Chapter 1The Bleeder

Foreword

I have spent my working life following money: the way it moves, the way it hides, and the systems men build to let it do both. White-collar crime was my beat for the better part of two decades — the frauds committed in good suits, in glass offices, by people who never once thought of themselves as criminals because the law had not yet caught up to what they were doing. I learned to read a balance sheet the way other reporters read a police blotter. I learned that the interesting question is almost never whether a man broke the law. The interesting question is how he built a machine that made breaking it unnecessary. So when I told people I was writing a book about a television executive, more than one of them looked at me the way you look at a man who has wandered off his own beat. Roger Ailes ran a cable channel. He was never indicted. There was no perp walk, no restitution, no number at the bottom of a settlement with his name on it. He was, they meant, not my subject.

That was exactly why I wanted him.

Because the thing I had spent twenty years trying to explain about fraud — that it is almost never a single crime and almost always a system, an architecture of incentives and silences that keeps the money flowing and the questions away — is written more plainly across the life of Roger Ailes than across any balance sheet I ever subpoenaed. Here was a man who took in fear and paid out ratings, who converted the anxieties of ninety million households into revenue and political power, and who did it for twenty years with no regulator, no auditor, and no prosecutor able to lay a finger on him. The closest thing to an accounting came late, and it came in the currency I knew best: the settlements a corporation writes to keep its secrets, the severance check that buys a man's exit, the eight- and nine-figure numbers that appear in a court docket long after the damage is done. I did not understand how a machine like that ran for two decades without anyone stopping it. I wanted to. That is the only honest reason to spend years inside another person's life.

The years were not what I expected. I had assumed I would be writing about media, and I was, but I kept finding myself somewhere else: in the economics of a company town that had lost its company, in the hospital ward of a boy whose blood would not clot, in the daily memos that ran a newsroom the way a foreman runs a floor, in the depositions and the settlements where the real ledger was kept. I worked from the record a fraud reporter always works from — the public filings, the court documents, the press archive, the memoirs and the biographies that came before mine, the paper that people generate when they believe no one will ever read it back to them. I followed it the way I had always followed money in a fraud story, because the money is where the truth is kept, and the money in this story was never separate from the man.

What I found, in the end, was not a villain, because villains are exculpatory — they let the rest of us off. And it was not a redemption, because redemption needs a debt that gets paid, and this debt never was. What I found was harder than either. I found that the thing that made Roger Ailes great was the same thing that made him monstrous, that the achievement and the fraud were not two facts about one man but a single fact wearing two faces, and that the system was built so well that the two could never be pried apart.

This is why the life demanded a book. The ordinary white-collar story ends with a conviction, or at least with a number — a fine, a sentence, a name struck from a registry, some ritual by which the ledger is closed and the rest of us are allowed to look away. Ailes never got one. He died in his own bed, rich, three days after his birthday, and the machine he built kept running without him, is running still, is running as you read this. That is the story a man on my beat cannot leave alone: the fraud that was never called a fraud, the account that was never settled, the bill that came due not to the man who ran up the charges but to a whole country.

I came to this book a skeptic of the celebrity biography, certain that a television executive was a small subject for a reporter who had spent his career on larger crimes. I leave it corrected. The crime was as large as any I ever covered. It simply never had a name. That is what the good subjects do to you: they make you set your certainties down and look.

— Elliot Cranmer, New York

Chapter 1 · The Bleeder

The boy could not stop bleeding.

This was the fact that preceded all other facts in the life of Roger Eugene Ailes: before the television, before the presidents, before Fox News, before the women, before the power and the ruin and the particular kind of American destruction he would spend a lifetime constructing. The first fact was the blood. He was a hemophiliac. His blood lacked the clotting factor that allows a wound to seal itself, that allows a cut to become a scab, that allows the body to do the ordinary, unconscious work of self-repair. In Roger Ailes, the mechanism was broken. A scrape could send him to the hospital. A fall could become a medical emergency. A childhood that for other boys was an unbroken series of minor injuries (skinned knees, split lips, the routine violence of play) was for him a negotiation with catastrophe. Every wound was a crisis. Every crisis was potentially the last one.

He was born on May 15, 1940, in Warren, Ohio, a factory town in the northeastern corner of the state, in the Mahoning Valley, in the industrial belt that stretched from Pittsburgh to Cleveland and sustained itself on steel, rubber, and the physical labor of men who came home from the mills with their hands cut and their backs broken and no particular interest in the feelings of their children. His mother was Donna Marie Ailes, née Cunningham, a housewife who supplemented the family income by embroidering handkerchiefs, a detail of such domestic precision that it seems almost fictional, the hand doing fine, careful work while the marriage that sustained the household grew coarser and harder. Warren was a company town without a single company. Its economy depended on the Packard Electric division of General Motors, on Republic Steel, on the Copperweld Corporation, and on the dozens of smaller manufacturing operations that fed the larger ones. It was a place where work was physical and masculinity was defined by the ability to endure it. The men of Warren worked with their hands. They bled, and the bleeding stopped, and they went back to work.

Robert Ailes, Roger's father, was a foreman at the Packard Electric plant. He was, by all accounts, a hard man, not unusually cruel by the standards of his time and place, but hard in the way that factory foremen in the Mahoning Valley were hard, which is to say that he believed in discipline, in physical toughness, in the absolute authority of the father within the household, and in the educational value of pain. He hit his children. This was not, in Warren, Ohio, in the 1940s, remarkable. What was remarkable was that one of his children could not be hit without risking a trip to the hospital. And this fact, rather than moderating Robert Ailes's behavior, seemed to sharpen it.

Roger would later tell a story about his father that he repeated throughout his adult life, a story that became part of his personal mythology, the founding narrative he offered to interviewers and colleagues and anyone who wanted to understand where he came from. The story was this. When Roger was a boy, his father told him to jump off the top bunk of his bed. The father held out his arms. The boy jumped. The father stepped back and let him fall. The lesson, as Robert Ailes explained it to his son while the boy lay on the floor, was simple: Don't trust anybody.

Roger Ailes told this story as an adult with something between pride and defiance, as if the lesson had been harsh but correct, as if his father had given him the single most valuable piece of information a person could possess. He told it to Gabriel Sherman, who reported it in The Loudest Voice in the Room. He told it to colleagues at Fox News. He told it in a way that suggested he had internalized the lesson so completely that it had become not merely a piece of advice but a philosophy: a comprehensive theory of human behavior in which trust was weakness, vulnerability was fatal, and the only safe position was the one from which you could not be dropped.

The hemophilia made the lesson literal. In a body that could not stop its own bleeding, every wound was an argument for the father's worldview. The world would hurt you. The hurt would not heal on its own. You could not afford to be soft, because softness in this body meant hemorrhage, and hemorrhage meant the hospital, and the hospital meant the particular humiliation of a boy in Warren, Ohio, who could not do what other boys did. He could not play football, could not roughhouse, could not absorb the ordinary physical punishment of an American boyhood, because his blood would not cooperate.

He spent weeks of his childhood in hospitals. He watched other boys through windows. He developed the particular watchfulness of the physically excluded: the ability to observe group dynamics from the outside, to study how people behaved when they believed no one was paying attention, to understand the mechanics of social power from the position of someone who could not participate in its most basic physical expressions. He could not be the toughest kid. He could not be the best athlete. He could not prove himself through the currency that Warren, Ohio, valued most. So he watched, and he learned, and he developed a different kind of toughness: a compensatory aggression, an intellectual brutality that he would spend the next six decades deploying against anyone who threatened him, anyone who doubted him, anyone who reminded him of the boy on the floor.

Warren, Ohio, in the 1940s and 1950s, was a particular kind of American place: prosperous enough to sustain a working class, small enough that everyone knew everyone, conservative enough that the cultural assumptions of the town were invisible to the people who held them. It was white. It was Christian. It was patriotic in the particular way of towns that had sent their sons to two world wars and believed, with the certainty of people who had never been asked to question it, that America was the greatest country in the history of the world and that anyone who suggested otherwise was either a fool or an enemy. The politics of Warren were the politics of the Mahoning Valley: union membership and cultural conservatism, Democratic at the ballot box and Republican in the gut, a combination that would not fully resolve itself until the twenty-first century, when the gut won.

Roger Ailes grew up inside these assumptions and never left them. The worldview he would later build into the most powerful cable news network in America (the suspicion of elites, the celebration of working-class white identity, the conviction that mainstream institutions were controlled by people who looked down on people like you, the emotional architecture of resentment and defiance) was not invented. It was inherited. It was the atmosphere of Warren, Ohio, made explicit and broadcast to 90 million households.

But that came later. In the 1940s and 1950s, he was a boy who could not stop bleeding, in a town that valued toughness above all things, in a family where the father's idea of education was to let his son hit the floor.

He attended Warren G. Harding High School, named after the president, who was from Marion, in central Ohio. He was a mediocre student with no particular academic distinction. What he had was a mouth: a talent for argument, for confrontation, for the kind of verbal aggression that substitutes for physical aggression when the body is not available. He was fat. The hemophilia had kept him sedentary, and the sedentary childhood had made him heavy, and the heaviness added another layer to the compensatory architecture he was building. Not just the boy who could not stop bleeding but the fat boy who could not stop bleeding, accumulating grievances and converting them into a kind of social energy that was not charm, exactly, but something more useful: a dominating presence, a willingness to occupy space through sheer force of personality that overwhelmed the physical limitations his body imposed.

He discovered theater. This was the turn, the moment when the watcher became a participant, when the boy who had spent his childhood observing group dynamics from hospital windows found a form in which observation was the skill that mattered. Theater was not football. It did not require a body that could absorb punishment. It required the ability to understand how an audience worked: what they wanted, what they feared, what made them lean forward and what made them pull back. And it required the willingness to manipulate those responses. Roger Ailes, who could not play the game, discovered that he could run the game. He could be the producer, the director, the person behind the scenes who determined what the audience saw and how they felt about it.

He enrolled at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, in 1958. He was not a theater major (he studied communications) but he gravitated immediately to the university's theater program and to the campus radio station, WOUB. He worked as a prop boy, then as a stage manager, learning the mechanics of production from the ground up. He was not interested in performing. He was interested in control: in the particular power of the person who decides what happens on stage, who determines the blocking and the lighting and the pacing, who shapes the experience of the audience without the audience ever knowing they are being shaped.

There is a detail about the hemophilia's discovery that most accounts of Ailes omit, but that is worth fixing in the record: he was two years old when the condition was diagnosed. Not as the result of a dramatic sports injury or a schoolyard fight, but because he bit his tongue. The bleeding that followed a two-year-old biting his tongue did not stop. It continued and continued, and the emergency that brought his parents to the hospital, and the tests that followed, and the diagnosis that arrived (hemophilia, a genetic disorder, permanent, untreatable, a condition the body could not grow out of or compensate for) established the terms of his childhood before the childhood had properly begun. He was two. He bit his tongue. His blood would not clot. Everything that followed (the hospitals, the windows, the watching, the father's lesson, the compensatory aggression, the half-century of accumulated power, the machine, the predation, the ruin) followed from a two-year-old biting his tongue and not stopping.

There is also a detail about his parents' marriage. Robert and Donna Ailes divorced in 1960, while Roger was at Ohio University. He came home for Christmas break to discover that the family home had been dissolved in his absence, that he would have to stay with a friend rather than return to the house he had grown up in. The timing was, in its particular cruelty, characteristic of the lesson his father had been teaching him: the people who are supposed to hold out their arms and catch you will step back. The world will let you fall. The floor is the lesson.

This is the biographical key. The hemophilia, the father, Warren, Ohio, the theater: they are not merely biographical details. They are the architecture of a psychology. Roger Ailes learned, before he was twenty years old, three lessons that would determine the course of his life and, through his life, the course of American political culture:

First: The world will hurt you, and the hurt will not heal on its own. You must build defenses. You must be tougher than your circumstances. You must never be the boy on the floor.

Second: If you cannot participate in the physical game, you can control the game from behind the scenes. The producer has more power than the performer. The person who shapes the audience's experience has more power than the person who is the experience.

Third: Audiences are not rational. They do not process information and arrive at conclusions. They feel. They respond to emotional cues, to fear, to anger, to the confirmation of beliefs they already hold. The person who understands this has power over the person who does not.

He graduated from Ohio University in 1962 with a degree that qualified him for nothing in particular and an understanding of audiences that qualified him for everything he would do next.

He went to Cleveland. The television station was KYW-TV, and the show was The Mike Douglas Show, a daytime variety program that aired from Cleveland before moving to Philadelphia in 1965. Ailes was hired as a prop boy — the lowest rung, the person who sets up the furniture and moves the plants and makes sure the coffee cups are in the right position before the cameras roll. He was twenty-two years old, overweight, hemophiliac, the son of a factory foreman from Warren, and he was carrying coffee cups for a television host in Cleveland.

He advanced quickly. This was not because he was talented in any conventional sense. He could not write, he was not a performer, he had no particular visual imagination. What he had was the producer's instinct: the ability to watch a show and know, instantly, what was working and what was not, what was holding the audience and what was losing them, where the energy was and where it had died. He understood pacing. He understood the emotional logic of a segment, the way a conversation needed to build to a point, the way a musical performance needed to be placed in the show's architecture, the way the host's energy needed to be managed so that the audience never felt the strain of live television. He understood, in other words, the audience: not as a demographic, not as a market segment, but as a collection of human beings sitting in their living rooms who wanted to feel something and would change the channel the moment they stopped feeling it.

By the time The Mike Douglas Show moved to Philadelphia, Ailes was its producer. He was twenty-five years old. He was running a nationally syndicated daytime television show that reached millions of viewers, and he was running it with a philosophy that he had developed in the hospital wards and theater stages and television studios of Ohio: the audience does not want information. The audience wants emotion. Give them emotion and they will stay. Give them information and they will leave. The distinction was absolute in his mind, and it was the foundation of everything he would build.

The show was a hit. It won Emmy Awards. It was, by the mid-1960s, one of the most successful daytime programs in American television. And it was in the studio of The Mike Douglas Show, in Philadelphia, in 1967, that Roger Ailes met the man who would show him what television was really for.

His name was Richard Milhous Nixon. He was a former vice president. He was a two-time loser, defeated by Kennedy in 1960, defeated by Pat Brown in the 1962 California governor's race, the man who had told the press they wouldn't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore. He was attempting a political comeback that most of the political establishment considered quixotic. And he was booked as a guest on The Mike Douglas Show because daytime television would take anyone with name recognition, and Nixon still had that.

Ailes watched from the control room as Nixon sat down with Mike Douglas. What he saw was a man who did not understand the medium he was sitting in. Nixon was stiff. He was awkward. He perspired under the studio lights. He answered questions as if he were being deposed: carefully, defensively, without warmth or spontaneity. He treated the television camera as an adversary rather than an opportunity. He radiated the particular discomfort of a man who believed that substance should matter more than style and could not accept that it did not.

Ailes saw all of this, and he saw something else, something that most people in the television business would not have seen, because most people in the television business thought of politicians as content rather than as product. What Ailes saw was a man who could be fixed. Not fixed in the sense of having his ideas improved or his policies refined, but fixed in the sense of having his relationship with the camera fundamentally reconfigured. Nixon's problem was not that he was unlikeable. His problem was that he did not know how to use television to make people feel the things he wanted them to feel. He was treating the medium as if it were radio, as if the words were what mattered, as if the audience was listening rather than watching, as if the visual dimension of television were an inconvenience rather than the entire point.

Ailes, who had spent five years learning that television was an emotional medium, not an informational one, understood something that would change his life, and Nixon's, and the country's: the man on the screen did not need to change who he was. He needed to change how the camera saw him. The distinction was everything. It was the difference between authenticity and performance, between substance and perception, between what was true and what was felt. And Roger Ailes, the bleeder from Warren, the boy who had learned to control what he could not physically dominate, understood that distinction better than anyone else in American public life.

He told Nixon. The details of the conversation have been reported differently by different sources (Ailes told one version, Nixon's people told another, and the truth is probably somewhere between them) but the substance was consistent: Ailes told Nixon that he was losing because he did not understand television, and that he, Ailes, could teach him. Nixon, who had been losing for seven years and was desperate enough to listen to a twenty-seven-year-old television producer, said yes.

It was 1967. The presidential election was a year away. And Roger Ailes (the hemophiliac, the prop boy, the producer of a daytime variety show, the son of a man who had dropped him on the floor to teach him not to trust anyone) was about to discover what he was for.

He was not for television. Television was merely the instrument.

He was for power.