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

running for Congress in a Houston district that had only elected Democrats. Treleaven theorized that persuading voters depended more on a candidate’s image than articulating positions on particular issues.“Political candidates are celebrities … and today with television taking them into everybody’s home right along with Johnny Carson and Batman, they’re more of a public attraction than ever,” he wrote in a report. Interviewing Texas voters, Treleaven discovered that they liked Bush personally, even if they were vague on where he stood politically. So he created a character for Bush to inhabit: the hardworking underdog.In his TV spots, Treleaven presented Bush—the pedigreed product of Greenwich, Andover, and Yale—as a homespun Texan amiably strolling dusty streets with his blazer slung casually over his shoulder and his shirtsleeves rolled up. It worked. Bush won comfortably, and Treleaven came aboard the Nixon campaign.
    Price acted as Garment’s media theoretician, deepening and enriching his concepts. In late November 1967, Price circulated a strategy memo drawing on the ideas ofMarshall McLuhan’s 1964 book
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
. In his chapter “Television: The Timid Giant,” McLuhan commented on Nixon’s 1963 appearance on
The Jack Paar Show
, in which he performed a work he had composed for the piano. “Instead of the slick, glib, legal Nixon, we saw the doggedly creative and modest performer,” McLuhan wrote. “A few timely touches like this would have quite altered the result of the Kennedy-Nixon campaign.”Price’s assumption was that in the age of television, humans inhabited multiple realities—the two most salient being the reality that actually existed and the reality burned onto a cathode ray tube. Since 99 percent of voters would never meet the candidate in person, Price was convinced that the only reality they would ever know was the one on their television screens. “It’s not what’s
there
that counts,” Price wrote. “It’s what’s projected—and, carrying it one step further, it’s not what
he
projects but rather what the voter receives.” Television was the only reality that mattered to swaying the minds of millions of voters. “It’s not the man we have to change, but rather the
received impression
.”
    Price argued that Nixon could win if the campaign made the audience
feel
differently about their candidate. “Politics is much more emotional than it is rational, and this is particularly true of presidentialpolitics,” Price wrote, adding, “Potential presidents are measured against an ideal that’s a combination of leading man, God, father, hero, pope, king, with maybe just a touch of the avenging Furies thrown in.” As Treleaven had done for Bush, Price drew up a character sketch for Nixon. The campaign would cast him as “the kind of man proud parents would ideally want their sons to grow up to be: a man who embodies the national ideal, its aspirations, its dreams, a man whose
image
the people want in their homes as a source of inspiration, and whose voice they want as the representative of their nation in the councils of the world, and of their generation in the pages of history.” Pulling this off would require some deception. “The TV medium itself introduces an element of distortion, in terms both of its effect on the candidate and of the often subliminal ways in which the image is received,” Price wrote. “And it inevitably is going to convey a partial image—thus ours is the task of finding how to control its use so the part that gets across is the part we want to have gotten across.”
    Roger Ailes would be responsible for executing this vision, transplanting his talk show techniques to the business of electing a president.
    T he legend of Roger Ailes has it that he almost single-handedly transformed Nixon from a schlump to a president with his talk-show alchemy. But the truth was more complicated. In many ways, Ailes