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dance with Mike Douglas, and now here he was, accompanied by an entourage, in the studio, needing to make it happen. Hope was booked to do a five-minute plug. Ailes wanted him to stay for the entire ninety minutes but he was too scared to ask Hope. He was, he writes, “incoherent.”
    Hope took him by the shoulder and led him into the next room. “Kid, I know nothing about your show. I’ve never been on it and I don’t know what you expect me to do. It’s very important for you to speak up and tell people exactly what you want. I’m a big enough star to refuse whatever you request, if I decide to. But if I don’t even know what you want, there’s no way I can give it to you.”
    Ailes told Hope he wanted him to stay for the entire ninety minutes. “The network pays me $100,000 for that,” Hope said, laughing. But he hit it off with Douglas and did stay. On the way out he turned to Ailes and said, “Next time, speak up.”

CHAPTER THREE
    POLITICS
    Ailes spoke up when he met Richard Nixon.
    In the autumn of 1967, Nixon was on the road in a quest to rehabilitate himself after losing the presidency in 1960 to John Kennedy and then, humiliatingly, the governorship of California to Pat Brown in 1962. After that loss, he conducted a spiteful press conference in which he promised reporters that they would no longer have Nixon to “kick around.”
    The landslide defeat of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election opened the door for a comeback. The Republican right, led by Ronald Reagan, was stunned into disarray by the magnitude of the Goldwater debacle. New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, the great moderate hope, dithered until it was too late to mount an effective campaign for the nomination. Meanwhile, Nixon stumped the country raising money and accruing political debts from Republican candidates, which he cashed in for the top spot on the ticket.
    During this barnstorming phase, Nixon came through Philadelphia, where he was booked to appear on
The Mike Douglas Show
. He was still considered a has-been and, in sophisticated circles, something of a joke. Woody Fraser was at the studio when the former vice president arrived. “He was early and they brought him into my office,” Fraser recalls. “I didn’t know what to do with him. I mean, what the hell did I have to say to Richard Nixon? ‘What have you been up to lately?’” Fraser said he was very sorry but he had a staff meeting to attend. Nixon asked if he could tag along. “I remember thinking, This guy was the vice president of the United States and he wants to come to a staff meeting of
The Mike Douglas Show
?” Fraser felt sorry for him, but not sorry enough to hang out. Says Fraser, “I asked Roger to take care of him, keep him happy and out of the way.”
    Ailes wasn’t especially excited to meet Nixon. He may have spoken eloquently for Eisenhower in Miss Irwin’s civics class, but he wasn’t interested in politics. “I don’t even know if I was registered to vote back then,” he says. “We had Nixon on because we booked everybody. We had Little Egypt on the show that day. She was an exotic dancer who performed with a boa constrictor. I figured I better not put her and Nixon in the same greenroom. I didn’t want to scare him, or the snake. So I stuck him in my office. If I had done it the other way around, I’d probably be managing snake dancers today.”
    It is also very possible that if Hubert Humphrey had turned up in the Douglas greenroom instead of Nixon, Ailes would have ended up working on the Democratic campaign in 1968. Ailes was far less political in those days than he was professionally ambitious.
    The conversation between Ailes and Nixon has become a part of modern political lore. Nixon said that it was a shame a man couldn’t get elected president without a gimmick like TV. Ailes assured him that the medium was here to stay. If Nixon didn’t grasp that, and figure out how to turn it to his advantage, he would never get to the