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

winced.
    “It was really a question, I think, of the timing,” he replied defensively. “As a potential president of the United States, anything that I say would be interpreted by the enemy in Hanoi as an indication they would wait for me rather than discuss with the man we have as president.”
    The camera captured a woman wearing a gold dress glowering at McKinney.
    Twenty minutes later, the floor returned to him. McKinney repeated a charge made by Humphrey: why had Nixon refused to appear on national political programs like
Face the Nation
where he would be interviewed by professionals and not by amateurs in a room full of Republicans ready to intimidate any questioner who sought to ask a tough question?
    In the control room, Ailes’s experiment was playing poorly. “The guy’s making a speech!” Frank Shakespeare yelled. Ailes reached for the phone to tell Wilkinson to cut McKinney off, but he stopped before that was necessary.
    Nixon stared down his accuser. “You talk about these quiz shows that take place on Sundays. I’ve done
Meet the Press
and
Face the Nation
until they were running out of my ears.”
    It was the exact image that Ailes wanted to create: Nixon was taking it and fighting back.
    “That socks it to him, Dickie Baby!” Shakespeare said.
    Later in the taping, another guest asked Nixon why, in 1965, he had called for the ouster of a Marxist professor at Rutgers. Insisting that he knew the facts, Nixon explained that on campus the professor had calledfor the victory of the Vietcong over American troops in Vietnam. When the questioning returned to McKinney, he went at Nixon one more time.
    Referring to the Rutgers professor, he said, “When you said you knew the story, you did not give it in full context. He did not call for a victory of the Vietcong, he referred to what he recognized as the impending victory—”
    Nixon cut him off abruptly. “And he said—and I quote him exactly—‘I welcome that victory.’ He used that word.”
    The crowd broke into applause.
    McKinney replied, “I think there’s a critical difference—”
    And got cut off again by the candidate: “You think there’s a difference between welcome or calling for?”
    McKinney did not get it. That kind of nuance mattered in print journalism, not television. Television was about emotion. The audience did not care that Nixon had fudged a few words. What they saw was the candidate telling a sanctimonious newsman that some Commie professor had no right to say nice things about the enemy killing American teenagers.
    After the taping, McKinney complained to reporters, “I don’t think you can finalize a question with an applause-getting technique.”
    The Philadelphia panel was a step forward in political communication.“Mr. Nixon came off the undisputed winner in the McKinney questioning,” Ailes later wrote in a memo to Garment and Shakespeare. “The audience sympathy was with him (McKinney was not likeable) … and when he ‘turned it over to the television audience’ to decide the semantics of ‘call for’ or ‘welcome’ victory by the Vietcong, it showed the strongest use of and confidence in television I’ve ever seen.” In a way, Ailes had manipulated Nixon into delivering the performance he wanted.“Boy, is he going to be pissed,” he told McGinniss. “He’ll think we really tried to screw him.”
    On his way out that evening, Ailes bumped into Pat Nixon in the elevator. She greeted him with pursed lips.
    “Everyone seems to think it was by far the best,” Ailes declared. Mrs. Nixon did not say a word.
    A fter Philadelphia, Ailes found himself working under a Nixon team that was increasingly reluctant to indulge his freewheeling vision. He was a television risk taker among political operatives who were becoming risk-averse. The ground was moving beneath their feet.On September 30, Humphrey called for a unilateral halt to bombing as “an acceptable riskfor peace,” and the antiwar tides flowed in