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

experience. After all, he had helped transform Mike Douglas, whose career had been in a death spiral when the show debuted, into a national celebrity. Price wanted Ailes to do the same for Nixon, and for the same kind of audience. Nixon had a famously conflicted relationship with TV, having exploited the medium brilliantly with the Checkers speech, but having been destroyed by it in the 1960 Kennedy debates.
    Ailes fit seamlessly into the culture of the Nixon campaign, partly because his life story had an uncanny symmetry with Nixon’s: both grew up poor and both took from childhood an indefatigable drive to acquire power.“He’s got guts, he’s tough,” Ailes later said of Nixon. “He picked himself up by the bootstraps two or three times and came back and won the prize.” Perhaps more than anything else, Nixon and Ailes both thought of themselves as men who got things done.“Nixon’s a doer, not a talker,” Ailes said.
    Ailes would later tell a
Washington Post
reporter that there was no other politician in the twentieth century he would have wanted to work for more than Nixon. When Price and Ailes met for lunch, the soft launch of Nixon’s new media strategy had already begun.In New Hampshire, the campaign was airing five-minute television advertisements, in which Nixon conversed naturally with state voters in schoolrooms, firehouses, and community centers. The traveling press pool was barred from attending these staged events. When reporters howled, Garment and his team simply ignored them. Nixon crushed his opponents in New Hampshire,winning the primary with a seven-to-one margin over Nelson Rockefeller, then a write-in candidate.
    Ailes’s main assignment would begin in the fall and it would be far more audacious than the five-minute New Hampshire experiment. Garment and Price tasked him with producing a series of one-hour town halls in cities across the country—meetings designed to showcase Nixon engaging with a panel of citizen interviewers. They were also designed to blow the padlocks off the gates to the national media. To the viewer at home, it would seem like Nixon was risking it all by answering difficult questions on live television when in fact,as Garment later wrote, “the chances of a case-hardened politician like Nixon stumbling seriously over any question was near zero.” The black and white world of newspapers was the past. And Nixon, with a much better makeup team, was going to be a man of his time.
    I t still stunned many that Nixon was attempting another run. Less than six years earlier, he had been left for dead, after an embarrassing failed run for governor of California, his home state. For this injustice Nixon blamed the national press.“For sixteen years, ever since the [Alger] Hiss case, you’ve had a lot of fun,” the former vice president said in his self-pitying concession speech at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in November 1962. He concluded his remarks with a challenge to the assembled journalists: “If they’re against a candidate, give him the shaft,” he said, “but also recognize if they give him the shaft, put one lonely reporter on the campaign who will report what the candidate says now and then.”Five days after the election, ABC broadcast a thirty-minute documentary titled
The Political Obituary of Richard M. Nixon
.
    But Nixon—who joined Mudge, Rose as a consultant in February 1963, soon became a partner, and toyed with the notion of becoming commissioner of baseball—wasn’t quite dead.The man who revived him was Len Garment. A Brooklyn-born trial lawyer, Democrat, and jazz saxophonist, Garment became Nixon’s all-purpose adviser and fixer, and helped smooth Nixon’s entry into the cloistered halls of Manhattan society. His main task was to assemble a crop of fresh faces for Nixon’s new political team.“This game is all about youth,” Dwight Chapin said. In addition to Ray Price, there was a fast-talking New York publicist named Bill Safire, and a