Read Roger Ailes: Off Camera for Free Online

Cummings of Maryland. Cummings asked how an organization like the Congressional Black Caucus could sponsor a televised primary debate. Ailes suggested that the CBC and Fox News cosponsor one. The idea didn’t go over well with many members of the Caucus, who viewed Fox as fundamentally hostile. Congresswoman Carolyn Kilpatrick of Detroit, the CBC chairwoman, was particularly skeptical about the wisdom of partnering with the enemy. Ailes met with her. She asked him to explain his sudden interest in civil rights. Ailes assured her that there was nothing sudden about it, and whipped out the picture with Malcolm. Kilpatrick was impressed, and the CBC and Fox jointly produced a Democratic primary debate in 2008, in Detroit.
    As a producer, Ailes was constantly on the lookout for new guests. He spotted Dick Gregory at the hungry i club in San Francisco. Today Gregory is a sometimes contentious civil rights icon, but back then he was doing satire laced with borscht belt humor. “He was funny—‘I bought a suit with two pairs of pants and burned a hole in the jacket’—and we booked him.” He also worked with Richard Pryor, who walked off the set because he didn’t like his billing on the show. “I chased him down Walnut Street and convinced him to come back,” says Ailes. “He was temperamental, but he was a very talented guy.”
    In the midsixties, NBC had a rising star on
The Today Show
, Barbara Walters. As one of the first women in network news, she caught Ailes’s eye. “Roger called the network and asked if I would be willing to go down to Philadelphia and do the Douglas show,” she told me. She was and she did. In keeping with his philosophy of adding showmanship to his interviews, Ailes convinced her to perform gymnastics on the program with a Swedish tumbling team, a stunt that upset Walters’s bosses in New York. “They thought it would hurt my reputation as a newswoman,” she says. Luckily, she managed to survive and prosper, and the appearance was the beginning of a fifty-year friendship.
    “Roger is a huge name and everybody knows who he is, but he doesn’t strive for fame,” she says. “He lives a quiet life. I was very happy when he finally married”—a reference to his latest marriage.
    The Walters-Ailes friendship has been a matter of Manhattan gossip for years. “I dated Barbara a couple times, or took her out as an escort, but we never had an affair,” Ailes told me. “We probably could have at some point, but we were always married or between marriages or talking about marrying someone. We never got beyond that point. But we trusted one another, and we still do.”
    •   •   •
    In 1994, Roger Ailes established a scholarship program at Ohio University for broadcasting and journalism students. After his success at Fox News, he donated half a million dollars to establish the Roger E. Ailes Newsroom at the school. In an interview with the campus radio station he was typically self-deprecating, wondering if they left his name on the place when he wasn’t in Athens. A university press release quoted Ailes in less caustic terms: “Ohio University ignited my interest in broadcasting, which became my lifetime career,” he said.
    But it was
The Mike Douglas Show
that was Ailes’s real alma mater. Woody Fraser taught him how to put on a show. From Douglas himself he learned “likability” and how to use it. And some of the lessons were provided by visiting guests.
    One of the foundational Roger Ailes stories appears in his book,
You Are the Message
. He told it to me the first time we met, since he guessed—correctly—that I had yet to read the book myself. Bob Hope was a huge star; Ailes was a twenty-three-year-old assistant producer. The senior producers were all sick or away when Hope, in town to promote a book, unexpectedly decided to appear on the Douglas show.
    Ailes was frazzled by the situation. One of his job-winning ideas for Fraser had been to get Bob Hope to sing and