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

young
Fortune
writer named Dick Whalen. Garment brought experienced hands on-deck, too, convincing municipal bond lawyer John Mitchell to sign on as campaign manager.
    Nixon himself grasped how to channel his bitterness at his treatment by the media and the wider culture into the wellspring of his political strength. In the mid-1960s, many Americans believed that the culture was out of control, that it had lost touch with traditional values, that it had stopped listening to the wisest among them—men like Nixon himself. To counteract the excesses of the youth movement, the culture needed a dose of adulthood. Nixon called his sober prescription “law and order”—a triangulation between Lyndon Johnson’s coddling liberalism and Barry Goldwater’s reactionary conservatism. Nixon wagered that, having put ideological purity ahead of reason, the Republican Party would return to its senses and see value in his familiar visage.After he campaigned for eighty-six Republican candidates in thirty-five states during the 1966 election, nearly two thirds of them won.
    Though Len Garment eagerly talked up a Nixon resurrection—“The man and the times have finally come together,” he said—few believed him. In the wider public imagination, Dick Nixon was still a sad joke. A paradox struck Garment: in person, Nixon came across as confident and jocular. On television, Americans saw a diffident, humorless pol. Garment realized that all the talk about the “New Nixon” and the “Old Nixon” missed the point entirely. There was only one Nixon. But a hostile press establishment and the unforgiving lens of the television camera had prevented the voters from seeing the real man. His mission in 1968 was to highlight the positive aspects of Nixon’s personality that had been obscured. Television, therefore, was not just a tactical consideration. It was a matter of strategic importance.
    The hardest part of the job may have been convincing Nixon himself of this truth. Television was at the top of Nixon’s list of resentments. To him, the Big Three networks were another tool the liberals on the East Coast had at their disposal to punish deserving men like himself. Nevertheless, he was determined to master the medium as he had mastered every other challenge in his life: with sedulous work and brute force.Harry Robbins Haldeman, the former J. Walter Thompson ad man with a famous buzz cut and athletic good looks, articulated the way forward. Bob, as he was known to friends, reasoned that one report on the nightly news would reach more people in an instant than the campaign could reach in ten months of stump speeches.“The time has come for political campaigning, its techniques and strategies, to move out of the dark ages and into the brave new world of the omnipresent eye,” he wrote.
    In the summer of 1967, Nixon sought out television advice from all over. Ed McMahon went to his office at 810 Fifth Avenue to help him prepare for his appearance on the Johnny Carson show, where the question of his presidential intentions was bound to be asked.In July, Nixon also took a meeting with Frank Shakespeare, the president of CBS Television. During a ninety-minute meeting at Nixon’s office, Shakespeare evangelized for the new religion of television.An ardent conservative, Shakespeare first considered working for Ronald Reagan until deciding that Reagan was too inexperienced. After the meeting, Nixon told Garment to hire him.
    Several weeks later, Garment ran into his summer neighbor Harry Treleaven, who would also become an important Ailes teacher, on the beach near his cottage in Amagansett, on Long Island. Treleaven had spent eighteen years at J. Walter Thompson and was the creative mind behind thecampaigns for such mid-century icons as Ford, Pan Am, and Singer.In 1966, Treleaven took a leave from J. Walter Thompson to go to Texas, where he produced advertising for the long-shot campaign of George H. W. Bush, a forty-two-year-old Republican