“I don’t care about my legacy,” Roger Ailes once said in a 2012 interview. “It’s too late. My enemies will create it, and they’ll push it.” It was a typical statement for the recently ousted Fox News CEO—half laissez-faire shrug, half baiting attack, and completely full of shit. In truth, Ailes cares a great deal about his legacy, and whenever one of those “enemies” (read: anyone but Ailes or a hired mouthpiece) attempts to define it for him, he’s quick to respond and shout them down. So it should come as no surprise to hear to that—in the wake of his being deposed from the network that served as the manifestation of the inner workings of his mind, right down to the rampant sexual harassment—Ailes is once again intent on channeling those displaced thoughts into a book, one that will attempt to secure his legacy in his own words.
According to CNN’s Brian Stelter, Ailes has been telling his friends that “the book is a priority for him now,” referring to the memoir that he’s been publicly mulling over since at least 2011. Around that time, New York Magazine’s Gabriel Sherman reported that Ailes was negotiating a deal with the Rupert Murdoch-owned HarperCollins to write it with the help of Fox News contributor Jim Pinkerton, with whom he’d previously conspired on George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign (and most famously, on the “Willie Horton” ad that destroyed Michael Dukakis). The timing there led some to believe that Ailes was planning on stepping down from Fox after the 2012 election, and so he was simply following the path of many other wealthy businessmen who can’t force boardrooms to listen to them drone on anymore. But it soon became clear Ailes had the far more pressing objective of countering Sherman’s own, 2014 Ailes biography, The Loudest Voice In The Room, by getting his book out first.
He didn’t. Instead—while Ailes repeatedly refused to talk to Sherman unless, as Sherman wrote, any quotes or background information he considered “negative” were removed—he did cooperate with the far more sympathetic Ze’ev Chafets on Roger Ailes: Off Camera, a slapped-together, book-length magazine profile that was fast-tracked to beat Sherman to the shelf by a couple months. Not surprisingly, it was a total Ailes-approved puff piece that parroted Ailes’ own self-aggrandizing anecdotes about what a tough-talking badass he is, and criticized him only where it doesn’t really count.
Meanwhile, Fox News granted Chafets plenty of airtime to sing Ailes’ praises, while its personalities spent more than a year before Sherman’s book release attacking him as a shoddy journalist, a liar, and a “puppet” of George Soros. And PR chief Brian Lewis, considered Ailes’ right-hand man, was reportedly fired over suspicion that he’d helped Sherman with his book, with Lewis receiving “$8 million in hush money,” Gawker reported, to prevent him from going public with presumably damning info on how Ailes ran things.
So clearly, Ailes does care about his reputation—and in recent weeks, after Gretchen Carlson’s lawsuit spurred Megyn Kelly to join a growing list of women who say Ailes sexually harassed them, one can see why burnishing that reputation would suddenly become “a priority for him” again. In fact, the timing is once again not especially coincidental, as this new report comes only days after The Daily Beast noted that former Fox News anchor Laurie Dhue is prepping her own tell-all. Dhue has so far refused to comment on whether that book will include yet more stories of Ailes treating the channel like one big locker room, but considering the accounts that are out there already, it’s a safe bet.