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

him that way. “Son, because of you, your brother, and your sister,” he answered. “I need the job, and you kids have got to go to college so you don’t ever have to put up with this.”
    During his prime earning years at Packard Electric, he was paid $650 a month, the equivalent of a $60,000 annual salary in today’s dollars. It was a decent wage, but after paying the bills for his wife, two boys, and younger daughter, Robert had little left over to spend on himself.To make some extra money, he took a second job painting houses in the evenings. Donna also worked outside the home, taking a clerical position at the local branch of the American Cancer Society, a further source of resentment for Robert Sr.“The poor guy never had a new suit. He had two pairs of shoes in the closet, one for Sunday and the other for the rest of the week,” Roger recalled.When it came time to buy the family’s 1957 Buick Special, Robert Sr. took out a home equity mortgage. For all his working-man bravado and his steady income, his life had the taint of failure.“He tried hard but never succeeded in anything,” Robert Jr. recalled. “He didn’t have the instinct to be a killer.”
    Roger learned enough about his father’s blue-collar struggles to know he wanted no part of them.“All I wanted to do was to make enoughmoney, so I’d never have to live the life my father lived,” he once said. Roger also vowed never to let others dominate him.After landing a job on a highway crew digging ditches along Ohio Route 45 at the age of seventeen, Roger had his first try on the jackhammer. “He told me to put it against my belly and just pull the trigger,” he recalled of the foreman. The jackhammer lurched, catapulting him onto his back. He lay in the mud, dazed. He wanted to attack the man, but recognized that “he’d kill me if I tried anything.”
    “Why’d you do that?” Roger yelled at him. He remembered the response for many years.
    “I ain’t your mama, boy,” the man said.
    O ne day, in the spring of Roger’s senior year of high school, his father pulled him aside. “Where are you going?” he asked. Roger thought it was a strange question. He was sitting in the living room, not going anywhere. “You can’t live here. You’re eighteen. You’re on your own. You have to make a life now.… If you get somebody pregnant, don’t bring them home. I’m not paying for it.”
    Around this time, Roger had received an acceptance letter from Ohio University in Athens. He wanted to go, but there were no prospects for a scholarship, as his brother had to Oberlin. His father said he was not prepared to pay for his education. He suggested he join the military or get a job at Packard.
    “I can put your name up at the shop, try to get you a job.”
    Roger was furious and did not speak to his dad for two months, but, looking back, Roger called it “the best thing he ever did for me.”
    Perhaps to spite his father, Roger enrolled in college. He may have been ambivalent about academics, but he would never allow himself to end up like his father.
    Later that summer, Roger arrived in Athens, a small city tucked into the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, for the beginning of his freshman year. The campus, with its stately redbrick buildings and manicured quads overlooking the Hocking River, a tributary of the Ohio, had the pastoral feel of an East Coast college.“It felt like a picture-perfect postcard of the Eisenhower years. You felt like there was a fort around the city,” Arthur Nolletti, a classmate, recalled.Students went for hayrides in the fall and caroled at Christmas.
    The Cold War was a campus preoccupation, while civil rights wereviewed skeptically.During Ailes’s sophomore year, the OU
Post
criticized a civil rights march down College Street, in which a mere eighty people participated. “If you are scared of the truth, don’t read this editorial!” it read. “Equality is not a one-way proposition. With equality