Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One

by Zev Chafets

  Ali was also controversial and dead serious about his political beliefs. He became a Black Muslim when it was dangerously unpopular to do so, and he paid for it. He was willing to face prison time rather than serve in a war he didn’t support. And yet, despite it all, white reporters couldn’t quite take him seriously. When he said alarmingly incorrect things, like calling Joe Louis an Uncle Tom, dubbing his fight with George Foreman in Zaire “the rumble in the jungle,” or mocking Joe Frazier as a gorilla, they thought it might be just part of the act. He couldn’t really mean those things, could he?

  Limbaugh is the Ali of the air, the all-knowing, all-seeing Maha Rishi who defeats his enemies in intellectual combat with half his brain tied behind his back, “just to make it fair.” He also happens to be the most important and influential conservative in the country, the one indispensable Republican voice. This can be confusing, which is the way Limbaugh wants it.

  After the Wall Street Journal article, Rush continued to insist that no true conservative could vote for the president’s porkulus bill; Republicans who did would be considered “moderates,” one of Limbaugh’s supreme insults, and dealt with accordingly. GOP congressmen took this threat seriously, especially after Limbaugh’s listeners began bombarding them with e-mail and phone calls. Rush, who is a realist, didn’t think he could block the bill, and that wasn’t his intention. The Democrats had a clear majority, and he wanted them to pass the stimulus alone, to completely own the spending, which he was sure would prove to be unpopular and ineffective. He got his way, too. Not a single Republican member of the House voted with Obama, who Limbaugh was now calling “The Messiah.” Bipartisanship, which Rush considered political and ideological surrender, was off the table. The Republicans were an opposition that would oppose. “I have hijacked Obama’s honeymoon,” he happily announced.

  Not every congressman enjoyed being strong-armed. Phil Gingrey, who represents Georgia’s 11th Congressional District, had been a GOP fence-sitter who resented Limbaugh’s intervention.

  In a moment of candor he complained about the way Rush had been razzing the party’s congressional leadership for their alleged softness on spending. Gingrey said it was easy for talk-show hosts “to stand back and throw bricks.” In American politics, “talk-show host” is a euphemism for “Rush Limbaugh.”

  Gingrey was deluged by outraged telephone calls and e-mails. The following day he crawled onto Limbaugh’s show and begged El Rushbo to forgive him. He called Limbaugh “a conservative giant” and praised him as a voice of conscience in their movement.

  He didn’t say the voice, but Rush was in a gracious mood and let it pass.

  For the moment, both Limbaugh and the Democrats were happy. Rush’s ratings were rising by the day, and his party was doing his bidding. This enabled the Democrats to keep using him as the face of the GOP. Paul Begala, a senior Democratic political consultant and informal adviser to the White House, declared that “the real leader of the Republican Party in America today is a corpulent drug addict with an AM radio talk show, Rush Limbaugh.” Begela was looking for a twofer; disparaging Limbaugh and, at the same time, starting a fight between him and Michael Steele, the newly elected head of the Republican National Committee. “Steele is going to need to stand up to Limbaugh if he wants to actually lead the party of Lincoln,” Begala said.

  Attacking Limbaugh for his drug use was a bold Democratic gambit; President Obama, after all, had confessed to serious recreational drugging as an angry young man. But the gloves were off. Hendrik Hertzberg, a former speechwriter for Jimmy Carter who now writes for the New Yorker, said that while he wasn’t comparing Obama to Martin Luther King or Limbaugh to Bull Connor, he was reminded by El Rushbo of the fire hoses and clubs that had been deployed against King by the infamously racist and brutal police chief of Selma, Alabama. Former Air America Radio talk-show host Janeane Garofalo offered a woman’s perspective. “The type of female that does like Rush is the same type of female that falls in love with prisoners,” she said. “Squeaky Fromme [one of Charles Manson’s groupies] is a good example. Eva Braun, Hitler’s girlfriend. That is exactly the type of woman that responds really well to Rush.”

  Tina Brown, the former editor of the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, was alarmed by all the attention Limbaugh was getting. She warned that the Democrats were turning him into an iconic figure.

  Rush couldn’t have been happier. After twenty years in the ring, he knew that when you start getting compared to Bull Connor, Charles Manson, and Adolf Hitler, you’re landing punches. Dishing out and absorbing punishment was all in a day’s work for the self-described harmless little fuzzball who had assigned himself the task of destroying the presidency of Barack Obama. There were risks—you don’t take on the most powerful man in the world lightly—but Limbaugh was prepared to take those risks. “This is my destiny,” he told his audience. “This is what I was born to do.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI

  In 1883 Mark Twain came down the Mississippi River and caught a glimpse of Cape Girardeau, the town of Rush Limbaugh’s nativity. “[It] is situated on a hillside, and makes a handsome appearance,” he wrote. “There is a great Jesuit school for boys at the foot of the town by the river. Uncle Mumford said it had as high a reputation for thoroughness as any similar institution in Missouri. There was another college higher up on an airy summit—a bright new edifice, picturesquely and peculiarly towered and pinnacled—a sort of gigantic casters, with the cruets all complete. Uncle Mumford said that Cape Girardeau was the Athens of Missouri, and contained several colleges besides those already mentioned; and all of them on a religious basis of one kind or another. He directed my attention to what he called the ‘strong and pervasive religious look of the town,’ but I could not see that it looked more religious than the other hill towns with the same slope and built of the same kind of bricks. Partialities often make people see more than really exists.”

  My first encounter with Cape, as the town is affectionately abbreviated by its citizens, came by land. I drove down from St. Louis on I-55, a two-hour stretch of highway through farmland that offers no temptation to stop or sightsee, and entered the town onto a commercial street of faded prosperity. It was a Sunday in mid-December, freezing cold and already dark at five thirty in the afternoon. The downtown district was festively lit for Christmas, but there was absolutely nobody on the street and only one or two places to eat. I chose an Italian ristorante with red-checkered tablecloths, ate a very good steak for the price of a mediocre Manhattan hamburger, and then checked in to the Bellevue Bed and Breakfast, a nineteenth-century Queen Anne Victorian only a couple blocks from the river.

  The town gets a fair number of tourists in season, but in the middle of December I was the only guest at the inn. The permanent population is thirty-eight thousand, about the same size as it had been when Rush was growing up there. Most of the Limbaughs are still there: Rush’s first cousin, Stephen Jr., a former justice of the Missouri Supreme Court who had recently been appointed to the federal bench by George W. Bush; another cousin, Jimmy, who is a local hospital executive; and David, Rush’s only sibling, a commentator and author in his own right who also runs the family law firm. The federal courthouse in town is named for Rush Limbaugh’s grandfather Rush Senior. When the courthouse was dedicated, the mayor referred to the family as “Cape Girardeau royalty.” The local Limbaughs played it down—“Mayor Knudtson is an immigrant from Minnesota,” David Limbaugh told me—but people who imagine Rush Hudson Limbaugh III is a disembodied voice or a rootless vagabond disc jockey are very much mistaken.

  The first American Limbaugh, Rush’s great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Johannes Michael Limbaugh (or “Limbach”), was born in Baden, Germany, in 1737 and immigrated to the colony of Pennsylvania before the Revolution. At least four of Rush’s ancestors—Peter Clubb, Thomas Coppedge, Conrad Hise, and Johannes Mull—are listed in the Patriotic Index of the National Society, Daughters of the American Revolution, maki
ng Limbaugh himself eligible for membership in the Sons of the American Revolution. Not all his ancestors were on the same side. His maternal grandmother, Emma Eisenberg, is very possibly descended from Quartermaster Sergeant Henrich Eisenberg, a Hessian mercenary from Waldeck, taken prisoner by the Colonial forces during the war.

  At one of our first meetings, Limbaugh introduced me to his girlfriend, Kathryn Rogers, as a lineal descendent of President John Adams. He seemed vague and not particularly interested in his own genealogy; “somewhere in Germany and then North Carolina I think, before they got to Missouri,” he told me. That’s ancient history; for Rush, the Limbaugh family saga really begins with his grandfather Rush Hudson Limbaugh Senior.

  Rush Senior was born and raised on a farm in nearby Bollinger County. He saw his first electric light at the age of twelve, at the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904. He and his mother traveled to the fair by train on newly laid track.

  Before then, St. Louis was three days away by stage coach or twelve hours by boat up the Mississippi. A railroad trip was a novelty in 1904, and the Limbaughs were written up in the local paper.

  “I don’t think I’d been away from home more than 15 to 20 miles before,” Rush Senior recalled in his biography, Rush Hudson Limbaugh and His Times: Reflections on a Life Well Lived. “I just discovered the world at that time.” Evidently he didn’t care that much for what he discovered; at least he never ventured very far. He learned the law, opened his first office in Cape in 1916, and practiced there until 1994. When he finally retired, at the age of 102, he was the oldest attorney working in the United States.

  The practice of law in southeast Missouri in those early days was informal—judges sometimes heard cases on their front porch—and not especially lucrative. Rush Senior furnished his “workshop” with a table, three chairs, a set of the latest Missouri Revised Statutes, a typewriter, and a spittoon. In his first year he made less than five hundred dollars; it took him six years to save enough money to buy his first car, a second-hand Dodge.

  At the age of forty Rush Senior was elected to the Missouri House of Representatives as an anti-New Deal Republican. The job paid five dollars a day plus roundtrip train fare to Jefferson City, the state capital. He served just one term but stayed active in local politics. In 1936 he was a delegate to the Republican National Convention that nominated Alf Landon of Kansas. Landon lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt in a landslide.

  Rush Limbaugh Senior was an honest lawyer and a pillar of the community: He helped start the local hospital. He contributed time and money to the Salvation Army. He was a Boy Scout leader. Generations of townsfolk and country people came to him with their legal and personal problems. Young attorneys saw him as a role model. Quietly but inevitably he became well to do, but he lived modestly. “He was a student of Thorstein Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption,” says Frank Nickell, the director of the Center for Regional History at Southeast Missouri State University. “Never ostentatious, but people watched him. He had charisma. He was polished, genteel, and sophisticated, a quiet, wise man who inspired a kind of reverence in Cape Girardeau.” Rush III dedicated his second book, See, I Told You So, to his grandfather. “You are the Limbaugh America Should Know,” he wrote.

  In 1949 a tornado hit Cape Girardeau, killing twenty-two people. The Limbaugh home was badly damaged but the family escaped unharmed. Everyone was in Kennett, Missouri, a hundred miles to the south, on the way to Memphis, attending the wedding of Rush Limbaugh Jr. to Millie Armstrong.

  “Millie was right out of the cotton fields,” says Frank Nickell. “She loved animals. She kept a mynah bird in the kitchen. She sang on the radio in Chicago before she was married, but she was the farthest thing from show biz you could imagine. Everybody in town loved Millie. She was a kind, gracious, gentle lady. To the extent that Rush Limbaugh has any gentility, it comes from his mother.”

  Frank Kinder, a boyhood friend of Rush and David’s, owns an advertising agency in Cape; his brother Peter is the lieutenant governor of Missouri. Kinder’s mother was Millie Limbaugh’s best friend. “We more or less grew up in each other’s houses,” Frank told me. “We attended the same church. Rush’s father, Big Rush, was my Sunday School teacher. And Millie and my mom sang together in the choir.”

  When Frank talks about Millie, his eyes tear up. “She was a wonderful woman, not just to her kids but to all of us,” he says. “Completely down to earth. She bought her clothes at Kmart. On her sixty-fifth birthday, Rush called my mom and asked her to come with Millie to New York. He sent his plane to bring them and got them a private shopper at Bergdorf Goodman. It was funny, really. Millie didn’t have good taste, and she didn’t care at all about fashion, but she and my mom had a great time. Five years later, for her seventieth birthday, Rush flew them both down to Florida. He wanted to give them a spa day but Millie put her foot down there. She said she was willing to shop but massages were just plain pampering.”

  Limbaugh sometimes mentions his mother on the show. By all accounts they were close, but it was his father, Rush Junior, who loomed largest in his son’s life. Limbaugh hero-worshipped his father, and he still calls him “the smartest man I ever met.”

  Certainly he was the most emphatic. Big Rush, who weighed in around three hundred pounds, was a World War II combat pilot who wore his hair in a crew cut and his opinions about politics (and every other subject) on his sleeve. He was not the community leader his father was, nor was he the best lawyer in the family—he was eclipsed by his cousin Stephen, who became a federal judge. As an attorney Big Rush was best known as a passionate advocate. “Clients love my dad,” David told me. “He would fight for them to the death. Within the bounds of ethics, of course.”

  Big Rush Limbaugh was a noted local orator, in demand on patriotic holidays. One of his best-known speeches, on the fathers of the American Revolution, provides an example of the uncompromising attitude and teary-eyed patriotism he bequeathed to his son. Here he is, recounting the story of Abraham Clark, a signer of the Declaration of Independence from New Jersey:

  “He gave two sons to the officer corps in the Revolutionary Army. They were captured and sent to that infamous British prison hulk afloat in New York Harbor known as the hell ship Jersey, where eleven thousand American captives were to die. The young Clarks were treated with a special brutality because of their father. One was put in solitary and given no food.” The British told Clark that they would spare his sons’ lives if he recanted his support for the Revolution, but despite the fact that the war was almost won, Clark refused, a decision Big Rush lauded. “The utter despair in this man’s heart, the anguish in his very soul, must reach out to each one of us down through two hundred years with his answer: ‘No.’ ”

  This is a stirring patriotic sentiment. It thrilled audiences on the Fourth of July. How it affected young Rusty Limbaugh, as Rush was called in those days, and his brother, David, is another question.

  Speechifying wasn’t Big Rush’s only activity. He had come back from the war an aviation nut, and he remained one long after he could no longer squeeze his bulk into a cockpit. He played a major role in lobbying for an airport in Cape Girardeau. He also dabbled in investments, including a piece of Cape’s AM radio station KGMO. And he, like Rush Senior, was a figure in the local Republican Party. In 1956 he proudly played host to Vice President Richard M. Nixon on his visit to southeast Missouri.

  Rush’s boyhood friends have very vivid memories of Big Rush, who often lectured them on the evils of Communism and liberalism. “We’d go over to his house sometimes just to watch him watch the six o’clock news,” recalls Frank Kinder. “He’d sit in front of the television drinking black cherry pop, eating popcorn, and just railing at the anchormen and the reporters. He’d yell at Dan Rather—‘They’re all typical liberals and Rather’s the worst one in the bunch,’ he’d say—and we’d try to keep him going, you know, ‘Mr. Rush, what do you think about this, Mr. Rush, what do you think about that?’ Sometimes he’d say, ‘Kinder, you�
�re going to be the first Dutchman on the moon.’ I don’t exactly know what he meant by that, but he was trying to be friendly. I liked him, but he was a harsh taskmaster with his sons.”

  Dick Adams was Limbaugh’s close friend and high school debate partner. As a teenager he often found himself at the Limbaugh dinner table in the midst of what he calls “spirited political discussions.”

  “Rush’s dad didn’t suffer fools lightly,” Adams says. “He was always very disapproving of Rush’s ambitions to have a career in radio. Rush’s mom was a kind, gentle person, but his dad could be pretty rough. He was not above calling down Rush and David in front of their friends, and when he did it, there was a string of expletives attached. I saw that happen many times.”

  “My dad stood out. Sometimes he provoked people who didn’t agree with him to violence,” David Limbaugh told me. “Once, for example, he was in a bar slamming FDR, and a couple guys jumped him and beat him up. I never did ask him the details of that one. But it was a couple guys, not a fair fight. I know that much.”

  Adams remembers Rush as a good debater—“he could argue either side of a proposition without missing a beat”—and generally in agreement with his father’s conservative opinions. But I was surprised to learn that Rusty wasn’t really very interested in politics. “The only political sentiment I recall him expressing was after the 1960 presidential election,” Frank Kinder told me. “Rush wrote on a drywall, ‘Kennedy won, darn. Nixon lost, shucks.’” This lack of partisan engagement is a recurring theme in the recollections of Limbaugh’s old friends and colleagues in his early radio career. He was in his midthirties before he began giving strong, consistent voice to his conservative beliefs.