Roger Ailes: Off Camera (10 page)

“Fox is the ultimate surrender of news to entertainment,” says Mark Danner, a professor of journalism and politics at Berkeley and one of the country’s leading progressive intellectuals. “Ailes pioneered the unembarrassed consequences of the recognition that news is entertainment. His influence has been so great that it is now hard to recognize it. For example, the use of music intros and outros to the news is now so common that it goes unnoticed. Roger Ailes started it.

“Everyone I know in Berkeley or New York thinks watching Fox News is total insanity. Liberals look at the
New York Times
, or CBS, and see the news they offer, ideologically, as ‘middle-of-the-road.’ Fox, on the other hand, maintains that it is always in the opposition, even when Republicans control the White House or Congress or both. To the right, certain permanent ‘constituencies’—the entertainment and culture industry, elite news media, and permanent bureaucracy—will always be against them even when [the right] holds power. This is how Ailes can seriously argue that it is Fox that is moderate and middle-of-the-road. He sees these permanent cultural and governmental forces as inherently liberal, and, seen from this point of view, there is a good deal of truth to that.”

Danner envies the energy Fox and others in the news media have brought to the struggle. “In the 1960s, the energy came from the left’s positions on race, poverty, and opposition to the war in Vietnam. In 1976, as I went off to college, I believed we were on the cusp of the era of liberalism.” Four years later, Ronald Reagan was in the White House, “and a three-decade ascendency of conservatism began—and it continues. And of course those on the right, from Reagan onward, basically believe that those sixties problems have been solved,” Danner says.

Danner’s experiences with left-wing media, like Air America and MSNBC, where he is a frequent commentator, have left him pessimistic. “I don’t see a true liberal answer to Fox on the horizon, although MSNBC tries hard,” he says. “The problem is that Fox, even now, is still more fun to watch. Ailes has proved cannier in seeing what attracts attention. In that sense, he’s a transformational figure.”

As Fox became more established, Ailes began moving it toward the journalistic mainstream. He carved out hours that adhere strictly to broadcast news standards.
Special Report
gave Fox viewers a place to go for a daily broadcast of record at 6:00 p.m. In 2002, Ailes hired Greta Van Susteren away from CNN and gave her the 10:00 p.m. slot. Van Susteren, a lawyer, was highly regarded by the media establishment in Washington, and her defection to Ailes came as an unpleasant surprise to Fox’s critics.

The following year, Ailes made an even more important acquisition when he hired Chris Wallace. He was broadcast royalty, the son of the legendary Mike Wallace—perhaps the greatest investigative interviewer in television history—and the stepson of Bill Leonard, the president of CBS News when CBS was the glory of liberal journalism.

Chris Wallace himself was the model of a modern major media figure. He had been a moderator of NBC’s
Meet the Press
and then, for fourteen years, a senior correspondent and anchor at ABC News. When he announced that he was going to Fox in 2003, he imagined his colleagues would be critical of the move. Some were, but he was surprised to see that most understood the pragmatism behind his decision. “People at ABC knew that the network would never be as good as it was, that it was constantly managing the decline,” Wallace told me. “The business model of a network with fewer and fewer viewers wasn’t promising. Fox was growing. And it was entertaining. I discussed it with my father, who had been a great fan of Roger’s for years, and he encouraged me to go ahead.”

Ailes was delighted. Wallace had the sort of awards (three Emmys, a DuPont, and a Peabody) that made his mainstream credentials unassailable. He offered Wallace the job of hosting Fox’s Washington Sunday morning talk show—Rupert Murdoch’s favorite program—on two conditions. “Roger told me, ‘I want you to be equally tough on Republicans and Democrats. And I want to know if you can get up in the morning and not think that America is to blame for most of the world’s problems.’” Wallace assured Ailes that he could deliver on both counts, and went on the air in early December 2003. “Whether you like it or not,” he recently told a gathering of journalists in Washington, DC, “Fox News is a major force in American journalism.”

GARRISON

In 2002, Roger Ailes and his third wife, Beth, bought three (and gradually twelve) acres of land on a mountaintop overlooking the Hudson River, across from West Point. For much of his life Ailes had been a nomadic bachelor moving from station to station, campaign to campaign. Finally, at sixty, he was ready to put down roots.

Roger met Elizabeth Tilson at CNBC, where she was the director of daytime programming in charge of business news. When Ailes arrived to take over in 1993, she was the one who did the introductions with the staff. In time, he promoted her to vice president and she launched America’s Talking.

Beth didn’t follow Ailes to Fox. She had a one-year noncompete clause in her NBC contract. They did meet from time to time. “We were friends,” she says. “Roger was in the process of getting divorced.” Beth had been married before, too. Gradually their friendship escalated. Her sister Eileen encouraged her. “He’s a guy who can tell you what to do and you can do it,” Eileen said. Beth told me this with a laugh; she says her sister meant it in a flattering way.

Even after the courtship commenced, Beth took it slowly.

“At first I wasn’t thinking of marriage,” she says. “I was just glad to go out with someone who would pick up the check besides me.” But soon enough they became a couple. On Christmas Eve 1997, Ailes said to her, “Let’s go get a ring.”

Beth said, “Great idea.” They went to Tiffany’s and selected an engagement ring. Rudy Giuliani performed the wedding at City Hall on Valentine’s Day in 1998. After the ceremony and a reception, they took their families, Chet and Dottie Collier, and a midwestern friend named Bob Gordon, to dinner in a private room at Windows on the World. They went to Florida on their honeymoon to visit Ailes’s mother and stepfather.

Beth, who is twenty years younger than her husband, wanted children. So did Ailes. In 2000, on New Year’s Day, Zachary, Zac for short, was born. There had been a lot of concern at the time about what was called Y2K, that computers might not function because they hadn’t been programmed for a change in millennia. The Aileses lived in Manhattan in an apartment on the thirtieth floor and worried that the elevators might stop running, leaving them stranded. Beth spent the evening resting on Ailes’s couch on the second floor at the News Corp building and fought her way through the New Year’s Eve traffic around Times Square to reach the hospital.

Like her husband, Beth Tilson grew up in straitened circumstances. She was one of five children raised in Watertown, Connecticut, by a widowed mother without a high school education who managed to send all of the kids to college. Beth majored in journalism at Southern Connecticut State. Her first job was as a production assistant at Satellite News Channel, a television version of 1010 WINS news, and from there she went to NBC. In a twelve-year career, she was promoted six times, and left the network shortly before Ailes did.

It took the Aileses four years to tame their wild property and reconstruct an old Yankee barn into a nine-thousand-square-foot home built of indigenous Adirondack river stone. “When we first started, the architect asked what kind of place we wanted,” says Beth. “I told him that we are round, warm people and we wanted the house to reflect it.” The interior is a combination of grand and homey: a marble foyer, mahogany floors, French country-style rugs and furnishings, an open floor plan, and river views from every room. “A lot of people in our situation would have had a team of decorators,” Beth told me during a tour of the house. “But I did this myself. Roger has wonderful things that he’s acquired over the years. But he wasn’t very interested in the decor. His thing was, ‘Just get it done.’” Ailes’s only request for their home was for a circular dining table, eight feet in diameter. “I’ve been to a lot of dinner parties at rectangular tables where you get a deadhead next to you and you’re stuck,” he told me. “With a circular table, you can always talk to people across from you.”

The Aileses do a lot of entertaining. Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh, Rupert and Wendi Murdoch, Jon Voight, and John Bolton have been among their houseguests in Garrison. On Zac’s ninth birthday, they threw a bash for 150 guests. The kids rode festively decorated ponies around the estate while Irish tenor Ronan Tynan serenaded guests including Rupert Murdoch, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Greta Van Susteren, and other luminaries and friends. “Roger and I are both producers, and we put on parties like shows,” says Beth.

•   •   •

I drove up to Garrison, about an hour and half from Manhattan, on a chilly Saturday morning in mid-January. The house is set back from the road, protected by a large security gate. A Christmas wreath still hung on the gate, near a sign warning visitors that the property is under video surveillance. I was buzzed in and found Roger and Beth waiting for me outside on the circular driveway. Ailes’s burgundy 1985 Cadillac Seville trophy car was parked nearby.

Ailes is a military history buff and the first thing he pointed out was the spot where George Washington chained off the river to block the British advance in the Revolutionary War. Moving to the banks of the Hudson provided Ailes with a piece of Americana right outside his window. It was also a solid investment. As a small boy in Warren he was given a piece of real estate wisdom—always buy property on the water—which has remained a guiding precept.

Four years ago, Ailes took Zac to visit his boyhood home in Ohio. Zac stood in the living room and said, “This is smaller than our car.”

“I told him my parents raised three kids here, and it was sufficient,” Ailes says.

The centerpiece of the house is a mahogany-paneled library the size of a small basketball court. There are photos of heroes, some predictable (Generals Eisenhower, Patton, Lee, and Grant) and some less so (FDR and David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s socialist founder). There is also a photo of Ailes in the Oval Office with Richard Nixon, taken on the day Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. “I produced the conversation between Nixon and Armstrong,” he said. “It was the first broadcast between earth and space.” The walls are lined with books. Ailes, a collector, keeps first editions in a special closet. He showed me a biography of Stonewall Jackson. During World War I, a young officer named George Patton owned the book and scribbled his comments on General Jackson’s tactics in the margins.

Up a flight of stairs, on a table near the picture window, sit two urns that contain the ashes of Ailes’s mother and stepfather. “They were cremated in Florida and when we went down there I didn’t like the looks of the place, so we took them with us,” he says. He and Beth were on the way to an overnight stay with Rush Limbaugh, and Ailes informed him that he would be arriving with his mother and her husband. He didn’t tell Rush that he was bringing them in a gym bag, a discovery that disconcerted the host. Ailes brought them to Garrison and put them where they could see the Hudson. “My mother always wanted to live on the water,” Ailes said in a not completely facetious tone.

•   •   •

Garrison, and the villages of Cold Spring and Nelsonville, technically belong to Philipstown, a metropolis of about ten thousand souls. The area was settled more than sixty years before the American Revolution, and for most of the time since then it has been a backwater. Its greatest pre-Ailes event was the train wreck of 1897, in which twenty people died. Ailes moved there imagining an idyllic, prosperous corner of small-town America where he would live among the sort of patriotic, God-fearing folks he identifies with. The military academy in nearby West Point was a visible symbol of the place he took the town to be. But Philipstown is no longer the village of his imagination, the sort of village that produces sons like Sergeant Hamilton Fish II, the first Rough Rider to die in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. There is still plenty of fighting spirit, but it is directed not against America’s external foes but developers who might want to despoil Mother Nature. For many of his neighbors, these enemies are embodied by Mr. Ailes and Fox News.

West Point is not the only landmark visible from Ailes’s window; he can also see Storm King Mountain, one of the iconic sites of the modern environmental movement. In the midsixties, the Scenic Hudson Preservation Coalition brought a lawsuit to stop Con Edison from building a pump storage generator and power lines there. The suit ended in a precedent-setting decision that aesthetic impacts could be considered in the licensing of power projects. Philipstown is now home to a plethora of nature sanctuaries, interfaith retreat centers, bioethics think tanks, Outward Bound USA, and numerous enviromental nonprofits. As Peter Boyer wrote in his
New Yorker
piece about Roger Ailes and the area, “Preservation [is] the local industry.”

Not everyone in Philipstown is a progressive or an environmentalist. Former New York Republican governor George Pataki lives there. So does Patty Hearst, the heiress/captive/radical bank robber/society matron whose political status is eternally unclear. The majority of townspeople are not particularly political. But Garrison and Cold Spring have their share of Fox haters, for whom the arrival of Roger Ailes was not a happy occasion.

Ailes’s first response was to defuse the situation with displays of generosity and goodwill. He donated to local charities, drove his Caddy in the Fourth of July parade, shopped in local establishments, and generally made it clear that he wanted to be part of the community. But, being Ailes, he didn’t bother to hide his disdain for the local pieties or institutions. The nearby public school, for example, proved too liberal and touchy-feely for his taste, so he enrolled Zac in a Catholic school in Manhattan. And he complained about the taxes, which, in his view, were out of proportion to the government services. He took to referring to the environmental establishment, with its heavy regulatory hand, as “the Politburo.” None of this endeared him to the Philipstown gentry.

In July 2008, Ailes and his wife, Beth, bought the local newspaper, the
Putnam County News and Recorder
, a weekly broadsheet known as the
PCN&R
that had been in existence, in one iteration or another, since the administration of Andrew Johnson. The paper was a typical village gazette, filled with bland neighborly stories about local occurrences and people. Beth Ailes became the publisher (and after Roger sold his share to her for a nominal price, the sole owner). The
PCN&R
remained a studiously local paper, but it also began to change. She reinstituted the paper’s original motto, “By the Grace of God, Free and Independent,” began running excerpts from
The Federalist Papers
, and—most controversially—broke with tradition and began running editorials, including one critical of the administration’s spending policies. There was, for the first time, actual reporting in the paper, including the disclosure, in a much-remarked-upon article, that some teachers and administrators in the 260-student Garrison Union Free School District were earning six-figure salaries.

Opinions in town vary over why Roger Ailes would want a local newspaper with an estimated readership of ten thousand. The anti-Ailes faction sees it as a vanity project or, more darkly, an effort to seize a partisan advantage. The notion that a man who runs two national networks would worry about Democratic Party control of Cold Spring and Garrison is a tribute to the self-regard of the community as well as the paranoia Ailes tends to arouse. He says he bought the paper “so the bastards couldn’t roll me on taxes.” But whatever his motives, the progressive opposition crystalized in the form of the Full Moon Project, a group dedicated to saving the town’s civic virtue from the Ailes’s family. What emerged was a website, Philipstown.info, owned and operated by Gordon Stewart, a Manhattan corporate executive, art collector, and sometime speechwriter for Jimmy Carter (he had a hand in writing Carter’s infamous “malaise” address) who arrived in Philipstown a few years after Ailes did. Stewart—who, in an odd coincidence, roomed with Ailes’s brother, Rob, at Oberlin College—grew up in Chicago as the son of poor Jewish immigrants, and in some ways, he says, he has more in common than Ailes does with the plain folks of his adopted (weekend) home. At first, he opposed the Full Moon idea of a rival newspaper, but he eventually changed his mind, setting up shop on Main Street. Ailes says that after Philipstown.info opened, a death threat was placed on the
PCN&R
’s door. Stewart dismisses this as a drunken prank. “Apparently someone tacked a message on the door of the paper. It was a bar-closing moment, and I had a long talk with the sheriff about it.”

The
PCN&R
has established a policy of not mentioning Philipstown.info. Stewart finds this infuriating (which is, of course, its purpose) and he believes that it is a symptom of Ailes’s high-handedness. “[Roger’s attitude] is, we did all these wonderful things, held picnics, invited people up to the estate and they were ungrateful. But if you approach a hardscrabble yeomanry population from the stance that they are supposed to be grateful for your arrival, that you are beneficent and they are the local peasantry, that’s not going to work, even if people are politically comfortable with you.”

Actually, there is little reason to imagine that Ailes is unpopular outside of the artsy-émigré circle. When Philipstown proposed a new zoning plan, a hundred-page legal document that Ailes considered a landgrab, he brought in a lawyer whose services he offered free of charge to members of the “yeomanry.” More than eighty people took him up on it. “The plan was too complex for the average person to understand,” he told me. “And I don’t like seeing rich environmentalists steal farms from old ladies.” The plan was altered to satisfy most of Ailes’s objections.

•   •   •

After Saturday morning brunch, Roger and Beth took me on a tour of the town. Our first stop was a nearby construction project; Beth and Roger, inspired, she says, by Rush Limbaugh’s compound, are renovating a 1950s house for use as a guesthouse. The site was muddy. Getting out of the car, Ailes stepped in a puddle and said, “Damn, I’m ruining my good shoes.” He seemed genuinely upset about the prospect of having wrecked what looked to me like a very nice, but not especially fabulous, pair of black loafers. Ailes is a city man; he does not believe that, in confrontation between a puddle and a man’s shoe, the puddle should prevail. He also confided that he was afraid that Beth would be upset with him if he tracked mud into the house.