Free Roger Ailes: Off Camera by Zev Chafets Page B

Middle East problem,’ and the other guy falls in the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?”
    But Ailes had been in one too many orchestra pits. That year his candidate, Dick Thornburgh, the former U.S. attorney general, lost a Senate race in Pennsylvania to Harris Wofford, a relative unknown. Wofford’s consultants were James Carville and Paul Begala. “I had followed Roger’s career since I was a student at the University of Texas,” Begala says. “To tell you the truth, I was thrilled to be up against him.”
    The feeling wasn’t mutual. Ailes is on good terms with Carville, despite the fact that Carville recently blurbed an anti-Ailes book by David Brock, the head of the progressive watchdog group Media Matters for America. That, Ailes assumed, was just business. But, like Jack Corrigan, Begala insulted him personally. Worse, he did it publicly, in a joint appearance on ABC’s
Nightline
. In the heat of battle, Begala called Ailes “a Madison Avenue blowhard.” Ailes responded by inviting Begala to step outside. It was a symbolic invitation—they were in separate studios in different time zones—but the sentiment was real. But Begala, at least, has no hard feelings. “I have limitless professional respect for Roger Ailes,” he told me.
    Thornburgh was Ailes’s last campaign. “I was coming back from Los Angeles on Christmas Eve on the red-eye,” he recalls, “and I realized that everyone who worked for me was at home with their families. I was out there all alone and I was sick of it. By then I hated politics. And so I quit running candidates.” Ailes met informally with George H. W. Bush during the 1992 race, “just to lighten him up a little,” but his career as a full-time consultant was over. His mind was now on other things. He wanted to get back into his first love: TV.

CHAPTER FIVE
    TELEVISION NEWS
    Over the years, Ailes had always combined his political and corporate consulting with television production. In addition to his stint at TVN, he produced
Tomorrow with Tom Snyder
, NBC’s precursor to
Late Night with David Letterman
; made some highly regarded documentaries that were sold to stations around the country; and did consulting work for local stations, including the
Washington Post
’s affiliates.
    In 1991, Rush Limbaugh’s radio show was a phenomenal success, the biggest thing on AM radio. One night Limbaugh was dining at one of his favorite New York restaurants, “21,” when Roger Ailes walked over and introduced himself. “I was in awe of him,” Limbaugh recalls. “I was amazed he even knew who I was. He said that his wife listened to me all day, every day.”
    Limbaugh and Ailes hit it off immediately. They had a great deal in common. Both were products of small-town midwestern America, shaped by the conservative values of the Eisenhower era and the sometimes harsh discipline of stern fathers. They had both been indifferent and rebellious students—Limbaugh dropped out of a second-rate college after one year—who made their bones as media showmen. And they were both more than willing to mix it up with the liberal establishment.
    Ailes told Limbaugh that they should do a television show together. At first Limbaugh thought it was a bad idea—he had never hosted a television show before—but Ailes convinced him that it would work. “Rush said he didn’t want guests on the show,” Ailes recalls. “He said he didn’t need them, because he didn’t care what anybody else thinks. There were very few people, then or now, who could hold a television audience all alone on the screen or who even had the balls to try. The only model I had was Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s program, and I thought Rush could carry it off.”
    Ailes couldn’t find a network that would carry the controversial Limbaugh’s one-man show. He decided to resort to syndication, which had worked beautifully for Mike Douglas. He reached out to Woody Fraser, who took the idea to