The Beautiful Mind of Roger Ailes
Excerpts from a book excerpt on the Wizard of Fox News, here:
…One day during the 2012 primary season, Newt Gingrich complained that Fox News’s support for Mitt Romney was responsible for Gingrich’s poor showing. Rick Santorum had made a similar claim when he dropped out of the race. Gingrich and Santorum had been Fox commentators before getting into the race, and Ailes found their complaints self-serving and disloyal. Brian Lewis, his spokesman, asked Ailes for guidance on how to respond to Newt. “Brush him back,” Ailes said. “He’s a sore loser and if he had won he would have been a sore winner.” Lewis nodded.
Ailes was silent for a moment and then added, “Newt’s a prick.”
Lewis then read Ailes a summary of the flap over Democratic operative Hilary Rosen’s comment that Ann Romney, mother of five, had never worked a day in her life. Ailes spun it without hesitation. “Obama’s the one who never worked a day in his life. He never earned a penny that wasn’t public money. How many fund-raisers does he attend every week? How often does he play basketball and golf? I wish I had that kind of time. He’s lazy, but the media won’t report that.” He noticed my arched eyebrows and added, “I didn’t come up with that. Obama said that, to Barbara Walters.” (What Obama said was that he feels a laziness in himself that he attributes to his laid-back upbringing in Hawaii.)
“I like Marco Rubio,” Ailes told a staff meeting of Fox News Latino when talk about the Florida senator being Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential pick was at fever pitch. “But I don’t know about as a vice-presidential candidate. He’s a nice guy, and that role requires kicking the crap out of your opponents.” He paused, thinking about vice presidents he had known. “I have a soft spot for Joe Biden,” he said. “I like him. But he’s dumb as an ashtray.” …
Ailes revels in his image as a tough-guy. He is fond of recalling rougher times, like the night he punched a hole in the wall of an NBC control room where he was producing The Tomorrow Show. “It was just a drywall, and luckily I didn’t hit any beams. But somebody put a frame around the hole and wrote, don’t mess with roger ailes. If you have a reputation as a badass, you don’t need to fight.”
Ailes admits that he sometimes flies off the handle. This can happen pretty much anywhere. Not long ago, on a ball field near his place in Garrison, NY, his nephew accidentally hit a baseball through the window of a 2012 Prius parked in a church lot. The owners were Koreans who didn’t speak much English, and they were extremely agitated. “It’s just a damn window,” Ailes told them. “I’ll pay for the damn thing.”
The owner was indignant. “We pray, you curse,” he said.
“Fine,” said Ailes. “Then let’s pray over the fucking window. Maybe that’ll fix it.”
“It was a 10-minute incident that I turned into an hour,” Ailes said when he told me the story. “Hell, it’s lucky they didn’t recognize me. It could have turned into a goddamn international scandal. But I told them I was sorry ” He laughed. “Damn it, though, I was kind of glad that it was a Prius.”
Ailes has a very acute sense of his own mortality. “I’d give anything for another 10 years,” he often says, and, typically, he has crunched the numbers.
…I asked if he is afraid to die. “… I’m ready. Everybody fears the unknown. But I have a strong feeling there’s something bigger than us. I don’t think all this exists because some rocks happened to collide. I’m at peace. When it comes, I’ll be fine, calm. I’ll miss life, though. Especially my family.” …
I asked Roger Ailes what he imagined heaven would be like. “I’m pretty sure that God’s got a sense of humor,” he said. “I think he gets a laugh out of me from time to time, so I suppose things will be all right.”
“What if you get there and it turns out that God is a liberal?” I asked.
Ailes paused. It was something that evidently hadn’t occurred to him. “Well, hell, if God’s a liberal, that’s his business,” he said. He paused again, imagining it. “But I doubt very much that he is. He’s got a good heart.”
