The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--And Divided a Country (68 page)

    
1.
The town
Henry Howe,
Historical Collections of Ohio: An Encyclopedia of the State
, Vol. 2, (Cincinnati: C. J. Krehbiel and Company, 1908), 669–70.

    
2.
In 1890, two sons
Dennis Adler,
Packard
(St. Paul, Minn.: Motorbooks International, 2004), 11–15. Also:
http://packardmuseum.org/ed1.aspx
.

    
3.
In 1932, the General Motors “
A. Wolcott Dies, Auto Parts Maker; Head of Packard Electric Co., Manufacturers of Cables,”
New York Times
, Oct. 14, 1933.

    
4.
Roger’s father, who had been
Entry for Robert Eugene Ailes, created by his son, Robert Ailes Jr., on
Findagrave.com
.

    
5.
In 1936, Neil Armstrong
James R. Hansen,
First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 45–46.

    
6.
That was the world
Roger’s birth date is given in his parents’ divorce papers:
Donna M. Ailes v. Robert E. Ailes
, Trumbull County (Ohio) Court of Common Pleas, Division of Domestic Relations, Case 5396, Oct. 7, 1959.

    
7.
Warren residents
Warren
(Ohio)
Tribune Chronicle
, April 20, 1954.

    
8.
“There were no slums”
Author interview with television executive Launa Newman-Minson. At the time she went to school and worked with Ailes, she went by her maiden name, Launa Newman.

    
9.
Packard
“Employment Hits New High of 6000: All-Time Mark Exceeds Both War-Time and Post-War Peaks, Further Growth Expected,”
Cablegram
, March 23, 1953, National Packard Museum.

  
10.
sponsored annual picnics
See, for instance, “Packard Family Picnic Program” and “18,000 Attend Picnic; Ruth Drenski Wins Top Prize,”
Cablegram
, July 1955, National Packard Museum.

  
11.
The career of Roger’s father
Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.
Cablegram
also identifies Robert Ailes as “foreman, Maintenance Dept” in an article mentioning Roger Ailes, “Employes’ [
sic
] Sons Get Collegiate Honors,” ca. 1959–1960.

  
12.
He raised his children
Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.

  
13.
He worked for forty years
Entry for Robert Eugene Ailes, created by his son, Robert Ailes Jr., on
Findagrave.com
.

  
14.
Growing up in the 1920s
Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.

  
15.
“I never could understand”
Ibid.

  
16.
Rapid industrialization
William D. Jenkins,
Steel Valley Klan: The Ku Klux Klan in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley
(Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1990), 57–58.

  
17.
One minister
Ibid., 58.

  
18.
As an adult
Entry for Robert Eugene Ailes, created by his son Robert Ailes Jr., on
Findagrave.com
.

  
19.
As a Master Mason
The full title of the affiliated body is Mystic Order of Veiled Prophets of Enchanted Realm, Ali Baba Grotto.

  
20.
His wife complained
Donna M. Ailes v. Robert E. Ailes
, Trumbull County (Ohio) Court of Common Pleas, Division of Domestic Relations, Case 5396, March 18, 1960.

  
21.
“One of his disappointments”
Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.

  
22.
Robert Sr. and his wife
Ibid.

  
23.
She had come to Warren
Entry for Donna Marie Cunningham [Ailes] Urban, created by her son, Robert Ailes Jr., on
Findagrave.com
.

  
24.
Her father
Entry for James Arley Cunningham, created by his grandson Robert Ailes Jr., on
Findagrave.com
.

  
25.
He was a religious man
Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.

  
26.
“They didn’t believe in movies or dancing”
Deroy Murdock, “This Is the Most Powerful Man in News,”
Newsmax
, Nov. 2011.

  
27.
Robert and Donna had a swift
Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.

  
28.
At the age of two
Ibid.

  
29.
“Well, you died”
Junod, “Why Does Roger Ailes Hate America?”

  
30.
“The treatment”
Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.

  
31.
The average life
Robert A. Zaiden, MD, “Hemophilia A,”
http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/779322-overview#aw2aab6b2b6aa
.

  
32.
In grade school
Tom Junod, “Roger Ailes on Roger Ailes: The Interview Transcripts, Part 2,” The Politics Blog,
Esquire
, Jan. 27, 2011,
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/roger-ailes-quotes-5072437
.

  
33.
His father rushed him
Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.

  
34.
“I heard the doctor say”
Ibid.

  
35.
Robert Jr
. Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.

  
36.
“Look, my son’s bleeding”
Junod, “Roger Ailes on Roger Ailes: The Interview Transcripts, Part 2.”

  
37.
“Get behind me”
Ibid.

  
38.
Dirty Neck Watson
Ibid.

  
39.
“Well, son”
Ibid.

  
40.
“Roger told me”
Author interview with Launa Newman-Minson.

  
41.
During recess
Junod, “Why Does Roger Ailes Hate America?”

  
42.
“He participated”
Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.

  
43.
“What saved me”
Junod, “Roger Ailes on Roger Ailes: The Interview Transcripts, Part 2.”

  
44.
“My dad, I saw”
Ibid.

  
45.
“violence never solves”
Lloyd Grove, “The Image Shaker; Roger Ailes, the Bush Team’s Wily Media Man,”
Washington Post
, June 20, 1988.

  
46.
“if you have to
” Ibid.

  
47.
if you have no options
Junod, “Why Does Roger Ailes Hate America?”

  
48.
“Roger and my dad”
Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.

  
49.
One time
Junod, “Roger Ailes on Roger Ailes: The Interview Transcripts, Part 2.”

  
50.
“When I was thirteen”
Ibid.

  
51.
When Roger was recovering
Ken Auletta, “Vox Fox: How Roger Ailes and Fox News Are Changing Cable News,”
New Yorker
, May 26, 2003.

  
52.
The cruelest lesson
Author interview with Stephen Rosenfield.

  
53.
Robert Sr. demanded quiet
Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.

  
54.
“I was terrified”
Junod, “Roger Ailes on Roger Ailes: The Interview Transcripts, Part 2.”

  
55.
Years later the brothers learned
Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.

  
56.
On the 1930 census
“United States Census, 1930,” index and images, Sadie H. Ailes (Warren, Trumbull, Ohio), FamilySearch. In reality, her husband, Melville, had married another woman on July 24, 1922. See “Michigan Marriages, 1868–1925,” index and images, Melville Ailes (1922), FamilySearch.

  
57.
When Robert Jr
. In college, Robert Ailes Jr. went by himself to meet his grandfather for the first time. Melville was living in Sidney, Ohio, suffering from Alzheimer’s. “We had dinner,” Robert recalled. “He wasn’t alert then. When I met him, he didn’t realize who I was.” After the meal, Robert went to the house of his great-aunt Helen, a history teacher, who told him family stories at the kitchen table late into the night. The experience instilled in Robert a lifelong interest in genealogy. He would go on to write an unpublished family history. “The first Ailes came to this country in 1700. Brothers William and Stephen Ailes. They were the first Ailes in America,” Robert said. “They settled in Pennsylvania. They were farmers, and the funny part was, they married two sisters by the name of Underwood. William’s first child was William Underwood Jr. Roger and I are descended from him.” The Aileses participated in many of the founding myths of America: escaping religious persecution in Europe, living the frontier log cabin life in the Midwest, serving valorously in the military, helping to build the country. William Jr.'s son, Moses Hoffman Ailes, was the first Ailes in Ohio. A veteran of the War of 1812, Moses brought his family to Shelby County, Ohio, forty miles from the Indiana border in 1842. There they bought a farm from a hunchbacked man named Daniel Baldwin. (Neighbors gave him the nickname Sassafras because, according to a local history, he carried a basket of the medicinal root from house to house to “purify and thin the blood of our people grown thick and sluggish by too substantial food and lack of exercise.”) They lived on the farm for seven years before Montra, the nearest settlement, was surveyed. In August 1862, Moses’s youngest surviving son, Hezekiah, went off to fight for the Union. Two years later, he was shot in the shoulder
at the Battle of Resaca, Georgia, where 112 out of 220 men in his regiment were killed or wounded in a five-minute salvo. Because of his bravery in the battle, he was promoted from the rank of sergeant to sergeant major. After the war, he returned to Shelby County and lived out his years teaching and holding political offices. He was a justice of the peace, a county auditor, and a three-term mayor of Sidney, Ohio. A history of the area remarked that “few can look back upon a busier and more blissful domestic and public life replete with honors.” His older brother Alfred Ailes—Roger’s great-great-grandfather—was a successful farmer and businessman. In April 1852, Alfred married Melissa Jane Young, the daughter of a Methodist Episcopal revivalist, a month before her seventeenth birthday. They worked on a farm for fifteen years—the dirt lane that winds by it is still known as Ailes Road. In 1868, they moved into Montra, where Alfred bought a half interest in a steam sawmill. By this time, Montra was a growing frontier outpost. It had a hotel, a liquor store, and a blacksmith shop. Like Hezekiah, Alfred was a civic leader and a member of the Democratic Party. From 1870 until his death in 1882, he served as a justice of the peace. A chronicle of the area noted that Alfred “was a man of importance.” On May 19, 1858, Alfred’s oldest son, John Forsythe Ailes, was born in Franklin Township, in the center of Shelby County. John continued the upward trajectory of the Ailes family in America. A bright man, he was the first in his family to attend college. He enrolled at Southern Ohio University. He married a schoolteacher named Rebecca Lovina Drumm who hailed from Hardin County. John taught school for thirty-two years and oversaw the remaining eighty acres of his family’s farm. John, like his father, was a prominent, politically active member of his community. “In politics he is democrat,” an area history noted, “of that school which prefers the doctrines of the fathers, based on the experience of the ages, to the untried theories of innovators.” John served for three years as deputy auditor for the county and for one year as deputy probate judge. For eight years, he was clerk of Jackson Township and also served as a board member of the county school examiners. For two decades, John frequented the local Odd Fellows hall and rose to leadership in the fraternal organization. He represented Ohio’s thirty-seventh district for four years. John and Rebecca raised three boys and a girl. Two became teachers, and two became doctors. Their first son, Melville Darwin Ailes—Roger’s grandfather—was born on April 17, 1883. Melville earned three advanced degrees, the highest level of education of any member of the Ailes family. He first studied at Ohio Northern University, graduating around 1905 with a bachelor’s degree and a law degree. Around this time, Melville married Sarah Hortense McMurray, a schoolteacher and Ohio Northern graduate, whom friends called Sadie. She was seven years his senior. Melville and Sadie had three children in quick succession. Roger’s father, Robert Eugene, was the middle child. He was born in 1907 in Springfield, Ohio. The primary sources for this genealogy are interviews with Robert Ailes Jr., A. B. C. Hitchcock’s
History of Shelby County, Ohio, and Representative Citizens
(Chicago: Richmond-Arnold Publishing, 1913),
History of Shelby County, Ohio with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Some of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers
(Philadelphia: R. Sutton & Co., 1883), as well as birth, death, and marriage records on
Ancestry.com
.

  
58.
Robert Jr. did not tell
Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.

  
59.
died, after suffering
Entry for Melville Darwin Ailes, created by his grandson Robert Ailes Jr., on
Findagrave.com
.

  
60.
Donna was a competitive
Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.

  
61.
Roger remembered her hugging him
Junod, “Roger Ailes on Roger Ailes: The Interview Transcripts, Part 2.”

  
62.
There was not much
Author interview with Robert Ailes Jr.