Read The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--And Divided a Country for Free Online

a.m. to turn on the transmitter.During one summer, instead of going home, he took a job earning $1.10 an hour at the Athens commercial station WATH.
    Despite the hours he spent in the tight-knit radio community, Ailes was an elusive figure.Without telling his classmates, he moonlighted as a rock and roll DJ under the pseudonym Dick Summers at WMPO, a radio station twenty-five miles south in Middleport, Ohio.“He didn’t let anyone get close to him,” Don Hylkema recalled. “He never talked about himself as an individual or things he felt or thought about. It was strange.… Everyone knew Roger, but they didn’t know anything about him.” His political convictions, if he had them, were unclear, even as he led the station during the 1960 election cycle.“He did not display any sign of extreme right-wing politics,” Don Swaim, the WOUB special events director, recalled. Ailes refrained from discussing his hemophilia with most people.“I remember when he told me,” said classmate Bill Klokow. “We were pulling music in the library. He said it was serious. At that time, he didn’t know how long he was going to live.”
    Ailes’s temper flared when he did not get what he wanted.“Controlwas extremely important to him,” Hylkema recalled. Robert Jr. linked this trait to his medical condition.“The thing is about hemophiliacs, they’re risk takers,” he said. “They tend to deny their illness. They don’t want to be special. They fight against it, and here’s the thing: they become aggressive in their behavior.”
    R obert Sr. and Donna’s marriage had been disintegrating throughout Roger’s childhood, and after Roger went to college, it broke apart. During the fall of his sophomore year, Donna filed for divorce.Her amended divorce petition was painfully graphic, a window into the dark environment Roger grew up in. “Over the entire period of their marriage,” her lawyer wrote, Robert Sr. “has screamed and yelled at her and inflicted physical abuse upon her all without valid provocation.” She felt unloved. “Over the years the Defendant has failed to pay the Plaintiff the proper respect owing by a husband to a wife: has failed to evidence outwordly [
sic
] any affection or love for her, has never complimented her for any good or favorable action or conduct by her and thereby lost the affection and respect of the Plaintiff.” She was lonely. “All during their marriage the Defendant has made his outside and social contacts largely with men and has not included the Plaintiff in any substantial amount of his social contacts.” When Donna expressed her unhappiness in the marriage, she said Robert blamed her—among other ways, by writing down his complaints on a blackboard in the kitchen. He had a paranoid streak, telling his friends that she was unfaithful. “He has become repulsive and offensive to her so that she can no longer endure his presence and submit to continued abuse from him,” read the complaint.
    Donna worried that Robert might kill her.The original complaint, filed Wednesday, October 7, 1959, alleged, “he has threatened her life and to do her physical harm in the event an action similar to the one herein alleged is filed against him.” She asked the court to bar him from coming to the house, calling her, or interfering with her job. “She fears that unless he is enjoined from molesting her that he will do her bodily injury,” the document stated. Two days later, at 9:00 a.m., after the court granted her atemporary restraining order, Sheriff T. Herbert Thomas and his deputy Edwin James drove to the house on Belmont Street to serve Robert with court papers ordering him to leave the premises.
    Nothing in the court records indicates that Robert contested the restraining order or the divorce filing. Roger recalled that he did not hearabout the divorce from his parents until right before he was scheduled to come home from college for the Christmas break.“I got a call from them saying