1988
George H. W. Bush was elected president of the United States against all political logic. “It wasn’t a tide-of-history election,” says Democratic consultant Paul Begala. “Republicans had been in for eight years and people were ready for change. And the only vice president who had ever succeeded his boss after eight years in office was Martin Van Buren. It was Roger Ailes who created the dominant issues in that campaign. He did it by defining Dukakis. The campaign was incredibly impressive, and it was mostly because of Ailes. He has an intuitive grasp of what Bill Clinton calls ‘walking around people.’”
Ailes played many roles. Brit Hume, who covered the campaign for ABC News, remembers him as a spine stiffener for the sometimes indecisive Bush. When Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis began publicly complaining about the aggressive tone of the Republican ads, some in the Bush camp counseled toning them down. Ailes advised the candidate to double down and tell his opponent to quit whining. It was a tactic that worked; it cast Dukakis as a wimp who couldn’t take criticism.
Ailes also acted as Bush’s morale officer. The patrician vice president had a tendency to come off as stiff and distant; Ailes wanted to keep him loose. Early in the campaign, Republican opposition researchers discovered that Dukakis, as governor of Massachusetts, once vetoed a law that would have made it illegal for humans to have sex with animals. It had been tacked onto a piece of legislation that Dukakis opposed; his veto was no more than pro forma. But Ailes found a use for it. During the campaign he frequently mentioned it, facetiously, as an issue that could be deployed. At the first debate, Ailes saw an opportunity. Bush seemed tense and nervous. Just before he took the stage, Ailes took him aside and whispered, “If you get in trouble out there, just call him an animal fucker.” Bush cracked up. To further lighten the mood, Ailes looked across the stage at Bob Squier, Dukakis’s consultant, and motioned that the Democratic candidate’s fly was open, causing a disconcerting moment on the Democratic side.
Mostly, though, Ailes was the man whose political ads set the tone of the campaign and kept Dukakis on the defensive. The Boston Harbor ad was one of those. Dukakis had a strong environmental record, especially contrasted with Bush’s history as a Texas oilman, and it earned him the support of the major green groups. Ailes decided to take that advantage away. He produced a commercial showing garbage and debris floating in the water of Boston Harbor, along with a sign that read Radiation Hazard: No Swimming, and a narration: “As a candidate, Michael Dukakis called Boston Harbor an open sewer. As governor he had the opportunity to do something about it but chose not to. The Environmental Protection Agency called his lack of action the most expensive public policy mistake in the history of New England. Now Boston Harbor, the dirtiest harbor in America, will cost residents $6 million to clean. And Michael Dukakis promises to do for America what he had done for Massachusetts.”
“I could almost see Dukakis drowning in the polluted water,” says Tim Carey.
It was Ailes’s idea to cast Dukakis as weak on national defense. Dukakis aided and abetted the effort by dressing up in a flak jacket and an oversized helmet to take a photo-op ride in the turret of an M1 Abrams tank in testing grounds near Detroit. The idea was to make Dukakis look like a commander in chief. In fact, he came off as ridiculous, a little boy playing soldier. Ailes let the footage of the grinning Dukakis speak for itself. Nothing could have better emphasized the difference between Dukakis and Bush, a World War II combat pilot.
The most infamous ad of the campaign was actually two ads, both on the subject of a Massachusetts prison furlough granted to an incarcerated murderer. Willie Horton was serving a life sentence for robbing and killing a seventeen-year-old gas station attendant. The crime was especially grisly: The victim was stabbed nineteen times and dumped into a garbage can.
There were other states (and the federal government) that had similar prisoner furlough plans. But they did not grant furloughs to murderers. The Massachusetts legislature passed a law to prevent such leniency, but Governor Dukakis vetoed it. He made the case that in 99 percent of cases, the furloughed prisoners returned without incident. It was his bad luck that Willie Horton belonged to the 1 percent.
In 1986, after more than a decade behind bars, Horton was released for a weekend. He traveled to Maryland, where he seized an engaged couple, knifed and tied up the man, and then proceeded to rape his fiancée twice as he looked on. The crime was so egregious that a Maryland judge refused to extradite him to Massachusetts on the grounds that he might again be furloughed.
The issue of the lenient Massachusetts furlough policy was first raised by Al Gore in the 1988 primary campaign, although Gore didn’t actually mention Horton by name. In the fall presidential campaign the National Security Political Action Committee began running a TV ad, which did mention Horton and displayed his picture. The NSPAC was supposedly an independent player, although it was clearly pro-Bush, and then run by Larry McCarthy, a former employee of Ailes Communications who had left the firm to work for Bob Dole in the primaries.
The NSPAC ad was denounced as racially incendiary by the Democrats, and was dropped. Shortly thereafter a Bush ad called “Revolving Door,” produced by Ailes, began airing. “Revolving Door” also attacked the Massachusetts prison furlough program, but it didn’t use a photo of Willie Horton. Ailes didn’t want to be charged with exploiting racial fears, as the NSPAC had. “At one point Lee Atwater [the hyperaggressive Republican campaign manager] handed me a picture of Horton and I tore it up,” Ailes says.
Still, the two ads became conflated in the mind of the media.
In 1990, the Ohio Democratic Party lodged a formal complaint with the Federal Election Commission, charging that the Bush campaign had coordinated with the National Security PAC, which would have been a violation of campaign finance laws. The FEC split 3–3, and the case was dismissed.
During the campaign, Ailes himself exacerbated the impression that the Bush campaign was connected to the NSPAC ad. A Time magazine profile at the time quoted him as saying that “the only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it.” Ailes doesn’t deny he said it to reporter David Beckwith. “We were supposed to be off the record. Beckwith and I were friends and I was just joking,” he told me. “Hell, I had no idea I’d be running a network someday.”
The controversy over the Horton ad had a predictable effect. The media picked it up and ran the ads over and over; the glowering mug shot of the black murderer-rapist became familiar to millions. Atwater bragged that “by the time we’re finished, they’re going to wonder if Willie Horton is Dukakis’s running mate.” At Harvard’s quadrennial electoral postmortem at the end of 1988—a seminar that includes the major professionals in all the campaigns—the Willie Horton ads were still a hot topic. Bob Beckel, a Democratic consultant who had run Mondale’s campaign four years earlier, conceded that Ailes might not have ordered the NSPAC ad, but noted that there had been “a lot of Republican money behind it.” Ailes responded by pointing out that the Dukakis campaign had run a similar commercial, featuring a woman in a body bag who had been raped and murdered by a Hispanic man on federal penal parole. Susan Estrich, Dukakis’s campaign manager, fired back that the Democratic ad had been simple retaliation. “You want to play to fear, you’ve got your ugly story of a black man raping a white woman. Well, we’ll tell you an even uglier story,” she said.
Ron Brown, who headed Jesse Jackson’s primary campaign and later served as Bill Clinton’s secretary of commerce, seconded Beckel’s accusation. “You knew what was happening,” he told Ailes. “Maybe you couldn’t control everything, but nobody stepped up to the plate and said, ‘This is divisive, it’s dangerous, it’s wrong.’”
“So you’re saying because he was black we can’t use the issue?” Ailes shot back. “Despite the fact that he was a murderer and a rapist, he should have been given special treatment because he was black?”
There were many disputes at Harvard, but very little doubt about Ailes’s crucial contribution to the Bush victory. Susan Estrich admitted that the campaign had been lost because the Republicans had seized control of the message and because “we didn’t have a Roger Ailes. I mean two things. First, a person of his talent, because it’s clear it doesn’t matter unless you have his talent. But second, and perhaps equally important, a person whose judgment and relationship with the candidate is such that he had his trust and respect.” Ed Rollins, who had been the campaign manager in Reagan’s reelection campaign, agreed. “As much money as we spent in 1984, nobody ever moved the entire course of the campaign,” he told his fellow participants. “There’s no presidential campaign in the age of television where one ad, or a series of ads, really made a difference. I mean, people will go back and argue that the Lyndon Johnson daisy-plucker ad made a difference. The truth is, that ad was run once on network television. In this particular campaign, Roger’s ads worked. . . . We have now come of age in presidential campaigns, with tough, hard-hitting negative comments in the arena. They will be here from [now] on.”
Much of the 1988 Harvard seminar was given over to a discussion of the flaws of the American electoral process. Ailes himself raised the issue, and offered a typically pragmatic analysis. “When I get hired by a candidate, my job is to help him get elected. I would like to change the system. I would like to spend all of my time on deep issues and talk about the homeless problem and figure out how to solve it, but it’s damn hard to do it in a ten-week campaign when you are getting banged around by the opponent and the press is interested in pictures, mistakes, and attacks.” Ailes said that no single consultant or campaign manager could effect change. “Unless we are all willing to admit that we have a stake in it, to admit that we had a part of it and discuss mistakes we’ve made, it ain’t ever going to change, folks. It’s going to get tougher. And next time it’s going to be six-second sound bites.”
There is etiquette among political professionals. Like defense lawyers and prosecutors, they accept the verdict and move on. Politics is business; personal animosity is for amateurs. Ailes has always set an example. In the eighties, the top Democratic consultant was Bob Squier. He and Ailes faced each other in a series of campaigns and, for five years, as debate partners on The Today Show. They would put each other down on the air and then go out to dinner afterward. When Squier died, Ailes wrote a glowing eulogy in Time magazine and spoke at his funeral.
Most of the pros at Harvard observed this rule. But one, Jack Corrigan, a senior Dukakis operative, insisted on refighting old battles. He accused Ailes of running a dirty campaign. “The difference between the two campaigns, and the way we [portrayed the two candidates] . . . is the difference between truth and fiction,” he said.
“Oh, come on,” said Ailes in a dismissive tone.
Corrigan was undeterred. “Michael Dukakis took very specific positions on all of the issues. Your candidate had fundamentally flip-flopped on basic values, in particular on the abortion question and on what he once called ‘voodoo economics.’”
Ailes reminded Corrigan that Dukakis, too, had changed positions on trade and weapons systems.
“That’s not true,” snapped Corrigan. “The positions as you characterized them are not correct . . . he ran on his values. He had a firm set of beliefs.”
“I don’t believe that at all,” said Ailes. “He ran to the right. He ran as a moderate. He didn’t run as a liberal.”
“You can’t imagine a different worldview than your own,” said Corrigan.
“Don’t attack me personally. There’s no need for that,” Ailes said.
The exchange was an excellent illustration of why Ailes was so effective. Corrigan saw the election as a battle between virtue and sin. If an Ailes opponent insisted on believing in fairy tales about the virtuous Sir Michael and the evil George Bush, so much the better. Corrigan was making the cardinal mistake of campaign operatives. He believed his own bullshit. And he took it personally.
Ailes never did. In fact, he used the Harvard seminar to network with the enemy. You never know when a senior liberal might come in handy. Eventually he hired Susan Estrich and Bob Beckel as commentators at Fox. He also hired Geraldine Ferraro, a liberal New York Democrat who in 1984, as the first female vice presidential candidate, had been Beckel’s candidate.
• • •
The 1988 election made Ailes into the first superstar political consultant, so famous and infamous that his mere participation in a campaign became an issue. George Voinovich wanted him enough to risk his own family.
Voinovich was the ex-mayor of Cleveland, acclaimed for bringing the city back from the racial and financial troubles that had typified it. In 1988, before the presidential election, he decided to run for the Senate against incumbent Howard Metzenbaum, and he wanted Roger Ailes on board. They were fellow graduates of Ohio University. Ailes knew Ohio politics, and Voinovich had never run statewide. But there was a problem.
“My brother was married to Mike Douglas’s daughter,” recalls Voinovich. “And Douglas was still teed off at Roger for leaving his show and going into politics. My brother heard I was going to hire Roger and he begged me not to. ‘Mike won’t be happy,’ he said. I don’t know if he asked him, but I didn’t hire Roger.” Nineteen eighty-eight was a Republican year in Ohio: George H. W. Bush won the state by 11 percent. But Voinovich lost to Metzenbaum by fourteen points. The campaign was amateurish and nasty (at one point Voinovich accused his opponent of being soft on child pornography) and it left him bruised but determined. Two years later, when he decided to run for governor, he informed his family that he was going to hire Roger Ailes whether Mike Douglas liked it or not, and he did.
“Why did I do it? I wanted Roger on my side. Going into the race I was behind my opponent in fund-raising by $3 million. Roger’s reputation was so good among Republicans that the mere fact that he was with me made it possible to close the money gap. Roger Ailes gave me gravitas.”
Ailes might have been popular with Republicans, but he was a target to Democrats. When he went to Columbus, a group of protesters passed out leaflets denouncing him; Newsweek reported that Ailes had made history by becoming “the first consultant on record to be the target of a demonstration.”
Voinovich had already lost his first debate against Democratic candidate Anthony Celebrezze Jr. Celebrezze had been a vocal supporter of abortion choice, but when he flipped to pro-life in the debate, he caught Voinovich off guard. “When Roger came in, the first thing he did was tag Celebrezze on the character issue, as a man who believed one thing and said another,” Voinovich says. Then, with Celebrezze on the defensive, Ailes concentrated on rebuilding his own candidate’s morale.
“Roger gave me confidence going into the second debate. He told me, ‘Don’t worry, you know this stuff!’ He took away my note cards. ‘You don’t need any cards to prompt you. Just be yourself.’ It was the Holy Spirit and Roger who got me through that debate,” he says.
Ailes also created ads that would humanize the reticent Voinovich. One, titled “Best Decision,” showed the candidate frolicking with his family. “Roger told me, ‘There are very few candidates who can twirl their wife around in a campaign ad. You can because it’s obvious that the two of you love each other.’ I said, ‘Yes, but I never twirled my wife around a stage.’ To which he replied, ‘Doesn’t matter, twirl her.’” Voinovich did. “That was one of the best ads I ever did,” says Ailes today. “If Mitt Romney had done one like it in the primary campaign, it would have solved his lack-of-warmth issue.”
“What Roger did for me was above and beyond what a consultant does for a client,” says Voinovich. “He got into the fight. A lot of big-time consultants work hard and then they go out and play hard, but that’s not Roger. He’s not the kind of guy who went out and had a few drinks with the boys. He worked his butt off and cooled out after work, by himself. I have to say that I really admired him. I still do.”
In Ohio, Ailes followed his custom of not involving himself much in his client’s platform. “Roger didn’t get involved with advocating any positions. He’s ideological today, but he wasn’t back then. What he did was make sure we knew what we were talking about. In 1988, my research was terrible. Roger made sure that didn’t happen again. He could see down the road, and look at things five different ways. He never got surprised.”
With Ailes at the helm, Voinovich won handily. And the story had a happy family ending. At a fund-raiser in Cleveland, Ailes and Douglas met, shook hands, and made up. Nobody was more relieved than Governor Voinovich’s brother. Ailes was happy, too. He and Douglas had been close during their years on the show, their desks literally next to each other in the cramped office in Cleveland, and it hurt Ailes when Douglas’s wife called him disloyal and Douglas predicted to the staff that Ailes would fail. “Later on he took credit for my success,” says Ailes. On one of my visits to Fox, he showed me a clip of a television interview Douglas did in 2005, in which he called his former producer “brilliant” and “amazing. Somebody you want to listen to.” Ailes smiled with satisfaction. “He never said anything like that when we were together.”
Ailes loved winning in the Voinovich campaign in Ohio. He loved winning anyplace, and he often did. In more than 140 campaigns he orchestrated, he estimates that his victories outnumbered his losses by about nine to one. “A lot of consultants try to stick to races they can win, in which their candidate is a favorite,” he says. “I didn’t do that. I took and won some pretty outside shots, like Holshouser in North Carolina, or Mitch McConnell, a county executive in Kentucky up against an incumbent senator. Sometimes I won those, and sometimes I lost if the guy wasn’t a good candidate. But with a good candidate and enough money, I didn’t lose many. And I never lost a race where I felt outproduced or outmaneuvered.”
Or outcompeted. “There was a consultant I was up against once in Baltimore,” Ailes says. “He told a reporter that there are a lot of consultants who will kill for their candidate, but Ailes is the only one ready to die for his.” But it was an arrangement that ended when the campaign did.
Nobody wins all the time. In 1982, Ailes’s candidate, Harrison Schmitt, lost a Senate race in New Mexico to Jeff Bingaman. His opponent in that contest was a young consultant named Dick Morris, whose star client was the governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton. After the election, they went to lunch and Ailes told Morris that people considered him a brilliant young guy, but worried about his loyalty and character and wondered if he was a team player. Evidently Morris calmed those fears, because in 1988, Morris did consulting work for the Bush campaign. When the Lewinsky scandal broke, Ailes put Morris on the air as a Fox contributor. “Roger hired me because he wanted someone who had been in the Clinton White House and who knew how to interpret what was happening there,” Morris says.
In 1989, Ailes signed on to run Rudy Giuliani’s first campaign for mayor, against David Dinkins, who had defeated incumbent Ed Koch in the Democratic primary. Dinkins won the race by the narrowest margin in New York City history, and became the city’s first (and so far, only) African American mayor. Ailes kept up his friendship with Giuliani. In 1996, then in office, Mayor Giuliani lobbied for Fox News to get carriage rights for New York City, a critical factor in the success of the network. Typically, Ailes also stayed on good terms with Dinkins.
• • •
By 1991, Ailes was getting tired of politics. He had been a political television producer, a debate coach, an ad maker, and a strategist for presidents. He had a client sitting in the Oval Office at the time, and lesser candidates standing in line for his services. He was, at fifty, an elder statesman and a mentor to consultants on both sides of the political aisle. “Roger invented the orchestra pit theory,” says Bob Beckel. “Campaigns are just a series of moments that people remember. If you have two guys onstage and one guy says, ‘I have a solution to the Middle East problem,’ and the other guy falls in the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?”
But Ailes had been in one too many orchestra pits. That year his candidate, Dick Thornburgh, the former U.S. attorney general, lost a Senate race in Pennsylvania to Harris Wofford, a relative unknown. Wofford’s consultants were James Carville and Paul Begala. “I had followed Roger’s career since I was a student at the University of Texas,” Begala says. “To tell you the truth, I was thrilled to be up against him.”
The feeling wasn’t mutual. Ailes is on good terms with Carville, despite the fact that Carville recently blurbed an anti-Ailes book by David Brock, the head of the progressive watchdog group Media Matters for America. That, Ailes assumed, was just business. But, like Jack Corrigan, Begala insulted him personally. Worse, he did it publicly, in a joint appearance on ABC’s Nightline. In the heat of battle, Begala called Ailes “a Madison Avenue blowhard.” Ailes responded by inviting Begala to step outside. It was a symbolic invitation—they were in separate studios in different time zones—but the sentiment was real. But Begala, at least, has no hard feelings. “I have limitless professional respect for Roger Ailes,” he told me.
Thornburgh was Ailes’s last campaign. “I was coming back from Los Angeles on Christmas Eve on the red-eye,” he recalls, “and I realized that everyone who worked for me was at home with their families. I was out there all alone and I was sick of it. By then I hated politics. And so I quit running candidates.” Ailes met informally with George H. W. Bush during the 1992 race, “just to lighten him up a little,” but his career as a full-time consultant was over. His mind was now on other things. He wanted to get back into his first love: TV.