Camera (21 page)

“Sir, when is it justified to ask the media to hold off on news for national security reasons?” a future brigadier asked.

“I have no problem delaying news when national security is involved,” said Ailes. “I respect the public’s right to know, but it’s moronic to say there are
never
extenuating circumstances.” To illustrate, he recounted the time when two Fox journalists were captured by Palestinian terrorists and held hostage in Gaza for thirteen days. Ailes had given the order to Fox News people to mention the capture but not to discuss it. He made a similar request to the other networks, and they complied. “The terrorists were holding rifles to our guys’ heads, trying to make them convert to Islam or some damn thing,” Ailes said. “One of our guys was gay, and his partner wanted to go on the air and ask the terrorists to let him go. Shit, that would have been good, right? Our guy would have had a whole new problem over there. So yeah, I’m not a neutral when people’s lives are at stake.”

There were enthusiastic nods around the table. Ailes was now on a roll. In quick order he pronounced green cars a waste of time (“I’ll buy one when they can make ’em comfortable, affordable, and cost effective”), denounced the American educational system (“Iceland beats us in math scores! Iceland, what the hell is that? Four people?”), sneered at his former employer, NBC (“I told them not to name the cable channel MSNBC. MS is a damn disease”), and explained that citizen journalism is mostly crap (“These days even real reporters almost never abide by the normal rules of journalism, let alone so-called citizen journalists”).

“A lot of kids go into journalism because they want to change the world, or they want to get invited to Washington cocktail parties,” Ailes said. “Those are lousy reasons. That’s not what this job is all about, being on good terms with the people in power or the people you agree with. They put one story critical of something the president is doing on the air and they think it covers them, that they’re doing their job. Bullshit.”

The officers didn’t know it at the time, and neither did I, but Ailes had been rehearsing his message to the journalism students of North Carolina.

•   •   •

We were fifteen minutes from landing in North Carolina when Ailes put down his notes and asked Brian Lewis what was going on in the world. “Newt is saying that Fox is less conservative than CNN,” Lewis reported. Ailes laughed. “Newt’s auditioning for a job over there. He’s going to need one, because he’s sure as hell not getting one with us again.”

Lewis read Ailes a summary of the flap over Democratic operative Hilary Rosen’s comment that Ann Romney, mother of five, had never worked a day in her life. Ailes spun it without hesitation. “Obama’s the one who never worked a day in his life. He never earned a penny that wasn’t public money. How many fund-raisers does he attend every week? How often does he play basketball and golf? I wish
I
had that kind of time. He’s lazy, but the media won’t report that.” He noticed my arched eyebrows and added, “
I
didn’t come up with that. Obama said that, to Barbara Walters.” (What Obama said was that he feels a laziness in himself that he attributes to his laid-back upbringing in Hawaii.)

Talk turned to the trial, due to start that day in Chapel Hill, of former senator and vice presidential candidate John Edwards. Edwards was accused of having illegally used campaign funds to support his mistress, Rielle Hunter. The amounts were relatively small, and I wondered aloud why a man as rich as Edwards would have taken that kind of risk.

“A married man who gives money to another woman can’t very well take it out of the joint account,” Ailes observed drily.

A car was waiting for us when we deplaned. On the way to the Carolina Inn, a charming hotel on campus, Lewis briefed Ailes for a last time on what to expect. The dean of the school, Susan King, was a TV journalist whom Ailes knew from the old days at CNBC. “She’s a nice lady,” Ailes said. “Probably a liberal, but pleasant.” He had done his own research on the faculty of the journalism school. “Eleven to one, liberals. Well, that’s not as bad as some of them.”

After check-in, Lewis and Jimmy, the security guy, went to the auditorium for a run-through. Ailes and I adjourned to the restaurant, where, over Carolina-style pulled pork sandwiches and fries, he talked about what he saw as the emerging Democratic charge that Republicans were waging a war on women. There had been reporting in the last couple of days that Romney was trailing the president by 7 percent among female voters. Ailes has been reading polls for more than forty years, and he wasn’t impressed. “They’re calling it a gender gap to make Romney look vulnerable,” he said. “What they don’t say is in the same poll Romney is leading among male voters. Why isn’t that a gender gap? What’s the difference?”

It is Ailes’s natural tendency, as a Republican in a Democratic media environment, to turn things upside down. Are white males overwhelmingly for Romney? Fine, what is the percentage of black males supporting Obama? Is the Affordable Care Act imperiled because four conservatives on the Supreme Court vote as a bloc? Okay, how will the liberal bloc vote? Is the Tea Party polarizing? Maybe the other pole is equally at fault. Since the advent of Fox News, there is a television network that frames these stories from a conservative perspective. “We’ll report on the gender gap from both sides,” Ailes said. “The other networks aren’t even aware that there
is
another side.”

Ailes expects that Romney will be treated unfairly by the mainstream media in the coming campaign, especially in the debates. “Mitt is a lot tougher than he looks,” says Ailes. “There were eight guys in the forest when the primaries started, and he’s the one who came out alive. But in debates, reporters never ask Republican candidates about foreign policy, the economy, or energy. They ask, ‘Do you think Jesus lives in the sky?’ If I were him, I’d hire [Florida congressman] Allen West to play Obama in prep. West’s smart, he knows all the liberal positions, and he’s black. Be a good chance for Mitt to get used to being called a racist.”

We were on a second cup of coffee when Brian and Jimmy returned from their inspection tour. Jimmy reported that security for the event would be handled by the university. Hecklers would be asked politely to desist, and if they didn’t, they’d be escorted out. In fact, Ailes is very rarely challenged in public (and he wasn’t that day), but he didn’t want to leave anything to chance. Neither did university authorities, who stationed cops around the building. To Ailes, who remembers the sixties without nostalgia, elite universities are forever enemy territory.

“If I get a job application from someone who went to Princeton or Harvard, they have a harder time selling me. I’d rather hire state school kids,” Ailes once told me. “They hustle, they’re not entitled, and they have a work ethic, a desire to win, and practical intelligence.” This, of course, describes Roger Ailes, son of Warren G. Harding High School and Ohio University, but it is far from a universal truth (I speak as the product of public education). In fact, Fox News is rife with graduates of fancy schools. John Moody, the first executive vice president for news, is a Cornell man. Woody Fraser attended Dartmouth. The Washington bureau includes Harvard grads Jennifer Griffin, Catherine Herridge, Chris Wallace, Charles Krauthammer (who went to Harvard Medical school and also attended Oxford), and Bill Kristol. Lou Dobbs of FBN is a Harvard grad, too. John Stossel, Judy Miller, and Andrew Napolitano have degrees from Princeton. Dick Morris, Gerri Willis (MBA), and Steve Hayes (Law School) are Columbia alums. Foreign correspondent Steve Harrigan has a PhD from Yale. Amy Kellogg matriculated at Brown and holds a master’s degree from Stanford. Business reporter Brenda Buttner is not only a Harvard woman but also a Rhodes scholar. Commentator Charles Lane has degrees from both Harvard
and
Yale. And this is just a partial list. Ailes’s suspicion of the corrosive effects of an elite American education notwithstanding, Fox’s journalists don’t seem to have been permanently damaged by their exposure to liberal ideas. If anything, it gives Fox an advantage over the competition. Very few network news organizations are staffed with graduates of right-leaning schools such as Hillsdale College, Liberty University, or the service academies; and they therefore often lack an accurate picture of what the plurality of Americans who identify as conservatives are actually thinking about, or interested in.

•   •   •

That night, Ailed faced his audience dressed in his customary black business suit, looking happy and well rested. After our lunch he had taken a long nap. There were twin beds in his hotel room, and he invited me to join him. I was tempted—being able to say that I had slept with Roger Ailes in North Carolina was almost irresistible—but I declined on the grounds that it would be inhumane to submit him to my snoring. And so he had slumbered away the afternoon undisturbed, arrived at Carroll Hall full of energy, and immediately lit into the crowd. “I understand most of you are journalism students, is that correct? All right. Well, I think you ought to change your major, because you’re probably all interested in politics and you probably are going into journalism because you think you can affect politics. Well, maybe you can, maybe you can’t. But if you’re going in to affect it, you have to think about that, because you might want to go to political science where you can join a campaign, help elect who you want, push the issues you believe in.”

The audience murmured, but no one protested. North Carolina is a fine university but it is also in the South, where young people are taught to respect their elders. Besides, Ailes was paying them the compliment of being blunt, which made him interesting.

Ailes told the room that the job of the press is to act as “a watchdog. Not a lapdog or an attack dog, but as a watchdog.” He went on, “If you want to bring world peace or save starving children, both very noble goals, the way to effect that as a journalist is to investigate why the United Nations is so ineffective at doing either of those.” Ailes does not care for the UN, and Fox had aggressively reported on its failures, most notably the corruption in its Oil-for-Food scandal. “I was at a UN party and a man I don’t know came up to me and said, ‘What you are doing on Oil-for-Food is very, very dangerous to you and your family,’” Ailes recalls. He didn’t learn the man’s identity, but Fox security, never lax, was alerted. Before his speech in North Carolina, Ailes had informed Dean Susan King that as the head of a news network, he would have to steer clear of politics. But he nudged up against it. President Obama was developing a strategy of blaming the recession on big capital and demanding that “millionaires and billionaires” pay more taxes.

“Every time I needed a job, I had to go to a rich guy,” Ailes said. “I love the poor guy; he had no job. I got a job. I tried to help the poor, okay? But I’m not going to let anybody divide me against the people who actually gave me the jobs. That does not seem very productive.” Now, of course, he is the millionaire with the jobs. He told the students that under his stewardship, Fox had experienced fifty-eight straight quarters of growth, been the number one cable news network for 123 consecutive months, and is the only television news operation never to have laid anyone off for financial reasons. Here was news a keen journalism student could use. Only Fox and Bloomberg, of the national electronic media, were fertile sources of employment.

Ailes didn’t want to leave an impression that he is a heartless plutocrat. “I’m not a big fan of government confiscating more than a third of what we make,” he said. “I think a third’s fair.” By this time, he was detached from the notes he had carefully prepared and was winging it. He praised Martin Luther King Jr. for his nonviolence and American soldiers for their willingness to fight and die for their country, without noticing any contradiction. He admonished the students to remember that America is a country that people try to get into, not escape from. He said that he believes in climate change (“every time you go outside it changes”) but that man-made global warming was unproven and environmentalists “keep trying to change the climate for God.” At one point he blanked on the name of CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien and referred to her as “the girl named after the prison.” When the talk ended, the kids applauded politely and some lined up for a photo.

On the way back to the airport in a university SUV, Brian Lewis read Ailes reactions to his remarks, which had been tweeted by reporters in the audience. Ailes seemed amused by how quickly his every word had been disseminated. He was pleased by how it had gone, although he regretted the Soledad O’Brien reference.

Lewis then began summarizing reactions from the mole story, which had been a major topic of conversation all day in the media and on the Internet. Most of the accounts, Ailes thought, were fair and balanced, even sympathetic to Fox. “Nobody likes a rat,” Ailes said.

“I don’t see how a guy could be so disloyal to his own friends and employer,” said Jimmy, who had been silent for most of the day. “I just don’t get that.”

“Gawker paid him five thousand dollars for the stuff he leaked,” said Lewis.

“Five thousand dollars?” Ailes, who was sitting in the front seat, sounded incredulous. A man had committed professional suicide for five grand?

“You know,” said Jimmy, whose career in the NYPD was spent investigating organized crime and drug dealers, “if this Gawker paid for stolen goods, it could be part of the crime, same as if somebody hires a hit man.”

There was a pause and then Ailes said to Brian, “We should have legal look into that.” A few weeks later, the New York district attorney’s office sent detectives to seize Joe Muto’s files and notebooks. Muto tweeted that he was suspected of grand larceny. Fox also let it be known that it was contemplating a suit against Gawker, which would, at a minimum, cost the online publisher a lot of money, and perhaps serve as a deterrent to similar Judas-like betrayals.

Ailes settled back in his seat, and we drove through the Carolina night. He had met the enemy and they were his.

ZAC’S BOX

On May 15, 2012, Roger Ailes turned seventy-two and received a birthday gift from his greatest rival. CNN’s prime-time shows registered their lowest ratings in fifteen years. In the nine o’clock hour, Hannity outpaced Piers Morgan in the key age demographic of twenty-five to fifty-four by almost ten to one. It was a victory of epic proportions, which Ailes, Beth, and Zac celebrated with a homemade birthday cake.

Not long ago, oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens asked Ailes if he is a billionaire. He isn’t. He works for a living, like his old man did at the Packard factory. That is the way he sees himself, and the way he wants to be seen. “I haven’t ever really had much time for introspection,” he told me. “My life has been mostly about being presented with hard problems and solving them, doing what needs to be done.” These have been other people’s problems. At the Douglas show, “get Ailes” (to fix things) became a crisis-management mantra. He saved the televised Nixon from himself in 1968, showed Ronald Reagan how to protect himself from the ravages of old age on the debate stage in 1988, and produced an ad campaign that enabled George H. W. Bush’s come-from-behind victory in 1988. Corporate CEOs and political aspirants paid him handsomely for troubleshooting and image making. And, finally, Ailes breathed life and vigor (and undreamed-of profitability) into Rupert Murdoch’s hunch that a vast number of Americans wanted a different sort of television news.

Ailes’s contract expires in June 2013, and he fully intends to keep on going at Fox News.
†
The division of News Corp into two companies complicated the negotiation. Fox Entertainment, which includes Ailes’s domain, is by far the larger and more lucrative, and Ailes wanted to see that expressed in stock as well as salary. Ten months before the target date, he wasn’t sure that he and Murdoch would come to terms. “I’m happy where I am, and this year our profit is very close to a billion dollars,” he said. “But if they can find somebody else who can produce that way, okay, I’ll find another job.”

Ailes is infuriated by press reports that he has no succession plan. “Of course I have one,” he told me. “I would be a very irresponsible executive not to. I don’t know if they will be implemented—that’s not up to me. But the ideas are on paper, and they’ll be there when I go.”

Some people think his legacy may be transient. “When you leave, you leave the keys,” Jack Welch says. “If Rupert leaves too, and a left-leaning Murdoch comes in, it could change a lot of things.”

Ailes agrees that new ownership could make a radical shift, but he finds it highly unlikely.

“Fox News is built on the principle of fair and balanced. An owner who gets away from that would kill it.”

That isn’t likely to happen. Fox News is not just a network; it is an entirely new approach to the news, and its impact goes well beyond the confines of the network. “Not only has Roger changed the way television is done, he has imbued an entire generation of producers with his vision,” says Neil Cavuto. One of them, David Rhodes, who spent twelve years as an Ailes protégé, is now the president of CBS News. And that is just the beginning. The old network pose of “news from nowhere,” which disguised a homogeneous worldview and story selection cribbed from the front page of the
New York Times
, still exists, but even Ailes concedes that the networks are far more fair-minded than they once were.

“Roger took some charisma and great ideas for shows and worked magic—framing the news in terms that are favorable to the Republicans,” says Rachel Maddow. “I feel that he has won. If the media were left of center before, they aren’t now.”

Some respected liberal media figures like Maddow, Bill Keller, Eric Deggans, and Mark Danner lament this. But a surprising number think that Fox News, by breaking the old monopoly on the news, is a positive development. “Roger gets a bum rap when people say that his network is biased, shallow, and bad for the country,” says Rick Kaplan, who has run both CNN and MSNBC.

Whatever Ailes’s professional legacy, he remains a realist about the cult of personality that has grown up around him at Fox. “Right now, everybody thinks I’m the greatest guy in the world,” he says. “I’m sure you heard that a lot. 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.” He seemed proud of the cynicism. He always does when he is trying to sound hard-boiled.

•   •   •

One of the first things I noticed about Roger Ailes is that he has a very acute sense of his own mortality. “I’d give anything for another ten years,” he often says, and typically, he has crunched the numbers.

“My doctor told me that I’m old, fat, and ugly, but none of those things is going to kill me immediately,” he told me shortly before his seventy-second birthday. “The actuaries say I have six to eight years. The best tables give me ten. Three thousand days, more or less.”

I asked if he is afraid to die. “Because of my hemophilia, I’ve been prepared to face death all of my life,” he told me. “As a boy I spent a lot of time in hospitals. My parents had to leave at the end of visiting hours, and I spent a lot of time just lying there in the dark, thinking about the fact that any accident could be dangerous or even fatal. So, I’m ready. Everybody fears the unknown. But I have a strong feeling there’s something bigger than us. I don’t think all this exists because some rocks happened to collide. I’m at peace. When it comes, I’ll be fine, calm. I’ll miss life, though. Especially my family.”

One day in his office, Ailes showed me a photo of Zac in a school play. The boy was made up as Teddy Roosevelt, in a suit and a fake mustache. Ailes studied the picture wistfully. The most painful fact of Ailes’s life is that he isn’t likely to see his son as a grown man. “I never really knew much about my father’s life, what it was really like,” he says. “I’m not going to be here forever and I want Zac to know me.” Recently, he and Beth took Zac, now twelve, back to Warren on a sentimental journey that included dinner with old school friends. “One of the girls there told Zac that I was one of the cool kids,” Ailes said with evident pride. “Don’t know what the hell he made of that.”

Since Zac was four, Ailes has been putting things away for him in memory boxes; there are now nine, stuffed with mementos, personal notes, photos, and messages from Ailes to his son. They are meant to be opened when Ailes is gone. I was curious to see what Ailes was leaving behind. He was reluctant to show me, but he finally brought one of the boxes to his office. I had been expecting an ornate trunk, but it turned out to be nothing more than a large plastic container stuffed with what appeared to be a random assortment of memorabilia. There was a pocket-size copy of the U.S. Constitution in which Ailes wrote, “The founders believed it and so should you”; photos of Zac and Beth on family vacations; an itinerary of their trip to the White House Christmas party; and a sentimental fourteenth-anniversary card from Beth (“It’s important for him to know that his mommy loved his daddy,” Ailes said) on which he had scrawled a note to Zac: “Your mother is a beautiful woman. Always take care of her.” I saw a printed program from a Fourth of July celebration in Garrison in which father and son read patriotic texts aloud, articles and press releases about Ailes’s career, and a couple of biographies of Ronald Reagan. Tossed in with the other stuff was a plain brown envelope that contained $2,000 in cash and a note: “Here’s the allowance I owe you,” which Ailes said was an inside joke sure to make his son smile. There were also a few symbolic gold coins, “just in case everything goes to hell,” he told me. “If you have a little gold and a handgun, you can always get across the Canadian border.” Zac is still too young for a pistol, but he sometimes accompanies his father to the shooting range at West Point for target practice.

At the bottom of the box there was a copy of Sun Tzu’s
The Art of War
with paternal advice inscribed on the first page:

Z—

Avoid war if at all possible but never give up your freedom—or your honor. Always stand for what is right.

If absolutely FORCED to fight, then fight with courage and win. Don’t try to win . . . win!

Love,
Dad

Courage. Honor. Freedom. This is a note that could have been written by Rudyard Kipling or Teddy Roosevelt to their sons, a celebration of manly virtues that have long since ceased to be fashionable. They are the virtues Ailes learned in his hardscrabble boyhood in small-town Ohio, and they are what he believes in today; they are the simple residue of a very complicated life.

“This is advice Zac might need to hear from me in ten years and I won’t be here to give it to him,” Ailes said as he closed the box. “I’ve told him, if he has a problem or he feels he needs me, to go off to a quiet place and listen, and he will hear my voice.”

I asked Roger Ailes what he imagined heaven would be like. “I’m pretty sure that God’s got a sense of humor,” he said. “I think he gets a laugh out of me from time to time, so I suppose things will be all right.”

“What if you get there and it turns out that God is a liberal?” I asked.

Ailes paused. It was something that evidently hadn’t occurred to him. “Well, hell, if God’s a liberal, that’s his business,” he said. He paused again, imagining it. “But I doubt very much that he is. He’s got a good heart.” Ailes sat back, pleased with his moment of theological speculation. The hell with his critics here on earth. He has every expectation that when the time comes, he will find himself standing at the seat of judgment before a fair and balanced God.