The loudest voice in the room How the brilliant, bombastic Roger Ailes built Fox News--and divided a country

TWENTY YEARS AGO, my wife and I bought a weekend house in the town of Garrison, N.Y., in the lower Hudson Valley. We love the place for its scenic beauty, its peace and quiet, and its old-fashioned sense of community. For us, it's a refuge from the pace of city life, a place with an easygoing mix of lifestyles and a widely shared ethos about preserving what makes it special. A few years ago, we found ourselves with a new neighbor. Roger Ailes, the chief executive of Fox News, seemed to be looking for something different when he moved to Garrison: not an escape, but a new arena for conflict. He bought the soothing local weekly, The Putnam County News & Recorder; named his wife, Elizabeth, publisher; and set about transforming it into The New York Post with field hockey scores. He fortified his hilltop property by buying up surrounding homes and installing an underground bunker with six months of survival rations. He began appearing at local meetings, Gabriel Sherman writes in his new book, with bodyguard and lawyer in tow, demanding to be heard in opposition to a zoning plan intended to limit future development. He drafted Republican candidates to run for town offices. According to "The Loudest Voice in the Room," Ailes dealt with Richard Shea, the well-liked and, as it turned out, impossible-to-intimidate supervisor of the small encompassing jurisdiction of Philipstown, by threatening, "I will destroy your life." Shea is a born-and-bred local who runs a contracting business - precisely the kind of "little guy" Ailes claimed to be representing against environmental elitists. Others who crossed the Aileses, Sherman tells us, reported being threatened with lawsuits or Fox News trucks at their doorsteps, or in one case, being trailed by News Corporation security officers. Without the restraining influences of his parent company, Ailes has acted out in ways that terrified even his minions. Sherman says a young conservative who was imported to edit The News & Recorder became so frightened by Ailes's surveillance of the staff and creepy personal comments that he quit and fled town. His replacement as editor, a destitute man's Sean Hannity, continues to denounce critics as "anarchists" and "anti-Christian." Garrison is the key to understanding Ailes because it's a microcosm of what he's spent his career doing to the country. He could have moved there to live and let live. Instead, in a way that seems to have been almost involuntary, he recapitulated the culture war he was already busily inciting at a national level. Within a short time of his arrival, town meetings turned ugly. Issues of patriotism, religion and political correctness overtook the normal debates about road paving and property taxes. Single-handedly and almost instantaneously, he injected a peaceable civic space with an aggression and unpleasantness that weren't there before. what drives this need to create conflict? In his actually fair and balanced, carefully documented biography, Sherman, a contributing editor at New York magazine, struggles to come up with an answer. (He does so, it bears noting, without the cooperation of his subject, who set a new benchmark for biographical obstruction by working with the journalist Zev Chafets to rush a more sympathetic portrayal out first.) Ailes's father, who was abandoned by a father with a degree from Harvard, spent his career working as a foreman in the maintenance department at Packard Electric, an automotive manufacturer. But Ailes himself grew up cared and provided for in an intact family in the middle-class town of Warren, Ohio. A diagnosis of hemophilia made his parents think he was living on borrowed time. But he was encouraged not to let the disability stand in his way, and for the most part it didn't. His father had a cruel streak, which led to a divorce from his less-than-affectionate mother, but not until after Roger and his older brother - who did speak to Sherman - had gone away to college. His rise was not based on ideology, but on a fierce drive to get ahead that coincided with an era of conservative ascendancy. Working for "The Mike Douglas Show," a daytime variety program, in the 1960s, Ailes climbed quickly up the greasy pole from $68-a-week prop boy to executive producer. He played a jagged-edged game of office politics, to be sure, but also benefited from the unexpected candor he directed at the talent. At one point, he brought Douglas to the brink of tears when he told him he'd been too sycophantic toward Sammy Davis Jr. The 27-year-old Ailes used Richard Nixon's appearance as a guest in early 1968 as an opportunity to let the presidential candidate-in-waiting know that he badly needed a media adviser, and to offer his services. Ailes applied his talk-show expertise to humanize the "New Nixon." He presented the candidate in flattering, phony town-hall settings, fed him jokes and warned cameramen never to shoot him from above. His biggest stroke of fortune was that a liberal columnist friend at The Philadelphia Inquirer, Joe McGinniss, was writing a book about the campaign. "The Selling of the President," published in 1969, cast Ailes as the profane genius who showed Nixon how to use TV. In part because of the suspicion his unauthorized cooperation with McGinniss engendered, he never made it into Nixon's inner circle, which was another stroke of luck. But the book opened up a lucrative new career as a media consultant. In Sherman's telling, Ailes was driven more by money than by any fixed set of political beliefs. As late as 1972, he was willing to work for Democrats. Putting out his shingle as a theatrical producer, he brought an eco-musical called "Mother Earth" to Broadway for the briefest of runs. He took Robert Kennedy Jr. to Africa to make a wildlife documentary and staged "The Hot 1 Baltimore," a Lanford Wilson play about down-and-outs. His identification with the right was mostly a matter of opportunities. One was a job working for TVN, a Joseph Coors-backed attempt to create a conservative news alternative that served as a dry run for what Ailes did two decades later at Fox. Another was producing attention-getting, often dishonest attack ads for Republican Senate candidates like Dan Quayle, Phil Gramm and Mitch McConnell. Ailes continued to deploy frankness as a comparative advantage in finding work. "Jesus, nobody likes you," he told Alfonse D'Amato on their first meeting. "Your own mother wouldn't vote for you. Do you even have a mother?" His media-consulting career culminated in George H. W. Bush's attacks on Michael Dukakis. Ailes asserts to this day he had nothing to do with the infamous Willie Horton spot. (Coordination with the independent expenditure campaign that financed the ad would have been illegal.) After 1988, he swore he was done with politics and got hired to run the nascent CNBC network. His management there was a story that has become familiar: brilliant ratings accompanied by diatribes, threats and conflicts of interest (Philip Morris kept him on retainer). NBC ultimately forced him out, in part, Sherman suggests, for an alleged anti-Semitic insult against David Zaslav, a colleague who supported the creation of MSNBC as an alternative to the cable channel America's Talking, which was Ailes's pet project. (Zaslav now denies the story.) in any event, there's little reason to think Ailes has a problem with Jews; he's simply a rage-a-holic who can't control himself. Sherman says that it bothers Ailes to be the object of so much hatred, but that he can't help provoking it. As he once told his friend McGinniss: "I'm walking around, and I feel just all this anger. I can't figure out where it's coming from." After Rupert Murdoch gave him the keys to Fox News, Ailes had a 24-hour megaphone to express both his personal feelings and his populist views. He stood by Glenn Beck's assertion that President Obama harbors a "deep-seated hatred for white people." But Ailes's own preferred style of smear is a shade more oblique: not a direct accusation, but a screen graphic posing the question "Is Obama a socialist?" The respective weight of Fox's ideological and commercial motives remains a topic for debate. Manufactured indignation (the "War on Christmas," "Obama's Czars," "the Ground Zero Mosque") drives viewership, especially when performed for a mostly male audience by leggy blond anchors. At one level, Fox's victimhood pose is obviously disingenuous; Murdoch has always played the outrage game to drive circulation and ratings. His most valuable player, on the other hand, seems to be genuinely seething with resentment, often at his friends as much as his enemies. Another pattern of his is to build up Frankenstein monsters, like Beck, Hannity and Bill O'Reilly, and then decry their ingratitude. Fox's populism is so clearly an expression of his authentic feelings that it's hard to see it as purely cynical. How valuable is Ailes's wrath to Murdoch? With Fox News generating $1 billion a year in profits, valuable enough for Ailes to win a power struggle with Rupert's son Lachlan, who fled to Australia in defeat. What he is not is a strategic conservative thinker. Intent on helping Republicans take back the White House in 2012, Ailes effectively sabotaged them by giving unlimited airtime to fringe figures like Rick Santorum, Sarah Palin and Herman Cain during primary season. Having weathered this freak show through the primaries, Mitt Romney couldn't shake the Fox News taint. For those who fear the paranoiac playground bully depicted in Sherman's account, Garrison offers an encouraging message. The town has rejected his takeover bid. The Putnam County News & Recorder now faces competition from The Philipstown Paper, which does not run headlines like "Ailes Helps Raise $1.6M for Charity; Hailed as 'Angel.'" In 2011, Richard Shea beat back an Ailes-financed challenger. In November, Shea was re-elected again. This time, Ailes didn't bother to field an opponent. 'I'm walking around, and I feel ... all this anger. I can't figure out where it's coming from.' JACOB WEISBERG is the chairman of the Slate Group and the author of "The Bush Tragedy."

Eye-opening biography of the would-be political kingmaker and Fox News mastermind. The subject of New York contributing editor Sherman's debut book, Roger Ailes, is said to be deeply unhappy with his portrait hereand for good reason. Ailes has said that his foes perceive him as "paranoid, right-wing [and] fat." Leaving aside the physical, he certainly emerges here as right-wing in the neoconservative, self-interested way of the arriviste as opposed to the old-republic conservative of his small-town Midwestern ideal. By Sherman's account, Ailes openly feared that his greatest bugaboo, Barack Obama, was going to put him in a prison camp after being re-elected. It seems certain that Ailes is an unpleasant customer, powerful enough to frighten Karl Rove into submission, quick to criticize his bevy of breast-shaking on-screen blondes for not being stunning enough (of one-time Miss America Gretchen Carlson, Sherman writes, Ailes said, "It must not have been a good year"). Sherman lingers on the unpleasant details, to be sure, but he charts the larger picture of the self-made man who is convinced that only he and a narrow number of his allies are worthy of the benefits of the free market and who has mastered the arts of TV and fabulation. Yet, even there, Ailes has not been entirely successful: For all his efforts, he never could make his first big media experiment, Richard Nixon, come off as likable, and the tea party that he helped create has apparently sent his vaunted permanent Republican majority off the rails. Yet Fox continues to hold a large market share and shape the political argument in this country, so for all his missteps (Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin et al.), Ailes promises to remain a player on the national scene, even if Sherman suggests that his dominance is coming to an end. A well-reported, engaging book. A bonus: Bill O'Reilly won't like it, either. Politics and media junkies, on the other hand, will have a field day.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

THE RAW MATERIALS FOR ROGER AILES'S MYTH of an America in danger of being lost come from his hometown of Warren, in the northeastern corner of Ohio. In the late 1800s, Warren became a center of trade and manufacturing, a city that worked. The town of six thousand boasted five newspapers, seven churches, and three banks. In 1890, two sons of Warren founded the Packard Electric Company, which would one day employ Roger's father. They produced the first Packard motorcar in their Warren factory in 1899, and made Warren's streets the first in America to be illuminated by incandescent light. Through the twentieth century, the company's growth was spurred by deposits of coal and iron ore in the Mahoning Valley. The region became one of the largest steel manufacturers in the country.   In 1932, the General Motors Corporation acquired Packard Electric to manufacture cables for its automobiles. Roger's father, who had been working at the plant since around the time of the 1929 stock market crash, held on to his job under the new management. Packard continued to thrive, as did the rest of Warren. In 1936, Neil Armstrong, age five, went for his first airplane ride in Warren in a Ford Tri-Motor. After World War II, Warren's industries boomed, and throughout the middle part of the last century it was a seat of limitless American potential.   That was the world into which Roger Eugene Ailes was born, on May 15, 1940. Warren residents earned incomes that were nearly 30 percent above the national average, redefining the middle class in ways that still have painful resonance today. "There were no slums," recalled Ailes's childhood friend Launa Newman. Warren, like blue-collar towns across postwar America, had been built on a benevolent compact between management and labor, which spread prosperity widely, as long as profits were growing. Packard, which employed six thousand workers in 1953, was like a city unto itself. It had its own newspaper, the Cablegram, and sponsored annual picnics for tens of thousands, where kids competed in pie-eating contests and lucky penny scrambles. The career of Roger's father, Robert Sr., who rose to the rank of foreman in the maintenance department, benefited from this arrangement. He raised his children in a tidy home on Belmont Street, with enough yard for his prized tomato garden and the family beagle hound, Tip. He worked for forty years at the company, retired in 1969 in his early sixties, and lived the last years of his life on a company pension.   Warren was a labor stronghold, but there were conservative currents coursing through the city's politics. Growing up in the 1920s, Robert Ailes Sr. was drawn toward them. He recoiled from unions. To him, they were arbitrary, often rewarding people who were undeserving. At the Packard plant, Robert was considered management, and thus excluded from the benefits of joining the union. But without a college degree he had no chance to advance into the corporate hierarchy. "I never could understand why he'd ever be a Republican. Ninety-nine percent of the people who came up through the school of hard knocks were Democrats," his son Robert Jr. said. His conservatism was a reaction against those who got breaks he never did, and his resentments consumed him.   Robert Sr. came of age at a time in which Warren was engaged in a culture war brought on by increasing ethnic and racial discord. Rapid industrialization brought waves of immigrants--Hungarians, Romanians, Italians, Yugoslavians, Greeks--to northeast Ohio. They came in search of work in the mills. In Warren, the immigrants lived in the Flats, a scruffy neighborhood by the rail depot. It was the Prohibition era, and corruption bloomed. The foreigners operated betting parlors and speakeasies--"vice dens"--in the back rooms of social clubs in the Flats. The city's Protestants blamed the newcomers, many of whom were Catholics and Orthodox Christians, for subverting their efforts to curtail bootlegging. One minister complained to the Dry Enforcement League that the county was "rich enough to lock up every bootlegger," but refused to do so.   As an adult, Robert joined Freemasonry, a fraternal organization that also stood up against the city's changing character. Robert devoted himself to the Masons. He became a 32nd-degree master and served for twenty-five years as chaplain of the Carroll F. Clapp Lodge in Warren. As a Master Mason, he was given entrée into an affiliated body called the Mystic Order of Veiled Prophets, for which he served as Shriner and Past Monarch. The organizations were the pride of his career. They gave him the titles and the respect he was denied at Packard. His wife complained that he spent far too many hours at the lodge. "One of his disappointments in life was that Roger and I didn't become Masons," Robert Jr. recalled.   Robert Sr. and his wife, Donna, met at church. She was a famous beauty, lithe, nine years younger than he, with brown hair and wide-set eyes. She had come to Warren from Parkersburg, West Virginia, when she was less than a year old. Her father, James Arley Cunningham, who lacked a high school diploma, sought work in the local steel industry. He was a religious man, who took his family to the fervent Evangelical United Brethren Church every Sunday. "They didn't believe in movies or dancing," Roger said. Robert and Donna had a swift courtship, and less than a year into their marriage she became pregnant with Robert Jr.   When Roger Ailes spoke of Warren, he invoked a small-town idyll, a lost American dream, but those images were only part of his childhood story, one in which tenebrous parts were edited out. The difficulties started with his illness. At the age of two, not long after learning to walk, Roger fell and bit his tongue. His parents couldn't stop the bleeding. Terrified, they rushed him to Trumbull Memorial Hospital. A doctor diagnosed their child with hemophilia, a genetic disorder that hinders the ability of the body's blood to clot. There was no cure for the little-understood condition. "Well, you died. That's what you knew about it," Roger later recalled. "I was told many times I wasn't going to make it." "The treatment for hemophilia back then was terribly crude," remembered Robert Jr., who would become a doctor. Their parents did what they could to keep Roger out of trouble, protecting him from uneven stretches of sidewalk where he could trip and scrape his knee, and from getting into backyard scuffles. The average life expectancy of a severe hemophiliac at the time was eleven years.   Notwithstanding his hemophilia, or perhaps in angry defiance of it, Roger had an incongruous physical boldness, with sometimes dire consequences. In grade school, when his parents weren't looking, Roger sneaked up onto the roof of his family's garage. He jumped to the ground and bit his tongue on impact. His father rushed him to Trumbull Memorial. This time the doctors there were unable to help him. "I heard the doctor say--I wasn't sure what it meant, but I heard him say, 'We really can't do anything,' " Roger said. His father, a short, obstinate man, pugnacious by nature, refused to give up. Robert Jr. remembered the incident vividly: "My dad bundled Roger in a blanket and put him in the family Chevy and drove to the Cleveland Clinic." Driving eighty miles an hour down Route 422, they were soon stopped by a state police car.   "Look, my son's bleeding. We've got to get to the hospital," Robert pleaded to a man in a Mountie hat standing outside his window.   The trooper looked at the boy wrapped in a blood-stained blanket in the backseat. "Get behind me," he said and escorted them, his lights flashing the rest of the way to Cleveland.   A whole crew of Robert's work friends, who had names like "Dirty Neck Watson," went to the hospital to donate their blood. Many were so filthy that the doctors had to scrub them down before they gave Roger a direct blood transfusion from their arms to his. "Well, son," his father said after he pulled through. "You have a lot of blue-collar blood in you. Never forget that."   The hospital traumatized the young boy, and the threat of returning there denied him many of the pleasures of childhood. "Roger told me one time, when he was really young, he was suspended upside down for hours at the hospital to keep the blood from pooling in dangerous ways," Launa Newman said. During recess, Roger often sat at his desk as the other kids played outside. But after school hours, his teacher could not stop him from playing touch football and sandlot baseball. "He participated until he got so black-and-blue he couldn't move," his brother said.   Simply walking to and from school was hazardous. A passing car clipped him once when he was in the second grade, an accident that landed him back in the hospital. "What saved me was a little square lunch box that I had," Roger said. "He hit the lunchbox and I flew into the air and into the curb." On another occasion, some neighborhood boys roughed him up on his walk home. "My dad, I saw tears in his eyes for the first time," Roger recalled. "I'd never seen it. And he said, 'That's never going to happen to you again.' " Excerpted from The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--and Divided a Country by Gabriel Sherman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.