Free Roger Ailes: Off Camera by Zev Chafets Page A

was terrible. Roger made sure that didn’t happen again. He could see down the road, and look at things five different ways. He never got surprised.”
    With Ailes at the helm, Voinovich won handily. And the story had a happy family ending. At a fund-raiser in Cleveland, Ailes and Douglas met, shook hands, and made up. Nobody was more relieved than Governor Voinovich’s brother. Ailes was happy, too. He and Douglas had been close during their years on the show, their desks literally next to each other in the cramped office in Cleveland, and it hurt Ailes when Douglas’s wife called him disloyal and Douglas predicted to the staff that Ailes would fail. “Later on he took credit for my success,” says Ailes. On one of my visits to Fox, he showed me a clip of a television interview Douglas did in 2005, in which he called his former producer “brilliant” and “amazing. Somebody you want to listen to.” Ailes smiled with satisfaction. “He never said anything like that when we were together.”
    Ailes loved winning in the Voinovich campaign in Ohio. He loved winning anyplace, and he often did. In more than 140 campaigns he orchestrated, he estimates that his victories outnumbered his losses by about nine to one. “A lot of consultants try to stick to races they can win, in which their candidate is a favorite,” he says. “I didn’t do that. I took and won some pretty outside shots, like Holshouser in North Carolina, or Mitch McConnell, a county executive in Kentucky up against an incumbent senator. Sometimes I won those, and sometimes I lost if the guy wasn’t a good candidate. But with a good candidate and enough money, I didn’t lose many. And I never lost a race where I felt outproduced or outmaneuvered.”
    Or outcompeted. “There was a consultant I was up against once in Baltimore,” Ailes says. “He told a reporter that there are a lot of consultants who will kill for their candidate, but Ailes is the only one ready to die for his.” But it was an arrangement that ended when the campaign did.
    Nobody wins all the time. In 1982, Ailes’s candidate, Harrison Schmitt, lost a Senate race in New Mexico to Jeff Bingaman. His opponent in that contest was a young consultant named Dick Morris, whose star client was the governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton. After the election, they went to lunch and Ailes told Morris that people considered him a brilliant young guy, but worried about his loyalty and character and wondered if he was a team player. Evidently Morris calmed those fears, because in 1988, Morris did consulting work for the Bush campaign. When the Lewinsky scandal broke, Ailes put Morris on the air as a Fox contributor. “Roger hired me because he wanted someone who had been in the Clinton White House and who knew how to interpret what was happening there,” Morris says.
    In 1989, Ailes signed on to run Rudy Giuliani’s first campaign for mayor, against David Dinkins, who had defeated incumbent Ed Koch in the Democratic primary. Dinkins won the race by the narrowest margin in New York City history, and became the city’s first (and so far, only) African American mayor. Ailes kept up his friendship with Giuliani. In 1996, then in office, Mayor Giuliani lobbied for Fox News to get carriage rights for New York City, a critical factor in the success of the network. Typically, Ailes also stayed on good terms with Dinkins.
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    By 1991, Ailes was getting tired of politics. He had been a political television producer, a debate coach, an ad maker, and a strategist for presidents. He had a client sitting in the Oval Office at the time, and lesser candidates standing in line for his services. He was, at fifty, an elder statesman and a mentor to consultants on both sides of the political aisle. “Roger invented the orchestra pit theory,” says Bob Beckel. “Campaigns are just a series of moments that people remember. If you have two guys onstage and one guy says, ‘I have a solution to the