Too Famous by Michael Wolff

Author:Michael Wolff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Fox News

The Death of Roger Ailes

MAY 2017

I made a mental note last night to call Roger in the morning and get his take on the Trump events of the last few days. There are few conversations more entertaining and insightful than Roger Ailes on Republican politics, where he’s known all the players, their strengths and particularly their weaknesses. Liberals might despise and fear him, but some of his most scathing and hilarious critiques have often been reserved for conservatives. His fifty years among the kahunas of GOP politics—as one of the creators of modern Republican politics—made him, in addition to his other political claims to fame, among his party’s sharpest observers. On his friend Donald Trump, and the unthinkable developments that put him in the White House, no one has been keener—or crueler. But at 8:30 Thursday morning, his wife Beth texted me that he had died a few minutes earlier. Days before, on ever-weakening legs, he had fallen, not for the first time, and hit his head.

It was a particular cruelty of the anti-Ailes press that it often focused on Beth, with rumors of a breakdown in their marriage and impending divorce. In fact, she was fierce in her devotion to him, and his most implacable defender. In the ten months since he had been forced out as chairman of Fox News Channel, the network—arguably, the most significant political force in American life for a generation—that he launched, built, and ran for twenty years, she carried him. This past autumn, after their hard summer of accusations and media conviction, she had flown down to Palm Beach and bought for themselves a waterfront mansion, where she hoped he would retire and where living well would at least be some revenge.

Retirement was more Beth’s idea than his. Roger and I spoke a week ago, just after the last ouster at Fox—Bill Shine, his lieutenant who had taken over his job, following by a week the ouster of Bill O’Reilly—and, invariably, the subject was Fox’s increasing disarray and the possibilities for a new conservative network. Yet proscribed by the noncompete provisions of his separation agreement, Roger nevertheless had a plan in his head and was taking calls. “I can’t call. But I can’t stop people from calling me,” he said. As we spoke, Beth texted pictures of their view and of a newly svelte Roger lying lazily in the sun.

All things considered, it was a happy winter. Or, anyway, he was certainly weighing the benefits of being out of the office and out of the fray. Still, clearly, both he and Beth could only get so far from the bitterness they felt about his end at Fox. Worse still, the terms of his departure from Fox put draconian limits on what he could say and how he might defend himself. The payout that he believed he had earned—having created a $30 billion asset and Twenty-First Century Fox’s most profitable business—was the price of his silence. The most voluble and pugnacious man in American media was forced to keep still.

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