The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--And Divided a Country Read Online Free PDF Page A

the world beyond Warren. “She was willing to do anything,” Robert Jr. recalled. She enrolled the brothers in acting and music lessons and demanded perfection in the classroom. “She would want to know before she saw a test that I got an A,” Robert Jr. remembered. “She wanted to know if I got 100 percent. And if I didn’t get a 100, she’d want to know that I got the highest grade.” Donna was also sparing in her display of affection.Roger remembered her hugging him only “once in a while.” He speculated to a reporter that perhaps she was scared of his hemophilia.
    Roger was proficient but uninspired in the classroom.There was not much use trying to compete academically with Robert Jr., who was class president at Warren G. Harding High before studying at Oberlin College on a scholarship and going on to medical school.“It was clear that my brother was sort of the favorite,” Roger recalled. Donna’s pressure worked for Robert, but backfired for Roger.“The more she’d hound him, the less he would do,” Robert recalled. Roger would say, “I got a ‘C,’ and that’s good enough!” To get through a Latin class, Roger cribbed the answers from his brother’s homework assignments and exams.
    The television screen was Roger’s classroom. As a child, frequently homebound with bruises, he watched variety shows and westerns, lying on the living room couch for hours on end.“He analyzed it, and he figured it out,” his brother said. Roger grew up as the medium did.In 1940, the year Roger was born, Herbert Hoover appeared on television for the first time, in an interview at the Republican National Convention.Seven years later, President Harry Truman staged the first telecast at the White House.Between 1950 and 1951, the number of households with sets doubled, to ten million. In 1952, Richard Nixon saved his political career delivering what became known as the “Checkers Speech” on television. Like his father, whose favorite program was
Gunsmoke
, Roger liked shows with strong male leads and simple plotlines.
    Roger also loved acting.“I liked to get out of class and I wasn’t a great athlete. That left the theater,” he said. He put on plays with neighborhood kids.One of those fellow actors was Austin Pendleton, who grew up to be a noted stage and film actor. Pendleton’s mother gave Roger acting lessons, and his father, the president of the Warren Tool Corporation, built a theater in the basement of their spacious home so that Pendleton and his friends could stage productions. Sometimes, Pendleton invited Roger to join them.
    At Warren G. Harding High, Roger acted in several plays and MC’d
The Frolics
, the school’s annual variety show.“He sat down and played the piano and sang,” Kent Fusselman, a schoolmate, recalled. “He was very good. He was in his element.”Launa Newman developed an instant connection with Roger at an audition for Ayn Rand’s
Night of January 16th
, a courtroom drama of greed and moral decay. They had never spokenbefore reading a scene together. “It was a moment of kismet,” she said. “He picked me. I picked him. The thing that crossed my mind was—
How did I miss this guy?
He was so good-looking. He was so intelligent.” They won the parts of secretary and defense attorney. Before graduating, Roger also starred in a stage adaptation of
A Man Called Peter
, about the faith of a charismatic United States Senate chaplain.
    Though Robert Sr. wanted his children to figure out a way to go to college, he had complicated feelings about academics.“Father did not encourage us,” Robert Jr. recalled. His own Ivy League–educated father had abandoned him, and the condescension of college-educated managers at the Packard plant got under his skin. But he recognized that his path, going to work right out of high school, brought hardship.Once, when Roger saw those “college boys” give his father “orders in an inappropriate manner,” he asked why he let them talk to