In 1988 Roger Ailes fashioned the media strategy for George H.W. Bush’s successful campaign for president, and in 1996 he became the first CEO of Fox News. Between these two historic events, he came to Illinois.
Ailes was already notorious, and Simon “had tremendous success raising a ton of money by using Ailes’s name as a scare tactic,” says Kerwin Swint in his 2008 biography of Ailes, Dark Genius. His hackles up, Ailes called a news conference. It didn’t go well.
Ailes’s current troubles with women who have lined up to denounce him (and his likely departure from Fox) indicate that being full of himself and not thinking straight are personality defects that have afflicted him for a long time.
