On most Thanksgiving Days, Roger Ailes gets to count his blessings. But the chairman and CEO of the Fox News Channel remembers all too well one Thanksgiving more than three decades ago when he had precious few blessings to count. The year was 1972, and he was 32 years old. "I was flat broke, sitting in a hotel coffee shop trying to find Thanksgiving dinner and thinking about what the hell I was going to do next," Ailes recalls. "I was young and stupid and in the middle of a divorce, and I'd just lost everything." The man who would become known as a ferocious Republican media strategist and creator of the right-leaning 24-hour Fox News Channel had just lost his shirt by backing, of all things, an environmental musical.

Until then, Ailes had been remarkably successful. The son of a factory foreman and a stay-at-home mother in Warren, Ohio, he worked on road crews during school vacations and got his first job in television as a "property assistant" --a gofer--on The Mike Douglas Show . Within three years, the local Cleveland talk show had gone national, and Ailes was its executive producer. "I worked hard, and I was always taught that you work hard, and you use your brain, and you provide a value to whoever you're working for." It's an ethic that has worked well for Ailes--and the people who have employed him. But it leaves out a critical element.

On the ropes. Competitive is probably the one word that best sums up Ailes's approach to business--followed closely by combative. And so, even as he reeled from the grand flop of Mother Earth , which closed after just 12 performances on Broadway, Ailes fought his way back off the ropes. "I was trying to figure out what the hell I'm gonna do for a living," he recalls. "So I went out and started calling people and saying, 'You got anything for me to do?' And surprisingly, a lot of people hired me [to produce promotions and other television], and I had $100,000 worth of billings within 30 days."

A natural networker, Ailes quickly parlayed his setback into a successful business as a media consultant to corporations and Republican politicians. He had started in the business with a stint producing TV for the 1968 Richard Nixon campaign--Ailes says he was just a low-level functionary, not a policy adviser--but it was with the 1984 Reagan campaign that Ailes really hit his stride. The Great Communicator was in trouble: Democrat Walter Mondale had done serious damage in the first debate, and Reagan's team was panicking. "The key to my success is having everybody in the room, when something goes wrong, saying, 'Get Ailes in here--he'll fix it.' If people want you in the room when things are going wrong, you'll succeed," Ailes says. Mondale went down, and Ailes was back in 1988, as one of the architects of then Vice President George H. W. Bush's vicious--and ultimately successful--campaign against Democrat Michael Dukakis.