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

reputation,” Walters recalled. “But thething was, Roger was smart enough to know people are going to be interested.”
    In September 1967, producers planned a segment featuring
Peyton Place
star and
Mike Douglas
co-host Ryan O’Neal boxing with a famous fighter. They booked Joe Frazier, who would become heavyweight champion the next year, to spar with O’Neal in the ring. Floyd Patterson would referee and Muhammad Ali would do the announcing. But a day before the segment, Frazier canceled.“Roger got on the phone with him and just laid into him,” LaPorta recalled.Kenny Johnson, another producer, said, “He just reamed his ass.” Frazier relented, but he was angry. When he showed up at the set, he asked the producers “where’s this Ralph guy? I got a bone to pick with this guy named Ralph.” He had misheard Ailes’s name over the phone. A quick-thinking producer told Frazier that Ralph was out of the office that day.“We called Roger ‘Ralph’ after that,” LaPorta said.
    I n the fall of 1967, Ailes and Marje paid $41,500 for a house on a wooded cul-de-sac in the aptly named suburb of Media, Pennsylvania. Around this time,Ailes was making $60,000 a year (more than six times what his father earned at his peak salary at Packard). He even began inviting the producers to the house for dinner, which offered them a glimpse of the tensions at home.Bob LaPorta was a guest one evening when Marje’s father was visiting. They were in the living room with the television on. Marje’s father told Roger to turn it off. “You’re not going to amount to anything,” LaPorta overheard him telling Ailes. LaPorta sensed Ailes wanted to prove him wrong. “It was an obsession for him to succeed, to pass everybody,” he said.
    During this period Ailes met a twenty-four-year-old journalist named Joe McGinniss. A columnist for
The Philadelphia Inquirer
, McGinniss was the youngest writer to have a regular column printed in a major American daily. McGinniss called Ailes about writing a piece on Mike Douglas.“Roger and I, we found out right away that we shared the same sense of humor,” he said. Ailes showed an instinct for how relationships with reporters could become valuable assets. He invited McGinniss and his wife, a quiet Catholic girl he’d met in Massachusetts at Holy Cross college, for dinner, and, not long afterward, they returned the invitation. “We always had a good time, my wife got along very well with Marje,”McGinniss recalled. When Ailes would visit, he liked to play with McGinniss’s two young children. “It was like Uncle Roger,” McGinniss said. Their domestic lives had another parallel. By 1967, both men, who had married young, knew their marriages were not working out. They would occasionally get dinner after work in Philadelphia and discuss their woes.
    Politically, Ailes seemed like a moderate to McGinniss, and on some issues, like civil rights, a progressive. “I would write columns that would get me called ‘nigger lover’ and Frank Rizzo, the police commissioner, would come after me,” McGinniss said. “Roger was always sending me a note or making a phone call sympathizing and congratulating me and saying we need more of this. He had some incipient commitment to civil rights in Philadelphia.” Ailes’s views on race may have been shaped by an experience he had working on a roadside construction crew one summer in high school.When a crew member came after Ailes with a shovel and “literally almost took his head off,” a friend recalled, “all of a sudden, this six-foot six-inch black dude stopped him in his tracks. Ailes and the guy had lunch together every day that summer. He said, ‘The guy saved my life.’ ”
    By 1968, Ailes and McGinniss saw each other less, as the frenzy of that year consumed them both. As if running the number one show in the country wasn’t enough, Ailes was accelerating his television career.A year after being named Douglas’s executive producer, he