The Sixth Floor

He was born on May 15, 1940, in Warren, Ohio, the son of a steel-mill foreman and a hemophiliac who would, four times in his childhood, nearly bleed to death. He was the twenty-eight-year-old executive producer of The Mike Douglas Show in 1968 when he advised the thirty-fifth caller — Richard Nixon — on how to look on television. He went on to advise Reagan in 1984, George H. W. Bush in 1988, and Rudolph Giuliani's 1989 New York mayoral campaign. In October 1996 he launched Fox News for Rupert Murdoch. He resigned in July 2016 after Gretchen Carlson's federal sexual-harassment suit. He died on May 18, 2017, after falling and hitting his head at his Palm Beach home, of hemophilia complications.

Elliot Cranmer's biography opens earlier — in the Warren, Ohio, childhood and the hemophilia that the book treats as the wound under everything — and follows the arc through Ohio University, the Mike Douglas years, the Nixon advising, the long Republican-political consultancy at Ailes Communications, the CNBC turnaround for Microsoft NBC, the Murdoch hire and the construction of Fox News, the Beth Tilson marriage of 1998 and the Garrison, New York, retreat, the twenty-year reign at Fox, the Carlson and Megyn Kelly accusations, and the Palm Beach fall.

What emerges is a portrait of the political consultant who, more than any other living American, remade the post-1968 architecture of American conservative-television politics.