The Ziegfeld of Political Theater

Many mistaken beliefs left over from the 1960s are embedded in mainstream, which is to say liberal, American culture. As an earnest young lefty I was taught that generals like war, that businessmen like free markets, that Christians think everyone else is going to hell, and that Republicans are conservative ideologues. None of these statements is true. Roger Ailes, for instance, was a Republican but he wasn't an ideologue.

Of course he believed certain things to be true. He believed that over the last two generations left-wingers had swept the field culturally and were now safely in control of every influential institution of American life, from the universities to the press to Hollywood to the bottomless sump of American philanthropy. (The exception is the large number of electoral offices around the country which, being sometimes in the control of ordinary voters, are often in the hands of non-liberals. He loved his party, the Republican party, as one of their last redoubts.) Ailes's second belief was that, having won all this booty in the culture wars, the left-wingers had screwed things up almost beyond repair. Almost: He was happy to do what he could to frustrate the progress of progressives. To the extent that he embraced political ideas, they were essentially negative, not so much pro-right as anti-left.

Maybe his enemies on the left sensed this—that his political project wasn't a crusade but an assault aimed directly at them—and that's why their hatred of him reached such an astonishing intensity. But they got him wrong. He was more a star-struck creature of show biz than of politics, and in either endeavor a rigid ideology is the surest impediment to success. He liked politics only where it intersected with show biz. Ailes always said his first love was for the theater, and he had some luck producing plays long before the idea of Fox News began twinkling in his eye. It was to his theatrical skill that he attributed his TV success; he had a deep understanding of how things would look to an audience out there—whether the audience was just beyond the footlights a few yards away or 1,500 miles from Manhattan, watching TV in a paneled living room in Garden City, Kansas.

As a political consultant he worked for Republicans right, center, and left, it didn't much matter. I first met him when we both worked for President George H. W. Bush, Ailes at the top rank, me a grunt in the trenches. One of the few extended conversations I had with him came many years later, not long after he had conceived of and then launched the Fox show The Five. He needed a program to fill the time slot left by Glenn Beck, who had quit Fox in a blaze of controversy and bad feeling. Ailes couldn't replace Beck's hourlong gasworks with another show built around a single performer. "No matter who it was," he told me, "the comparisons with Beck would kill 'em."

And so, like a theatrical producer, he put together an ensemble show. He made it clear he didn't care much about its political content, which would be the usual Fox palaver. What he worried over was its look, its "dynamic," he said. It would air at 5 p.m. Eastern Time and would have five stars and would be called The Five. But the key was the set of types that would make up the ensemble.