Roger Ailes, GOP Mastermind

Fox News chief Roger Ailes has advised every Republican president since Richard Nixon, and – as Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson details in this profile – he's engineered some of the dirtiest tricks in American political history. Click through for highlights of Ailes' shady – and highly successful – career as a campaign guru.

As a consultant for Richard Nixon, Ailes bypassed journalists who might pose tough questions, creating fake "town hall" events that enabled the candidate to field softball queries from voters handpicked by the campaign. "The events were not staged," says historian Rick Perlstein. "They were fixed." 

Read: How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory