THE GIFT OF FRIENDSHIP
One of the first people Roger Ailes hired at Fox News was a young reporter named Douglas Kennedy. It raised eyebrows: He was the youngest son of Bobby Kennedy, born a year before his father was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination. The Kennedy family business is politics, but Doug decided to go into journalism. He started out at the Boston Herald and then came to New York as a crime reporter for the New York Post. Although he didn’t have much television experience, he put together a reel of appearances and sent it to Chet Collier at Fox. Kennedy came on board as a reporter a month before Fox launched.
“Some people at the network resented it and some still do,” he said. “I’ve had epic battles at Fox where my name was an undercurrent,” he says. He was protected, then and now, by Roger Ailes.
“Some people find their own humanity overwhelming. Roger doesn’t. He knows you when he is talking to you. You walk by Roger in the hallway and he’s happy to see you—not the fake TV executive happy, but genuinely. He grabs you by the shoulders and there you are, wrestling with him in the corporate office building.”
Kennedy is a lifelong Democrat. “I was terribly moved by the election of the first black president,” he says. Ailes was less moved, but it doesn’t matter. “What people don’t understand is that Roger is very comfortable with others who don’t agree with him. He knows what he believes and says it—Roger never talks for effect—and we go out to lunch and really go at it. All he asks is that you be real with him in return.”
After Kennedy went to work at Fox, liberal friends suggested that Ailes was using him for public relations, to demonstrate Fox’s fairness and balance. “That’s never happened,” he said. His family stood behind his decision to work for Ailes. In the midseventies, “Roger took my brother Bobby to Kenya and made a wildlife documentary,” he says. “It was a kind gesture on his part. In my family, Roger is held in high regard. We don’t think of him the same way others in the Democratic Party do.”
The African excursion came up at lunch with Austin Pendleton. Ailes’s version was far different from Doug Kennedy’s account of Roger as an avuncular benefactor. He said that he had a client with $100,000 in hard currency that the Kenyan government wouldn’t allow out of the country. The client came to Ailes and asked if he could use his political contacts. Ailes had a better idea: He offered to produce a documentary film with the money and then sell it to American television. That way, everybody came out ahead.
The question was, Who would buy a nature travelogue? What would the hook be? “I needed an automatic sale,” Ailes told Pendleton. “At the time, there was no name more commercial than Kennedy. And I knew Bobby Jr. was a wildlife guy.” Ailes took the proposal to Lem Billings, an intimate of JFK and after the assassination of Bobby Kennedy a mentor to his sons. Billings wasn’t sure it was a good idea, especially given Ailes’s Republican credentials and his work for Nixon, but he promised to raise it with Ethel Kennedy. Ailes waited several months while he was vetted, and finally got a yes. “We can’t find anyone who says you are untalented or a liar,” Billings told him, “so you can go ahead if you promise to protect Bobby.” They shook on the deal, traveled to Kenya, and made the film, which recouped the client’s money with a tidy profit.
Sometime later, I informed Doug Kennedy that Ailes’s motive for making the documentary had been financial, not humanitarian. He just laughed. “Roger always wants people to think he is worse than he is,” Kennedy said. “He hates admitting that he’s softhearted.”
I had noticed this myself. He often talks about epic fights that, on closer examination, turn out to be more like scuffles, and he usually explains his motivations and behavior in the most cynical way. When I asked him why, he began by denying it.
“What I told you and Austin was the truth. I did want to find a way to get the money out of Kenya. And it worked. But, yeah, there was more to it than that. Bobby was a troubled kid. He was obnoxious at the beginning of the trip, too. He borrowed a comb from the cameraman and then tossed it on the ground. I took him aside and said, ‘Pick up the comb and hand it to the cameraman. He’s going to be filming you for the next month and if you act like a prick, he’s going to make you look like one.’”
Over the course of the trip, though, Ailes took a liking to Kennedy. “One night Lem Billings and I were sitting around the campfire—we were the last ones awake—and he said to me that Bobby would be running for office eventually and he wanted my promise that I would help him. I told Lem I couldn’t guarantee that—I didn’t know what the political situation might be in the future. But I did promise that I would never work against him, for a candidate who was running against him. And I promised I would always look out for Bobby.”
The Kenyan expedition resulted in a decadeslong connection between the Kennedy clan and Ailes. Ailes is especially close to Ethel, whose charities he has supported over the years. He was also friendly with John Jr. They had several meetings in Ailes’s office to explore joint marketing strategies for Fox News and Kennedy’s magazine, George. After one of those meetings, Ailes walked JFK Jr. through the Fox newsroom so he could say hello to Doug. “The girls down there were practically fainting,” Ailes recalls. He offered Kennedy his own talk show on Fox. Kennedy was considering it when his plane went down.
After the birth of Doug Kennedy’s fifth child in the winter of 2012, he tried to take his infant son out of the hospital to get some fresh air. Two nurses intervened, and they got into a scuffle. Since it involved a Kennedy, the incident became a sensational story. Reporters flocked to the hospital in northern Westchester; news helicopters flew to the scene. “In my family the reflex in a situation like this is to shut up,” Kennedy told me. “But Roger said, hell no. Fight! Nobody touches your baby. Stick up for yourself. You did nothing wrong.”
Ailes instructed Kennedy to leave the hospital and come to his house in Garrison. Beth cooked him dinner. Ailes told the press that Kennedy had been right to do what he did. “You don’t grab a baby out of the arms of a loving father,” he said. (A Westchester court subsequently acquitted Kennedy of all charges.) He was, needless to say, grateful for Ailes’s support. “There is no other television executive in the business who would do something like that,” he says. “No one.”
In the winter of 2012, Ailes, Beth, and Zac took a short vacation to Palm Beach. One night Ethel Kennedy invited them to a small party at her estate, where he found himself surrounded by friendly Kennedys and other liberals. The next day he took Zac to hang out with Rush Limbaugh in his studio. “I doubt if too many people have had a weekend like that one,” he says.
Chris Cuomo is another scion of a liberal Democratic dynasty, the son of former New York governor Mario Cuomo and brother of the incumbent, Andrew Cuomo. He considers Roger Ailes one of his close friends. They lunch often, and discuss personal problems and professional issues. “I was at CNBC when Roger began staffing Fox News,” he told me. “I was twenty-eight, just starting out. When Roger hired me he said, ‘I don’t care who your father is. Just do your job the right way.’ He’s a guy’s guy, a brilliant teacher, and as good a boss as I’ve ever had. If he wanted me to come to Fox, I’d be tempted.”
The roster of Friends of Roger is long and incongruous. It includes Rudy Giuliani and Gladys Knight, Jack Welch and Jesse Jackson, George H. W. Bush and Dukakis campaign chief Susan Estrich. Dennis Kucinich, the former boy-wonder mayor of Cleveland and longtime darling of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, is a buddy. When he and his wife came to Garrison for dinner, Ailes saw to it that a photo of Kucinich and Elizabeth made the local paper. “I wanted the local commissars to see it,” says Ailes. “I thought it would ruin their day.” He regularly lunches with Henry Kissinger. He was so close to Geraldine Ferraro, the Democratic vice presidential candidate on the Mondale ticket Ailes helped to defeat in 1984, that he produced a film of her marital rededication ceremony. He also hired her as a commentator on Fox and, when she was diagnosed with cancer and couldn’t work, kept her on the payroll at full salary.
It is easy to be cynical about Ailes’s friendships, many of which double as business connections or professional relationships. They undermine the notion, fostered by Ailes himself, that he is hated by the liberal establishment. “There are some who think Roger would love to be the subject of scorn and abuse, but he isn’t,” says Rick Kaplan. “The truth is, in our business he is admired—I love Roger Ailes.” Kaplan doesn’t hold a grudge over Ailes’s disparaging comments about the Clinton News Network. Cable news, Ailes style, promotes itself through controversy and personal feuds, but—like politics or boxing—only suckers believe the contestants actually hate their opponents.
Once Ailes makes friends, he tends to keep them. When he began the second round of his television career, he brought in Chet Collier, his old mentor in Cleveland, as his second-in-command. And he remained close to his first boss at The Mike Douglas Show, Woody Fraser.
Douglas died in Los Angeles in 2006 at age eighty-one. His widow called Fraser and asked if he would be willing to put together a memorial show. Fraser wasn’t enthusiastic. A few years earlier he had been asked by the widow of Steve Allen, Jayne Meadows, to stage a similar tribute. It was a flop. “Steve Allen had been a beloved figure in the show-business community in Hollywood,” Fraser told me, “but despite that, almost nobody agreed to show up. Everybody had an excuse—they were out of town, they had a crucial appointment, something. Really, most of them just didn’t want to bother. And Mike Douglas wasn’t Steve Allen. He wasn’t especially well liked in L.A. I got some of the original staff on board and we tried to get some of the guests on the Douglas show to appear, but when we called around, people kept turning us down.”
Fraser called Ailes and told him what was happening. “We need names,” he said.
Ailes saw this as a debt of loyalty. He told Fraser to send him a list of celebrities who had been guests on the show, and he began to work the phones. “Just about everybody on that list, from Tiger Woods to Billy Crystal, showed up,” Fraser said. “Roger came, too, and gave a speech. The show went really well and afterward Roger took me aside and said, ‘I’d forgotten what a good producer you are.”
The job offer came with a caveat. “This may not work,” Ailes said. “I once worked for you. Now this is my ship and it works my way. You can’t break legs here. I have ten executives who have made Fox News number one, and if you don’t get along with them I’ll have to let you go.”
Fraser took the job but the adjustment wasn’t easy. He clashed with some of the Fox brass, especially John Moody, the executive vice president in charge of news. “Moody and I didn’t like each other,” Fraser says. “He told me that I didn’t know anything about news. I told him that I had produced Nightline and Good Morning America. He wasn’t impressed, and I wasn’t impressed with him.” The antipathy got nasty and it was talked about at the network.
Ailes does not abide internecine warfare. It was a negative situation, and negative situations, according to him, make positive people sick. He called in his old boss and read him the riot act. Fraser promised to be good. “I’m proud of Roger,” he says. “He taught me something important. I wish I had learned before how to work with people without breaking legs.”
Anyone who has any experience with Ailes knows that he prizes loyalty, to him and to the company he runs. Violate it, and you wind up like anchorman Mike Schneider or Jim Cramer, out on the street looking for a new job. But abide by it and you have a supporter of uncommon power and understanding. For example, Ailes recently sent a young reporter from an affiliate, who had had a fistfight in the newsroom, to anger management. “If you run an organization and nobody’s crazy, you never get a full picture of life’s possibilities,” he says.
“Roger taught me that being a great interviewer is a mixture of head, heart, and balls, and even if you have all three, you have to figure out how to use them effectively on the air,” says Chris Cuomo. “A lot of TV journalists are afraid to do that.”
When Geraldo Rivera was expelled from Iraq amid charges that he had endangered American lives in wartime, a lot of news executives would have been glad to see him go. Ailes was different. “Roger totally backed me,” Rivera says. “He stuck up for me with the Pentagon, and he was steady as a rock. We are both smart guys who push back. Roger has a lot of physical courage and it gives him his swagger.” A few weeks after telling me this, Rivera ran into Ailes and repeated the quote, to which Ailes replied, “Damn right.”
“Ours is a perfidious business,” Cuomo told me, “but Roger stands up for his people. When somebody threatens to sue a Fox reporter, Roger comes to that person and says, “‘Are you right on the story?’ If you say you are, he believes you and then the people complaining have to get through him.”
“Roger thinks long and hard about hiring, but once you are in, he’s got your back,” says Chris Wallace. “He’s never told me who to have on the show or what questions to ask. But loyalty is very important to him. I found that out.”
In the spring of 2008, Wallace did a spot on Fox & Friends. Barack Obama had just delivered his well-received speech on race relations in the wake of the Jeremiah Wright controversy, and the hosts, including Steve Doocy, spent a good part of the show picking it apart. They invited Wallace to join in, but he declined. “I told them that two hours of Obama bashing was enough,” he recalls. Ailes was furious that Wallace had criticized his colleagues on the air. “You shot inside the tent,” he said, and informed Wallace that he was a “jerk.” Wallace sent Ailes a letter of apology, and he hasn’t forgotten the lesson.
Ailes doesn’t usually allow employees who leave the network for the competition to return. Fox News is a team, and you don’t leave your teammates to play for the other side. But if you show the right kind of attitude, it can be done. Arthel Neville proved that.
Neville joined Fox News as a correspondent and host in 1998. She is the daughter of Art Neville, the underappreciated member of the Neville Brothers, who is also a founder of the Meters. Neville majored in journalism at the University of Texas, became the first black on-air reporter at KVUE-TV in Austin, and did a nationally syndicated TV show before coming to Fox.
Soon after arriving, Neville followed family tradition and fell in love with a drummer. They moved to L.A. In 2002, she got an offer to join CNN as the host of her own program, Talk Back Live with Arthel Neville and as weekend coanchor with Anderson Cooper. Before taking the job, she called Ailes.
“I did it out of respect,” she says.
Ailes told her to go ahead.
In 2010, Neville returned with her husband to New York. “When I called Roger about coming back to the network, the first thing he said was, ‘You still married to that drummer?’” He was letting her know he remembered why she had left, and that he had given her his blessing. She hadn’t been disloyal and she was still welcome. “I feel very special about that,” she says.
Ailes has a knack for making his employees feel like friends, and his friends feel special. “Every time I meet with Roger he asks if I am all right and what do I need?” says Shep Smith. “When the meeting is over he says, ‘I love you.’ Roger is like a second dad. He’s good to me. He changed my life. I wouldn’t leave Roger any more than I would leave my brother. Roger doesn’t just teach you how to be a better broadcaster; he teaches you how to be a better man.”
Smith owes his career and his success to Ailes. A lot of people do.
Bob Beckel is a quintessential old-school political consultant, the kind of guy who worked hard during the day to make his candidates winners and harder at night, in the bars and clubs of America, to make himself a legend. A former football player and boxer, he could be a nasty drunk and he got into his share of brawls. He also developed a cocaine habit that was bigger than he was. The pinnacle of his career was managing Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign; he borrowed “Where’s the beef?” from a Wendy’s ad and turned it into a Mondale slogan. But managing the Democratic catastrophe of 1984 wasn’t really much of a credential. Beckel, who is funny and brash, was a better television performer than a political operator; he was scooped up as a talking head by various shows and caught on as a full-time commentator at CNN.
In 2002, Beckel was caught up in an extortion attempt by a prostitute. He says that he wasn’t involved with her, and he had been part of a police sting. In any case, he gave her a check with his signature on it, a surpassingly naïve thing for a celebrity to do, even as a favor to the cops. The incident made headlines and CNN dropped him. “I went from making $750,000 a year to working at the Government Printing Office for thirteen bucks an hour, that’s how screwed I was,” he says.
Ailes saved him with a job offer.
“Roger and I go back,” says Beckel. “We did the first Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, on Comedy Central. We hit it off and stayed in touch. In the consulting business you make friends across the lines.”
In 2004, Fox invited Beckel to come on and do a guest spot. “I didn’t have a contract with CNN or anybody else, so I did it,” he says. Ailes turned it into a one-year contract, and he’s kept Beckel there ever since. In 2008, the gig became a full-time job, doing commentary on the Hannity show and, more recently, as the lone liberal member of the panel on The Five. “Roger cast that show as an ensemble—a femme fatale, a brainy woman, a leading man, a comedian, and a Falstaff. That’s me. Falstaff.”
Working at Fox was a difficult social adjustment. “You have to go pretty far to the left to be farther than I am,” says Beckel. “I got shit from all my liberal friends. At one point, some of them actually staged an intervention.”
It didn’t snap him out of it. Beckel stayed at Fox, but he continued to be active in the Democratic Party. One night he was sitting in the bar of the Capital Hilton Hotel when two young men, delegates to the Young Democrats convention, came over and began berating him. “Roger Ailes is worse than fucking Hitler,” one of them said.
“I lost it and put them both on the floor,” says Beckel. “I was embarrassed about this. Shit, I did it sober.”
The story got around Washington and made it to New York. Ailes sent Beckel a giant gift basket with a note: “Thank you for being loyal.” When Ailes saw Beckel at Fox, he took him aside and gave him some advice handed down from Bob Ailes: “When you get into a fight, always go for the thumbs.”
It’s a good thing for Beckel that he earned Ailes’s loyalty, because he has sometimes needed it. “When the show first started, I used the word ‘bullshit’ on the air four or five times. Roger took me aside and said, ‘If you do that again, I’ll put a five-second delay on the show.’ I haven’t done it again.” What he did do, on the Hannity show, was tell a fellow panelist that she didn’t “know what the fuck” she was talking about in a discussion about the efficacy of Head Start. Beckel said he didn’t realize that he was on the air at the time. Another time, referring to commentator Roland Martin’s suspension by CNN, he said, “The black dude got suspended at CNN for saying something on a tweeter, Twitter, twats, twits . . . sorry.” Not many people would get away with saying “bullshit,” “fuck,” and “twat” on a family network and keep their jobs, but Ailes protected him. Not only that, he saved his life. At a festive lunch Ailes hosted to celebrate the success of The Five, Beckel got a shrimp stuck in his throat and began turning blue. Ailes jumped up and pounded him on the back until he could breathe again. “All those years in the bars. I got shot at, stabbed, been in two car wrecks, and Roger saved me from choking on a fucking shrimp.”
“Everybody makes mistakes,” Ailes says. “It’s just human. If it is a pattern, or something done intentionally, that’s different. But you don’t fire anybody over a mistake.” In 2009, on a Mediterranean cruise, Bill Sammon regaled his conservative audience with a tale of inside news making. During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama had famously told ‘Joe the Plumber,’ an Ohio blue-collar voter, that there was nothing wrong with spreading the wealth around. “I have to admit that I went on TV on Fox News and publicly engaged in what I guess was some rather mischievous speculation about whether Barack Obama really advocated socialism, a premise that privately I found rather far-fetched,” Sammon boasted. Fox critics learned about the speech and castigated Sammon for this obvious misuse of his position. There were rumblings in the Fox Washington bureau that Sammon should be replaced as bureau chief. Ailes reprimanded Sammon but he also let it be known that he didn’t consider it a firing offense. (Ailes himself made headlines, in 2012, when he said that comic Jon Stewart had once called himself a “socialist” in a barroom conversation. Ailes was derided by Stewart and others for what they portrayed as an exercise in right-wing witch hunting. Ailes, however, got the last laugh when a tape of Stewart describing himself to Larry King as “a socialist or an independent” turned up on the Internet.) Ailes watches out for his friends, but there are a lot of people out there who have his back, too. Some Friends of Roger are ideological fellow travelers or longtime employees. Others come from far outside what the public imagines his circle to be. People like MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, for example.
Roger and Rachel met at the White House Christmas party in 2009. Maddow was standing alone next to the tree when she saw Ailes break loose from a group of guests and walk in her direction. Maddow is the most provocative and successful cable host outside of Fox, but at that time she had been on the air for less than two years and she was still feeling her way. She also viewed Roger Ailes with considerable trepidation. But he introduced himself with an unanticipated compliment: “You’re not good yet but you have the talent to be good,” he said.
Maddow was intrigued. They struck up a conversation about television production. To her surprise, she found Ailes charming and friendly. The next day the Huffington Post ran a picture of the encounter, and Maddow sent Ailes a note. “I didn’t want him to think that I agreed with the Huffington Post’s implication that this was a scandal,” she says. Ailes sent a note back, assuring her that he had thought no such thing. It was the start of an off-the-record handwritten correspondence between them, mostly on the art of cable news. They didn’t try to change each other’s politics. “I think Roger’s vision is wrong, but he’s the most important Republican in the country,” she says. “The party is like an old Ford Pinto, a hunk of junk, into which he has installed a jet engine.”
“Rachel is good and she will get even better when she discovers that there are people on earth who don’t share every one of her beliefs,” says Ailes.
In March 2012, Maddow published her first book, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power. The jacket featured predictable blurbs by Frank Rich, Glenn Greenwald, and other progressives—and one from Roger Ailes: “Drift never makes the case that war might be necessary. America would be weakened dramatically if we had underreacted to 9/11. However, Rachel Maddow makes valid arguments that our country has been drifting toward questionable wars, draining our resources, without sufficient input and time. People who like Rachel will love the book. People who don’t will get angry, but aggressive debate is good for America. Drift is a book worth reading.”
The endorsement was heartfelt. “I don’t reject a good idea just because it belongs to a liberal,” he says. “Conservatives sometimes underestimate the value of diplomacy. And we need to discuss and seriously vet wars like Vietnam or Libya before plunging in. It’s a point worth considering.”
Ailes enjoyed the surprise he knew his endorsement of Maddow’s book would generate. He also appreciated the opportunity to demonstrate his open-mindedness. He realized that praising Maddow would cause suspicion at MSNBC that he was planning to steal their brightest star. “I don’t want to recruit her but they’ll think I do,” he told me with a grin. “Hell, they’re paranoid over there.” Maddow’s book went to number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and although Ailes didn’t put it there, the publicity surrounding his blurb helped publicize her book. Everybody came out ahead. Once again, Ailes had made the gift of friendship work for him.
Ailes had another surprise up his sleeve. Shortly after he endorsed Maddow’s book, he announced that he had hired a new commentator: Santita Jackson, a Chicago radio talk show host who had recently lost her job. She was looking for a new gig, which her father happened to mention to Roger Ailes. Her father is Jesse Jackson.
“My father and Roger have known and respected one another for forty years,” she told me. “My whole family is very supportive of my coming to Fox. Roger is a very authentic man, and he takes me as I am. It is an opportunity for both of us to broaden the conversation.”
Quite a few bloggers and pundits on the right as well as in the African American community were disconcerted by the fact that Ailes hired Santita Jackson. Few people realized that Jesse Jackson, of all people, is a friend of “Brother Roger.” Fewer know that Santita Jackson is one of Michelle Obama’s closest friends: Jackson is a godmother to Malia Obama. Having her on board at Fox, in an election year, gives Ailes an interesting channel to the White House. It makes Fox more difficult to assault as a bastion of racism. It means that one of the nation’s premier civil rights leaders owes him. And, as an extra bonus, it is sure to cause a little heartburn for Jackson’s chief rival, Al Sharpton. After all, Sharpton has daughters, too.