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

On the evening of December 7, 2011, Roger Ailes found himself in enemy territory: mingling with journalists in the East Room of the White House at a holiday party hosted by the Obama administration. As the chairman and CEO of Fox News, Ailes was effectively the most powerful opposition figure in the country, with a wide swath of the Republican establishment on his payroll. The reception was studded with East Coast news anchors, Ivy League journalists, and Democrats—the kinds of people Ailes had built his career by attacking, and the kinds of people who Ailes believed had it in for him, too. Though Ailes had spent more than four decades in Washington, D.C., and New York City, he still saw himself as a scrapper from a small town in a flyover state who’d had to fight for everything he had.
When asked by one reporter what his antagonists thought of him, he replied, “I can pretty much pick the words for you: paranoid, right-wing, fat.”

But Roger Ailes believed in the importance of American institutions, and in the sacredness of the presidency, which was why he’d brought his eleven-year-old son, Zachary, along to meet the president. And the White House was a place where Ailes had long been comfortable. He had been going there since he was a twenty-eight-year-old television adviser who’d helped Richard Nixon become president by making the famously stiff, dour man seem warmer and more human on screen.

Ailes and Nixon met in Philadelphia in January 1968. Nixon, about to embark on his second presidential campaign, was in town to appear on
The Mike Douglas Show
, an afternoon variety program watched by seven million housewives across America. Ailes, who was the show’s executive producer, understood the revolutionary power of the medium in ways
that the politician did not.
“It’s a shame a man has to use gimmicks like this to get elected,” Nixon told Ailes off-camera. “Television is not a gimmick,” Ailes shot back, “and if you think it is, you’ll lose again.” Ailes would help to re-create Nixon, and Nixon, in turn, re-created Ailes.
“I never had a political thought,” Ailes recalled, “until they asked me to join the Richard Nixon presidential campaign.” He imbibed Nixon’s worldview, learning how to connect to the many Americans who felt left behind by the upheavals of the 1960s, an insight Ailes would deploy for political advantage, and, later, at Fox News, for record ratings and profits.

“Roger was born for television. The growth of television paralleled his whole life,” said the journalist Joe McGinniss, whose landmark book about the 1968 election,
The Selling of the President
, turned Ailes into a star political operative. As a pugnacious television adviser to Presidents Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush and then as the progenitor of Fox News, Ailes remade both American politics and media.
More than anyone of his generation, he helped transform politics into mass entertainment—monetizing the politics while making entertainment a potent organizing force.
“Politics is power, and communications is power,” he said after the 1968 election. Through Fox, Ailes helped polarize the American electorate, drawing sharp, with-us-or-against-us lines, demonizing foes, preaching against compromise.

At the prescribed time, Ailes hobbled with Zachary to the rope line to see the president. At seventy-one, his body was failing him. The proximate problem was arthritis, but it was his hemophilia that had accelerated it. He had suffered from the debilitating condition since he was a little boy. Over time, the disease caused blood to pool in his knees, hips, and ankles. Though the swelling ravaged his joints, he was stoic about the problem—on occasion he’d sit through a meeting, his shoe filling up with blood from a cut. His pain became a kind of badge.
“The difference between pros and amateurs is that pros play hurt,” he once said. Ailes displayed a certain fatalism, perhaps a result of his medical history.
A couple of weeks before his thirtieth birthday, he told a reporter, “Most people think I’ll be dead before I’m 35.”

As a young man, Ailes had the striking features of an actor, with dark eyebrows over wide-set eyes and a sly, confident smile. But these days he looked more like Alfred Hitchcock. He was resigned to his girth, rationalizing it as beyond his control.
“It’s not that I eat too much,” Ailes would say. “It’s that I can’t move.” Which wasn’t strictly true.
During the 1988 presidential campaign, when his weight was ballooning, colleagues observed
Ailes inhaling Häagen-Dazs ice cream. At rare moments, Ailes expressed vulnerability about his body image.
“Photo editors are sadistic bastards,” he told a journalist around this time. “And photographers always make me look heavy.”

Mainly, his appetite was in keeping with his no-bullshit attitude—you’re hungry, you eat—but it could also be seen as a metaphor for his gargantuan ambition.
“I’m never going to be one of those $25,000 a year guys,” he’d vowed at the outset of his career. He also knew what this goal might cost him.
“I think I’ll lead an unhappy life, in terms of what most people consider personal happiness,” he said. “Personal unhappiness causes you to work harder, and working harder causes more personal unhappiness.” He married three times and did not become a father until an age when most people think about retirement. He denied himself the American ideal of happiness—“home, family, the 9-to-5 job, a good golf score, three weeks paid vacation, a new car”—in the service of his career.

Money and power were one thing, important measures of success especially to someone from middle America, and Ailes liked to keep score. But another reason he worked so hard was that he saw himself as a field marshal in an epic battle to defend the American dream against the counterculture. “Revolutionaries want to take away from people who have. They don’t want to create. They get in gangs for support,” he said. All of his tactical genius as a political consultant—dismembering Michael Dukakis as soft on crime in the service of George H. W. Bush, for one—was driven by his urge to defeat them. Fox News itself, immensely profitable business though it was, was a continuation of his politics by other means.
“A lot of the time Roger sees himself as holding back the tide. And a lot of the hysteria around him is people thinking he might be able to,” said David Rhodes, who spent twelve years working at Fox and in 2011 became the president of CBS News.

For Ailes, Obama’s meteoric ascent onto the national stage was yet another triumph of the counterculture and the liberal news media.
“People need to be reminded,” Ailes told Fox News executives around the time Obama declared his candidacy, “this guy never had a job. He’s a community organizer.”
A few days after
Obama’s historic election, Ailes remarked during his morning editorial meeting, “There’s no reason to have a civil rights movement anymore, since there is a black man in the White House.” Obama’s victory changed the mission of Fox News.
“When he started the channel, it was a campaign against CNN. But it is now less about the competition and more about the administration,” a former senior
Fox producer said. “He honestly thinks Obama has set back the country forever. He feels like he is the only one out there who can save the republic. He has said it.”

Ailes’s battle did not end when he left the office. At his weekend estate in Putnam County, some forty miles north of New York City, Ailes bought the local newspaper and used it to advance his agenda. He complained to neighbors that Obama refused to call Muslims “terrorists.” He told them that Obama was using the stimulus as a “political tool” in order to buy his reelection in 2012. Obama pushed green energy, when in fact climate change was a “worldwide conspiracy” spun by “foreign nations” to gain control of America’s resources.

Ailes even told his advisers that if Obama were reelected, he could be prosecuted and jailed, like a political prisoner.
During a forty-five-minute meeting at Bill Clinton’s foundation in Harlem, Ailes told the former president that he might emigrate to Ireland, and had explored acquiring an Irish passport.

And yet, in the halls of the White House, Ailes kept these feelings to himself. As he walked up to Obama to shake his hand and pose for a photo, he faced a very different politician than the one he’d first met in the summer of 2008. At the time, Obama was a candidate who believed in his ability to overcome the grievance politics of the past through the force of his personal narrative. He told his aides he thought he could win over Fox’s audience—and even Ailes himself—by reasoning with them. Now, nearly three years into his first term, Obama had learned—often the hard way—that his vision of harmony was a pipe dream.