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

better, and not be governor, in which case you won’t be able to do anything about the issue one way or the other. But that’s not my problem. I’m going to cash my check before Election Day and be back on a plane for New York before the votes are counted. You have to live here. It’s your life and your decision.”
    I asked Ailes what happened.
    “He did the spot and won.”
    “And what did he do about busing?”
    Ailes seemed surprised by the question. “I have no idea,” he said.
    For the next decade, Ailes kept up a frenetic schedule. He produced Broadway shows, including
Mother Earth
, a short-lived environmental musical, as well as
The Hot l Baltimore
. He traveled to Africa to shoot a wildlife documentary starring Bobby Kennedy Jr. He and John Huddy (and, typically, two of Huddy’s children now work for him) made a TV special on Federico Fellini,
Fellini: Wizards, Clowns and Honest Liars
. He consulted for local television stations around New York and the country, and he took on corporate clients as an expert in image making and damage control. He also made his first venture into conservative television. In 1973, Joseph Coors, a right-wing multimillionaire, sought to combat the ideological tilt of the networks by establishing his own TV news provider, Television News, Inc. (TVN). Ailes served as a consultant who had a license to fire, and he used it to get rid of some thirty employees. One he kept was Charlie Gibson, who went on to a distinguished network career. But no amount of hiring and firing could save TVN. Conservative television news was an idea whose time had not yet come. It closed in 1975 and Ailes busied himself with his filmmaking and his commercial and political clients.
    In 1980, a Long Island machine politician named Al D’Amato came to see Ailes. He had unseated the venerable incumbent senator, liberal Republican Jacob Javits, in a nasty primary in which D’Amato illustrated Javits’s old age and precarious health by showing a kid popping a balloon. Javits, who was in the early stages of Lou Gehrig’s disease, responded by running against D’Amato in the general election on the Liberal Party ticket. The Democrats fielded Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman.
    “I went from ‘Al who?’ to a nasty guy,” says D’Amato. “People hated those ads and I don’t blame them.” He realized that he had no chance unless he could change his image in a hurry. He went to see Roger Ailes.
    Ailes looked at the situation and came to a simple conclusion: D’Amato was perceived as a jerk. “Jesus, nobody likes you. Your own mother wouldn’t vote for you. Do you even have a mother?” D’Amato assured him that he did, in fact, have one, and Ailes proceeded to turn her into a television star. In what became known as the “mama” ad, he showed an elderly woman, returning from the market with an armful of groceries, talking about how hard it was these days (of Carter-era inflation) for the middle class to make ends meet. Then she turned to the camera, introduced herself, and told viewers that if they wanted things to change they should vote for her son, Al D’Amato.
    “That ad was stupendous,” says D’Amato. “Everybody loved her. [Liberal columnist] Jimmy Breslin wrote, ‘I’d never vote for Al D’Amato, but I’d vote for his mother.’ That one spot turned the election around, and made my victory possible.” It was a narrow victory—he got fewer than half the votes in the three-way race—but a win is a win and he spent the next eighteen years in the Senate.
    By 1998, Ailes was out of the consulting business and running Fox News, but he is not the kind of guy who loses touch with old friends and clients, and he agreed to meet with D’Amato for a friendly chat about the senator’s political future. D’Amato wanted a fourth term. Ailes advised against it. “You’ve had three. What do you need another one for?” he asked. He told D’Amato he would probably lose, and he did, defeated by