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

goes responsibility and obligation. There are negroes who have shown that they are not ready to accept this obligation.… Just remember one thing White Man—you’re the minority in this here bigoted world of ours. And you’re becoming a smaller minority with the passing of each day.”
    The handbook distributed to Roger’s class encouraged students to conform to social convention. “The ‘big man on campus’ will want a dark suit and sport coats,” the manual stated. “The co-ed will want sweaters and skirts, bobby sox and saddles, and Sunday ensembles.” The guiding principle was modesty. “Individualism is encouraged at OU, so long as it is within University rules,” it stated. “Put your best foot forward at OU. Leave your family skeletons in the closet.”A caption in the 1959 yearbook below a photo of a boy and girl standing in a bowling lane noted, “he instructs and she listens.”In December 1959, a group of three hundred students protested against the Beats.
    When Ailes arrived on campus, he did not know what he wanted to study, but he was sure about one thing.He wanted to join the military, just as Doug Webster, his best friend from Warren, had done. Roger signed up for the Air Force ROTC and stayed with the program for two years, but his health was an issue. “What I really wanted to do was fly fighter planes.… But my eyesight and other physical problems made the government in their wisdom not allow me to have an expensive aircraft,” he later said.In a certain sense, the closest he came was playing the bossy Private Irwin Blanchard in the university’s stage production of
No Time for Sergeants
.
    Just as in high school, Ailes had little interest in classes.“I was hammered all the time,” he recalled.“I skipped a lot of classes, finally got an F. The dean brought me in, said ‘We have to keep you because it’s a state school, but we only have to keep you one more semester.’ ” But he found new direction when, on a lark, he applied for an on-air position at WOUB, the college radio station, during his freshman year. At the time, Ohio University was a pioneer in college broadcasting, one of only a handful of colleges in the country with a student-run radio and television station.Ailes’s starting position was reading news headlines on a program called
Radio Digest
.He then hosted the
Yawn Patrol
, a morning variety show, with his friend Don Hylkema.Vincent Jukes, a stout, imperious man whoran the radio department, imposed rigid rules on his young broadcasters, insisting he approve all music played on air. Rock and roll records were expressly forbidden, but Ailes proved adept at skirting Jukes’s authority.One day, he concocted a plan with Hylkema to slip a Bobby Darin record by him. “We took the record to him to get it okayed,” Hylkema recalled. “The two of us talked and distracted him through the whole thing.”
    With his acting experience, Ailes was a natural broadcaster.Archie Greer, the thirty-seven-year-old faculty adviser for the station, spotted his talent.Unlike Jukes, Greer had a friendly disposition and was an enthusiastic mentor.“Archie was probably the first person to have confidence in me and say, ‘You can do things,’ ” Ailes said.By the end of his sophomore year, Greer promoted Ailes to station manager, a position normally assigned to seniors.Ailes was soon selected to join the Alpha Epsilon Rho radio and television society for his performance in broadcasting. Even as an underclassman, Ailes seemed older and more imposing than the other students.“We were sort of afraid of him, because he was the boss,” Mike Adams, who entered OU in 1960, recalled.
    The radio studio became Ailes’s home. To concentrate on broadcasting, Ailes decided to major in fine arts.When school was in session, he never seemed to leave the basement of the speech building, except to grab a bite to eat at Blackmore’s up the street.He was often the first person to arrive at 6:00