Roger Ailes: Off Camera (22 page)

ELECTION NIGHT

I arrived at Fox News on election night, around seven, and was ushered into the sports suite on the second floor of the News Corp building. About two hundred network executives and invited guests mingled in the bar area or grazed at a buffet featuring sushi and grilled lamb on skewers. The men wore business suits, the women evening attire. Mounted along a long wall of the rectangular room were eight large television screens offering a choice of election coverage: Fox News, Fox Business, Fox Broadcasting, and the competition—CNN, MSNBC, and the major networks. From time to time someone glanced up at the TV screens, but it was too early for actual results and, anyway, the volume was turned down so low that you had to concentrate to hear the talking heads over the murmur of the cocktail hour.

Thirty feet away from the crowd, directly in front of the screens, Roger Ailes, wearing his customary black suit, sat at a round coffee table staring intently at the screens. Half a dozen empty chairs were arranged in a crescent on either side. “These are reserved,” a Fox News staffer told me. It was an explanation, not an invitation to sit down, but when the aide turned her back, I slipped into a chair next to him. “Our electoral map is too small,” he told me by way of greeting. There was a phone on the table with direct lines to every department of the network, from engineering and security to the anchor desk and the decision room. Ailes pressed a button, said a few words, and watched the map almost instantaneously grow. “That’s better,” he said. “Right now it doesn’t matter, but it will when the results start coming in. Look how small CNN’s is. Who the hell wants to look at a map that you can barely see?”

This was the eleventh election night since Ailes helped put Richard Nixon in the White House, his fifth presiding over Fox News. The public polls were a virtual tie, but I figured if anyone had inside info, it would be Ailes. “I guess you’re expecting a late night,” I ventured.

“Could be,” said Ailes. It sounded like a late night was the last thing he was looking forward to.

“What are your exit polls showing?”

Ailes shrugged. He doesn’t believe much in exit polls, and he is skeptical of even his own in-house experts. That day, at lunch, Karl Rove had told him he thought Romney would win. “Hell, maybe Karl’s right,” he said. “We’ll see.”

As the 8:00 p.m. poll closings approached, the crescent around Ailes began to fill in. Beth sat on his right, intermittently editing the front page of the
Putnam County News and Recorder
on her iPad and occasionally briefing Roger on developments in Garrison. The room itself was getting quieter in anticipation of the first results when suddenly there was a rustling at the door—Rupert Murdoch, accompanied by a small entourage. Ailes hit the button to the decision room for an update; he had it by the time Murdoch wended his way through the room and sat down. He gave Ailes a comradely pat on the back and asked, “What does it look like?”

“Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina are all too close to call,” said Ailes.

Murdoch threw up his hands in a you-just-told-me-what-everyone-in-America-already-knows gesture. “Well, what do
you
think?”

“Too early to tell,” Ailes said. “Could go either way.”

“Roger is always a pessimist,” Murdoch proclaimed to no one in particular. Bill Shine came by with news. Jeb Bush had just tweeted that Florida was looking good. A couple of counties were unexpectedly strong.

“Jeb wouldn’t have tweeted this if he wasn’t sure,” said someone. “He must know something.” Heads nodded in affirmation. Ailes leaned over and instructed Shine to find out exactly what counties Jeb was talking about.

Meanwhile, the screens weren’t providing much in the way of enlightenment. Obama and Romney were each winning the states they were supposed to win. The swing states were all still swinging. From time to time Ailes called down to the decision room, but came up with nothing new. It was all on the air. Aside from enlarging the map and contacting engineering when he saw a technical glitch during an interview with Robert Gibbs, Ailes was a spectator. “Moody and Clemente are solid news guys,” he said. “There’s no reason for me to get involved.”

Of course, Ailes had been very much involved since the primaries, the guiding force at the only Republican-leaning source of television news. Obama, who appeared on every TV show from Jimmy Fallon to
The View
, had declined a standing invitation to appear on Fox. Ailes, in the Nixon campaign, had more or less invented the strategy of keeping his candidate away from critical interviews; he understood perfectly well why the president had preferred chatting with Whoopi Goldberg and David Letterman to a session with Bill O’Reilly or Chris Wallace. A few days before the election, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press published a survey that found just 6 percent of Fox’s coverage of the president had been positive, 46 percent negative, a ratio of 8–1. (MSNBC, Fox’s chief cable rival, was far more partisan—only 3 percent of its Romney coverage was positive, 71 percent negative, a ratio of 23–1. The broadcast network coverage came out mildly pro-Obama, but far less than it had been in 2008.)

But if Fox had rooted for Romney during the campaign, it was dispassionate and professional. The young talent Ailes had chosen and developed—Megyn Kelly, Bret Baier, Shep Smith, Ed Henry, and others—were fair and balanced without quotation marks. Earlier that day, Ailes had chaired what is known as the exit poll meeting, a gathering of the anchors and commentators scheduled to appear that night. It was a bipartisan group and Ailes cautioned them all to stay positive and energetic. “If the candidate you like isn’t doing well, don’t look like somebody just ran over your dog,” he said. In the event, Fox was among the first networks to call the election for the president, and when Karl Rove objected that the decision to award Obama Ohio—and, essentially the election—was premature, Kelly marched down the hallway and confronted Arnon Mishkin, the head of the decision team. “You tell me if you stand by your call in Ohio,” she demanded. Mishkin stood by the call, and he was right. It was the most dramatic television moment of the evening, underscoring Ailes’s contention that Fox was a reliable source of news (and in the process removing the modifier “rising” from Megyn Kelly’s stardom).

It was apparent long before the Ohio call that this wasn’t going to be Romney’s night. When someone in the crescent groaned at the loss of Pennsylvania, Ailes said, “Hey, it’s early. The second day at the Alamo didn’t look that good, either.” He paused, considering the implications of that observation, and barked out a laugh. “Hell, maybe that’s not the best example. The Alamo didn’t turn out too well in the end.”

Wisconsin came in, for Obama. “That’s one Romney should have won,” Ailes said. Murdoch got up to mingle, and he was replaced in the crescent by Jack Keane, the retired general who helped convince George W. Bush to launch the successful troop surge in Iraq and now serves as a Fox military analyst. “This thing is far from over,” he said in a pronounced New York accent. He said it with the certainty of a man used to command, but he couldn’t change what people were seeing on the screen, and already the crescent was bubbling with recriminations. “Chris Christie’s name should be in the dictionary next to the definition of the word ‘traitor,’” said a woman who was angry at the New Jersey governor for the electoral boost he had given Obama when he embraced the president in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy (later that night, on MSNBC, Chris Matthews expressed his gratitude for the hurricane and the help it had given the president’s image). Others blamed the auto bailout, the American education system, or the voters. A woman from Tennessee said the real problem was the welfare state. “My family came from nothing,” she said, “and we worked for what we have. Nobody wants to work anymore. They’re just looking for handouts.”

Ailes looked up from the screen and frowned. “I don’t know about that,” he said. “About ten percent of the population really needs help. We should
quadruple
their aid or they’ll never get out of poverty. Instead, we keep them at subsistence level and give the entitlement money to people who don’t really need it.” The woman gave Ailes an uncomprehending nod.

Nobody, I noticed, had a good word to say about Romney, a man who had, at the very least, campaigned hard on their party’s behalf. I admit to a moment of petty satisfaction at the cold shoulder he was getting. Romney and I are the same age and we grew up near one another in Michigan. He was the governor’s son, handsome, rich, and famous. I was none of those things. In high school I fell for a classmate who, alas, had a huge crush on Mitt Romney, whom she knew from Sunday school. Fifty years is a minute when it comes to unrequited teenage romance.

Rupert Murdoch came by, said he was hearing good things about Virginia, and what did Roger know? Ailes checked with the decision desk and reported that the Richmond precincts were in, which
might
be construed as good news. Murdoch got the message. Once more he patted Roger on the shoulder, and then he left.

A young man wearing a black cowboy hat and western boots joined the crescent. He was introduced as John Rich, half of the country duo Big & Rich. He was the only showbiz figure at the party, and he seemed optimistic. “I’ve been out singing for Mitt for weeks,” he said. “He’s got a good chance, right?”

“He’d have to draw to an inside straight,” Ailes said. “Virginia, Florida, Ohio, North Carolina . . .” Rich blinked. Maybe he didn’t know so much about politics, but he evidently knows poker. He wasn’t likely to be singing at the inauguration.

We watched Nevada, a state that led the nation in housing foreclosures, fall to Obama. Hispanics made the difference. “When this election is over, I’m going to give a speech,” Ailes told me. “Conservatives aren’t going to like it but I don’t give a damn. There is a confusion between the issue of sovereignty and the issue of immigration. Of course we have to protect our sovereignty and the border. But we’ve got to stop insulting millions of people by calling them ‘illegal aliens’ and acting like hopping the fence to feed your kids is a capital crime. We need to give them a way to enter legally, contribute, and feel welcome.” He knew that right-wing ideologues, led by his friend Rush Limbaugh, would insist that the GOP had underperformed because it had been insufficiently hard-line, and that the party had to double down. But Ailes was making a different bet. The GOP was going to need candidates who didn’t come across as heartless plutocrats or anti-Latino xenophobes and who had a less doctrinaire interpretation of core conservative principles. This wasn’t an election-night epiphany; Ailes had said similar things to me over the previous few months. But it was time to turn thought into action. The next day, at a production meeting with the senior staff, Ailes reiterated his views in very strong terms. Barely twenty-four hours later, Sean Hannity—the hardest of hard-liners on illegal immigration—would experience a change of heart, or as he put it, an evolution in his thinking: “If people are here, law abiding, participating for years, their kids are born here, you know, first secure the border, then the pathway to citizenship.”

Around 10:40 p.m., Ailes put in a last call to the decision desk. He asked some questions about key counties in several unsettled swing states, listened impassively, and replaced the receiver. He had been hunched over the coffee table for hours without so much as a bathroom break. Now he signaled to Beth that it was time to go home. “You can stay here until tomorrow,” he said to the few true believers still in the crescent, “but I’m leaving. I want to kiss Zac good night before he goes to sleep.”

As we rode the elevator down to the deserted lobby, Ailes seemed to be in remarkably good spirits. During his consulting days he had won elections and lost elections and he knew that in American politics there are no final victories or defeats. A second Obama term was not a disaster. Hell, looked at in a certain way, it was an opportunity. Earlier that evening, Bob Beckel had stopped by to offer Ailes a few words of mock condolence over the Obama trend, but Ailes declined to be baited. “If Romney wins, it’s good for the taxpayers,” he said. “If Obama wins, it’s great for our ratings.” Barack Obama had four more years, but so did Roger Ailes, and he intended to use them to grow Fox News ever bigger (that night, as it turned out, Fox got the highest prime-time ratings in its history); build the number one business channel on cable (if Rupert will just give him a hundred million dollars for distribution); and showcase Republican candidates and policies that couldn’t be dismissed as nativist or elitist. All that would start bright and early the next morning. If there is a first principle in the world of Roger Ailes, after fifty years spent at the heart of American politics and entertainment, it is this: No matter what the hell else happens, the goddamn show
must go on.

Roger Ailes, son of Warren, Ohio.

Bob Ailes and Donna Cunningham Ailes, Roger’s parents, on their wedding day. They divorced when Roger was in college.