Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One (15 page)

Over the years, Cline supplied Limbaugh with thousands of pills. This wasn’t done pro bono, of course. Limbaugh paid both for the drugs and for her silence. But eventually the deal went sour, and in 2003 Cline went to the Palm Beach County State Attorney’s office with documents and e-mails. The
Enquirer
reported that one ledger alone showed her bringing Rush 4,350 pills in a forty-seven-day period, enough, in Cline’s words, “to kill an elephant.”

The fact that Limbaugh was a drug addict came as a shock to his audience but not as a surprise to his tight inner circle. He had been abusing substances since 1996 at least. Twice before he had checked himself into detox programs but failed. At least one specialist warned him that the OxyContin was endangering his hearing. Members of his family and a few old friends planned an intervention, but it fell through when no one was willing to actually confront him. Now the entire country knew his secret.

Limbaugh-haters were jubilant. He had never been much of an anti-drug crusader, but in 1995 he had made a comment that came back to haunt him: “Too many whites are getting away with drug use. The answer is to . . . find the ones who are getting away with it, convict them, and send them up the river.”

Limbaugh was busted, pure and simple, and he had nowhere to hide. On October 10, 2003, he went on air and tried to explain what had happened to his audience.

“I have always tried to be honest with you and open about my life,” he began. “So I need to tell you today that part of what you have heard and read is correct. I am addicted to prescription pain medication.”

According to Limbaugh, he had started taking prescription painkillers after painful spinal surgery. His back and neck continued to bother him, and he decided to deal with the problem by taking pain medication, which had proven “highly addictive.” He told listeners that he would be leaving the studio and going directly to a treatment center, where he hoped to beat his drug addiction once and for all. “I am not making any excuses. You know, over the years athletes and celebrities have emerged from treatment centers to great fanfare and praise for conquering great demons. They are said to be great role models and examples for others. Well, I am no role model. I am no victim and do not portray myself as such. I take full responsibility for my problem.”

Limbaugh concluded by saying that he would like to go into more detail but couldn’t, because he was under criminal investigation. If he was guilty of doctor shopping, a crime in Florida, he could get up to five years in prison. His celebrity status—especially as a notorious conservative in an extremely liberal jurisdiction—made him more vulnerable than the average user. On the other hand, he was much richer. He hired Roy Black, one of the top defense attorneys in the country, to keep him out of jail.

Black sent Limbaugh to a Florida-based clinical psychologist, Steven Stumwasser, who specializes in treating addiction. They met for the first time on October 5, 2003—just as the
Enquirer
story was about to break. “I had heard Limbaugh’s name and I knew what he did for a living, but I was certainly no Dittohead,” Stumwasser told me in an interview (authorized by Limbaugh) in 2008. “I evaluated him and saw that he was, indeed, an addict. He knew it, too. A lot of people have a hard time taking personal responsibility, but he was ready, and he wasn’t in denial. He said, ‘Tell me what to do.’ He knew he had a problem and he surrendered.”

Stumwasser arranged for Limbaugh to be treated at the Meadows, in Wickenburg, Arizona, about an hour north of Phoenix. The Meadows is a Level I psychiatric hospital equipped to deal with celebrities who, for obvious reasons, have concerns about privacy. Stumwasser flew out to Phoenix, met Limbaugh at the airport, and personally checked him in to the hospital.

“They guarded his privacy, but other than that, he was treated like everybody else,” says Stumwasser. “Group sessions, individual treatment, the entire program. He could have left anytime, but he completed the entire program. He did the work, and he did it with passion.”

On November 18, Rush returned to the air and reported for action. “I was a drug addict from about 1996, 1995, or whatever, to just five weeks ago,” he said. “The truth of the matter is I avoided the subject of drugs on this program for the precise reason that I was keeping a secret.”

Limbaugh called his rehab “probably the most educational five weeks” he had ever spent. “I have to admit that I am powerless over this addiction that I have. I used to think I could beat it with force of will. I used to think that I would be different, but I’m not.” And then he went back to business as usual.

The legal issues dragged on. Eventually, in 2006, Limbaugh was convicted of doctor shopping and given eighteen months’ probation under the court-appointed supervision of Dr. Stumwasser. Only a month later, he was stopped at the Palm Beach International Airport, where authorities found and seized a bottle of Viagra in a vial that wasn’t in his name. It turned out that the prescription had been written by Rush’s cardiologist in Stumwasser’s name, to protect Limbaugh’s privacy. In the doctor-shopping case, the elected state attorney of Palm Beach Country, Democrat Barry Krischer, had authorized seizing Limbaugh’s medical records—an act that prompted the ACLU to file an amicus curie brief on Limbaugh’s behalf. This time the authorities decided not to try to send him to prison for the risible charge of possession of Viagra.

Needless to say, many of Limbaugh’s critics didn’t feel sorry for him. Hendrik Hertzberg of the
New Yorker
spoke for many when he called Rush a “Vice Versa Virtuecrat” and reminded his (presumably drug-free) readers that Limbaugh’s pain medication addiction “correlates strongly with committing acts that the law defines as crimes.” Limbaugh’s friends on the right, such as Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity, had rallied, calling him courageous for coming clean (as though he had a choice), but the dominant tone was gleeful. Limbaugh had been brought down and exposed as a hypocrite. He might even get locked up. The man who had irritated liberals by boasting that he was “having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have” stood naked now. Evan Thomas of
Newsweek
described him as “a lonely object of mass adulation, socially ill at ease, at least occasionally depressed and, for the past several years, living in a private hell of pain and compulsion.”

People who thought that Limbaugh’s drug bust and rehab would cost him his career were mistaken. His audience accepted his explanation and stuck with him. He had been the number one talk radio host in the country in 2003, when the
Enquirer
article appeared, and he was number one again in 2004, after he returned from Arizona. He didn’t seem chastened, either. On the air he was his usual opinionated, cocky self.

A couple years later, I asked Limbaugh directly what he had learned about drugs and the people who abuse them. Was he in favor of liberalizing drug laws? Did he see a significant difference between crack and powder cocaine?

Rush responded in an e-mail: “I have no knowledge whatsoever of cocaine or any drug other than prescription painkillers,” he said. He was, he told me, opposed to letting people legally obtain any drug they wanted. “My addiction taught me that there is nothing good that can result from increasing the number of addicts in society. There is nothing useful about addiction. It is destructive and not just to the addict because no one lives in a vacuum. We all have responsibilities to others in one form or another.”

At the same time, he said that he didn’t think that drug use should, in most cases, be a crime. “My experience, which as you know I value greatly, informs me that incarceration is not the best road to recovery except in cases of blatant, serial offenses where people repeatedly abandon serious attempts at rehabilitation. Everyone needs a wakeup call, and for some I suppose jail might suffice.”

In his own case, Limbaugh made a distinction between street drugs and prescription medication. “I would never consider cocaine, heroin, crystal meth,” he said. “I was introduced to codeine [the main ingredient in prescription painkillers, which, like heroin, is an opiate] via medical procedures. My ‘initiation’ was not recreational. But never once did I want anything more powerful, such as heroin or other forms of opiates like morphine. The reason is that I knew what I was doing was not healthy, was not ‘right’ and could lead to trouble, even before the law got involved. Plus I was in pain, at times very severe. Besides, I told myself, one gets painkillers at the drug store and technically they are not illegal in the sense that street drugs are. We all rationalize. Still I had my boundaries, in part because I was experiencing severe pain episodes. And with opiates, the more you take the more you need. It is a vicious cycle, and I feel for people in bad chronic pain who cannot live without painkillers.”

Like a lot of conservatives, Limbaugh has a considerable libertarian streak, which doesn’t always come out on the air. He regards homosexuality as, most probably, biologically determined, and while he opposes gay marriage as culturally subversive, he has no problem with gay civil unions—which is the stance of President Obama and Hillary Clinton. He drinks adult beverages, smokes cigars, and is not exactly a shining example of Christian family values. He is not opposed to capital punishment, but he “wouldn’t go to the mat over it.” Bill Clinton tried to lump Limbaugh and Jerry Falwell together, but the two men never met, and Limbaugh turned down repeated invitations by Falwell to speak at Liberty University. In 2009 he declined an offer to speak at the Liberty graduation and receive an honorary degree. Rush didn’t belong to the Falwell-Robertson wing of the Republican Party and never supported its candidates. Until George W. Bush came along.

CHAPTER SEVEN

L
imbaugh liked George W. Bush the first time he met him back during the administration of Bush Senior. W was taking care of political business at the White House in those days, and the two young conservatives found they had a lot in common. They were products of the 1950s, fervent believers in the values of Midland, Texas, and Cape Girardeau, Missouri. They had both set out on courses that had disappointed their revered, demanding fathers. Bush, who graduated from Andover, Yale, and Harvard, was almost as contemptuous of the Northeastern elite as Limbaugh. They were both frustrated jocks, too. Rush had worked for the Kansas City Royals and dreamed of becoming an NFL broadcaster. Bush went from his father’s White House to the Texas Rangers, where he was part owner and managing partner. Later he invited Rush down to Arlington, Texas, to see the last three games of George Brett’s career. Limbaugh sat in Bush’s private box near the team dugout and got a standing ovation from the crowd. He remembers W as profane, cocky, and determined. “He was planning to run for governor of Texas and he told me, ‘Rush, I’m gonna kick Ann Richards’s ass.’ ”

In 2000 Limbaugh was a Bush man. Bush cast himself as a latter-day Reagan. His primary opponent, John McCain, seemed to Limbaugh to be another Bob Dole. Rush was delighted when Bush won and generally approved of his first year in office. Limbaugh didn’t care much for the new president’s “uniter-not-a-divider rhetoric” or his warmth toward Teddy Kennedy, who was invited to the White House and praised for cosponsoring the No Child Left Behind education reform. But Bush cut taxes, which was the highest item on Limbaugh’s small-government, business-oriented agenda. And he wasn’t Bill Clinton. Those weren’t Rush-more credentials in Limbaugh’s eyes, but they were more than enough to win his approval.

Then came the attacks of 9/11. Communism, not Islamic extremism, had been Limbaugh’s lifelong foreign enemy of choice, but not even the Ruskies had bombed New York City or the Pentagon. This was war, flat-out, and he wanted it fought no-holds-barred, without nuances or niceties, World War II-style. Limbaugh realized, as many more sophisticated commentators did not, that the attack on America was not an isolated criminal act launched by a group of fanatics operating out of Afghanistan. If it had been, there would not be cheering on the rooftops of Baghdad, Ramallah, Cairo and Damascus and Teheran. This was the logical next step in the wild anti-Americanism that had dominated Middle Eastern political culture—pan-Arab secular and Islamic fundamentalist, Nasserite and Ba’ath, Arab and Persian, Sunni and Shia—for decades. Limbaugh didn’t believe in winning the hearts and minds of these enemies; he had no respect for either. What he wanted was a victory so brutal and so decisive that it would leave the countries of the Middle East prostrate and remorseful, like the Germans and the Japanese of an earlier era. Afghanistan was a good place to start, if that’s what Bush wanted, but capitulation would mean a killer punch into the centers of the enemy. Baghdad was one of those centers, and the United States had an outstanding debt to collect from Saddam Hussein. If there were weapons of mass destruction there, as the Bush administration had said, so much the better. But with them or without them, total war was justified until the Arabs cried uncle.

At first, Democrats as well as Republicans supported the war in Iraq. Even Bill Clinton and the
New York Times
were caught up in the enthusiasm for taking down Saddam Hussein. But Limbaugh thought the Democrats would go wobbly eventually, and he was right. The hard left had never liked these wars, which they saw as examples of American imperialism. They rallied under the banner “Bush Lied, People Died,” a slogan that became more strident when it turned out that Saddam Hussein actually didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. Clinton himself said publicly that he, too, had thought Saddam had WMD, based on the assessments of U.S. and other Western intelligence. No matter: The Democratic base had never forgiven the president for “stealing” the election of 2000, or for his Texas smirk. Charles Krauthammer, who is a psychiatrist as well as a columnist, diagnosed it as “Bush Derangement Syndrome,” and it infected the Democratic mainstream in time for the acrimonious 2004 election campaign. Liberals were inflamed by Bush’s “Axis of Evil” conception of the world, his demand that NATO allies contribute to the fight in Iraq, and his refusal to admit that he had made mistakes in the conduct of the war. Part of this was simple politics. Democrats saw an opportunity to make Iraq Bush’s Vietnam, and they took it. Limbaugh understood this kind of hardball. What he didn’t understand was the concern the left was demonstrating for the previously undiscovered civil rights of enemy combatants. He reminded listeners that the sainted FDR had ordered the execution of German spies in Long Island during wartime, not to mention the internment of Japanese American citizens.