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

perhaps a Connie Francis soundtrack. “It might give us a classy ‘standard’ opening to use,” he wrote.
    On September 18, McGinniss and Ailes arrived in Philadelphia two days ahead of the candidate. Ailes loved to ham it up for McGinniss’s notebook.“He never forgot I was writing,” McGinniss later said. Ailes’s mordant one-liners about Nixon’s running mate, Spiro Agnew, were especiallybold:“We’re doing all right,” he told McGinniss. “If we could only get someone to play Hide The Greek.”
    Although his home in the suburbs was just ten miles from the studio, Ailes was staying at the Marriott Motor Hotel. Things were not going well with Marjorie. He had been on the road for six weeks working eighteen hours a day and the pace of the campaign was naturally pulling them apart. In Philadelphia, Ailes wanted to push the envelope. The previous taping in California had been flat—the panelists asked stale questions. Ailes wanted to scramble the cast.“Nixon gets bored by the same kind of people,” he said. “We’ve got to screw around with this one a little bit.” Dan Buser, an assistant from the local Republican Party, recommended the head of a black community group as a panelist.
    “And he is black,” Buser added.
    “What do you mean, he’s black?” Ailes asked.
    “I mean he’s dark. It will be obvious on television that he’s not white.”
    “You mean we won’t have to put a sign around him that says, ‘This is our Negro’?”
    Ailes booked him. McGinniss suggested the name of a political reporter, who Ailes found out was also black.
    “Oh, shit, we can’t have two. Even in Philadelphia.”
    The panel was almost complete. He had secured an Italian lawyer from Pittsburgh, a suburban housewife, a Wharton student, a Camden newsman, and a raspy-voiced radio and TV commentator named Jack McKinney. That left one open slot. As Ailes sat with McGinniss eating room service, Ailes told his friend just what he wanted. “A good, mean, Wallaceite cab driver. Wouldn’t that be great? Some guy to sit there and say, ‘Awright, mac, what about these niggers?’ ” Ailes went on: “A lot of people think Nixon is dull. They think he’s a bore, a pain in the ass. They look at him as the kind of kid who always carried a bookbag. Who was forty-two years old the day he was born.… Now you put him on television, you’ve got a problem right away. He’s a funny-looking guy. He looks like somebody hung him in a closet overnight and he jumps out in the morning with his suit all bunched up and starts running around saying, ‘I want to be president.’ I mean this is how he strikes some people. That’s why these shows are important. To make them forget all that.”
    The Philadelphia taping was scheduled to begin at 7:30 the next evening. Ailes showed up at the studio at 2:00 in a fighting mood. “I’m going to fire this fucking director!” he snarled. The camera placements were all off. He needed close-ups of individual audience members. Having multiplepeople in every shot was dated 1940s direction. “I want to see faces,” he said. “I want to see pores. That’s what people are. That’s what television is.”
    The director protested. “I don’t want to hear that shit!” Ailes said. “I told you what I wanted, and it’s your job to give it to me.”
    “He’s crazy,” the director later told McGinniss. “He says he wants close-ups, it’s like saying he wants to go to the moon.” (After the show, Ailes fired him.)
    The evening show would be the fourth panel Nixon had done, on top of the thirty-minute “Nixon Answer” specials. But Roger Ailes was about to teach Nixon a lesson: the best television is unpredictable television.
    Jack McKinney set the tone for the evening. His demeanor was decidedly unfriendly.He questioned why Nixon was being so evasive on his Vietnam position, noting that in 1952 the candidate had made partisan remarks about the political situation in Korea. Nixon