Read Roger Ailes: Off Camera for Free Online Page B

White House.
    It was a cheeky thing for a guy in his midtwenties to tell a two-term vice president of the United States. Nixon was, after all, making television history when Ailes was still in grade school. In the presidential campaign of 1952, a scandal over an alleged political slush fund threatened to cause Eisenhower to dump his running mate from the ticket. Nixon went on TV, still a new medium, and delivered a corny, emotional, and highly effective self-defense invoking his wife’s “respectable Republican cloth coat” and his daughter’s love for Checkers, the family dog. Another memorable moment came in 1959, when Nixon toured the American National Exhibition in Moscow and, standing in a model American kitchen with TV cameras running, debated Soviet ruler Nikita Khrushchev on the respective merits of communism and capitalism.
    The 1960 presidential debates were what soured Nixon on TV. Nixon went into the first debate unprepared and without makeup. Kennedy was tanned, rested, and ready. People who heard the debate on the radio thought Nixon won, but television viewers saw the charismatic Kennedy completely outshine the untelegenic vice president. TV went from being a form of communication he manipulated to one he dreaded. Ailes was a cocky young guy who knew, he said, how to make Nixon shine on the screen. A few days after their meeting in Philadelphia, Leonard Garment, Nixon’s law partner and confidant, invited Ailes to come up to New York for a meeting with the Nixon media team. “It was a Sunday morning,” says Ailes. “We had breakfast at the Plaza Hotel and they grilled me for four hours. I guess they liked what they heard. They offered me a job producing Nixon’s TV.” Ailes took it. Mike Douglas was furious about losing his executive producer. Friends in the business thought Ailes was crazy to abandon a promising career for a flier with Tricky Dick. But he had a vision of what he could accomplish.
    The result was the Man in the Arena campaign. Nixon wouldn’t debate his Democratic opponent, Hubert Humphrey, or Alabama governor George Wallace, who was running as a third-party candidate. He would also keep his spontaneous public appearances to a minimum. Instead, Ailes staged a series of town meetings with selected audiences and prescreened citizen questioners who lacked the guile (and, in many cases, hostility) of the political press. Man in the Arena made it possible for Nixon to control his media environment. Ailes’s role as a profane, skydiving, hard-charging producer was documented in
The Selling of the President
, a bestseller by Philadelphia columnist (and Ailes pal) Joe McGinniss.
    Contrary to myth, Ailes did not win the election for Nixon. The country was in turmoil over Vietnam; there was racial violence in cities across America; Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were murdered. President Lyndon Johnson was so unpopular that he decided not to run for reelection. It would have taken a much more compelling candidate than Vice President Hubert Humphrey to salvage the situation for the Democrats.
    History recalls the 1968 campaign as the start of the Republican “Southern Strategy” of wooing conservative white Democrats below the Mason-Dixon Line. But it didn’t quite work at the time, although it would when Ronald Reagan came along. Nixon carried only five Southern states that had traditionally gone Democratic (South Carolina, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee). Humphrey got Texas. Wallace won the rest of the old Confederacy. Even if Humphrey had won Nixon’s Southern states, he wouldn’t have had a sufficient margin for election. George Wallace, running well to the right of Nixon, got forty-six electoral votes in the Deep South.
    Ailes downplays his role in the Nixon victory. “People think I invented strategy or ads,” he says. “Really, I was just the TV producer. I was in charge of making sure the backlights worked.” It is an overly modest assessment. Ailes