Zev Chafet’s Roger Ailes: Off Camera is an excellent book, well-paced and crisp, as perceptive, unpretentious, and entertaining as its subject.1 As is appropriate for a book about an entertainment and journalism personality, most of the material is anecdotal—when publishing such a biography, there are rarely primary source papers and documents worth waiting for as there generally are with statesmen. The author is a well-traveled New York journalist who has had as good a vantage point as anyone who is not an intimate to appreciate the talents and achievements of Roger Ailes, the president of Fox News and media consultant for numerous Republican campaigns. And his factual, unembellished, refreshingly informal treatment of his subject is a pleasure and a relief. Mr. Chafets seems never to have been tempted by the raging pandemic to monumentalize the writer’s subject as biographers of other media figures have tended to do. In retrospect, Ronald Steele’s ponderous weighing of the life and influence of Walter Lippmann seems excessive, and Douglas Brinkley’s workmanlike life of Walter Cronkite is an attempted transplant of gravitas to a man about whom the dirty little secret was that he was a dunce. Walter Cronkite had a reassuring moustache, like Marshal Pétain, not a raffish and threatening one like Errol Flynn, as well as a country-doctor manner. But he was a very simple observer who, like many war correspondents, took his comfortable place in the baggage train of the victorious Allied armies as a license to pontificate