Life Of O'reilly

To be sure, O'Reilly is only too willing to browbeat guests and viewers with his opinions. As a little boy, says his sister Jan, he declared, "I'm going to go on TV and tell people what to think, what's right and what's wrong." O'Reilly says he was "put on earth to be a check on power," but he is really selling class rage. And his resentment is the real thing. He grew up in a lower-middle-class housing development a few miles and a world apart from Long Island's rich and WASPy Gold Coast. His father, who he says "hit first and asked questions later," sent him to a well-to-do parochial school, where a sneering rich kid fingered O'Reilly's cheap sport coat. "I floored the guy," says O'Reilly. At Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., O'Reilly and his buddies, mostly from ethnic working-class families, crashed the mixers at neighboring Vassar, then a tony women's college. "I could feel those rich girls and their Ivy League dates measuring me," O'Reilly recalls. He once tipped over the punch bowl.

As a TV newsman, O'Reilly worked his way up to the national desk at CBS, then ABC. But he never quite fit in. "He reeked of local. He was rough, unvarnished," says a former colleague at ABC. "I refused to be big-footed and patronized," says O'Reilly. In 1989 he left ABC for the more down-market syndicated tabloid show "Inside Edition," then took a surprising detour: to get a master's degree from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. In his book, O'Reilly writes that Harvard allowed him to observe the ruling class up close.

O'Reilly was a "loner" at Harvard, said one of his professors, former CBS newsman Marvin Kalb. "But he was blunt in a very charming way. He had a candor that was meant to offend but also to amuse you and win you over." A disco fan, O'Reilly, 51, didn't marry until he was 47. He boasts in his book about having dated "hundreds of women." "I was a dancing machine," he writes. When it comes to choosing a wife, he advises: "Evaluate others the way you evaluate a car or a new suit. Is this one really right for you?" His approach to child rearing is similarly retro. Children, he writes, should "fear" their parents. But his wife, Maureen, just laughs. "You should see him with his little girl," she says. ("She's 20 months old," says O'Reilly, not missing a chance to take a swipe at his favorite hobbyhorse--"same age as Jesse Jackson's. Only she's legitimate.") At home, his disco days long over, O'Reilly is actually quite "shy" and "introspective," says Maureen. Says his sister Jan: "He can be the life of the party when he wants to be, but then he clams up. At family dinners, he sort of shuffles around. But he's very loyal."

The man who really understands O'Reilly--certainly his appeal to viewers--is Roger Ailes. The son of a factory foreman in Ohio, Ailes has been switching among politics, entertainment and news since he was a producer for an early TV talkathon, the "Mike Douglas Show," then went to work for one of Douglas's first political guests, Richard Nixon, in the 1968 presidential campaign. As a cunning media adviser to the GOP, Ailes exploited the resentment of voters on behalf of Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Bush. (Ailes is widely credited with, or blamed for, the infamous Willie Horton ad, which was actually the work of some imitators.) As the programming guru for CNBC in the early '90s, Ailes created the Geraldo Rivera show and "Hardball With Chris Matthews." Hired by media mogul Rupert Murdoch to create the Fox News network from scratch in 1996, Ailes had the good sense to snap up O'Reilly, who, with his new Harvard degree, was looking to host a talk show that would allow him to hold forth on politics and popular culture.

On a Wednesday night in mid-January, O'Reilly is working himself up for his show, enthusiastically bashing the "elite media" for the entertainment of a visiting NEWSWEEK reporter. When it comes to holding power accountable, the big TV networks are "passive," says O'Reilly, dismissively. "There's lots of money involved. They have to do business with the government. They have to play it safe." But, the visitor asks, don't other establishment organs like The New York Times and The Washington Post break most of the big stories involving official corruption? "The New York Times!" O'Reilly splutters. "They never reviewed my book! That's snobbery! Look what they have on the cover of the Book Review this week! James Carroll [author of "Constantine's Sword"], a notorious Catholic basher! They're gonna give that huge play, but a book about the working class, about how to survive in America... "

It's showtime. At 6 feet 4, O'Reilly is imposing, but not a backslapper. His handshake is arm's length. He hates to shop for clothes and says he "won't touch mousse," though he is always patting down his wiry hair. On the set, he spies his first guest, former Clinton Labor secretary Robert Reich. "You just come from Charlie Rose?" he asks, referring to the cerebral PBS late-night host. "You gotta stop that." During a break, O'Reilly announces, to no one in particular, "Nobody likes me." Later he declares, "I am so misunderstood. It's pathetic." His camera crew just stares at him blankly.