The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--And Divided a Country by Gabriel Sherman

“Well, first, Mr. Saunders,” he said, “I’m quite aware of this fact that law and order, I think the term that I’ve heard used, is a code word, a code word for basically racism.” Then he pivoted to one of his prepared points: past injustices never justified lawbreaking. “I have often said you cannot have order unless you have justice. You cannot have order unless you have progress. Because order without progress, if you just stifle the dissent, if you just stifle the progress, you’re going to have an explosion, and you’re going to have disorder. On the other hand, you can’t have progress without order because when you have disorder—
revolution
—what you do is you destroy all the progress.”
    The director caught a reaction shot from Ed Brooke, the black Massachusetts senator, who was seated in the front row next to Pat Nixon. Then it was back to the candidate: “The greatness of America, with few exceptions, over the period of our history, is that we have had the combination of having a system in which we could have peaceful change, peaceful progress, with order. Now that’s what I want for America.”
    The virtually all-white audience responded with ecstatic applause. This well-run talk show was a microcosm of the civil society Nixon and his team were trying to sell.
    Nixon sailed through the rest of the broadcast. He spoke of ending the war and building “bridges to human dignity” and getting “this country on a sound basis again.”
    At the fifty-five-minute mark, Wilkinson spoke up. “I’m very sorry I have to interrupt this very interesting discussion, but our time is running short.”
    Nixon asked Wilkinson if Mary Frances Squires, the housewife, could have one more question.
    “I never like to cut off a lady, you know,” Nixon said. On cue: more laughs.
    Squires wanted to know if Nixon favored releasing the names of POWs held in Vietnam. “If it doesn’t involve the security of the country,there’s no excuse whatever for that kind of retention of information,” he said. “I will certainly look into it.”
    The final question of the night came from Wilkinson. “I wonder if definite plans have been set for Julie and David’s wedding?”
    The camera held on Julie Nixon and David Eisenhower grinning and squirming in their seats.
    “That is confidential information,” Nixon replied, with mock conspiracy.
    The audience tittered. It was the payoff, just like one on
The Mike Douglas Show
.
    T he next morning, Ailes reviewed tape of Nixon’s performance. On the Douglas set, Ailes’s perfectionist streak would often cause him to feel down immediately after the taping. But watching the footage of Nixon in Chicago reassured him that Nixon had delivered.“Mr. Nixon is strong now on television and has good control of the situation,” Ailes wrote in a memo to Garment and Shakespeare. “He looks good on his feet and shooting ‘in the round’ gives dimension to him.… The ‘arena effect’ is excellent and he plays well to all areas. The look has ‘guts.’ ”
    Nixon would tape three more panels that month. The next stops were Cleveland and Los Angeles, whereNixon made a four-second taped appearance on
Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In
. (“Sock it to
me
?” he deadpanned.)Ailes had already developed more than two dozen ideas to improve the Man in the Arena shows, which he delivered to Garment and Shakespeare. To play to the home audience, Nixon had to speak more directly into the camera. Because he would sweat under the hot studio lights, the air-conditioning needed to be turned up to the max at least four hours before his arrival. His deep-set eyes benefited from slightly whiter makeup applied to his upper eyelids. Ailes had timed all twenty of Nixon’s answers: “Some … are still too long and over half tended to be the same length,” he explained. Nixon needed “memorable phrases to use in wrapping up certain points.” Ailes also recommended more applause and more music,