ZAC’S BOX
On May 15, 2012, Roger Ailes turned seventy-two and received a birthday gift from his greatest rival. CNN’s prime-time shows registered their lowest ratings in fifteen years. In the nine o’clock hour, Hannity outpaced Piers Morgan in the key age demographic of twenty-five to fifty-four by almost ten to one. It was a victory of epic proportions, which Ailes, Beth, and Zac celebrated with a homemade birthday cake.
Not long ago, oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens asked Ailes if he is a billionaire. He isn’t. He works for a living, like his old man did at the Packard factory. That is the way he sees himself, and the way he wants to be seen. “I haven’t ever really had much time for introspection,” he told me. “My life has been mostly about being presented with hard problems and solving them, doing what needs to be done.” These have been other people’s problems. At the Douglas show, “get Ailes” (to fix things) became a crisis-management mantra. He saved the televised Nixon from himself in 1968, showed Ronald Reagan how to protect himself from the ravages of old age on the debate stage in 1988, and produced an ad campaign that enabled George H. W. Bush’s come-from-behind victory in 1988. Corporate CEOs and political aspirants paid him handsomely for troubleshooting and image making. And, finally, Ailes breathed life and vigor (and undreamed-of profitability) into Rupert Murdoch’s hunch that a vast number of Americans wanted a different sort of television news.
Ailes’s contract expires in June 2013, and he fully intends to keep on going at Fox News.† The division of News Corp into two companies complicated the negotiation. Fox Entertainment, which includes Ailes’s domain, is by far the larger and more lucrative, and Ailes wanted to see that expressed in stock as well as salary. Ten months before the target date, he wasn’t sure that he and Murdoch would come to terms. “I’m happy where I am, and this year our profit is very close to a billion dollars,” he said. “But if they can find somebody else who can produce that way, okay, I’ll find another job.”
Ailes is infuriated by press reports that he has no succession plan. “Of course I have one,” he told me. “I would be a very irresponsible executive not to. I don’t know if they will be implemented—that’s not up to me. But the ideas are on paper, and they’ll be there when I go.”
Some people think his legacy may be transient. “When you leave, you leave the keys,” Jack Welch says. “If Rupert leaves too, and a left-leaning Murdoch comes in, it could change a lot of things.”
Ailes agrees that new ownership could make a radical shift, but he finds it highly unlikely.
“Fox News is built on the principle of fair and balanced. An owner who gets away from that would kill it.”
That isn’t likely to happen. Fox News is not just a network; it is an entirely new approach to the news, and its impact goes well beyond the confines of the network. “Not only has Roger changed the way television is done, he has imbued an entire generation of producers with his vision,” says Neil Cavuto. One of them, David Rhodes, who spent twelve years as an Ailes protégé, is now the president of CBS News. And that is just the beginning. The old network pose of “news from nowhere,” which disguised a homogeneous worldview and story selection cribbed from the front page of the New York Times, still exists, but even Ailes concedes that the networks are far more fair-minded than they once were.
“Roger took some charisma and great ideas for shows and worked magic—framing the news in terms that are favorable to the Republicans,” says Rachel Maddow. “I feel that he has won. If the media were left of center before, they aren’t now.”
Some respected liberal media figures like Maddow, Bill Keller, Eric Deggans, and Mark Danner lament this. But a surprising number think that Fox News, by breaking the old monopoly on the news, is a positive development. “Roger gets a bum rap when people say that his network is biased, shallow, and bad for the country,” says Rick Kaplan, who has run both CNN and MSNBC.
Whatever Ailes’s professional legacy, he remains a realist about the cult of personality that has grown up around him at Fox. “Right now, everybody thinks I’m the greatest guy in the world,” he says. “I’m sure you heard that a lot. The eulogies will be great, but people will be stepping over my body before it gets cold. Within a day or two, everybody will be complaining about what a prick I was and all the things I didn’t do for them.” He seemed proud of the cynicism. He always does when he is trying to sound hard-boiled.
• • •
One of the first things I noticed about Roger Ailes is that he has a very acute sense of his own mortality. “I’d give anything for another ten years,” he often says, and typically, he has crunched the numbers.
“My doctor told me that I’m old, fat, and ugly, but none of those things is going to kill me immediately,” he told me shortly before his seventy-second birthday. “The actuaries say I have six to eight years. The best tables give me ten. Three thousand days, more or less.”
I asked if he is afraid to die. “Because of my hemophilia, I’ve been prepared to face death all of my life,” he told me. “As a boy I spent a lot of time in hospitals. My parents had to leave at the end of visiting hours, and I spent a lot of time just lying there in the dark, thinking about the fact that any accident could be dangerous or even fatal. So, I’m ready. Everybody fears the unknown. But I have a strong feeling there’s something bigger than us. I don’t think all this exists because some rocks happened to collide. I’m at peace. When it comes, I’ll be fine, calm. I’ll miss life, though. Especially my family.”
One day in his office, Ailes showed me a photo of Zac in a school play. The boy was made up as Teddy Roosevelt, in a suit and a fake mustache. Ailes studied the picture wistfully. The most painful fact of Ailes’s life is that he isn’t likely to see his son as a grown man. “I never really knew much about my father’s life, what it was really like,” he says. “I’m not going to be here forever and I want Zac to know me.” Recently, he and Beth took Zac, now twelve, back to Warren on a sentimental journey that included dinner with old school friends. “One of the girls there told Zac that I was one of the cool kids,” Ailes said with evident pride. “Don’t know what the hell he made of that.”
Since Zac was four, Ailes has been putting things away for him in memory boxes; there are now nine, stuffed with mementos, personal notes, photos, and messages from Ailes to his son. They are meant to be opened when Ailes is gone. I was curious to see what Ailes was leaving behind. He was reluctant to show me, but he finally brought one of the boxes to his office. I had been expecting an ornate trunk, but it turned out to be nothing more than a large plastic container stuffed with what appeared to be a random assortment of memorabilia. There was a pocket-size copy of the U.S. Constitution in which Ailes wrote, “The founders believed it and so should you”; photos of Zac and Beth on family vacations; an itinerary of their trip to the White House Christmas party; and a sentimental fourteenth-anniversary card from Beth (“It’s important for him to know that his mommy loved his daddy,” Ailes said) on which he had scrawled a note to Zac: “Your mother is a beautiful woman. Always take care of her.” I saw a printed program from a Fourth of July celebration in Garrison in which father and son read patriotic texts aloud, articles and press releases about Ailes’s career, and a couple of biographies of Ronald Reagan. Tossed in with the other stuff was a plain brown envelope that contained $2,000 in cash and a note: “Here’s the allowance I owe you,” which Ailes said was an inside joke sure to make his son smile. There were also a few symbolic gold coins, “just in case everything goes to hell,” he told me. “If you have a little gold and a handgun, you can always get across the Canadian border.” Zac is still too young for a pistol, but he sometimes accompanies his father to the shooting range at West Point for target practice.
At the bottom of the box there was a copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War with paternal advice inscribed on the first page:
Z—
Avoid war if at all possible but never give up your freedom—or your honor. Always stand for what is right.
If absolutely FORCED to fight, then fight with courage and win. Don’t try to win . . . win!
Love,
Dad
Courage. Honor. Freedom. This is a note that could have been written by Rudyard Kipling or Teddy Roosevelt to their sons, a celebration of manly virtues that have long since ceased to be fashionable. They are the virtues Ailes learned in his hardscrabble boyhood in small-town Ohio, and they are what he believes in today; they are the simple residue of a very complicated life.
“This is advice Zac might need to hear from me in ten years and I won’t be here to give it to him,” Ailes said as he closed the box. “I’ve told him, if he has a problem or he feels he needs me, to go off to a quiet place and listen, and he will hear my voice.”
I asked Roger Ailes what he imagined heaven would be like. “I’m pretty sure that God’s got a sense of humor,” he said. “I think he gets a laugh out of me from time to time, so I suppose things will be all right.”
“What if you get there and it turns out that God is a liberal?” I asked.
Ailes paused. It was something that evidently hadn’t occurred to him. “Well, hell, if God’s a liberal, that’s his business,” he said. He paused again, imagining it. “But I doubt very much that he is. He’s got a good heart.” Ailes sat back, pleased with his moment of theological speculation. The hell with his critics here on earth. He has every expectation that when the time comes, he will find himself standing at the seat of judgment before a fair and balanced God.
† In October 2012, he signed a four-year contract with a very substantial raise.