Gabriel Sherman's "Loudest Voice in the Room" Twenty years ago, my wife and I bought a weekend house in the town of Garrison, N.Y., in the lower Hudson Valley. We love the place for its scenic beauty, its peace and quiet, and its old-fashioned sense of community. For us, it's a refuge from the pace of city life, a place with an easygoing mix of lifestyles and a widely shared ethos about preserving what makes it special. A few years ago, we found ourselves with a new neighbor. Roger Ailes, the chief executive of Fox News, seemed to be looking for something different when he moved to Garrison: not an escape, but a new arena for conflict. He bought the soothing local weekly, The Putnam County News & Recorder; named his wife, Elizabeth, publisher; and set about transforming it into The New York Post with field hockey scores. He fortified his hilltop property by buying up surrounding homes and installing an underground bunker with six months of survival rations. He began appearing at local meetings, Gabriel Sherman writes in his new book, with bodyguard and lawyer in tow, demanding to be heard in opposition to a zoning plan intended to limit future development. He drafted Republican candidates to run for town offices. Illustration by Lou Beach; photograph of Roger Ailes by Angel Franco/The New York Times According to "The Loudest Voice in the Room," Ailes dealt with Richard Shea, the well-liked and, as it turned out, ­impossible-to-intimidate supervisor of the small encompassing jurisdiction of Philips­town, by threatening, "I will destroy your life." Shea is a born-and-bred local who runs a contracting business - precisely the kind of "little guy" Ailes claimed to be representing against environmental elitists. Others who crossed the Aileses, Sherman tells us, reported being threatened with lawsuits or Fox News trucks at their doorsteps, or in one case, being trailed by News Corporation security officers. Without the restraining influences of his parent company, Ailes has acted out in ways that terrified even his minions. Sherman says a young conservative who was imported to edit The News & Recorder became so frightened by Ailes's surveillance of the staff and creepy personal comments that he quit and fled town. His replacement as editor, a destitute man's Sean Hannity, continues to denounce critics as "anarchists" and "anti-Christian." Garrison is the key to understanding Ailes because it's a microcosm of what he's spent his career doing to the country. He could have moved there to live and let live. Instead, in a way that seems to have been almost involuntary, he recapitulated the culture war he was already busily inciting at a national level. Within a short time of his arrival, town meetings turned ugly. Issues of patriotism, religion and political correctness overtook the normal debates about road paving and property taxes. Single-handedly and almost instantaneously, he injected a peaceable civic space with an aggression and unpleasantness that weren't there before. What drives this need to create conflict? In his actually fair and balanced, carefully documented biography, Sherman, a contributing editor at New York magazine, struggles to come up with an answer. He does so, it bears noting, without the cooperation of his subject, who set a new benchmark for biographical obstruction by working with the journalist Zev Chafets to rush a more sympathetic portrayal out first. Ailes's father, who was abandoned by a father with a degree from Harvard, spent his career working as a foreman in the maintenance department at Packard Electric, an automotive manufacturer. But Ailes himself grew up cared and provided for in an intact family in the middle-class town of Warren, Ohio. A diagnosis of hemophilia made his parents think he was living on borrowed time. But he was encouraged not to let the disability stand in his way, and for the most part it didn't. His father had a cruel streak, which led to a divorce from his less-than-affectionate mother, but not until after Roger and his older brother - who did speak to Sherman - had gone away to college. His rise was not based on ideology, but on a fierce drive to get ahead that coincided with an era of conservative ascendancy. Working for "The Mike Douglas Show," a daytime variety program, in the 1960s, Ailes climbed quickly up the greasy pole from $68-a-week prop boy to executive producer. He played a jagged-edged game of office politics, to be sure, but also benefited from the unexpected candor he directed at the talent. At one point, he brought Douglas to the brink of tears when he told him he'd been too sycophantic toward Sammy Davis Jr. The 27-year-old Ailes used Richard Nixon's appearance as a guest in early 1968 as an opportunity to let the presidential candidate-in-waiting know that he badly needed a media adviser, and to offer his services. Ailes applied his talk-show expertise to humanize the "New Nixon." He presented the candidate in flattering, phony town-hall settings, fed him jokes and warned cameramen never to shoot him from above. His biggest stroke of fortune was that a liberal columnist friend at The Philadelphia Inquirer, Joe McGinniss, was writing a book about the campaign. "The Selling of the President," published in 1969, cast Ailes as the profane genius who showed Nixon how to use TV. In part because of the suspicion his unauthorized cooperation with McGinniss engendered, he never made it into Nixon's inner circle, which was another stroke of luck. But the book opened up a lucrative new career as a media consultant. In Sherman's telling, Ailes was driven more by money than by any fixed set of political beliefs. As late as 1972, he was willing to work for Democrats. Putting out his shingle as a theatrical producer, he brought an eco-musical called "Mother Earth" to Broadway for the briefest of runs. He took Robert Kennedy Jr. to Africa to make a wildlife documentary and staged "The Hot l Baltimore," a Lanford Wilson play about down-and-outs. His identification with the right was mostly a matter of opportunities. One was a job working for TVN, a Joseph Coors-backed attempt to create a conservative news alternative that served as a dry run for what Ailes did two decades later at Fox. Another was producing attention-getting, often dishonest attack ads for Republican Senate candidates like Dan Quayle, Phil Gramm and Mitch McConnell. Ailes continued to deploy frankness as a comparative advantage in finding work. "Jesus, nobody likes you," he told Alfonse D'Amato on their first meeting. Your own mother wouldn't vote for you. Do you even have a mother? His media-consulting career culminated in George H. W. Bush's attacks on Michael Dukakis. Ailes asserts to this day he had nothing to do with the infamous Willie Horton spot. Coordination with the independent expenditure campaign that financed the ad would have been illegal. After 1988, he swore he was done with politics and got hired to run the nascent CNBC network. His management there was a story that has become familiar: brilliant ratings accompanied by diatribes, threats and conflicts of interest (Philip Morris kept him on retainer). NBC ultimately forced him out, in part, Sherman suggests, for an alleged anti-Semitic insult against David Zaslav, a colleague who supported the creation of MSNBC as an alternative to the cable channel America's Talking, which was Ailes's pet project. Zaslav now denies the story. In any event, there's little reason to think Ailes has a problem with Jews; he's simply a rage-a-holic who can't control himself. Sherman says that it bothers Ailes to be the object of so much hatred, but that he can't help provoking it. As he once told his friend McGinniss: "I'm walking around, and I feel just all this anger. I can't figure out where it's coming from. After Rupert Murdoch gave him the keys to Fox News, Ailes had a 24-hour megaphone to express both his personal feelings and his populist views. He stood by Glenn Beck's assertion that President Obama harbors a "deep-seated hatred for white people." But Ailes's own preferred style of smear is a shade more oblique: not a direct accusation, but a screen graphic posing the question "Is Obama a socialist?" The respective weight of Fox's ideological and commercial motives remains a topic for debate. Manufactured indignation (the "War on Christmas," "Obama's Czars," "the Ground Zero Mosque") drives viewership, especially when performed for a mostly male audience by leggy blond anchors. At one level, Fox's victimhood pose is obviously disingenuous; Murdoch has always played the outrage game to drive circulation and ratings. His most valuable player, on the other hand, seems to be genuinely seething with resentment, often at his friends as much as his enemies. Another pattern of his is to build up Frankenstein monsters, like Beck, Hannity and Bill O'Reilly, and then decry their ingratitude. Fox's populism is so clearly an expression of his authentic feelings that it's hard to see it as purely cynical. How valuable is Ailes's wrath to Murdoch? With Fox News generating $1 billion a year in profits, valuable enough for Ailes to win a power struggle with Rupert's son Lachlan, who fled to Australia in defeat. What he is not is a strategic conservative thinker. Intent on helping Republicans take back the White House in 2012, Ailes effectively sabotaged them by giving unlimited airtime to fringe figures like Rick Santorum, Sarah Palin and Herman Cain during primary season. Having weathered this freak show through the primaries, Mitt Romney couldn't shake the Fox News taint. For those who fear the paranoiac playground bully depicted in Sherman's account, Garrison offers an encouraging message. The town has rejected his takeover bid. The Putnam County News & Recorder now faces competition from The Philipstown Paper, which does not run headlines like "Ailes Helps Raise $1.6M for Charity; Hailed as "Angel." " In 2011, Richard Shea beat back an Ailes-financed challenger. In November, Shea was re-elected again. This time, Ailes didn't bother to field an opponent. How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News - and Divided a Country By Gabriel Sherman Random House. $28.