Free Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One by Zev Chafets Page A

American culture were in a state of exceptional flux.
    Rusty Limbaugh’s reaction to the events of 1968—an apolitical shrug, conversations with newsmen about how he could break into big-time broadcasting—became Rush’s pattern. He did not participate, one way or the other, in the great causes of his time. The civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, Stonewall, the feminist revolution, political assassinations, Watergate, Jimmy Carter, even the Reagan counterrevolution didn’t engage him until he was nearly forty. He had his opinions, of course. Once a station manager in Pittsburgh cautioned him not to talk positively about Richard Nixon on the air. He read newspapers and kept up but didn’t talk politics with his roommates or his closest friends, like George Brett. He was so detached and apolitical that he didn’t register to vote until he was thirty-five years old.
    When he did begin talking about politics, in Kansas City, he reached for the doctrines he had been raised on. That they were not original or less absolutely true than he imagined was secondary; what mattered, what was unusual, was that he was a talking disc jockey with a coherent, conservative credo. They were an honest representation of how Limbaugh saw the world. They also were sufficiently overstated to give him a plausible, Alilike, just-kidding deniability when it suited him.
    Limbaugh came to New York with many ambitions, not all of them complementary. First, he wanted to become the country’s leading radio personality, and he accomplished that in short order. Within five years, Playboy noted that his show was so widespread on the American air that it ought to come with its own environmental-impact statement. By most standards he was rich and famous, but not by the standards of Manhattan. In interviews he gave in the early 1990s, he often remarked on how disconcerting it was for him, after his celebrity in Sacramento, to go unrecognized on the streets of New York.
    He was especially hurt and disappointed by the rejection of his peers. Limbaugh arrived believing that there was an elite club of broadcasters (“not media people, broadcasters,” he says) who would recognize his ability and welcome him into their fraternity with fellowship and camaraderie. “These guys had millions of listeners every night. I looked up to them. I wanted to be accepted as one of them. But that’s not what happened.” In fact, the only mainstream broadcasters who were even remotely welcoming were Tim Russert and Ted Koppel.
    Limbaugh was right: there was (and is) a broadcast elite in New York with connections to one another (not always friendly) and other very important people in the arts and entertainment, the news business, politics, publishing, academia, and Wall Street. Outsiders are always welcome—Walter Cronkite himself came from Missouri; Tom Brokaw, from Nebraska; and Peter Jennings, from Canada, of all places—but the price of admission is accepting and, in some small way propagating, the group ethos. Get in and you become eligible for prizes and awards, college commencement gigs, famous neighbors, social respectability (if not popularity), front-row-center seats, and great tables. In that respect, acceptance by the Manhattan media elite is not different from membership in any high school in-crowd. Dobie Gray sang about the experience on a hit record Rusty Sharpe used to spin: “You ain’t been nowhere ’til you’ve been in . . . with the in crowd, yeah!”
    Internalizing the lyrics of hit songs is an occupational hazard for disc jockeys. Besides, Dobie Gray didn’t spell out the Manhattan rules. Members of the club had to be (and still have to be) secular, socially liberal, politically Democratic (or at least not Republican), aspirationally Ivy League, discreetly avaricious, and unwilling to express opinions not sanctioned by the editorial page of the New York Times . Of these values, Limbaugh shared only avarice. There was precisely no chance that