Roger Ailes: Off Camera (6 page)

Ailes might have been popular with Republicans, but he was a target to Democrats. When he went to Columbus, a group of protesters passed out leaflets denouncing him;
Newsweek
reported that Ailes had made history by becoming “the first consultant on record to be the target of a demonstration.”

Voinovich had already lost his first debate against Democratic candidate Anthony Celebrezze Jr. Celebrezze had been a vocal supporter of abortion choice, but when he flipped to pro-life in the debate, he caught Voinovich off guard. “When Roger came in, the first thing he did was tag Celebrezze on the character issue, as a man who believed one thing and said another,” Voinovich says. Then, with Celebrezze on the defensive, Ailes concentrated on rebuilding his own candidate’s morale.

“Roger gave me confidence going into the second debate. He told me, ‘Don’t worry, you know this stuff!’ He took away my note cards. ‘You don’t need any cards to prompt you. Just be yourself.’ It was the Holy Spirit and Roger who got me through that debate,” he says.

Ailes also created ads that would humanize the reticent Voinovich. One, titled “Best Decision,” showed the candidate frolicking with his family. “Roger told me, ‘There are very few candidates who can twirl their wife around in a campaign ad. You can because it’s obvious that the two of you love each other.’ I said, ‘Yes, but I never twirled my wife around a stage.’ To which he replied, ‘Doesn’t matter, twirl her.’” Voinovich did. “That was one of the best ads I ever did,” says Ailes today. “If Mitt Romney had done one like it in the primary campaign, it would have solved his lack-of-warmth issue.”

“What Roger did for me was above and beyond what a consultant does for a client,” says Voinovich. “He got into the fight. A lot of big-time consultants work hard and then they go out and play hard, but that’s not Roger. He’s not the kind of guy who went out and had a few drinks with the boys. He worked his butt off and cooled out after work, by himself. I have to say that I really admired him. I still do.”

In Ohio, Ailes followed his custom of not involving himself much in his client’s platform. “Roger didn’t get involved with advocating any positions. He’s ideological today, but he wasn’t back then. What he did was make sure we knew what we were talking about. In 1988, my research was terrible. Roger made sure that didn’t happen again. He could see down the road, and look at things five different ways. He never got surprised.”

With Ailes at the helm, Voinovich won handily. And the story had a happy family ending. At a fund-raiser in Cleveland, Ailes and Douglas met, shook hands, and made up. Nobody was more relieved than Governor Voinovich’s brother. Ailes was happy, too. He and Douglas had been close during their years on the show, their desks literally next to each other in the cramped office in Cleveland, and it hurt Ailes when Douglas’s wife called him disloyal and Douglas predicted to the staff that Ailes would fail. “Later on he took credit for my success,” says Ailes. On one of my visits to Fox, he showed me a clip of a television interview Douglas did in 2005, in which he called his former producer “brilliant” and “amazing. Somebody you want to listen to.” Ailes smiled with satisfaction. “He never said anything like that when we were together.”

Ailes loved winning in the Voinovich campaign in Ohio. He loved winning anyplace, and he often did. In more than 140 campaigns he orchestrated, he estimates that his victories outnumbered his losses by about nine to one. “A lot of consultants try to stick to races they can win, in which their candidate is a favorite,” he says. “I didn’t do that. I took and won some pretty outside shots, like Holshouser in North Carolina, or Mitch McConnell, a county executive in Kentucky up against an incumbent senator. Sometimes I won those, and sometimes I lost if the guy wasn’t a good candidate. But with a good candidate and enough money, I didn’t lose many. And I never lost a race where I felt outproduced or outmaneuvered.”

Or outcompeted. “There was a consultant I was up against once in Baltimore,” Ailes says. “He told a reporter that there are a lot of consultants who will kill for their candidate, but Ailes is the only one ready to die for his.” But it was an arrangement that ended when the campaign did.

Nobody wins all the time. In 1982, Ailes’s candidate, Harrison Schmitt, lost a Senate race in New Mexico to Jeff Bingaman. His opponent in that contest was a young consultant named Dick Morris, whose star client was the governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton. After the election, they went to lunch and Ailes told Morris that people considered him a brilliant young guy, but worried about his loyalty and character and wondered if he was a team player. Evidently Morris calmed those fears, because in 1988, Morris did consulting work for the Bush campaign. When the Lewinsky scandal broke, Ailes put Morris on the air as a Fox contributor. “Roger hired me because he wanted someone who had been in the Clinton White House and who knew how to interpret what was happening there,” Morris says.

In 1989, Ailes signed on to run Rudy Giuliani’s first campaign for mayor, against David Dinkins, who had defeated incumbent Ed Koch in the Democratic primary. Dinkins won the race by the narrowest margin in New York City history, and became the city’s first (and so far, only) African American mayor. Ailes kept up his friendship with Giuliani. In 1996, then in office, Mayor Giuliani lobbied for Fox News to get carriage rights for New York City, a critical factor in the success of the network. Typically, Ailes also stayed on good terms with Dinkins.

•   •   •

By 1991, Ailes was getting tired of politics. He had been a political television producer, a debate coach, an ad maker, and a strategist for presidents. He had a client sitting in the Oval Office at the time, and lesser candidates standing in line for his services. He was, at fifty, an elder statesman and a mentor to consultants on both sides of the political aisle. “Roger invented the orchestra pit theory,” says Bob Beckel. “Campaigns are just a series of moments that people remember. If you have two guys onstage and one guy says, ‘I have a solution to the Middle East problem,’ and the other guy falls in the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?”

But Ailes had been in one too many orchestra pits. That year his candidate, Dick Thornburgh, the former U.S. attorney general, lost a Senate race in Pennsylvania to Harris Wofford, a relative unknown. Wofford’s consultants were James Carville and Paul Begala. “I had followed Roger’s career since I was a student at the University of Texas,” Begala says. “To tell you the truth, I was thrilled to be up against him.”

The feeling wasn’t mutual. Ailes is on good terms with Carville, despite the fact that Carville recently blurbed an anti-Ailes book by David Brock, the head of the progressive watchdog group Media Matters for America. That, Ailes assumed, was just business. But, like Jack Corrigan, Begala insulted him personally. Worse, he did it publicly, in a joint appearance on ABC’s
Nightline
. In the heat of battle, Begala called Ailes “a Madison Avenue blowhard.” Ailes responded by inviting Begala to step outside. It was a symbolic invitation—they were in separate studios in different time zones—but the sentiment was real. But Begala, at least, has no hard feelings. “I have limitless professional respect for Roger Ailes,” he told me.

Thornburgh was Ailes’s last campaign. “I was coming back from Los Angeles on Christmas Eve on the red-eye,” he recalls, “and I realized that everyone who worked for me was at home with their families. I was out there all alone and I was sick of it. By then I hated politics. And so I quit running candidates.” Ailes met informally with George H. W. Bush during the 1992 race, “just to lighten him up a little,” but his career as a full-time consultant was over. His mind was now on other things. He wanted to get back into his first love: TV.

TELEVISION NEWS

Over the years, Ailes had always combined his political and corporate consulting with television production. In addition to his stint at TVN, he produced
Tomorrow with Tom Snyder
, NBC’s precursor to
Late Night with David Letterman
; made some highly regarded documentaries that were sold to stations around the country; and did consulting work for local stations, including the
Washington Post
’s affiliates.

In 1991, Rush Limbaugh’s radio show was a phenomenal success, the biggest thing on AM radio. One night Limbaugh was dining at one of his favorite New York restaurants, “21,” when Roger Ailes walked over and introduced himself. “I was in awe of him,” Limbaugh recalls. “I was amazed he even knew who I was. He said that his wife listened to me all day, every day.”

Limbaugh and Ailes hit it off immediately. They had a great deal in common. Both were products of small-town midwestern America, shaped by the conservative values of the Eisenhower era and the sometimes harsh discipline of stern fathers. They had both been indifferent and rebellious students—Limbaugh dropped out of a second-rate college after one year—who made their bones as media showmen. And they were both more than willing to mix it up with the liberal establishment.

Ailes told Limbaugh that they should do a television show together. At first Limbaugh thought it was a bad idea—he had never hosted a television show before—but Ailes convinced him that it would work. “Rush said he didn’t want guests on the show,” Ailes recalls. “He said he didn’t need them, because he didn’t care what anybody else thinks. There were very few people, then or now, who could hold a television audience all alone on the screen or who even had the balls to try. The only model I had was Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s program, and I thought Rush could carry it off.”

Ailes couldn’t find a network that would carry the controversial Limbaugh’s one-man show. He decided to resort to syndication, which had worked beautifully for Mike Douglas. He reached out to Woody Fraser, who took the idea to Bob Turner, who was the head of Multimedia Entertainment (and later became a Republican congressman from Manhattan).

Limbaugh’s TV show was taped before an audience and ran five days a week for half an hour. Like the radio show, it consisted of Limbaugh riffing off the news. “Everybody marvels at Jon Stewart’s show,” says Limbaugh. “That’s what my show was. That’s what Roger and I did—find news clips and make fun of people who weren’t used to being laughed at. We combined the comedy with dead serious political and cultural discussion.”

Limbaugh believes that the TV show, which ran four years, provided a template for the Fox News evening format, although he concedes that Ailes probably doesn’t agree. “Our premise of conservatism, unabashed and unafraid, was established once and for all on mainstream television. We showed it could be done,” he says.

Ailes was Limbaugh’s executive producer and he was also his mentor. Limbaugh, who was a decade younger and comparatively new on the national scene, leaned on his producer’s sophistication in the ways of Washington and the New York media. When President George H. W. Bush invited them to the White House for a sleepover, it was Ailes who told him it was all right to call his mom from the Lincoln Bedroom.

The media were, of course, interested in the pajama party at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Limbaugh cleared an invitation from
The Today Show
with Ailes, who gave him some media advice. “Roger told me that he had detected in me a common fault that newcomers to TV make when being interviewed by mainstream journalists. He said, ‘Rush, they don’t care what you think. Don’t try to persuade them of anything. Don’t try to change their mind. They are not asking you questions to learn anything. So don’t look at this as an opportunity to enlighten them. Whatever they ask, just say whatever you want to say.’”

Ailes sometimes took a more direct approach in protecting his friend and star. They got wind that
Time
magazine was planning a cover story portraying Limbaugh and Howard Stern as similar figures. Ailes figured this would hurt the show and make it less attractive to potential advertisers. “Roger got in gear and called
Time
magazine. I sat in his office during the call,” Limbaugh recalls. “He told them that if they persisted in this, we on the TV show would do features on all the reporters working on the story. That we would hire investigators to look into their backgrounds, find out how many DUIs they had, run a story demonstrating the similarities of these reporters to Al Goldstein [the publisher of
Screw
magazine]. It was a virtuoso performance. I was laughing my ass off. And I think it worked to an extent because when the story came out, it was basically harmless. That’s the thing—when you have Roger Ailes on your side, you do not lose.”

Limbaugh eventually left the show because he didn’t like the meetings and collaboration that go with television, but he and Ailes have remained close friends, an alliance that has helped shape the tone and direction of the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Limbaugh—despite the fact that he is boycotting New York State because of what he regards as its confiscatory taxation policy—visits Ailes at his Putnam County mountaintop home from time to time; Ailes is a regular at Limbaugh’s Palm Beach estate for the Spring Fling, a long weekend that brings Limbaugh cronies and political friends together for golf (which Ailes can’t play), drinking (which Ailes no longer does), and conversations about the state of the world and the country. “Politically, Roger and I are brothers,” Limbaugh says. “Trust me when I tell you there is never any strategy session, in the sense that we never coordinate content. There has never been a time where we even discussed mutual programming to achieve an objective. That never happens. It doesn’t really have to. Ideologically and culturally, we are two peas in a pod.”

While he was producing the Limbaugh show, Ailes began exploring a new frontier: cable news. CNN had gone on the air in 1980 to considerable derision: Ted Turner, its founder, was called crazy for imagining that a station based in Atlanta could make money providing around-the-clock news from all over the world to an initially small cable audience.

But Turner was right. Over time the cable audience grew and so did CNN’s reach and reputation. During the 1991 Gulf War, it was the only American station with journalists in Baghdad, and its war coverage became the talk of the media world. Cable appeared to be the wave of the future, and the big networks wanted a piece of the action. NBC was especially keen to explore the new terrain. It already had a struggling business channel, CNBC, which it hoped to expand. NBC president Bob Wright saw that as just the beginning, and he reached out to Roger Ailes to run the channel. Jack Welch, the outspoken, politically conservative head of NBC’s parent company, General Electric, blessed the decision. Both he and Wright had reason to be pleased by the results. When Ailes took over, CNBC’s asset value was $400 million. When he left, two years later, it had more than doubled.

Ailes had been watching cable news from the sidelines, and he had an intuition that it should be personality-driven. He brought in Chet Collier, a Bostonian of the old school and thirteen years Ailes’s senior. He had been Ailes’s boss and mentor and drinking buddy at the Douglas show, and had promoted Ailes to the post of executive producer after Woody Fraser left. “Chet was a Kennedy liberal, but I didn’t give a damn about his politics,” says Ailes. “He was a brilliant television guy. And he could tell me the truth. A lot of times that’s crucial, to have somebody around who isn’t afraid. You need somebody with the kind of relationship that allows him to close the door and, one-on-one, tell the boss, ‘What the fuck are you thinking?’ Collier did that for me. If I did something he thought was wrong, he’d tell me straight out that I was full of shit.”

Neil Cavuto was already at CNBC when Ailes arrived. “I was worried about how badly we were doing after five years on the air,” he says, and the arrival of Roger Ailes, known then for his partisan political activities, didn’t help much.

“Roger wasn’t a GE executive type,” Cavuto says. “Jack Welch went way outside the petri dish when he hired him. But when I met Roger I remember thinking, this guy has elected presidents—maybe he can help us.”

Ailes began with research. He spoke to everyone at the network and grilled them about the most minute details of their jobs. Once he knew what was happening, he began to intervene. “He’d tell the graphics guy if the writing was too small,” Cavuto recalls. “He’d call the sound guy and say that the volume was too low. Editorial meetings were opened up, and everybody, even production assistants or other junior staff, were encouraged to speak up. On the other hand, he made it clear that he was not going to put up with eye-rolling or negativity.”

“When I got to CNBC, I found chaos and a lack of leadership,” Ailes told me. “There were executives there who spent their days playing basketball or at the track. First thing, I told people to get their feet off the goddamn desk and get to work.”

“Roger tested people,” says Cavuto. “He called me in and said, ‘People tell me you are cocky and arrogant and you constantly interrupt—’ At which point I interrupted him and said, ‘You’re right but I’m working on it.’” Ailes laughed and said that he liked Cavuto’s work. They have been together ever since.

He demanded that producers and reporters rethink their approach to business news. At the time, it was considered bad form for journalists to talk about ratings or network profits. “Our thought was, is this story important, not who will watch it,” says Cavuto. Roger forced people to get out of the ivory tower. “Everything is financial in some way,” he said. “You can make a story out of anything.”

Ailes insisted on not insulting the audience. He informed his staff that he didn’t want an antibusiness climate on a business network, or a lot of financial jargon. “Roger is a guy from the middle of Ohio, and he knows how people think,” says Cavuto. Reporters who acted superior to the corporate leaders they interviewed or conveyed the message that capitalism was selfish and crass didn’t find the Ailes’s regime congenial.

But, in general, Ailes was popular with the troops. His television expertise and down-to-earth sensibility were welcomed. He knew everybody’s name, learned their personal stories, and came to be known as a soft touch. He also mocked the fashionably healthy cuisine of the network’s cafeteria, paying the cooks extra to prepare burgers and fries.

Ailes’s style of wisecracking profanity contributed to his common touch. It also sometimes got him in trouble, especially when he let loose in public. He mocked Tom Rogers, who was president of NBC cable operations, as a “publicity seeker.” He went on the
Imus in the Morning
radio show and speculated that President Clinton’s schedule in New York might include a date with Olympic ice-skating champion Nancy Kerrigan. He made an ugly joke implying that Hillary Clinton might have had something to do with the fate of three administration lawyers—Webster Hubbell, Bernard Nussbaum, and Vince Foster—who were, respectively, under investigation, forced to resign, and dead. “I wouldn’t stand too close to her,” he said. These cracks were way out of character for an NBC suit, which was just the way Ailes wanted it. Complaints to the corporate office were brushed aside; he was making NBC too much money to be disciplined.

•   •   •

On the Fourth of July, 1994, CNBC launched a second network, America’s Talking, the forerunner of MSNBC. He branded the overall product “First in Business, First in Talk” and hired compelling personalities, including liberals like Chris Matthews (former aide to Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill), Tim Russert (who had been an aide to New York Democratic senator Pat Moynihan), and Geraldo Rivera.

Ailes also hired a host for his morning show. Steve Doocy was an aw-shucks country boy from Clay County, Kansas, who had been working for various network affiliates for a decade. He sent a reel to Chet Collier, who invited him to the cable network’s headquarters in Fort Lee, New Jersey, for a meeting.

“What do we need to know about you?” Collier asked Doocy.

“I like to sit in a baby pool filled with lime-green Jell-O with no pants on,” he replied.

“Roger looked at me, grinned, and said, ‘You’re hired,’” Doocy recalls. Beth Tilson, the programmer in charge of the network (and years later Ailes’s wife), signed off on the line.

The roster of America’s Talking was composed of a seemingly random selection of programs. There was a daily talent show; a medical advice program; a review of new gadgets and technology; a newscast featuring positive stories called
Have a Heart
; a mental health call-in show,
Am I Nuts?;
an ongoing investigative series on government waste; and
AT In-Depth
, two hours of news and chat cohosted by Matthews. Ailes himself did an interview show,
Straight Forward
, in which he talked to guests, many of whom were showbiz friends like Broadway star Carol Channing or interesting counterculture figures such as Joan Baez. As an interviewer Ailes was cordial and easygoing, with a style resembling that of his old friend Brian Lamb, the founder of C-SPAN. Ailes had piled up a lot of on-air experience in his
Today Show
appearances with Bob Squier between 1989 and 1992, and he had often been a guest on other shows, but he wasn’t especially interested in performing. He did it for the team. It was hard to lure top guests all the way out to Fort Lee to appear on a new cable channel. “I had a pretty good Rolodex,” he says.

The electronic media landscape of the 1990s was marked by an effort to understand and capture the technological opportunities offered by satellite, cable, and the Internet. Synergy was the order of the day. Time Warner acquired CNN and then merged with AOL, a combination that really worked. Roone Arledge, the head of ABC News, announced that he was getting into the cable news business, although nothing came of it. Meanwhile, NBC struck a deal with Microsoft for a new cable network, MSNBC, that would replace America’s Talking and current affairs talk shows on CNBC. Bob Wright and the other corporate heads at 30 Rock didn’t see a place for Ailes in this new alignment. He was too brash and too partisan for their new partner, Bill Gates. With oceans of Silicon Valley dollars swimming before their eyes, they were free to toss Ailes overboard.