Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

by Rick Perlstein

The idea had come of an appearance the previous autumn on Mike Douglas’s afternoon chat show. As Nixon sat in the Douglas show’s makeup chair, he chatted perfunctorily with a young producer about how silly it was that it took gimmicks like going on daytime talk shows to get elected in America in 1968. The producer, a twenty-six-year-old named Roger Ailes, did not come back with the expected deferential chuckle. Instead he lectured him: if Nixon still thought talk shows were a gimmick, he’d never become president of the United States. Ailes then reeled off a litany of Nixon’s TV mistakes in 1960, when Ailes had been in high school—and, before he knew it, had been whisked to New York and invited to work for the man in charge of the media team, Frank Shakespeare. Shakespeare had been a division president at CBS. There had been talk of him as the fair-haired boy who might one day replace William S. Paley, the network’s president. A friend of William F. Buckley’s, what he really wanted to do was destroy liberals.