"Someone...thought he had a yellow cast to his make-up"
Rick Perlstein
TomPaine.com
My über-nerdy contribution to Falafel Day: the backstory on this dude Roger Ailes, the 26-year-old whiz-kid producer of the Mike Douglas Show, every housewife's favorite back in the day.
Dick Nixon chatted him up in the makeup chair in 1967 about how silly it was that it took gimmicks like going on daytime talk shows to get elected. Ailes had the balls to lecture him: if Nixon still thought talk shows were a gimmick, he'd never become President of the United States. He then reeled off a litany of Nixon's TV mistakes in 1960, when Ailes had then been in high school--and before he knew it, he was whisked to New York and invited to join Nixon's media team.
I love this detail from Joe McGinniss's classic book The Selling of the President. Ailes did yeoman service for Nixon in 1968: he invented the fake "town hall meeting," in which a hand-picked panel and audience asked the candidate "tough" question. He also hired the makeup man from the Tonight show. In Chicago the set sported turquoise curtains. "Nixon wouldn't look right unless he was carrying a pocketbook," Ailes grumbled, ordering them replaced with wood panels with "clean, solid, masculine lines." Republicans are nothing without their set-dressers and makeup men. Simply: nothing.
In Philadelphia, Ailes proposed adding "a good, mean, Wallaceite cab driver" to the panel. "Wouldn't that be great? Some guy to sit there and say, 'Awright, Mac, what about these niggers?'" Nixon then could abhor the incivility of the words, while endorsing a "moderate" version of the opinion. Ailes walked up and down a nearby taxi stand until he found one who fit the bill.
Great American, Roger Ailes.
(Continued here.)
TomPaine.com
My über-nerdy contribution to Falafel Day: the backstory on this dude Roger Ailes, the 26-year-old whiz-kid producer of the Mike Douglas Show, every housewife's favorite back in the day.
Dick Nixon chatted him up in the makeup chair in 1967 about how silly it was that it took gimmicks like going on daytime talk shows to get elected. Ailes had the balls to lecture him: if Nixon still thought talk shows were a gimmick, he'd never become President of the United States. He then reeled off a litany of Nixon's TV mistakes in 1960, when Ailes had then been in high school--and before he knew it, he was whisked to New York and invited to join Nixon's media team.
I love this detail from Joe McGinniss's classic book The Selling of the President. Ailes did yeoman service for Nixon in 1968: he invented the fake "town hall meeting," in which a hand-picked panel and audience asked the candidate "tough" question. He also hired the makeup man from the Tonight show. In Chicago the set sported turquoise curtains. "Nixon wouldn't look right unless he was carrying a pocketbook," Ailes grumbled, ordering them replaced with wood panels with "clean, solid, masculine lines." Republicans are nothing without their set-dressers and makeup men. Simply: nothing.
In Philadelphia, Ailes proposed adding "a good, mean, Wallaceite cab driver" to the panel. "Wouldn't that be great? Some guy to sit there and say, 'Awright, Mac, what about these niggers?'" Nixon then could abhor the incivility of the words, while endorsing a "moderate" version of the opinion. Ailes walked up and down a nearby taxi stand until he found one who fit the bill.
Great American, Roger Ailes.
(Continued here.)
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