Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One

by Zev Chafets

  By 1990 Limbaugh’s national audience had grown to almost twenty million listeners, and imitators were springing up on local stations around the country. The national press began to take notice. Lewis Grossberger, in an early profile in the New York Times Magazine, described Limbaugh as “some odd combination of Teddy Roosevelt, Willard Scott and the old Jackie Gleason character, Reginald Van Gleason 3rd.” Vanity Fair’s Peter Boyle compared him to Garrison Keillor and Paul Harvey, as someone who used radio as a theater of the mind and said his show was similar to David Letterman’s ironic takedown of the “phony decorum of the studio setting itself.” A profile in Cigar Aficionado written by a New York Times reporter presented Limbaugh as a modern-day W. C. Fields. Ted Koppel hosted him on Nightline and declared, “There is absolutely no one and nothing else out there like him, anywhere on the political spectrum.”

  In 1993 the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd went out to a four-hour dinner with Rush Limbaugh at “21” and came away confused. She had been expecting a caveman, or at the very least a male chauvinist pig. “But oddly enough,” she reported, “beneath the bombast, there beats the heart of a romantic.”

  Limbaugh confessed to Dowd that he was very rarely invited out, a statement she found hard to believe. “New York loves celebrities, no matter what they are famous for,” she wrote, but, of course, that isn’t quite right. Billionaire tax cheats, debauched rock singers, crooked (Democratic) politicians, journalistic plagiarists, society pimps—almost anyone could (and can) be part of the celebrity social life of New York—at least the New York that Dowd was talking about. But Limbaugh was a pariah. “You have no earthly idea how detested and hated I am. I’m not even a good circus act for the liberals in this town . . . You can look at my calendar for the past two years and see all of the invitations. You’ll find two, both by Robert and Georgette Mosbacher.”

  Dowd reported that despite his anti-feminist rhetoric, Rush liked girls and tear-jerking movies. “I’m an incurable romantic,” he told her. Dowd seemed nonplussed by such sentimentality.

  She had bearded the lion at New York’s posh supper club “21” only to discover that while he was, of course, a provincial doofus and a bigot, he was also, puzzlingly, a big sweetie.

  Or maybe not. In November 2004, eleven years after their date, Limbaugh had an opportunity to share his impression of Maureen Dowd with his audience. She had appeared on Meet the Press after George W. Bush’s reelection and had made it clear she considered it a cataclysm. “Maureen Dowd,” Rush remarked, “is literally a shadow of her former self, both physically and intellectually; it’s a shame what’s happened to MoDo. She was, at one time, she was pretty funny. She had a caustic, rapierlike wit. She’s just become embittered, just totally embittered.” For “reasons,” he added gallantly, “we won’t go into.”

  Not everyone shunned Limbaugh in Manhattan. He was taken up by William F. Buckley, the publisher of National Review. For Limbaugh, entering the Buckley orbit was like walking through the looking glass and finding himself in a magical kingdom.

  Buckley was a hero to Limbaugh, as he was to all American conservatives. His book God and Man at Yale, published in 1951, was the beginning of the right-wing counteroffensive to the political and cultural dominance of New Deal liberalism. Before Buckley, conservatives were stodgy budget scolds from the Midwest, like Senator Robert Taft of Ohio; or unattractive anti-Communists like Whittaker Chambers; or Southern segregationists like Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas. The term “conservative thinker” was regarded by the cultural and media establishment as oxymoronic. As Lionel Trilling wrote in 1950, “Liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition . . . there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”

  Buckley’s aim was to change this, and in the process, he almost singlehandedly debunked every one of the anti-conservative stereotypes. He was a handsome, dashing, and hyperarticulate debater and polemicist, the scion of a large fortune married to the daughter of an even bigger one, a convivial and charming man with a sophisticated tolerance for opposing views and a social circle broad enough to include some of New York’s best-known liberals.

  On matters of principle Buckley was unyielding. He was a Catholic anti-Communist who spoke and wrote about liberating Eastern Europe and the Baltic states at a time when the very idea seemed absurd. A partisan Republican who once ran for mayor of New York and whose brother James served as a Republican senator from New York, he supported Barry Goldwater’s right-wing takeover of the party in 1964 and was invaluable to the political ambitions of his close friend Ronald Reagan. Buckley’s magazine was the intellectual boiler room of modern American conservatism, and he—through his books, his syndicated newspaper column, and, most especially, his TV show Firing Line, in which Buckley debated the country’s most prominent liberals—its most important spokesman.

  Limbaugh had once read a book by Buckley that he had found in his father’s library, and he sometimes watched Firing Line. Rush even did a very funny imitation of Buckley’s mellifluous, multisyllabic English. But it wasn’t until Limbaugh began doing political satire full-time that he actually began reading National Review on a regular basis.

  “I thought you had to be invited to read it,” he said in an emotional broadcast on the day Buckley died. “I thought there was a select group of people that were entitled to be part of that. I’d never seen it on a news-stand. I had never seen it anywhere at anybody’s house.”

  Limbaugh recounted how he had called the magazine from Sacramento and meekly asked if he could subscribe. “I was as nervous making that phone call as any phone call I can remember making,” he said. The magazine was his first introduction into formalized post-Cape Girardeau conservatism. National Review was a revelation, a clear enunciation of the modern conservative movement’s agenda and policy prescriptions. It was especially influential on his economic thinking: “My first real understanding of the concept of lowering tax rates to generate revenue came from Bill Buckley.”

  About a month after Limbaugh began doing his national show, he was invited to a reception at the home of Lewis Lehrman, a major conservative benefactor. He met several National Review editors and was thrilled to learn that he was being listened to by Buckley himself. Not long afterward he was invited to attend a National Review editorial meeting at Buckley’s apartment on Park Avenue. Limbaugh was so excited that he began shaking when he got the call, and he prepared for the event like a kid going to his first prom. “I did not want to go in there and make a fool of myself. The time arrived, the day arrived, and I had my driver drive around the block four times while I’m mustering the courage to get out of the car and go in.”

  The first thing Limbaugh noticed when he entered the salon was a harpsichord. Buckley was an accomplished musician, a world-class sailor, a proficient skier, an amateur boxer, and a novelist who wrote spy fiction based partly on his own experience as a covert CIA agent in Latin America. Limbaugh, who had an aversion to physical exertion and cultural pursuits (he told Maureen Dowd that he would start visiting museums when they got golf carts to ride around in), was suitably awed.

  Buckley himself poured Limbaugh a drink, and Rush sat silently as the editors discussed a burning question: could James Joyce have published Ulysses today? Limbaugh had no idea what they were talking about, but, like the harpsichord, it awed him, as did the grand entrance of Buckley’s socialite wife, Pat.

  At dinner, Limbaugh found himself the center of attention.

  Buckley and the others grilled him on his thoughts and opinions, his broadcasting secrets, what his goals were. “They were fans!” Limbaugh said, still amazed after all these years. “It was one of the most memorable nights of my life . . . that night I was made to feel welcome in the conservative movement as started by its leader.”

  Some of Buckley’s friends and associates looked askance at their leader’s enthusiasm for Limbaugh, whom they regarded as crude and poorly educa
ted. But the imprimatur of William F. Buckley and his wife, Pat, was more than sufficient. Through them he met and socialized with Henry Kissinger, Norman Podhoretz, Richard Brookhiser, and other prominent conservative intellectuals. He lunched with Buckley from time to time, visited him in Connecticut, even went on a National Review cruise. And on one memorable occasion, in the mid-1990s, he hosted Buckley and some other conservative dignitaries, including Newt Gingrich, in his newly acquired New York penthouse. After dinner they smoked cigars and drank brandy, and Limbaugh, who wasn’t much of a drinker, found himself on his feet, snifter in hand. He raised the glass to Buckley and said, “You know, my father passed away in 1990, but you make me think my dad’s still alive here with me.”

  In 1990 Limbaugh struck up another strategic friendship. Roger Ailes was a television producer and political media consultant who helped Richard Nixon re-create himself as the “New” Nixon in 1968, coached Ronald Reagan in his crushing debate victory over Walter Mondale in 1984, and helped George H. W. Bush craft his media campaign in 1988. He was a rare bird in the world of TV, a hard-line conservative and partisan Republican who was also a highly respected professional, with two Emmy Awards as executive producer of The Mike Douglas Show and another for a 1984 documentary on the presidency.

  In the fall of 1990, Ailes met Limbaugh and discussed the possibility of producing and syndicating a TV show starring Limbaugh. They worked on the deal for almost a year, then took it to Multimedia Entertainment, which also syndicated The Phil Donahue Show.

  At first Limbaugh was ambivalent about his venture into television. EIB had more than four hundred radio stations and was growing, as he often bragged on the air, “by leaps and bounds.” He was making perhaps three million dollars a year.

  He also had a book deal with Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, which had netted him a six-figure advance. Besides, he was a radio guy. He’d done some television commentary in Sacramento but never a whole show. And New York was a different world than the mellow media atmosphere of California. He had made a guest appearance on Live with Regis and Kathie Lee, where he had been ambushed by the dyspeptic liberal columnist Jimmy Breslin, who disparaged him as a fat blowhard as the hosts looked on innocently. But that was nothing compared with his one-night stint as a sit-in for Pat Sajak.

  The Pat Sajak Show was a national late-night talk program on CBS, which was on its last legs when Limbaugh was invited to guest-host in early 1990. He took the opportunity seriously and prepared several topics. One was abortion. The governor of Idaho had just vetoed a bill that would have outlawed abortion in his state, and Limbaugh was critical of the decision. He took his microphone into the studio audience to hear reactions and ran into a group of screaming protestors who called him a Nazi. He changed the topic to AIDS, and activists in the crowd began chanting, “You want people to die!” and “Murderer!” Limbaugh was visibly taken aback but restrained in his response. “I am not responsible for your behavior,” he told the activists. Some in the studio audience jeered, while others gave him a standing ovation.

  Limbaugh then went to the subject of affirmative action, which he said was an “insult” to African Americans because it implied they couldn’t compete fairly. Once more there was a chorus of heckling.

  The show was taped in advance, and the producers decided to shoot the last segment in an empty studio. Media critics interpreted this as a surrender by Limbaugh. In fact, it was a gimmick, aimed at stirring controversy ahead of the show. It worked. Limbaugh’s enemies thought he had been humiliated, while his fans saw it as an illustration of the intolerance of the far left. Rush himself didn’t think he had done badly. But Big Rush, who had seen the program in Cape, called with a bleak assessment. “Son,” he said, “these things don’t just happen by themselves. They set you up.”

  Nobody would set up Limbaugh again. He and Ailes were in complete control of the format and the content. They taped every day at 5:00 p.m., making sure that the show was freshly topical. Limbaugh commented on the news, bantered with the crew, and clowned around. But there was a serious purpose to the program, just as there was to the radio show. Limbaugh was seeking conservative converts. “They call me the most dangerous man in America,” he boasted. “Know why? Because I am.”

  The mainstream critics were dismissive. The show exposed Limbaugh as “a blowhard casting about for a TV persona,” said the Boston Globe. But Limbaugh and Ailes couldn’t have cared less about the voices of the liberal establishment. Their audience was elsewhere.

  The show ran at various hours on more than two hundred stations. In cities where he competed in the late-night slot, his ratings often topped both Jay Leno’s and David Letterman’s. By the end of his first season, he had more than three million viewers a night, a very respectable number, especially considering that some stations put him on at 1:00 a.m.

  On the air, Limbaugh did some memorable stunts. Once he sent a reporter out into a snowstorm to interview people about global warming. He showed a clip of Vice President Al Gore at Monticello asking the curator who the plaster busts were (one of them, Gore was told, was George Washington). He ran a video clip of Bill Clinton telling an audience of children how he had learned to count to ten to control his temper, and then showed him cursing and chewing out the mayor of Washington for messing up a photo op.

  Some of his bits went in surprising directions. He showed congress-woman and feminist icon Pat Schroeder praising Martha Washington for spending three terrible winters with the Revolutionary Army and boosting the morale of the troops, while Limbaugh, on a split screen, played an imaginary violin. He said that Martha had been in Valley Forge to boost her husband’s morale, not the troops’; and that Washington had made up the troop morale story in order to bill the Continental Congress for her expenses, “under the table.” He then clarified, for the “males in the audience,” that the term “under the table” referred only to money. Not too many comics were doing ribald Colonial humor on television.

  As always, a lot of Limbaugh’s humor was self-referential. He ran a home movie of himself visiting Israel (a trip on which he was accompanied by Rabbi Segal), meeting dignitaries, and praying at the Wailing Wall. The clip ended with his standing in the turret of an Israeli Merkava wearing, Dukakis-like, a helmet and commanding the tank.

  Some of the TV humor misfired. He ran a training film by a homeless-activist group, Project Dignity, that showed how to salvage edible food from restaurant Dumpsters. Limbaugh thought this was hilarious, but it wasn’t; it was callous and cringe inducing. Sometimes he got it just right. Katie Couric took the Today show to a Boston restaurant and girlishly grimaced as the chef cut up and fried a lobster. Limbaugh added a soundtrack of the lobster’s groans and screams of pain to mock Couric’s empathy for an essentially brainless (and soon to be devoured) crustacean.

  One of Limbaugh’s recurring themes was his admiration for Ronald Reagan, whom he called “Ronaldus Maximus” and “the greatest president of the twentieth century.”

  In mid-October of 1994, Limbaugh received a fan letter from the great man himself. “I am comforted to know that our country is in the capable hands of gifted young individuals like you and your listeners,” Reagan wrote. “You are the backbone of our great nation, solely responsible for the success of our worldwide crusade. God bless you and your audience for believing; for having faith in America’s future; and for making a difference in this world.” It was signed “Ron.”

  Limbaugh had never quite captured the admiration of his father, but this was the next best thing, Ronald Reagan sitting in his living room in California watching him on television. Despite his “El Rushbo” shtick and his considerable political and cultural power, Limbaugh had never really been certain that he deserved his place in the conservative movement or the national media. He had been put down too often by his father, and fired too many times by dissatisfied station managers, to easily believe that he had truly and finally made it. The validation of Buckley, and especially Reagan, were critica
lly important to him. He could finally say to himself, in the words of Jesse Jackson, a man Rush despises but in some ways resembles, “I am Somebody.”

  Limbaugh was a television star but he didn’t like it. TV was profitable and ego gratifying, but it was also exhausting when coupled with the radio show. In 1996 he pulled the plug. “Rush didn’t like being dependent on so many people, which is the nature of television,” Roger Ailes, who went on to found FOX News, told me. “There are too many meetings for him. He likes the solo style of radio, the fact that it is all up to him. But his TV show was a success, don’t forget that. Believe me, if Rush wanted to go back on television, he could have a program of his own tomorrow. And not just on FOX.”

  “I’ve done television and I’ve done radio—and radio, to me, is incomparable and irreplaceable,” Limbaugh said to a convention of broadcasters in 2009. “You own that audience member. It’s not Muzak. They’re not doing anything else. This is direct, hands-on. This is primary listening . . . Television provides the pictures. Radio doesn’t. The host either paints them or the listener paints the image him- or herself. But once that starts happening, you’ve got them locked.”

  In the fall of 2009, not long after Limbaugh’s speech, the White House launched a campaign against FOX News. Obama himself said that FOX was more like talk radio than a conventional television network. This was, obviously, a political judgment; FOX, at that time, was the only TV network actually engaged in adversarial journalism in the first part of the Obama administration. It had broken scoops about Obama’s mentor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and played excepts from his incendiary anti-American sermons; revealed the political and professional connection between Obama and former Weatherman terrorist leader Bill Ayers; raised questions about Van Jones, a presidential adviser who had signed a petition accusing President Bush of collusion in the 9/11 terrorist attacks; and broadcast hidden-camera clips showing employees of ACORN—the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a left-wing group with which Obama had close ties—advising a pimp on how to import underage prostitutes into the United States. These stories were profoundly embarrassing to the Obama administration—the president had been forced to sever his ties with Wright, accept Jones’s resignation, and watch as Congress cut off ACORN’s federal funding. Naturally, the president wanted to discredit the network.