Roger Ailes: Off Camera by Zev Chafets Read Free Book Online

didn’t win the election, but his careful handling and attention to detail in the staging of the Man in the Arena format helped make sure that Nixon didn’t blow another election on TV.
    After the victory, Ailes was hired as an outside adviser to the president. He was too young to be personally close to Nixon, and his advice could be abrasive. He once told Nixon not to ditch his wife when he left Air Force One and greeted reception committees. “Leaving her on the steps of the plane doesn’t look too good on TV,” he said.
    Ailes wasn’t really trusted by the Nixon inner circle. Some Nixonites blamed Ailes for the access McGinniss got and the unflattering observations Ailes made about the candidate. “Let’s face it, a lot of people think Nixon is dull,” McGinniss quoted Ailes as saying. “Think he’s a bore, a pain in the ass. They look at him as the kind of kid who always carried a book bag. Who was forty-two years old the day he was born. They figure other kids got footballs for Christmas, Nixon got a briefcase and he loved it. He’d always have his homework done and he’d never let you copy. . . . Now you put him on television and you’ve got a problem right away. He’s a funny-looking guy . . . [he] looks like somebody hung him in a closet overnight and he jumps out in the morning with his suit all bunched up and starts running around saying, ‘I want to be president.’”
    Bob Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, was especially inflamed by what he saw as Ailes’s treachery, and saw to it that there was no real job for him at the White House. From time to time he was summoned by the White House to undertake special assignments, such as producing Nixon’s chat with Neil Armstrong during the moon landing, or helping with the media strategy after the crippled flight of Apollo 13—but he did these things pro bono. “I never even took a per diem, let alone payment,” Ailes told me. “I didn’t want to have to tell my kid someday that I had been on the government payroll.” This may be sour grapes, but Ailes was indeed lucky that he didn’t get drawn into the political side of the Nixon operation. “I was completely out of it in 1972,” he says. “When the Watergate guys were going to jail, I was in Africa making a wildlife documentary with Bobby Kennedy Jr. Some people called me Houdini, but I was never even questioned. Not getting a job was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
    Looking back, Ailes has mixed emotions about Nixon. He admires his dogged persistence—his willingness to be the worst player on his college football team, a guy who got hammered every day at practice but kept coming back until he won a letter; and his insistence, as a candidate, on keeping every speaking commitment, no matter how trivial or logistically difficult (Nixon’s insistence on going to Alaska on the last weekend before Election Day in 1960, while Kennedy campaigned in swing states, may have cost him the presidency). But he also sees Nixon’s flaws, one of which was indulging in tough talk he didn’t really mean. “Nixon thought that the 1960 election was stolen by the Daley machine in Chicago,” Ailes told me, “and he had a lasting fear that the Kennedys would do it again in 1972. He believed the Democratic National Committee might be planning to replace George McGovern with Teddy. I wasn’t at the White House but I heard that Nixon said that somebody should look into it. Nixon was always saying things like that, and people around him understood that he didn’t necessarily mean them literally. But Gordon Liddy was there, and he may have taken it as a marching order. With a guy like that, who burns his fingers for fun, you have to be careful about what you say and how you say it.”
    In 1969, Ailes left Washington. “I drove up to Manhattan in an old Pontiac and hit a snowstorm where I got stuck for about ten hours,” he recalls. “I got into town about 2:00 a.m. Next day I rented an