Read Online Roger Ailes: Off Camera by Zev Chafets - Free Book Online

legislation that Dukakis opposed; his veto was no more than pro forma. But Ailes found a use for it. During the campaign he frequently mentioned it, facetiously, as an issue that could be deployed. At the first debate, Ailes saw an opportunity. Bush seemed tense and nervous. Just before he took the stage, Ailes took him aside and whispered, “If you get in trouble out there, just call him an animal fucker.” Bush cracked up. To further lighten the mood, Ailes looked across the stage at Bob Squier, Dukakis’s consultant, and motioned that the Democratic candidate’s fly was open, causing a disconcerting moment on the Democratic side.
    Mostly, though, Ailes was the man whose political ads set the tone of the campaign and kept Dukakis on the defensive. The Boston Harbor ad was one of those. Dukakis had a strong environmental record, especially contrasted with Bush’s history as a Texas oilman, and it earned him the support of the major green groups. Ailes decided to take that advantage away. He produced a commercial showing garbage and debris floating in the water of Boston Harbor, along with a sign that read Radiation Hazard: No Swimming, and a narration: “As a candidate, Michael Dukakis called Boston Harbor an open sewer. As governor he had the opportunity to do something about it but chose not to. The Environmental Protection Agency called his lack of action the most expensive public policy mistake in the history of New England. Now Boston Harbor, the dirtiest harbor in America, will cost residents $6 million to clean. And Michael Dukakis promises to do for America what he had done for Massachusetts.”
    “I could almost see Dukakis drowning in the polluted water,” says Tim Carey.
    It was Ailes’s idea to cast Dukakis as weak on national defense. Dukakis aided and abetted the effort by dressing up in a flak jacket and an oversized helmet to take a photo-op ride in the turret of an M1 Abrams tank in testing grounds near Detroit. The idea was to make Dukakis look like a commander in chief. In fact, he came off as ridiculous, a little boy playing soldier. Ailes let the footage of the grinning Dukakis speak for itself. Nothing could have better emphasized the difference between Dukakis and Bush, a World War II combat pilot.
    The most infamous ad of the campaign was actually two ads, both on the subject of a Massachusetts prison furlough granted to an incarcerated murderer. Willie Horton was serving a life sentence for robbing and killing a seventeen-year-old gas station attendant. The crime was especially grisly: The victim was stabbed nineteen times and dumped into a garbage can.
    There were other states (and the federal government) that had similar prisoner furlough plans. But they did not grant furloughs to murderers. The Massachusetts legislature passed a law to prevent such leniency, but Governor Dukakis vetoed it. He made the case that in 99 percent of cases, the furloughed prisoners returned without incident. It was his bad luck that Willie Horton belonged to the 1 percent.
    In 1986, after more than a decade behind bars, Horton was released for a weekend. He traveled to Maryland, where he seized an engaged couple, knifed and tied up the man, and then proceeded to rape his fiancée twice as he looked on. The crime was so egregious that a Maryland judge refused to extradite him to Massachusetts on the grounds that he might again be furloughed.
    The issue of the lenient Massachusetts furlough policy was first raised by Al Gore in the 1988 primary campaign, although Gore didn’t actually mention Horton by name. In the fall presidential campaign the National Security Political Action Committee began running a TV ad, which did mention Horton and displayed his picture. The NSPAC was supposedly an independent player, although it was clearly pro-Bush, and then run by Larry McCarthy, a former employee of Ailes Communications who had left the firm to work for Bob Dole in the primaries.
    The NSPAC ad was denounced as