Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One (9 page)

An accusation of anti-Semitism, even an unfair one, was nothing to take lightly in the media world of New York. Limbaugh was right to be frightened by the damage it could do. The effort to smear him as a Jew-hater persisted, and eventually he confronted it head on, publicly offering a million dollars to anyone who could demonstrate that he was, in any way, an anti-Semite. Not long after that challenge, Abe Hirschfeld, an eccentric millionaire, bought the
New York Post
. It was a scandal—Hirschfeld was not only a kook but a lowlife; he eventually went to prison for trying to have his ex-business partner murdered. Limbaugh, in discussing the sale of the
Post
, mistakenly referred to Hirschfeld as “Irv.” When he was corrected by a member of his staff, he said, “Irv, Abe, what’s the difference?” A listener in California heard this and demanded to collect the million dollars. Limbaugh refused, the listener sued, and the case was laughed out of court.

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 educated. 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.”