The National Brain-Damage League
The epidemic of head injuries in football is even worse than you thought.
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 18, 2011, at 12:03 PM ET 
In collisions, "G" is a unit equal to the force of gravity. A low-speed rear-end crash causes an impact of 10G to 30G. A high-flying soccer ball lands on your head with a force of around 20G. Then there's the high-school football player who, according to a recent evaluation by Purdue researchers, received a blow to the head during a game that carried a force of 289G—nearly 300 times the force of gravity.
The scary thing about the hit was not the size of the impact. It was that the young man had no visible symptoms of a concussion.
Newfound concern about the wellbeing of football players has focused on the tip of a very large iceberg. Parents, schools, and athletes worry that thousands of amateurs each year may be suffering head injuries similar to the ones that make us gasp during NFL games. But there's a worse possibility: The most serious brain injuries at all levels of the sport are going completely undiagnosed and undetected. It gives me no pleasure to say this. I am a fan who eagerly awaits game day and the ultimate redemption of my long-suffering team.
Today we worry more about high-impact strikes to the head than about repetitive blows of moderate intensity. We think the only players who suffer brain injuries during collisions are the ones who later look dazed, or who can't keep their balance, or who suffer from slurred speech and vision.
The Purdue research changes all that. Many brain injuries suffered by football players do not produce the "shell-shock" symptoms we associate with concussions. The damage caused by these hits is just as evident when you study players in brain scanners or give them tests that measure sophisticated aspects of brain functioning, but are not picked up by trainers on the sidelines.
The finding about a new group of brain injuries came about, like many discoveries, by accident. Purdue biomedical engineering professor Eric Nauman and his colleagues were studying garden-variety concussions among high-schoolers—hits similar to this one and this one and this one during NFL games.
Nauman and his colleagues wanted to compare changes in the brains of football players who had suffered concussions with the "normal" brains of football players who were concussion-free. But when they scanned the concussion-free players a few weeks into the season and compared these pictures to the same players' preseason scans, they found that many had long-lasting brain changes.
"At first we thought our scanner was broken," Nauman said during a recent presentation of his findings to a group of journalists. "Then we realized this was a new group of impaired players."
Nauman calculates there are about 1 million high-school football players in any given year in the United States. There are some 67,000 reported concussions, and probably about as many that go unreported because fans, coaches, and parents don't want a star athlete pulled from a game. But among the supposedly injury-free remainder, the Purdue researchers believe tens of thousands of athletes routinely suffer serious brain injuries from high-impact collisions intrinsic to the game.
Some of the high-schoolers Nauman studied suffered about 150 head impacts per week during the season, or about 1,500 impacts per year. On average, the hits carried a force of around 40G. (The force of impacts is measured by sensors within helmets.) These hits did not knock players out, but they caused systematic changes in their brain functioning. Unlike the violent helmet-to-helmet collisions in the open field that have drawn warnings and suspensions from the NFL, these blows usually involved routine blocks and tackles, often along the line of scrimmage.
"Half the population we brought in had no obvious impairment whatsoever," Nauman said. But when the Purdue group compared the in-season scans with the preseason scans, "we saw even more significant neurophysiological changes than in the players diagnosed with concussions."
Nauman and other researchers aren't exactly sure what is happening to these players. But they believe that what we call concussions are only one of several kinds of head injury that affect players' verbal ability, memory, and "vestibular system," which controls spatial orientation and balance. Many of the hits that produce "shell-shock" concussions involve blows to the side of the head, as happens with helmet-to-helmet collisions in the open field. The new group of injured players—the ones without visible injury—had suffered damage to the frontal lobe, the part of the brain that controls high-end "executive functioning."
"These seem to result from repetitive blows to the top-front of the head," Nauman told me in an e-mail. "Most common when players lead with their heads to block or tackle. The challenge is that we don't really have sideline tests that can evaluate visual working memory or impulse control. So it is very hard to find the players in this group. Our fear is that they go undiagnosed, keep playing, and accumulate more and more damage."
To avoid running afoul of physicians who believe that all football concussions can be diagnosed on the sidelines, the Purdue researchers are not calling the new kind of brain injuries concussions. They are calling them impairments. But medical turf wars aside, it seems obvious these injuries are concussions, too.
Nauman thinks that while football helmets are pretty good at protecting against skull fractures, they are not good at protecting against concussions. And overconfidence in the helmets' protective power prompts many NFL athletes to deliver and accept hits that would have killed the helmetless players of previous generations.
"If you have traumatic brain injury and keep playing, you are at enormous risk for really serious damage later on," Nauman said. "Because these kids don't show any symptoms, they keep playing and exposing themselves to neurological trauma."
The neurological changes observed by the Purdue researchers did subside in the postseason. As good as brain scans are, they measure only indirectly what is happening at the neural level. And, as with all science, the findings of the Purdue team need to be expanded and independently verified. So we're likely to remain uncertain about the exact nature of this new class of injuries, their behavioral implications, and how they translate to measurable deficits later in life.
While acknowledging those uncertainties, Nauman told me he would never allow a child of his to play football. And now that I've seen the pictures of brain changes among "concussion-free" players, I would no more let a school-age child of mine play competitive football than I would let him or her start smoking. At least one prominent footballcommentator has said the sport is not for his own son. What does it say about us that we derive so much enjoyment from watching other people's kids take risks we would never accept for our own?
The Oldest Bench Ever
Extreme aging in the federal judiciary—and the trouble it causes.
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 18, 2011, at 7:01 AM ET
Judge Richard Owen of the U.S. District Court in Manhattan gathered a group of lawyers in his courtroom in 2007 to discuss the possible leak of sealed documents in a business case. As the hearing got under way, Owen, then 84, asked for someone to explain this newfangled mode of communication the lawyers kept mentioning—e-mail. "It pops up in a machine in some administrative office, and is somebody there with a duty to take it around and give it to whoever it's named to?" he asked.
Some of the lawyers figured that Owen, whose chambers came with a mimeograph machine when he became a judge in 1973, was just behind the times. Others wondered if the judge's memory was failing him. After all, the most famous case in his long career—the back-to-back trials of Silicon Valley investment banker Frank Quattrone—had revolved around a single e-mail. Yet he now acted as though this was the first he was hearing about it. "He didn't understand what was happening in his own courtroom," said one lawyer present that day.
Owen's memory lapses popped up at critical moments. A month after his e-mail query, the judge stumbled badly when handing down a life sentence to drug dealer Darryl Henderson for his connection to a robbery crew that murdered three people in a Bronx apartment. The prosecutor had previously called Henderson "the key into that apartment," because Henderson was sleeping with the apartment's female tenant and conceivably helped the murderers get past the front door. In Judge Owen's mind, the metaphorical key became a literal key. He announced that the tenant had given Henderson "a key to get into that apartment," and seemed unperturbed when the prosecutor explained there was no such evidence.
Then Owen expressed confusion over the relatively limited counts the jury had found Henderson guilty of and grew exasperated when the defense and prosecution tried to set him straight. Lawyers questioned whether Owen's mind was working well enough to be deciding matters of life and liberty. "Do I think age was a factor in some of his cloudy thinking? Yes," said David Patton, a defense attorney for Henderson. "There were many times when he seemed confused and exhausted." Owen declined repeated interview requests.
Life tenure, intended to foster judicial independence, has been a unique feature of the federal bench since the Constitution was ratified in 1789. Back then, the average American lived to be about 40 and the framers didn't express much worry about senile judges. "A superannuated bench," Alexander Hamilton said, is an "imaginary danger."
No longer. Today, aging and dementia are the flip side of life tenure, with more and more judges staying on the bench into extreme old age. About 12 percent of the nation's 1,200 sitting federal district and circuit judges are 80 years or older, according to a 2010 survey conducted by ProPublica. Eleven federal judges over the age of 90 are hearing cases—compared with four just 20 years ago. (One judge, a Kansan appointed by President John F. Kennedy, is over 100.) The share of octogenarians and nonagenarians on the federal bench has doubled in the past 20 years. The demographics of the federal bench have no analogue on the state courts, where judges mostly occupy their office for a term of fixed years and generally have mandatory retirement ages, often in their 60s or 70s.
Scholars like David Garrow of Cambridge University have looked at senility on the Supreme Court and called for a reconsideration of life tenure for its justices. But on the lower federal courts, where judges still wield enormous power, the failings that come with age have gotten much less attention. Sometimes, when judges stay on the bench longer than they should, no one questions their fitness. And most courts have no systemic way to deal with judges with age-related cognitive problems. "We are the worst fraternity in the world about this," said Judge Boyce Martin, chief judge of the Cincinnati-based 6th Circuit Court of Appeals from 1996 to 2003.
For many older judges, no doubt, experience is a virtue. "My memory is not as acute as it was, [but] principles, I know, and my judgment is the same—it may be better," said U.S. District Judge Jack Weinstein, a Brooklyn legend at 89 and one of the nation's most respected legal minds.
But judges of advanced years are clearly at increased risk for trouble with memory and cognition. According to the Alzheimer's Association, about 13 percent of Americans over 65 have Alzheimer's and nearly half of those 85 and older develop it or suffer from dementia.
The judiciary does not assess the competence of its senior judges. The courts have no formal policy requiring, or even recommending, that judges receive medical checkups or consult with geriatricians. Instead, the institution relies on other judges to monitor colleagues, and, working discreetly behind the scenes, to push out enfeebled judges gently. Judge Dee Benson of U.S. District Court in Utah, age 62, likened the process to persuading an elderly parent to stop driving: "How are we going to get grandma off the highway?"
The judge who patrols that highway most aggressively is Frank Easterbrook, chief of the Chicago-based 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. In the last four years, Easterbrook says, he has arranged for two colleagues to see neurologists. One was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and retired. The other insisted on returning to the bench after a stroke, but because he had difficulties "with executive function," Easterbrook said, he removed all criminal cases from the judge's docket. Easterbrook has even publicly called on lawyers to contact his chambers directly if they think a judge is exhibiting symptoms of dementia—a rare move by the bench to enlist the public in monitoring judges.
Why do judges outstay their welcome? Longer life spans and attachment to the job play a role. Another factor, judges and experts say, is that in some ways the job has gotten easier. Until the 1930s, district and circuit court judges functioned without law clerks. Now even district court judges get two apiece, and they can pick up the slack as a judge's output diminishes. A 2005 study offers a sense of just how long judges are holding on: More than nine out of 10 district court judges die within a year of retiring fully. "I can't remember a judge who went home to clip roses," said Bill Dazey, a longtime assistant federal defender in Indianapolis. "I just feel better working," explained 94-year-old Judge Robert McWilliams of the Denver- based 10th Circuit. "You can't just sit around the house watching TV."
And for nearly a century, Congress has invited judges to work less, starting at age 65, instead of retiring. A judge who goes on senior status, as the arrangement is called, still draws a salary and works as much or as little as he or she likes; meanwhile, the president can nominate a new judge to take the spot the senior-status judge has vacated, at least on paper. It's a system meant to encourage elderly judges to make room for younger ones, without giving anybody the boot.
There's no question that the arrangement aids the smooth functioning of the judiciary. Senior judges provide the extra manpower needed to keep the federal docket moving, especially at times when the president and Senate are slow to fill vacancies on the bench. (At present, 101 seats are empty, a relatively high number). In 2008, judges with senior status handled more than 18 percent of the caseload in the federal trial courts, double the portion they handled a generation ago.
But the work-as-you-wish arrangement also insulates judges from normal retirement pressures and enables senior status judges to stick around even if they are too enfeebled to do the entire job. Some senior status judges, for instance, only hear cases that can be decided entirely on written motions—like social security or habeas petitions—which don't require the exertion of presiding over a courtroom or the risk of public scrutiny. Judge Owen now decides cases only in this way.
In a similar fashion, the 94-year-old Judge McWilliams generally leaves the heavy lifting to others on the three-judge panels he is a part of. For the most part, he has stopped writing precedential opinions, limiting himself to issuing short orders in less significant cases.
Judges facing age-related mental decline are prone to make rookie mistakes that harm the rights of the people before them. Judge John Shabaz of the federal court in Madison, Wisc., had a reputation as a strict sentencer who resolved cases at a brisk pace. But when he reached his mid-70s, attorneys began to suspect his mind was deteriorating. "He had trouble reading things out loud, such as plea agreements," lawyer David Mandell says. "He would start and stop and start over."
In August 2006, before announcing a 20-year sentence, Shabaz forgot to offer a convicted drug dealer the chance to ask for mercy, a right spelled out in the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. The judge reversed the process, first announcing the sentence and then offering the man a chance to speak. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit called this "the kind of error that undermines the fairness of the judicial process" and sent the case back to a different judge for a do-over. A story about Shabaz appeared in the Capital Times, a Madison newspaper, under the headline "Confusion in the Court." Easterbrook, playing his role as highway patrolman, sent intermediaries to persuade Shabaz not to return from a medical leave for shoulder surgery in 2008. For a while Shabaz resisted, but eventually he acquiesced, a colleague said. He assumed senior status in January 2009 and no longer hears cases.
Sometimes the problem isn't as clear-cut as forgetfulness—a failing that, after all, is relatively easy to recognize. Attorneys say J. Thomas Greene, a U.S. district judge in Utah, seemed to grow more impulsive with age, a common sign that the brain's ability to self-censor is eroding. In 2006, Greene, then 76, presided over the trial of a man charged with lying about the disappearance of a teenage girl. At a proceeding to pick a jury, the judge asked prospective jurors whether they were acquainted, a question meant to keep friends from serving on the same panel. One man answered that he knew one of the other potential jurors, a woman. "I didn't recognize you," the woman exclaimed.
"She didn't recognize you with your clothes on," Greene shot back, shocking the courtroom.
Another impulsive outburst affected the sentence of a serial bank robber. "Maybe I'm a fool to have given you this kind of break twice, but somehow I have a feeling about you," Greene said, before sentencing the man to less than half the prison time called for in the federal sentencing guidelines. The appeals court threw out the sentence in a decision expressing concern that Greene hadn't taken the case seriously enough. Greene stopped hearing cases in 2008.
How common are such lapses? One answer comes from an experiment by the 9th Circuit. In 2001, the appeals court set up a confidential help line for judges, expecting most calls to be about depression or addiction. Instead, the overwhelming majority have come from judges concerned that elderly colleagues were showing signs of slipping, said Richard Carlton, the consultant who answers the line. He said that each year he receives calls about six to eight judges within the circuit whose "mental acuity or change in temperament, or other changes in behavior are troubling."
Beyond the help line, and the informal pressure of chief judges, the more formal remedies have little effect. The last impeachment for mental incapacity was in 1803. Judges also can be stripped of their dockets if a committee of their peers votes to issue a certificate of disability. That has happened just twice in the last 20 years. Fewer than 1 percent of the 5,277 complaints from litigants and lawyers against judges, filed from 2000 to 2005, involved allegations of mental disability. Generally protective of the bench and fearful of a backlash, lawyers rarely complain.
Without clear rules or a protocol to guide them, some judges initiate their own early-warning system, asking colleagues or a former clerk to let them know if they are slipping. Judge Weinstein of Brooklyn gets an annual neurological checkup, including a CAT scan. In an interview, he suggested that the judiciary should consider amending its ethical code to encourage judges to notify their chief judge about health concerns, particularly if they are taking medications that affect memory or emotional balance.
Judge Martin of the 6th Circuit would go further: He thinks regular mental and physical checkups for senior status judges should be required. "Shouldn't you take that extra step of letting the government make sure you're as agile as you thought you were?" he asked.
Karen Williams knows firsthand what it means for a judge to face mental decline. While she doesn't support mandatory testing, she said she wouldn't object to a guideline that encouraged judges to consider regular exams. Named to the 4th Circuit at age 40, Williams was seen as a rising star, possibly even a Supreme Court candidate, until 2009. That's when she began to notice changes in herself. She struggled with spatial distortion. Even in familiar places, she couldn't remember which way to turn when she left a room. Stunningly, at age 57, Williams was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.
There was no roadmap for what to do next. Could she continue working until her symptoms worsened? For how long? "I questioned how and who would determine when I reached the stage that my mental processes truly were affected to such a degree as to make me unfit to remain on the bench," she said in a written response to my questions in the most detailed public account she has given about her diagnosis. "Would it require daily, weekly, monthly testing? What kind of testing? What test result would be needed to equate with 'unfitness'?"
Though she still felt able to perform her duties, after reflection Williams decided to retire immediately. "It was inappropriate to continue working, knowing that at any time any opinions I wrote or joined could be challenged or second-guessed," she told me. She added that she "did not want to harm in any way the dignity of the court." Without rules or a policy to guide her decision, Williams had to make her own call. She decided to put the court first. But she may be more the exception than the rule.
Like other Phenomena of the '80s, Steve Jobs was supposed to be long gone by now. After the spectacular rise of Apple, which went from a garage start-up to a $1.4 billion company in just eight years, the Entrepreneur of the Decade (as one magazine anointed him in 1989) tried to do it all again with a new company called NeXT. He was going to build the next generation of the personal computer, a machine so beautiful, so powerful, so insanely great,it would put Apple to shame. It didn't happen. After eight long years of struggle and after running through some $250 million, NeXT closed down its hardware division last year and laid off more than 200 employees. It seemed only a matter of time until the whole thing collapsed and Jobs disappeared into hyperspace.
But it turns out that Jobs isn't as far gone as some techno-pundits thought. There are big changes coming in software development — and Jobs, of all people, is trying to lead the way. This time the Holy Grail is object-oriented programming; some have compared the effect it will have on the production of software to the effect the industrial revolution had on manufactured goods. "In my 20 years in this industry, I have never seen a revolution as profound as this," says Jobs, with characteristic understatement. "You can build software literally five to 10 times faster, and that software is much more reliable, much easier to maintain and much more powerful."
This article appeared in the June 16, 1994 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available in the online archive.
Of course, this being Silicon Valley, there is always a new revolution to hype. And to hear it coming from Jobs — Mr. Revolution himself — is bound to raise some eyebrows. "Steve is a little like the boy who cried wolf," says Robert Cringely, a columnist at Info World, a PC industry newsweekly. "He has cried revolution one too many times. People still listen to him, but now they're more skeptical." And even if object-oriented software does take off, Jobs may very well end up a minor figure rather than the flag-waving leader of the pack he clearly sees himself as.
Whatever role Jobs ends up playing, there is no question evolutionary forces will soon reshape the software industry. Since the Macintosh changed the world 10 years ago with its brilliant point-and-click interface, all the big leaps in computer evolution have been on the hardware side. Machines have gotten smaller, faster and cheaper. Software, by contrast, has gotten bigger, more complicated and much more expensive to produce. Writing a new spreadsheet or word-processing program these days is a tedious process, like building a skyscraper out of toothpicks. Object-oriented programming will change that. To put it simply, it will allow gigantic, complex programs to be assembled like Tinkertoys. Instead of starting from the ground up every time, layering in one line of code after another, programmers will be able to use preassembled chunks to build 80 percent of a program, thus saving an enormous amount of time and money. Because these objects will work with a wide range of interfaces and applications, they will also eliminate many of the compatibility problems that plague traditional software.
For now, the beneficiary of all this is corporate America, which needs powerful custom software to help manage huge databases on its networks. Because of the massive hardware requirements for object-oriented software, it will be years before it becomes practical for small businesses and individual users (decent performance out of NeXT's software on a 486/Pentium processor, for example, requires 24 megs of RAM and 200 megs on a hard drive). Still, in the long run, object-oriented software will vastly simplify the task of writing programs, eventually making it accessible even to folks without degrees from MIT.
No one disputes the fact that NeXT has a leg up on this new technology. Unlike most of its competitors, whose object-oriented software is still in the prototype stage, NEXTSTEP (NeXT's operating system software) has been out in the real world for several years. It's been road-tested, revised, refined, and it is, by all accounts, a solid piece of work. Converts include McCaw Cellular, Swiss Bank and Chrysler Financial. But as the overwhelming success of Microsoft has shown, the company with the best product doesn't always win. For NeXT to succeed, it will have to go up against two powerhouses: Taligent, the new partnership of Apple and IBM, and Bill Gates and his $4 billion-a-year Microsoft steamroller. "Right now, it's a horse race between those three companies," says Esther Dyson, a Silicon Valley marketing guru. A recent $10 million deal with Sun Microsystems — the workstation company that was once NeXT's arch rival — has breathed new life into NeXT, but it is only one step in a very long journey. Still, few dare count NeXT out.
Today, Jobs, 39, seems eager to distance himself from his reputation as the Wunderkind of the '80s. He wears small, round John Lennon-style glasses now, and his boyish face is hidden behind a shaggy, Left Bank-poet beard. During our interview at the NeXT offices in Redwood City, Calif., just 20 miles north of his old Apple fiefdom, he took particular joy in bashing his old rival Bill Gates but avoided discussing other heavyweights by name. Trademark Jobsian phrases like "insanely great" or "the next big thing" were nowhere to be found. Friends say the Sturm und Drang of the past few years has humbled Jobs ever so slightly; he is a devoted family man now, and on weekends, he can often be seen Rollerblading with his wife and two kids through the streets of Palo Alto.
"Remember, this is a guy who never believed any of the rules applied to him," one colleague says. "Now, I think he's finally realized that he's mortal, just like the rest of us."
It's been 10 years since the Macintosh was introduced. When you look around at the technological landscape today, what's most surprising to you?
People say sometimes, "You work in the fastest-moving industry in the world." I don't feel that way. I think I work in one of the slowest. It seems to take forever to get anything done. All of the graphical-user interface stuff that we did with the Macintosh was pioneered at Xerox PARC [the company's legendary Palo Alto Research Center] and with Doug Engelbart at SRI [a future-oriented think tank at Stanford] in the mid-'70s. And here we are, just about the mid-'90s, and it's kind of commonplace now. But it's about a 10-to-20-year lag. That's a long time.
The reason for that is, it seems to take a very unique combination of technology, talent, business and marketing and luck to make significant change in our industry. It hasn't happened that often.
The other interesting thing is that, in general, business tends to be the fueling agent for these changes. It's simply because they have a lot of money. They're willing to pay money for things that will save them money or give them new capabilities. And that's a hard one sometimes, because a lot of the people who are the most creative in this business aren't doing it because they want to help corporate America.
A perfect example is the PDA [Personal Digital Assistant] stuff, like Apple's Newton. I'm not real optimistic about it, and I'll tell you why. Most of the people who developed these PDAs developed them because they thought individuals were going to buy them and give them to their families. My friends started General Magic [a new company that hopes to challenge the Newton]. They think your kids are going to have these, your grandmother's going to have one, and you're going to all send messages. Well, at $1,500 a pop with a cellular modem in them, I don't think too many people are going to buy three or four for their family. The people who are going to buy them in the first five years are mobile professionals.
And the problem is, the psychology of the people who develop these things is just not going to enable them to put on suits and hop on planes and go to Federal Express and pitch their product.
To make step-function changes, revolutionary changes, it takes that combination of technical acumen and business and marketing — and a culture that can somehow match up the reason you developed your product and the reason people will want to buy it. I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I've done that sort of thing in my life, but I've always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don't know why. Because they're harder. They're much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you've completely failed.
Is that the period you're emerging from now?
I hope so. I've been there before, and I've recently been there again.
As you know, most of what I've done in my career has been software. The Apple II wasn't much software, but the Mac was just software in a cool box. We had to build the box because the software wouldn't run on any other box, but nonetheless, it was mainly software. I was involved in PostScript and the formation of Adobe, and that was all software. And what we've done with NEXTSTEP is really all software. We tried to sell it in a really cool box, but we learned a very important lesson. When you ask people to go outside of the mainstream, they take a risk. So there has to be some important reward for taking that risk or else they won't take it
What we learned was that the reward can't be one and a half times better or twice as good. That's not enough. The reward has to be like three or four or five times better to take the risk to jump out of the mainstream.
The problem is, in hardware you can't build a computer that's twice as good as anyone else's anymore. Too many people know how to do it. You're lucky if you can do one that's one and a third times better or one and a half times better. And then it's only six months before everybody else catches up. But you can do it in software. As a matter of fact, I think that the leap that we've made is at least five years ahead of anybody.
Let's talk about the evolution of the PC. About 30 percent of American homes have computers. Businesses are wired. Video-game machines are rapidly becoming as powerful as PCs and in the near future will be able to do everything that traditional desktop computers can do. Is the PC revolution over?
No. Well, I don't know exactly what you mean by your question, but I think that the PC revolution is far from over. What happened with the Mac was — well, first I should tell you my theory about Microsoft. Microsoft has had two goals in the last 10 years. One was to copy the Mac, and the other was to copy Lotus' success in the spreadsheet — basically, the applications business. And over the course of the last 10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost.
They were able to copy the Mac because the Mac was frozen in time. The Mac didn't change much for the last 10 years. It changed maybe 10 percent. It was a sitting duck. It's amazing that it took Microsoft 10 years to copy something that was a sitting duck. Apple, unfortunately, doesn't deserve too much sympathy. They invested hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars into R&D, but very little came out They produced almost no new innovation since the original Mac itself.
So now, the original genes of the Macintosh have populated the earth. Ninety percent in the form of Windows, but nevertheless, there are tens of millions of computers that work like that. And that's great. The question is, what's next? And what's going to keep driving this PC revolution?
If you look at the goal of the '80s, it was really individual productivity. And that could be answered with shrink-wrapped applications [off-the-shelf software]. If you look at the goal of the '90s — well, if you look at the personal computer, it's going from being a tool of computation to a tool of communication. It's going from individual productivity to organizational productivity and also operational productivity. What I mean by that is, the market for mainframe and minicomputers is still as large as the PC market And people don't buy those things to run shrink-wrapped spreadsheets and word processors on. They buy them to run applications that automate the heart of their company. And they don't buy these applications shrink-wrapped. You can't go buy an application to run your hospital, to do derivatives commodities trading or to run your phone network. They don't exist. Or if they do, you have to customize them so much that they're really custom apps by the time you get through with them.
These custom applications really used to just be in the back office — in accounting, manufacturing. But as business is getting much more sophisticated and consumers are expecting more and more, these custom apps have invaded the front office. Now, when a company has a new product, it consists of only three things: an idea, a sales channel and a custom app to implement the product. The company doesn't implement the product by hand anymore or service it by hand. Without the custom app, it doesn't have the new product or service. I'll give you an example. MCI's Friends and Family is the most successful business promotion done in the last decade — measured in dollars and cents. AT&T did not respond to that for 18 months. It cost them billions of dollars. Why didn't they? They're obviously smart guys. They didn't because they couldn't create a custom app to run a new billing system.
So how does this connect with the next generation of the PC?
I believe the next generation of the PC is going to be driven by much more advanced software, and it's going to be driven by custom software for business. Business has focused on shrink-wrapped software on the PCs, and that's why PCs haven't really touched the heart of the business. And now they want to bring them into the heart of the business, and everyone is going to have to run custom apps alongside their shrink-wrapped apps because that's how the enterprise is going to get their competitive advantage in things.
For example, McCaw Cellular, the largest cellular provider in the world, runs the whole front end of their business on NEXTSTEP now. They're giving PCs with custom apps to the phone dealers so that when you buy a cellular phone, it used to take you a day and a half to get you up on the network. Now it takes five minutes. The phone dealer just runs these custom apps, they're networked back to a server in Seattle, and in a minute and a half, with no human intervention, your phone works on the entire McCaw network.
In addition to that, the applications business right now — if you look at even the shrink-wrap business — is contracting dramatically. It now takes 100 to 200 people one to two years just to do a major revision to a word processor or spreadsheet. And so, all the really creative people who like to work in small teams of three, four, five people, they've all been squeezed out of that business. As you may know, Windows is the worst development environment ever made. And Microsoft doesn't have any interest in making it better, because the fact that its really hard to develop apps in Windows plays to Microsoft's advantage. You can't have small teams of programmers writing word processors and spreadsheets — it might upset their competitive advantage. And they can afford to have 200 people working on a project, no problem.
With our technology, with objects, literally three people in a garage can blow away what 200 people at Microsoft can do. Literally can blow it away. Corporate America has a need that is so huge and can save them so much money, or make them so much money, or cost them so much money if they miss it, that they are going to fuel the object revolution.
That may be so. But when people think of Steve Jobs, they think of the man whose mission was to bring technology to the masses — not to corporate America.
Well, life is always a little more complicated than it appears to be.
What drove the success of the Apple II for many years and let consumers have the benefit of that product was Visi-Calc selling into corporate America. Corporate America was buying Apple IIs and running Visi-Calc on them like crazy so that we could get our volumes up and our prices down and sell that as a consumer product on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays while selling it to business on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We were giving away Macintoshes to higher ed while we were selling them for a nice profit to corporate America. So it takes both.
What's going to fuel the object revolution is not the consumer. The consumer is not going to see the benefits until after business sees them and we begin to get this stuff into volume. Because unfortunately, people are not rebelling against Microsoft. They don't know any better. They're not sitting around thinking that they have a giant problem that needs to be solved — whereas corporations are. The PC market has done less and less to serve their growing needs. They have a giant need, and they know it. We don't have to spend money educating them about the problem — they know they have a problem. There's a giant vacuum sucking us in there, and there's a lot of money in there to fuel the development of this object industry. And everyone will benefit from that
I visited Xerox PARC in 1979, when I was at Apple. That visit's been written about — it was a very important visit. I remember being shown their rudimentary graphical-user interface. It was incomplete, some of it wasn't even right, but the germ of the idea was there. And within 10 minutes, it was so obvious that every computer would work this way someday. You knew it with every bone in your body. Now, you could argue about the number of years it would take, you could argue about who the winners and losers in terms of companies in the industry might be, but I don't think rational people could argue that every computer would work this way someday.
I feel the same way about objects, with every bone in my body. All software will be written using this object technology someday. No question about it. You can argue about how many years it's going to take, you can argue who the winners and losers are going to be in terms of the companies in this industry, but I don't think a rational person can argue that all software will not be built this way.
Would you explain, in simple terms, exactly what object-oriented software is?
Objects are like people. They're living, breathing things that have knowledge inside them about how to do things and have memory inside them so they can remember things. And rather than interacting with them at a very low level, you interact with them at a very high level of abstraction, like we're doing right here.
Here's an example: If I'm your laundry object, you can give me your dirty clothes and send me a message that says, "Can you get my clothes laundered, please." I happen to know where the best laundry place in San Francisco is. And I speak English, and I have dollars in my pockets. So I go out and hail a taxicab and tell the driver to take me to this place in San Francisco. I go get your clothes laundered, I jump back in the cab, I get back here. I give you your clean clothes and say, "Here are your clean clothes."
You have no idea how I did that. You have no knowledge of the laundry place. Maybe you speak French, and you can't even hail a taxi. You can't pay for one, you don't have dollars in your pocket. Yet I knew how to do all of that. And you didn't have to know any of it. All that complexity was hidden inside of me, and we were able to interact at a very high level of abstraction. That's what objects are. They encapsulate complexity, and the interfaces to that complexity are high level.
You brought up Microsoft earlier. How do you feel about the fact that Bill Gates has essentially achieved dominance in the software industry with what amounts to your vision of how personal computers should work?
I don't really know what that all means. If you say, well, how do you feel about Bill Gates getting rich off some of the ideas that we had ... well, you know, the goal is not to be the richest man in the cemetery. It's not my goal anyway.
The thing I don't think is good is that I don't believe Microsoft has transformed itself into an agent for improving things, an agent for coming up with the next revolution. The Japanese, for example, used to be accused of just copying — and indeed, in the beginning, that's just what they did. But they got quite a bit more sophisticated and started to innovate — look at automobiles, they certainly innovated quite a bit there. I can't say the same thing about Microsoft.
And I become very concerned, because I see Microsoft competing very fiercely and putting a lot of companies out of business — some deservedly so and others not deservedly so. And I see a lot of innovation leaving this industry. What I believe very strongly is that the industry absolutely needs an alternative to Microsoft. And it needs an alternative to Microsoft in the applications area — which I hope will be Lotus. And we also need an alternative to Microsoft in the systems-software area. And the only hope we have for that, in my opinion, is NeXT.
Microsoft, of course, is working on their own object-oriented operating system —
They were working on the Mac for 10 years, too. I'm sure they're working on it
Microsoft's greatest asset is Windows. Their greatest liability is Windows. Windows is so nonobject-oriented that it's going to be impossible for them to go back and become object-oriented without throwing Windows away, and they can't do that for years. So they're going to try to patch things on top, and it's not going to work.
You've called Microsoft the IBM of the '90s. What exactly do you mean by that?
They're the mainstream. And a lot of people who don't want to think about it too much are just going to buy their product. They have a market dominance now that is so great that it's actually hurting the industry. I don't like to get into discussions about whether they accomplished that fairly or not That's for others to decide. I just observe it and say it's not healthy for the country.
What do you think of the federal antitrust investigation?
I don't have enough data to know. And again, the issue is not whether they accomplished what they did within the rule book or by breaking some of the rules. I'm not qualified to say. But I don't think it matters. I don't think that's the real issue. The real issue is, America is leading the world in software technology right now, and that is such a valuable asset for this country that anything that potentially threatens that leadership needs to be examined. I think the Microsoft monopoly of both sectors of the software industry — both the system and the applications software and the potential third sector that they want to monopolize, which is the consumer set-top-box sector — is going to pose the greatest threat to Americas dominance in the software industry of anything I have ever seen and could ever think of. I personally believe that it would be in the best interest of the country to break Microsoft up into three companies — a systems-software company, an applications-software company and a consumer-software company.
Hearing you talk like this makes me flash back to the old Apple days, when Apple cast itself in the role of the rebel against the establishment. Except now, instead of IBM, the great evil is Microsoft. And instead of Apple that will save us, it's NeXT. Do you see parallels here, too?
Yeah, I do. Forget about me. That's not important. What's important is, I see tremendous parallels between the solidity and dominance that IBM had and the shackles that that was imposing on our industry and what Microsoft is doing today.... I think we came closer than we think to losing some of our computer industry in the late '70s and early '80s, and I think the gradual dissolution of IBM has been the healthiest thing that's happened in this industry in the last 10 years.
What's your personal relationship with Bill Gates like?
I think Bill Gates is a good guy. We're not best friends, but we talk maybe once a month.
A lot has been made of the rivalry between you two. The two golden boys of the computer revolution —
I think Bill and I have very different value systems. I like Bill very much, and I certainly admire his accomplishments, but the companies we built were very different from each other.
A lot of people believe that given the stranglehold Microsoft has on the software business, in the long run, the best NeXT can hope for is that it will be a niche product.
Apple's a niche product, the Mac was a niche product And yet look at what it did. Apple's, what, a $9 billion company. It was $2 billion when I left They're doing OK. Would I be happy if we had a 10 percent market share of the system-software business? I'd be happy now. I'd be very happy. Then I'd go work like crazy to get 20.
You mentioned the Apple earlier. When you look at the company you founded now, what do you think?
I don't want to talk about Apple.
What about the PowerPC?
It works fine. It's a Pentium. The PowerPC and the Pentium are equivalent, plus or minus 10 or 20 percent, depending on which day you measure them. They're the same thing. So Apple has a Pentium. That's good. Is it three or four or five times better? No. Will it ever be? No. But it beats being behind. Which was where the Motorola 68000 architecture was unfortunately being relegated. It keeps them at least equal, but it's not a compelling advantage.
You can't open the paper these days without reading about the Internet and the information superhighway. Where is this all going?
The Internet is nothing new. It has been happening for 10 years. Finally, now, the wave is cresting on the general computer user. And I love it. I think the den is far more interesting than the living room. Putting the Internet into people's houses is going to be really what the information superhighway is all about, not digital convergence in the set-top box. All that's going to do is put the video rental stores out of business and save me a trip to rent my movie. I'm not very excited about that. I'm not excited about home shopping. I'm very excited about having the Internet in my den.
Phone companies, cable companies and Hollywood are jumping all over each other trying to get a piece of the action. Who do you think will be the winners and losers, say, five years down the road?
I've talked to some of these guys in the phone and cable business, and believe me, they have no idea what they're doing here. And the people who are talking the loudest know the least
Who are you referring to –John Malone?
I don't want to name names. Let me just say that, in general, they have no idea how difficult this is going to be and how long it is going to take. None of these guys understands computer science. They don't understand that that's a little computer that they're going to have in the set-top box, and in order to run that computer, they're going to have to come up with some very sophisticated software.
Let's talk more about the Internet. Every month, it's growing by leaps and bounds. How is this new communications web going to affect the way we live in the future?
I don't think it's too good to talk about these kinds of things. You can open up any book and hear all about this kind of garbage.
I'm interested in bearing your ideas.
I don't think of the world that way. I'm a tool builder. That's how I think of myself. I want to build really good tools that I know in my gut and my heart will be valuable. And then whatever happens is... you can't really predict exactly what will happen, but you can feel the direction that we're going. And that's about as close as you can get. Then you just stand back and get out of the way, and these things take on a life of their own.
Nevertheless, you've often talked about how technology can empower people, how it can change their lives. Do you still have as much faith in technology today as you did when you started out 20 years ago?
Oh, sure. It's not a faith in technology. It's faith in people.
Explain that.
Technology is nothing. What's important is that you have a faith in people, that they're basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they'll do wonderful things with them. It's not the tools that you have faith in — tools are just tools. They work, or they don't work. It's people you have faith in or not. Yeah, sure, I'm still optimistic I mean, I get pessimistic sometimes but not for long.
It's been 10 years since the PC revolution started. Rational people can debate about whether technology has made the world a better place –
The world's clearly a better place. Individuals can now do things that only large groups of people with lots of money could do before. What that means is, we have much more opportunity for people to get to the marketplace — not just the marketplace of commerce but the marketplace of ideas. The marketplace of publications, the marketplace of public policy. You name it. We've given individuals and small groups equally powerful tools to what the largest, most heavily funded organizations in the world have. And that trend is going to continue. You can buy for under $10,000 today a computer that is just as powerful, basically, as one anyone in the world can get their hands on.
The second thing that we've done is the communications side of it. By creating this electronic web, we have flattened out again the difference between the lone voice and the very large organized voice. We have allowed people who are not part of an organization to communicate and pool their interests and thoughts and energies together and start to act as if they were a virtual organization.
So I think this technology has been extremely rewarding. And I don't think it's anywhere near over.
When you were talking about Bill Gates, you said that the goal is not to be the richest guy in the cemetery. What is the goal?
I don't know how to answer you. In the broadest context, the goal is to seek enlightenment — however you define it. But these are private things. I don't want to talk about this kind of stuff.
Why?
I think, especially when one is somewhat in the public eye, it's very important to keep a private life.
Are you uncomfortable with your status as a celebrity in Silicon Valley?
I think of it as my well-known twin brother. It's not me. Because otherwise, you go crazy. You read some negative article some idiot writes about you — you just can't take it too personally. But then that teaches you not to take the really great ones too personally either. People like symbols, and they write about symbols.
I talked to some of the original Mac designers the other day, and they mentioned the 10-year-annniversary celebration of the Mac a few months ago. You didn't want to participate in that. Has it been a burden, the pressure to repeat the phenomenal success of the Mac? Some people have compared you to Orson Welles, who at 25 did his best work, and it's all downhill from there.
I'm very flattered by that, actually. I wonder what game show I'm going to be on. Guess I'm going to have to start eating a lot of pie. [Laughs.] I don't know. The Macintosh was sort of like this wonderful romance in your life that you once had — and that produced about 10 million children. In a way it will never be over in your life. You'll still smell that romance every morning when you get up. And when you open the window, the cool air will hit your face, and you'll smell that romance in the air. And you'll see your children around, and you feel good about it. And nothing will ever make you feel bad about it.
But now, your life has moved on. You get up every morning, and you might remember that romance, but then the whole day is in front of you to do something wonderful with.
But I also think that what we're now may turn out in the end to be more profound. Because the Macintosh was the agent of change to bring computers to the rest of us with its graphical-user interface. That was very important. But now the industry is up against a really big closed door. Objects are going to unlock that door. On the other side is a world so rich from this well of software that will spring up that the true promise of many of the things we started, even with the Apple II, will finally start to be realized.
After that ... who knows? Maybe there's another locked door behind this door, too; I don't know. But someone else is going to have to figure out how to unlock that one.
Updated 2:30 pm near bottom of post, to clarify recipient of a letter from Yahoo's lawyers.
The tech world is abuzz with a remarkable display of backbone by Twitter in the Wikileaks case. It deserves wider notice.
Federal prosecutors want to indict Julian Assange for making public a great many classified documents. In December the feds obtained a secret order instructing Twitter to hand over private account contents for Assange and four Wikileaks associates, including network addresses, connection logs, credit card information and identities of everyone they talked to. The order forbade Twitter to notify those affected, among them Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of Iceland's parliament.
Twitter stalled, fighting and winning a motion to lift the gag order, which is how we know about the case. (If the judge had believed government claims that lifting the gag would blow the investigation, she could equally have rejected Twitter's motion.) Having obtained permission, Twitter notified its users and promised to hand over nothing if they filed a motion to quash within ten days. That is simply the gold standard of customer protection, enabling courts to balance the legitimate needs of prosecutors with the civil liberties of their targets. It almost never happens.
The Obama administration, like those before it, promotes a disturbingly narrow interpretation of the Fourth Amendment, misapplying the facts of old analog cases to a radically different digital world. I do not deny that there is a line of judicial precedents allowing government agents to search our emails, copy our hard drives andplant GPS trackers on our cars without anything close to probable cause. But there are also contrary cases, and the steady march toward a surveillance state would be unrecognizable to the Founders. Computer files and the contents of smartphones are indisputably the present-day equivalents of constitutionally protected "houses, papers, and effects." Surveillance-happy authorities define the problem away. The search-and-seizure provisions of the Fourth Amendment, they say, are irrelevant because you and I have no "reasonable expectation of privacy" in digital records that tell vastly more about us than our parents' file drawers. This is not primarily a legal argument. It's an assertion of fact about what we think, and about the nature of our society. It says that, because we have entrusted our private data to Google or Sprint or Skype -- without which transactions we cannot function in today's economy or society -- we are affirming that we do not actually regard our secrets as private. Another version, equally circular, is that we know that high-tech surveillance tools exist, and therefore don't expect privacy for anything those tools can reach. (In case you haven't heard, thermal imagery can take pretty good pictures through your bedroom wall from the street.) Raise your hands, all you government lawyers, if you purport to believe your emails and personal files are not private. I'll be happy to link to them in my next column.
Companies that receive government information demands have to obey the law, but they often have room for maneuver. They scarcely ever use it. Digital security guru Christopher Soghoian, in a first-rate piece of reporting and analysis awaiting publication in the Minnesota Journal of Law, Science and Technology, describes the available legal and technical tools in rich detail. In general, the companies could keep fewer records that could be subpoenaed, insist that data requests be narrowly tailored to the asserted purpose and ask courts to lift restrictions on customer notice.
It is beyond reasonable doubt that authorities asked other companies to supply the same kinds of information sought from Twitter, but none of them admit it. Soghoian notes that standard procedure in this kind of forensic work is to assemble data from many sources to "draw the graph" of Wikileaks and its leadership -- who communicates with whom, and when, and who initiates the contact -- even if the contents of the conversations are encrypted. Twitter lived up handsomely to a policy of providing no private information without a binding order, and of notifying users unless legally barred from doing so. The other companies, with a few partial exceptions, will not say what their policies are. I sent carefully framed questions to Verizon Wireless, Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, MySpace and Skype. None replied to most of them. Partial answers, when I got them, were mostly homilies about how seriously they take privacy and how carefully they review each request.
Details are below, but here's the bottom line. As Paul Ohm, a former computer crime prosecutor, put it to me, there is a "classic tacit collusion problem" by companies that do not want to compete on privacy and agree among themselves that "the less you know the better." Yahoo actually said as much when Soghoian filed a freedom of information request for helped disclose some of its surveillance practices. Yahoo's lawyers asked the U.S. government to deny the request, saying disclosure would "shock [our] customers" and damage wrote him a threatening letter, saying he had damaged the company's "reputation for protection of user privacy and security, which is a competitive disadvantage for technology companies."
If only. We know what's in our Cheerios and in our retirement accounts because the law requires disclosure. The market for privacy is broken. Suppliers don't let us comparison-shop and Congress is not disposed to oblige them. Attention state legislators: does anyone care?
---
Here's the fine print:
I asked the companies how many times in 2010 they were served with government demands for non-public information about their customers, and whether they (1) try to narrow those demands; (2) insist on compulsory legal orders before complying; (3) ask courts to allow them to notify their customers; (4) tell customers who inquire, if legally permitted, whether their private data has been obtained by authorities; (5) follow stronger or weaker interpretations of their customers' rights in areas of disputed law, such as the pro-privacy holdings in the Sixth Circuit and Ninth Circuit that do not bind other jurisdictions. I further asked them, if they declined to answer these questions, why they believed their customers did not deserve to know.
-----
Here is what I got back (any italics are mine):
- Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, Google and MySpace simply ignored the questions. No response at all.
- Microsoft said "we take our responsibility to protect our customers' privacy very seriously, so have specific processes that we use when responding to law enforcement requests." No hint on what those processes might be. As for the rest: "We appreciate your questions and, unfortunately, this statement is the extent of what Microsoft can provide at this time."
- Skype "does not comment on law enforcement matters" but "cooperates with law enforcement agencies where legally required... Though we'd like to help you with your story, I'm afraid we're going to have to decline offering any further details." Skype's privacy policy is said to be "very transparent," although it answers exactly none of my questions. The closest it comes is to say Skype "may" disclose your personal information "to respond to legal requirements, to protect Skype's interests, to enforce our policies or to protect anyone's rights, property, or safety." That is the kind of language that lawyers write to justify almost any conceivable disclosure.
- T-Mobile "complies with all relevant federal and state laws, including privacy laws. We take our customers' privacy very seriously, and carefully control the circumstances under which we disclose customer information to any governmental or non-governmental entity." How so? T-Mobile leaves itself even more wiggle room than Skype does. It hands over your private information "when compelled or permitted" by law," and this includes, but is not limited to, circumstances under which there is a declaration from law enforcement of an exigent circumstance, as well as other valid legal process, such as subpoenas, search warrants, and court orders."
- Yahoo "responds to valid law enforcement demands." Its lawyers "carefully review all incoming legal demands," and "take very seriously our dual responsibilities to abide by US law and to protect our users' privacy." The company "is committed to protecting user data." The privacy policy says disclosures come in response to "subpoenas, court orders," or unspecified "legal process," or "to establish or exercise our legal rights or defend against legal claims," or when "we believe it is necessary to share information in order to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the physical safety of any person, violations of Yahoo!'s terms of use, or as otherwise required by law."
- Sprint manages to be the most responsive and the least reassuring. It gets "thousands of record requests a year" from authorities -- other published hints have suggested tens of thousands -- and requires a "valid legal request," which is not the same thing as a compulsory request. "We act as good stewards of our customers' personal information while also meeting our obligations to law enforcement agencies." Sprint "usually" requires a subpoena or court order but in other cases "Sprint can provide information without requiring this supporting documentation." Sprint notifies its customers only when "ordered buy a judge to do so," which in practice is almost never, rather than as legally permitted, which would be often, because "we do not seek to interfere with the progress of law enforcement investigations." Then comes the boilerplate that "we are ardent about addressing privacy in our products and services and then clearly communicating those policies and practices to our customers." On the whole, this answer is not terribly specific, but the company's priorities are pretty clear. It values cooperation with authorities more than the privacy of its customers, and notifies them only when compelled to do so.
- Comcast makes "every reasonable effort to protect subscriber privacy," and the rest of the answers amount to "maybe." Disclosures of personal information "may be made with or without the subscriber's consent, and with or without notice, in compliance with the terms of valid legal process such as a subpoena, court order, or search warrant." It gives the greatest protection to customer's television viewing habits because the Cable Act requires notice and an opportunity for customers to contest release of their personal information. For internet customers, "we are usually prohibited from notifying the subscriber of any disclosure of personally identifiable information to a government entity by the terms of the subpoena, court order, or search warrant." There is no mention of contesting gag orders, or of notifying customers when permitted to do so.
- Facebook: "We have no comment at this time" on Wikileaks. On the policy questions, "Will get back to you." I'm still waiting.
Read more: http://techland.time.com/2011/01/14/twitter-wikileaks-and-the-broken-market-for-consumer-privacy/#ixzz1BRIf461Z
Why Does Roger Ailes Hate America?
An exclusive and unbiased investigation into the highly paid operative of a foreign-born tycoon, a man who reengineered political and media culture and fomented a revolt that threatens the very stability of our country
Roger Ailes
Thomas Porostocky
Today, here at Esquire — and only at Esquire, because only Esquire has the guts to tell you this story — we're going to tell you about a man you need to know a little better, maybe a lot better: a man named Roger Ailes. Maybe you've heard of Mr. Ailes. As the chairman and CEO of a well financed and admittedly antigovernment organization called Fox News, he made a reported $23 million in 2009, which, to do the math, was not just more money than you earned, it was more money than everyonerelated to you earned, combined, even if you count the sudden windfall that came your aunt Ida's way after she got five out of six in Powerball. Nice work if you can get it, Mr. Ailes — especially when that "work" consisted of nothing but advancing your own agenda at the expense of the president of the United States of America during a time of war. But that $23 million, outrageous as it sounds, is chump change next to the almost $1 billion in profits that Fox News — and even Mr. Ailes's most ardent defenders admit that he is Fox News — earned Ailes's foreign-born boss, Rupert Murdoch, aka "Koala Kong," in honor of the Australian heritage he long ago rejected in favor of more convenient American citizenship. So yes, you might have heard of Roger Eugene Ailes, because you read the newspapers, you read books, you stay informed (despite what members in good standing of the East Coast media elite like, well, oh, likeRoger Ailes might say about you), but how much do you really know about him? For forty years, he has stood astride the intertwined worlds of media and politics like a veritable colossus, making sure the worlds of media and politics stay intertwined, the better to control them. He has used his considerable powers of persuasion to persuade us to elect presidents, and, if they're not following the "Ailes Agenda," to turn against them. At seventy years of age, when most hardworking American seniors have had enough of the rat race and are looking forward to spending some more quality time with the grandkids, Roger Ailes is at the height, perhaps the apogee, maybe even — some say — the very zenith of his power. Indeed, with most of the potential Republican candidates for president in 2012 on his payroll, he may be said to be just getting started. Hmmm. Maybe we don't know this Roger Ailes as well as we think we do. Maybe we don't know him very well at all, which is, of course, just the way he likes it.
Until now.
(More Exclusive Roger Ailes Reporting on The Politics Blog >>)
"I know what you're going to write about me," Roger Ailes says. "I can pretty much pick the words for you. Paranoid, right-wing, fat. I love that. I'm the only guy in America who's fat."
No, Mr. Ailes, you're wrong. You're not the only fat man in America. And we're not going to call you fat, either. Or bald. Or old. First of all, Esquire is completely unbiased, and beholden to no agendas. Second, we're not going to call you any names. We're not going to hurt your feelings, because in our extensive and exclusive investigation, we've found that you actually have them. You're a sensitive guy, Mr. Ailes. You're vulnerable. Indeed, for a guy who attributes his power to the power of not caring what people think about him, you really care what people think about you. You even care what bloggers think about you. You not only read the blog posts that your wife sends you, you remember what they say. And so, when you yourself are accused of unfairness, you'll say, "Well, the Huffington Post says I'm a J. Edgar Hoover look-alike with a face like a clenched fist. Keith Olbermann calls me the worst person in the world. How is that fair?" And then you go out and crush them.
You are particularly sensitive about your weight. "It's not that I eat too much," you say. "It's that I can't move." Is this just another example of the "Ailes spin"? It is not. In the course of its exclusive, intensive, and above all unbiased investigation, Esquire has learned many surprising things about Roger Ailes. One is that he claims to have discovered the openly socialist folksinger Buffy Sainte-Marie. Another is that his body has been wrecked by arthritis. The man who has challenged the world to a fight turns out to be a man who can't, by his own admission, walk two city blocks. Even in his office, he's too stiff to unwrinkle himself, walks like he's learning to ice-skate, wears rubber-soled shoes, props up his feet on the nearest low table as soon as he sits down, bites his lower lip when he's in pain (or angry), strains and sweats, loosens his tie and unbuttons his collar, wears a tie bar, pops breath mints, and is supposed to be proud of his arms, which look like cinder blocks under his wrinkled suit jacket. He has thin lips, a long nose, hair that curls over his collar, and small hands and feet, all of which conspire to give his appearance a certain aristocratic delicacy, as if his bulk were not earned but rather imposed. His eyes are gray, and, because they are framed by extensive and almost geological gray circles, often look black. They are the only things about his physical presence that are true to his reputation for menace.
So no, Mr. Ailes: We're not going to call you fat. But paranoid? You have seven TV screens in your office. Six are on your wall and allow you to watch what's being broadcast by Fox or its competitors. The seventh is on your desk, and the screen on your desk shows nothing but the live feed from the security cameras in your building. Beyond that, your private-security apparatus is both extensive and expensive, and your office itself is a study in contrasts. On the one hand, you sit at the very heart of the world that you have made — a world of information and power, of information as power — and all you have to do to reach virtually any of the world's most powerful people is pick up a phone. On the other, you communicate by means so personal and old-fashioned, they would make Tony Soprano comfortable. Your door opens, and your assistant approaches, her arm extended and her fingertips bracketing a yellow Post-it note. You read the note and nod; she leaves. "Rupert," you say, indicating that your down-under overlord is waiting outside. "He comes down here a lot, because I'm the only one of his executives who's not crawling up his leg."
Roger Ailes
Vincent J. Ricardel/Contour Photos
(More Exclusive Roger Ailes Reporting on The Politics Blog >>)
Now, when you talk to Roger Ailes, he will inevitably tell you a few things. One is that he's a simple man. Another is that he's from Warren, Ohio. Another is that he owes his success to the fact that he's a simple man from Warren, Ohio. Another is that he knows you — the American viewer. Another is that he knows you because he is like you — "an average guy from flyover country." And yet another is that because he is like you, he likes you, and thinks that America is a "pretty good country" that we ought to think twice about blaming for the world's problems.
Okay, Mr. Ailes, we get it. You don't have to tell Esquire that America is the greatest country in the world. And there's no doubt you have a talent for giving American audiences television news that they want to watch. But if you're such an average guy, can you please tell us what happened to your BlackBerry?
Oh, you don't have one, do you?
We didn't think so.
Of course, a lot of average Americans do have BlackBerrys, or something like them — "smartphones," they're called. And a lot of Americans can be depended upon to handle their BlackBerrys responsibly, to be "smart" with their "smartphones." Not Roger Ailes. For Roger Ailes, having a BlackBerry was a very big deal — or, to be more precise, a very small one. You see, while most of us average Americans are very happy with our BlackBerrys, our iPhones, and our Androids — happy for the chance to stay "connected" with our loved ones when we're out there trying to make ends meet — Roger Ailes was not. Roger Ailes admits that he thought his BlackBerry was too ... small for a man of his size and stature. Roger Ailes thought that his BlackBerry made him look ... ridiculous. Indeed, when Roger Ailes sees one of his few peers in the rarefied world of media, business, or politics using a BlackBerry, he tells him to ... get rid of it, adding, "You have executives for that." Thanks, Mr. Ailes. Thanks for the tip. The next time one of our readers uses his BlackBerry to receive a photograph of his daughter in the school play he had to miss because he's out there making ends meet, we'll remind him: "You have executives for that." And we'll remind him of the reason that you gave us for giving up your BlackBerry in the first place: You don't get paid to think about some little device you have to work with your thumbs. You get paid to think about winning. And that's what you spend all day doing at Fox News: "thinking of ways to win."
But the story of Roger Ailes's BlackBerry doesn't end there, with his admission that he is an obsessively competitive man. Esquire has found out — from Roger Ailes himself — that he didn't give up his BlackBerry simply because it was beneath him. No, he lost it because he wasn't aboveit — wasn't above the temptation to use it to get into fights with average Americans. Is Roger Ailes, as he likes to think of himself, a "perfect target"? To be fair — and Esquire strives to be never less than fair — he is. Of course he is: He's one of the most powerful media executives in the history of the world, if not the universe. People are going to come at him, and they might write him an intemperate e-mail once in a while. But think of it: You're Roger Ailes, one of the most powerful media executives in the history of the world, if not the universe. Your BlackBerry "pings" you with an intemperate e-mail from one of your fellow Americans, telling you that he's going to catch a plane from the heartland of our great homeland so he can find you among the rich and powerful there in New York City and kick your big Aeron-seated posterior. Would you answer him? Probably not — you would probably figure that the fellow had a bad day trying to make ends meet and leave it at that. Would you threaten the fellow back? Would you tell your fellow American that if he buys a ticket to New York City and tries to come up to see you at your well-guarded domicile in midtown Manhattan — and here we quote — "he shouldn't bother buying a return ticket because he'll never make it back home"? No, you wouldn't, because you're an American, and Americans don't threaten other Americans exercising the sacred right of free speech, no matter how intemperate they might be. But Roger Ailes would. Roger Ailes did. He did it time and again, fighting fire with fire, intemperately answering every intemperate e-mail that came his way with no insult or complaint beneath his notice, until his public-relations staff, fearing that the Ailesian e-mails might become public and that their boss was having too much fun, concluded that maybe giving a man like Roger Ailes a BlackBerry wasn't such a good idea after all.
Roger Ailes History
(Clockwise) Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum; George Bush Presidential Library and Museum; Jerry Mosey/AP Photo
So who is this … Roger Ailes, if he's not who he says he is — if he's not an average American? Well, the short answer is this: He is not only a man who has spent his entire life thinking of ways to win; he is a man who has spent his entire life winning. Nothing wrong with that, of course: America loves a winner. But let's be honest here: We're all average Americans. Does any of us winall the time? Of course not, or else we wouldn't be average. But Roger Ailes does. And so, Mr. Ailes, Esquire has a question, on behalf of other average Americans: What kind of man wins all the time? What kind of man gives his country, in roughly this order, Mike Douglas, Richard Nixon, Tom Snyder, Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America," the Willie Horton ad, the ad in which Michael Dukakis rides around in a tank and looks like a chipmunk, the presidency of George H. W. Bush, CNBC, Fox News (upstart-insurgent edition), Fox News (airwaves-of-the-empire edition), Fox News ("Obama sux" edition), and Fox News (Tea Party edition)? More pointedly, what kind of man figures out at age twenty-seven how to use television to legitimize Richard Nixon and then at age seventy to legitimize Sarah Palin?
Wait. You didn't know that it was Roger Ailes who gave us Richard Nixon? Well, he did. And, more important, Richard Nixon gave America Roger Ailes. Put it this way: When Richard Nixon met Roger Ailes in 1967, Nixon was still the sweaty, shifty-eyed, self-pitying, petulant, paranoid perpetual candidate whom Americans instinctively mistrusted. And Roger Ailes was still the prodigy who'd started with The Mike Douglas Show — the first nationally syndicated daytime television talk show — when he was right out of Ohio University and was executive producer by the time he was twenty-five. Roger Ailes was still a card-carrying member of the notoriously liberal entertainment industry, still a guy who liked to go to clubs and listen to "folksingers" such as José Feliciano and Buffy Sainte-Marie and then put them on television, so American housewives could have their consciousness raised and realize that they hated their husbands. And it was as entertainment that Roger Ailes booked Richard Nixon on The Mike Douglas Show, along with "Little Egypt," a burlesque star who raised more than consciousnesses ... and who made American husbands realize that they hated their wives. Well, as Mr. Ailes tells it, even admitted pornographers have some scruples, so instead of making Richard Nixon wait in the same greenroom as Little Egypt, he asked the candidate back to his office. "It's a shame a man has to use gimmicks like this to get elected," Mr. Nixon is supposed to have remarked to Mr. Ailes. "Television is not a gimmick, and if you think it is, you'll lose again," Mr. Ailes is supposed to have remarked to Mr. Nixon. And there the modern conservative movement — not the ideological entity but the telegenic one — was born.
You see, when Richard met Roger, it was not just a meeting of men; it was a meeting of need. It was a meeting of what Roger Ailes calls "stuff." As in: "If Richard Nixon was alive today, he'd be on the couch with Oprah, talking about how he was poor, his brother died, his mother didn't love him, and his father beat the shit out of him. And everybody would say, Oh, poor guy, he's doing the best he can. See, every human being has stuff — stuff they have to carry around, stuff they have to deal with. And Richard Nixon had a lot of stuff. He did the best he could with it, but it got him in the end. Still, he did a lot of good things as president." Yes, Roger Ailes is instinctively alert to people's stuff — perhaps because he's as surprisingly empathetic as he is sensitive, and perhaps because it allows him an all-important sense of advantage. But is he aware of his own? He began working for Richard Nixon a few months after he met him on the show. He began working to get Richard Nixon elected "by television," as he says, instead of in spite of it. He disavows his political commitment to Nixon by saying that he never worked in the White House and was more interested in the political potential of TV than he was in politics itself — "I wasn't worried about the message. I was worried about the backlighting." And a year later Richard Nixon was still sweaty, still shifty-eyed, still petulant, still paranoid, and still instinctively mistrusted by most Americans. The only difference was that thanks to Roger Ailes, he was president.
As for Mr. Ailes, he was free to pursue what he was really interested in: raw power. But it was a new kind of power, based on the insight that came to him through his own "stuff." Before the arrival of Roger Ailes, television was thought to be a unifying medium — the "electronic hearth." Mr. Ailes knew better. Mr. Ailes knew that it was the fire itself. Mr. Ailes knew that the television screen in each American home was nothing less than a battleground, and he who controlled it controlled America, no matter what the message. He didn't even have to be overtly political, because television was by definition a political medium. Roger Ailes could win ... if the idea of a unified America lost. He could win ... if his own subversive vision of America was realized. He could win ... if American life became an endless, entrenched, and above all electronic argument. And you know what?
He did win.
Did you hear that, Mr. Ailes?
You won.
We surrender.
We concede.
You're absolutely right when you say that the nature of your achievement isn't political, because you've done nothing less than change the game ... the conversation ... the very nature of public discourse in these, the United States of America. Politics? For a man like you, politics are just a way of keeping score. And so, as a measure of your triumph, we ask only the question that you would ask of a man as radical, as subversive, as much of a mischief-making provocateur as yourself. On Fox News, your reporters and opinionists would never simply ask if you hate America. They would never give you that chance. And so, as the only suitable tribute to how much you've changed us, we can only ask the question as you would ask it:
Why does Roger Ailes hate America?
(Story continues on next page; click here for more Roger Ailes reporting on The Politics Blog >>)
Fox News Players
(Clockwise) Ron Sachs/CNP; Mark Lennihan/AP Photo; Fox News
Okay, come to think of it, there was one time Roger Ailes lost. Of course, he was a good sport about it, no big deal, all's fair in love and war and the rarefied world of the media elites.
Just kidding.
No, Mr. Ailes wasn't a good loser. Was he the kid who loses and takes his marbles home? Well, not exactly. More like the kid who takes his marbles, sells them to Russian spies, then works with the Russian government to deliver a thermonuclear device straight to your house.
In this case, though, it wasn't the Russians who were interested in what Mr. Ailes was selling. It was the Australian oligarch Rupert Murdoch. Talk about stuff meeting stuff! On the one hand: the cunning antipodean entrepreneur who is to "global domination" as Tiger Woods is to "be sure to tip your waitress." On the other: Roger Ailes, who had just lost out to the very media elite he'd always despised and distrusted.
This was 1996, almost thirty years after Roger Ailes helped Richard Nixon win the presidency. He was fifty-five and undergoing a midlife crisis. He was at NBC, where he had turned CNBC from a news channel into a highly successful talk-show circus, complete with dancing bears (and bulls), and where he had an unsuccessful channel of televised talk shows called America's Talking. (Name of one of the shows he programmed: Am I Nuts?)
Now NBC was planning to turn America's Talking into MSNBC, a twenty-four-hour news channel to compete with CNN. MSNBC? With characteristic delicacy, Ailes told NBC News that it "sounded like a disease." But still he wanted it. Oh, how he wanted it. See, he had some ideas about cable. NBC was thinking along the lines of extending its network news to cable — all Brokaw, all the time. Roger Ailes was thinking more along the lines of "divide and conquer." What Mr. Ailes understood about the political nature of television back in 1968 he would be able to put into practice on cable television thirty years later. "Roger got cable," says Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC. "Everybody else learned it, studying Roger. Well, maybe not CNN. CNN still doesn't get it. But Roger got it from day one."
What did he get? Well, he got what he was temperamentally equipped to get: that cable news would be different from broadcast news. That cable news didn't have to please all Americans. That a committed audience was better than a broad one. And that the best audience of all was one you had all to yourself — one that had not only been ignored, but one that felt ignored.
He pitched that idea to NBC.
NBC's answer: "Are you nuts?"
So he quit, and he called Rupert Murdoch. The cunning international media tycoon asked him the question that would come to define Fox News, and so our era: "Can you build me a network that can beat CNN?"
Listen again, folks: beat CNN, an American company. Not "compete with." And certainly not "play nice with."
Beat.
And this is what Roger Ailes remembers answering: "Yes, if you take away whoever stands in the way of my complete control and get me distribution. I can beat CNN because CNN has never had any competition and won't know what to do. And MSNBC will ignore me, because they're arrogant. And if they ignore me for two years, I'll destroy them."
So Roger Ailes began studying CNN. Studying the screen, searching for weaknesses.
He found two: Boring. Biased.
He took out a notepad and wrote, "Fair and balanced" and "We report. You decide."
And here we are today, boys and girls. It's Mr. Ailes's world. We just get spun in it. Is Fox News "fair and balanced"? Doesn't matter. Because fair and balanced is not a description of Fox News; it's an attack on everyone else. And what really makes Fox News different from other respectable news organizations is that its original charge, from the Emperor of the Outback, was neither "report" nor even "decide." It was "win."
"Well, winning is a lot more interesting than the other alternative," Mr. Ailes said recently, when asked by Esquire to justify his consuming need to win at every turn, damn the consequences. Oh, come on, Mr. Ailes. Esquire has no ax to grind and will bend over backward to give you a fair shake. But you know as well as we do: That's just spin. You told us yourself: You just can't help yourself. You told us yourself that when you saw MSNBC's new advertising campaign, Lean Forward, you said, "Lean? They paid Spike Lee $3 million for 'Lean'? What kind of word is that? Isn't that their problem — that they're leaning? Didn't anybody say, What about 'move'?"
And so once again, you took out your pad, wrote down "Move For-ward," and in four hours had your own campaign on the air for $1,500.
Pretty clever, Mr. Ailes. You win again. You must be proud of yourself. We wonder if you'll still be proud when you do the math and figure out what was lost when you did an entire ad campaign for fifteen hundred clams instead of three million:
American jobs.
(More Exclusive Roger Ailes Reporting on The Politics Blog >>)
There's a professor at the Columbia University School of Journalism by the name of Dick Wald. Yeah, yeah, we know — Roger Ailes doesn't give a CNN ratings share about what some professor at Columbia journalism school has to say. Indeed, whenever he's asked what qualifies him to be the head of a major television-news network, he gives the same answer: "I dug ditches for a living, there are no parties that I want to go to, and I didn't go to Columbia journalism school." But Professor Wald is no mere don, no mere pointy-headed practitioner of the liberal arts. He used to be the president of NBC News. He likes Roger Ailes. And if you ask him the secret of Mr. Ailes's success, he'll say it's pretty simple: "Roger, in many ways, is just more competent. He just does it better. The anchors are better. The crispness of the reporting is better. The anchors don't interrupt, the shows move along, and the point of view is clear. It's just a good product. Roger found an area in which he could reach each audience member individually. That's the big difference between Fox and CNN."
Then he adds this, about the difficulty of taking on Roger Ailes: "You can't beat Roger fighting on territory he's left behind."
Pretty astute for a professor. Indeed, it might be the most astute thing Esquire's ever heard on the subject of Mr. Ailes, because it explains why he drives his opponents absolutely nuts. The pundits, the professors, the professional journalists, the left-wingers, the tree huggers, the liberal blogosphere, President Obama — they all keep trying to catch him on violations of rules that they follow and he doesn't. "Frankly, Roger doesn't give a shit," says an associate. "He just doesn't have the governor that other media executives have. He does things they would never do, says things they would never say."
And recently Roger Ailes gave us a demonstration of precisely what the associate — and Professor Wald — might mean.
It was Veteran's Day, and he was watching TV in his office on the second floor of the News Corp. building in New York City. He does a lot of that. Yes, that's right: Roger Ailes likes to watch. He watches TV, he studies TV, mostly with the sound off, so that he can observe one of the rules he does follow — if someone's doing something to make you turn the sound on, then they're doing something interesting. On a wall in his office, there are screens broadcasting Fox News and Fox Business Network, as well as CNN, HLN, MSNBC, and CNBC. He watches them all, from the corner of his eye, and if you give him three seconds, he'll give you the world ... a world of criticism for each one, including his own. That's because he knows how to follow his own eye — show Roger Ailes a television screen, he'll tell you what works, what doesn't, and how to make it better. "I tell my people that if they want to be artists of television, the screen is their canvas, but they have to repaint it every three seconds." Then he said: "Look at all those screens. Where does your eye go?"
You really want to know the truth, Mr. Ailes?
We don't know about you, but Esquire's eye goes to the screen featuring your creamy redhead, Jenna Lee.
Sure, that's a Fox screen, and so you win again. But — if you don't mind our saying so — it didn't exactly require an advanced degree in TV geniusology to see the potential of Ms. Jenna Lee.
Wait — it did? "Well, she didn't look anything like she looks now when she came here. She'd just completed Columbia journalism school, and she wanted to be a writer. But I met with her and sent her down to hair and makeup to clean her up a little. When she came back, I took a look at her and said, 'What would you think of going on air?' I had to work with her a little to bring her pitch down, and now she's going to be a big star. And she wanted to be a writer."
So that's how it's done — that's how Fox has become the Schwab's drugstore for right-wing mean girls. But if you listen to Mr. Ailes, it's not simply a matter of beauty; it's a matter of authenticity. "Look at the girl over there on HLN. African-American. Attractive, though she needs a haircut. And she doesn't know how to dress — her dress is too busy, look what it's doing to the screen. And they use her too much. But she has an interesting look. Look at the difference between her and the anchor. She's just being herself. She's not trying to do anything. She's just trying to tell him a story. That's interesting. He's trying to be an anchor. He's trying to project authority. It's always more interesting watching people be who they are than it is watching people try to be who they are not.
"Now look at Megyn."
By "Megyn," he means, of course, Fox fox Megyn Kelly, the meanest of the mean girls, the heaving, sumptuous blond with the wide-set eyes, the briskly triangular chin, and the porno sneer she directs at ill-fated liberal guests. Roger Ailes loves Megyn Kelly (in a fatherly way, of course): "She's a host. For one thing, she's fearless — she'd crawl down a smokestack for a story. But look at the way she moves. She'd move like that if she was arguing at the dinner table. Very natural. O'Reilly's the same way. He's an Irishman who likes to argue. He'd do it anywhere. We just found a way for him to do it on TV."
Now, if you talk to some other network people, they'll tell you that Roger's not exactly the first person to figure out that people would rather look at pretty girls reading the news than plain ones. "Roger's just willing to go further than anyone else," one industry insider says. "He takes the obvious further than anyone else. Everybody else goes halfway, and they wind up looking foolish." Roger, however, has a different take. He is able to hire authentic talent — that is, talent who have the ability to appear authentic in front of a camera — because he himself is authentic. "I'm not trying to be anyone," he says. "You know why other executives always hire phonies? Because they're phonies. They hire phonies because they like phonies. They're comfortable with them." It's the same reason they all hire left-wingers — "because they are left-wingers.
"Look," he said, "it's Veteran's Day, and we're the only ones doing anything about it. So maybe people like us because we like veterans. Those other networks probably had to have a meetingabout it. They probably worried that if they were pro-veteran, people would think they were pro-war." See, that's the difference: Fox is pro-veteran and the other networks are ... well, they're not even pro-choice. "They say they're pro-choice. They're proabortion! Some of the talent who come to Fox come here because the other networks require them to be proabortion."
Then he told a story of triumph, about wearing a flag pin to an event at New York's Museum of Television & Radio after 9/11 and being accosted by none other than Morley Safer and "that asshole Dick Wald" for giving up his journalistic objectivity. They really got on him, asking how he could possibly be fair and balanced sporting a flag pin, until finally he'd had enough: " 'Look,' I said, 'I might be a little squishy about killing babies. But I'm pro-choice about flag pins!' "
O-kay ... and so Esquire called Dick Wald afterward for comment. "I remember it a little differently," he said. "We weren't asking whether Roger had a right to wear a flag pin. I would never do that. What we were talking about, if I remember correctly, was whether anchors should wear flag pins. I seem to remember something about Roger asking his anchors to wear flag pins... ."
And then we heard it. Do you? Listen closely. Yes ... that's the terrible sound of someone trying to beat Roger Ailes on territory Roger has long ago left behind.
Roger Ailes History
There is a restaurantin New York City called Michael's. If you haven't heard about it, don't worry — youhave a life. You're out there trying to make ends meet. You have more important things to worry about than what kind of table you get at Michael's compared with what kind of table your competitor at another network or at another newspaper or another magazine gets. You have more to worry about than your standing amongst the media elite. Because that's who goes to Michael's. It is not the kind of place an average American goes to. It is not even the kind of place an average New Yorker goes to. It is a clubhouse for media people and for only media people — for exactly the people whose contempt Roger Ailes regards as an inspiration and a reward for a job well done.
Does Roger Ailes have a table at Michael's?
Of course he does. He has the best table at Michael's. He goes there for lunch, and this is how one of his guests describes the experience of eating with him: "You'll be sitting at his table at Michael's, and he'll grouse about not getting any respect and being an outsider while everybody is lining up to kiss his ring. And you'll be like, Roger, you're at Michael's, you're at the best table — what more do you want?"
Is Roger Ailes a cynical man? Not at all. He really believes the things he says. He really believes that he is an average American. He really believes that he is looked down upon by those who admire and fear him. He really believes that he is the only man in America who can be called fat with impunity. He really believes that his power is rooted in his disregard for what people think of him. He really believes that he is the only genuine person in the media business. He really believes that Fox is fair and balanced. He really believes that his success has very little to do with politics and very much to do with television. He really believes — despite his subsequent apologies — that the people who fired poor Juan Williams from NPR are Nazis. He really believes that he seeks out liberal voices as ardently as he seeks out conservative ones. He really believes that until his arthritis immobilized him, he could always have gone back to digging ditches for a living. He really believes that despite being immobilized by arthritis, he could handle himself if someone challenged him to a fight, and that whoever comes to New York to fight him shouldn't bother buying a plane ticket home.
Okay, then: Is Roger Ailes crazy? Now that's a good question ... because Roger Ailes believes thatyou are — or, at the very least, that you think you are. It's his grand theory of human behavior. "Look," he says, "there isn't a day that goes by that everybody doesn't say to themselves, 'Am I nuts?' They do it in their heads. People think that they're nuts." He has such confidence in the validity of this theory that he created a show for his America's Talking network called exactly that — Am I Nuts? He's so confident that he built Fox News as a twenty-four-hour Am I Nuts? for American conservatives. See, what Roger Ailes has done at Fox is find a way to mainstream extremity for fun and, of course, for profit. He's found out that people need the validating experience of extremity in the same way that he does. And he takes extreme positions and says extreme things because he needs to, because they allow him to make the choice that's at the heart of his power.
"It would be a lie to say that I don't care what people say about me," he says. "Every human being cares unless they're nuts. Am I nuts? But you can't allow that to override your mission. You cannot allow whether someone likes you or not to alter your course of action. Sometimes I think, Sure, that hurts my feelings. But it's not so important that I will adjust what I'm doing because someone is not going to like me."
(More Exclusive Roger Ailes Reporting on The Politics Blog >>)
One day, some bullies beat up Roger Ailes as he walked home from school. His father hated to see him bruised and bloodied, but he didn't want to fight his son's battles for him, so he taught him how to fight, and sent him back to school with the words, "Remember, son, for them it's a fight, for you it's life and death."
You have heard this story before. You might have even told this story before, because it's an average American story, and you, the Esquire reader, are an average American. Certainly, you wouldn't be surprised to hear a man like Roger Ailes tell it, because it's exactly the kind of story powerful men tell to burnish their myths at their coveted tables at Michael's. But what if Roger Ailes is a powerful man because he really is different from other powerful men? What if Roger Ailes really does have to win every fight because every fight is a matter of life and death? So listen again to an average American story from an average American childhood, and ask if Roger Ailes is an average American after all:
When he was a baby, he fell out of his crib. He split his lip and he bled. A lot of babies do the same thing. But Roger kept on bleeding. Remember, this was seventy years ago. There was hardly anything known about hemophilia back then. And there was certainly not much that could be done about it, except transfusions of whole blood. "Well, you died. That's what you knew about it. I was told many times I wasn't going to make it."
The closest he came to dying was when he was seven or eight. He bit his tongue when he jumped off the roof of the garage. His mouth filled with blood and the blood would not stop, the blood soaked the sheets of his bed, and he heard the doctor tell his father that there was nothing he could do. Roger Ailes was going to bleed out through his tongue. But his father was a fighter; that is, he got into fights, and Roger admired him for it. Now he fought for his son's life. He picked Roger up, swaddled in bloody bedclothes, and drove him to the Cleveland Clinic with a police escort. At the factory where he worked, the old man tracked down everybody who had type-O-positive blood, and now he called upon all of them to come to Cleveland for his son. They did, and Roger can still remember their names, Dirtyneck Watson and the rest, men filthy from work who lined up one after another to give Roger their blood, arm to arm. " 'Well, son, you have a lot of blue-collar blood in you, never forget that,' my father said after I got through it, and I never have. A lot of what we do at Fox is blue-collar stuff."
But he was never that kid, not really. He couldn't be. The disease he had was the Royal Disease, the disease of Queen Victoria's progeny, a disease considered effete, a mortal taint. He used to have to sit on a pillow at school. He wasn't able to go out at recess. And so one day he asked his parents to let him walk to school, like the other kids, and they let him. "And some guys beat me up. I went home a little beat up and my dad, I saw tears in his eyes for the first time. I'd never seen it. And he said, 'That's never going to happen to you again.' He taught me how to fight. And he told me to stay away from any fight that I could. 'But if you have no options, then remember, son, for them it's a fight. For you, it's life and death.' "
Everybody bleeds. We bleed all the time. We bleed when we move, we bleed when we bump into things. But for many years — there wasn't much that could be done for hemophilia until the sixties — Roger kept on bleeding. That's why he has such bad arthritis: because blood collects in the joints and ruins them. And that's why he labors under the judgment of his bulk and finds it so deeply unfair when people call him fat. Because he can't move. And that's why he found a way to fight so many of his life-and-death battles through the television screen: It was his way of fighting the kids he saw playing outside through the window. And that's why he's so sensitive and so instinctively alert to other people's stuff ... why one day, when he was talking about the need for his anchors to have warmth, and the subject of President Obama's warmth problem came up, he responded quickly, instantly, "Well, maybe if your father left you when you were two, your stepfather left you when you were four, and your mother was out of your life when you were ten, you wouldn't be warm, either."
So what kind of man has to win all the time? The kind of man whose wounds are always fresh.
Roger Ailes
Thomas Porostocky
So what happens when a man like ...Roger Ailes comes to America and tries to fit in with average Americans? Well, ask your fellow Americans in Putnam County, New York — they know. Of course, to hear Roger Ailes tell it, he is no different from anyone else. He has a wife and a kid. He's trying to protect them. He's trying to give them a legacy. He also probably needed some extra space — a second home where he could mount George Soros's head on his wall. So, like any average American, Roger Ailes bought some land and started working on that dream house — that dream mansion, really — about an hour and a half north of Manhattan, in the sleepy Hudson River Valley village of Garrison, in the township of Philipstown, in the county of Putnam. It's Mr. Ailes's kind of place — the kind of place with history (Benedict Arnold slept there); a view, across the river, of West Point (where Mr. Ailes occasionally lectures on media and the military); a volunteer fire department (where he likes to hang out); and one of the highest per capita incomes in the United States. He thought of retiring there with his wife and son. Maybe writing his memoirs so his son wouldn't have to learn about his father by reading his obituary in The New York Times.
Of course, the taxes were too high for Mr. Ailes's taste, and he wanted to have some input into that. So, like any other average American, he bought a couple of newspapers. Bought them for his wife, really, to give her something to do, and for his son, to give the boy a legacy. And then, because he's concerned about his family's safety, and because the problem with America is that there are actually Americans there, he started buying all the houses around him and leaving them empty. Million dollars here, million dollars there, what the hell, it's a good investment. And then he found out that there was actually something called zoning up there, with all sorts of restrictive covenants and all sorts of ways for the government to take land from average Americans out there trying to make ends meet. And then he found out that the town of Philipstown has been working nine years — "twice as long as World War II!" — on something called a comprehensive zoning agreement. Thing's a hundred pages long. The Constitution's only thirty-five! It's like the health-care bill. No one can read it, no one can understand it. There's language in the damned thing that suggests that if you build a fence, you need to put openings in it so wildlife can pass through and an environmental inspector can come on your property. Roger wasn't having it. "I said, I would suggest that you call first, because otherwise I'll shoot him and my dog will eat him." But that's Roger Ailes. "I can fight. The rest of the people up there were having this thing shoved down their throats, and they were terrified." So he hired a lawyer, and then made the lawyer available, gratis, to anyone who wanted to challenge the zoning agreement. And then he got the paper involved, Fox News style. And then suddenly, Roger Ailes really had come to America. He'd come to one small town in America in precisely the way he had come to the rest of the country. "I had no idea there was any intrigue up there when I moved there. I thought this was a normal, nice community. All of a sudden, we find out, holy shit. It reminds me of the Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam. Remember? In '65, they fly the air cavalry to this field, and they're surrounded by two thousand North Vietnamese troops that are on vacation in an ammo dump. So that's what happened to me. I landed in the Ia Drang Valley. All of a sudden, I got people saying, Oh, my God, Roger Ailes from Fox News is in town. Oh, my God ... "
Was he suffering from a flashback from his days in 'Nam? He couldn't have been — he never went to 'Nam because of his bleeding. But he dreamed of going and seeing what he was made of. Now they had him surrounded in Putnam Country. He had come to hang out with the volunteer fire department and have locals to the mansion for dinner. He had come to drive a car in the Fourth of July parade and to buy the township its fireworks. He had come to help people fight who couldn't fight on their own. Now, at a big zoning meeting last April, he brought along his lawyer to speak, and the town supervisor was telling his lawyer to sit down. The town supervisor wasn't letting Roger Ailes's lawyer speak! So Roger stood up and went to the microphone. "Civility," was the first word he uttered, but by this time the crowd in the high school gymnasium was either cheering him or cheering the town supervisor who was standing up to him. The people in the gym all knew one another; many of them had gone to school together. But now they were divided, as Roger Ailes stood in the middle of them, quoting George Washington and lecturing on the economy and the Constitution. And you know what? He won again. The town supervisor made the changes in the comprehensive zoning agreement that Roger Ailes wanted, although it hasn't passed yet. If it does — if it passes the way the town supervisor says he wants it to pass — then the town supervisor is a "man of honor," and Roger will go back to his average American life.
And if it doesn't?
"Then," Mr. Ailes says, "there will be war."
In the course of its exclusive and unbiased exploration of Roger Ailes, Esquire had several meetings with him. At the end of the first, he said something that was, like much of what he had to say, seemingly offhand but in the end deeply revealing. It was on a subject he knows well — the subject of people's stuff. He was talking about President Obama's stuff. He was saying that he could never underrate the importance of a person's formative experiences in who that person turned out to be. Your Esquire correspondent said that he, as an adoptive parent, was well aware of this. And Roger Ailes, knowing stuff when he hears it, said, "Yes, but your daughter loves you. And this is how you'll know: One day, something will scare her. She'll be scared, terrified, and she'll look to you for protection. And that's how you'll know she loves you."
Your Esquire correspondent was moved, as he often was in his dealings with Roger Ailes. It was a human moment, the kind that Mr. Ailes frequently offers and even insists on. But your Esquire correspondent couldn't help but also notice Mr. Ailes's conflation of love and fear, because it's one of the polarities that defines him and everything he has ever done. Victory and defeat. Weakness and strength. Love and fear. They are familiar to any viewer of Fox News, familiar to any resident who attended the April zoning meeting in Putnam County, familiar to his many friends and many enemies. They are his stuff, or the inevitable consequences of his stuff, and he can't help but see life in terms of them. He's an old dad. He was fifty-nine when his son was born. He has never loved anyone the way he loves his son, but he fears that his love has made him weak in a way he has never been; has made him soft in a way he has never been; has made him vulnerable in a way he has devoted his entire life to rising above. He even uses those words when describing his domestic and paternal happiness: "I have a weakness now. I have a soft spot."
And so he pleads for sympathy. Of all the remarkable aspects of Esquire's exclusive and unbiased exploration of Roger Ailes, this is the most remarkable, and the most surprising. He asked us that certain things not be written about him, because he has a son. Most of these things are unremarkable, and can be found in his Wikipedia entry. Nevertheless, he doesn't want his son to read them. He doesn't want his son to read them here. It is a deeply human request, and deeply manipulative. But that's what makes Roger Ailes who he is. He makes sure that you cannot deal with him without having to contend with him. Not simply at the level of his machinations but at the level of his stuff — at the level of his bruised and bloodied human core. But the human moment is the most dangerous. He asks for quarter when he has given none, asks for sympathy when he has offered none, asks for fairness when he has been "fair and balanced," asks for consideration while admitting that the only consideration he has ever shown is consideration for his mission, whatever that may be. And so, here, at the end of Esquire's brave, bold, exclusive, and utterly unbiased report on Roger Ailes, we'd like to ask him one last question.
You know, Mr. Ailes, there are television executives who are so convinced you get television news that they admit asking themselves before they make any decision, What would Roger do?
So that's the question we'd like to ask you now. You have asked Esquire to be sympathetic to your situation. You have asked for fairness. And yet you must have heard these same kinds of requests many times in your life; you must have heard these same pleas, so you, in your heart of hearts, must already know the answer to the question that only Esquire dares to ask:
What would Roger do?
Hey. there is a broken link in this article, under the anchor text -a secret order
ReplyDeleteHere is the working link so you can replace it - https://selectra.co.uk/sites/selectra.co.uk/files/pdf/subpoena.pdf