by Zev Chafets
There was never a doubt that Limbaugh would support the reelection of George H. W. Bush in 1992—he was the Republican candidate—but Rush wasn’t enthusiastic. Bush struck him as a preppy, country club moderate, an Ivy League snob who, as a candidate in the Republican primaries of 1980, had dismissed Ronald Reagan’s supply-side ideology as voodoo economics. Not only that, Bush had raised taxes.
Bush needed Reagan voters who were attracted to third-party candidate Ross Perot’s Texas populism; many of these people were Limbaugh listeners. Limbaugh dismissed Perot as “not a real politician.” He certainly didn’t want Clinton. And so he was stuck with Bush.
Early in the summer of 1992, Roger Ailes, who was working for President Bush, made the connection. The president invited Limbaugh to accompany him to the Kennedy Center and spend a night at the White House. Bush personally carried Limbaugh’s bag from the elevator of the White House residence to his room, a gesture Rush never forgot. That night he called his mother and brother from the Lincoln bedroom. “Guess where I’m sleeping tonight,” he said. Bush might not be Reagan, but he was the president of the United States. Big Rush had hosted Vice President Nixon in Cape; Big George was hosting Rusty in the White House.
In August, Rush went to the Republican convention in Houston, where he wandered the halls attracting huge crowds of fans and autograph seekers. The mayor of Houston, Bob Lanier, proclaimed an official Rush Limbaugh Day. Houston was George W. Bush’s home turf, but Limbaugh was the biggest celebrity in town. He sat in the presidential box when he felt like it and bonded with Bush over sports and politics. The connection was cemented, the deal struck. The president would do his best to sound like Reagan, and Limbaugh would campaign hard for him.
After Labor Day, Bush traveled to New York to address the General Assembly of the United Nations and dropped by Limbaugh’s studio for a chat. “Just one more fan sitting at the table here,” he chirped. But the visit had a purpose. Bush wanted to raise the issue of Bill Clinton’s Vietnam-era draft dodging.
This wasn’t Limbaugh’s favorite topic. George H. W. Bush, like Big Rush, was a World War II combat pilot. Rush, like Clinton, sat out Vietnam. Hundreds of his classmates and neighbors from Cape Girardeau served, and twelve died, while he was skipping class at SEMO and spinning records in Pittsburgh. He had a medical exemption. He pulled a good number. Then they canceled the draft. “Simple as that,” he says.
But nothing was simple when it came to the draft, as every man of Limbaugh’s generation (and mine) knows perfectly well. In his freshman year of college, Limbaugh had the usual 2-S, a student deferment. In the draft lottery of 1970, he drew 152. Nobody knew if 152 was a safe number or not. The war was slightly past its peak, and troops were scheduled to begin leaving Vietnam in the fall of 1970, but there would still be more than four hundred thousand U.S. personnel there, and they had to be replenished.
Four months after the lottery, Limbaugh gave his draft board medical information that led him to be reclassified 1-Y; eligible only in case of national emergency. A 1-Y was golden, better than a 4-F medical deferment, because 4-F made it sound like there was something seriously the matter with you. In Limbaugh’s case, the disqualifying malady was a pilonidal cyst, a painful, hairy cyst ingloriously located near or on the cleft of the buttocks. During World War II, pilonidal cysts were commonly known as “jeep riders disease.” Limbaugh probably could have talked his way into uniform if he had wanted to serve. But he didn’t. If he had been called he would have gone. But he wasn’t and he didn’t.
When he became a national radio commentator, Limbaugh’s draft history drew attention. Reporters went out to Cape Girardeau and interviewed his mother, who spoke to them amiably but without providing much information. They talked to Rush’s contemporaries, members of the draft board, and physicians, but found no irregularities. Many of them (and many of their editors) had draft irregularities of their own.
Limbaugh himself unwittingly kept the issue alive. “In 1988 or ’89, I don’t remember exactly, some lib called up with the usual ‘you-didn’t-serve-in-the-army’ stuff, and I decided to turn it into a joke,” Limbaugh told me. “I told the caller, ‘Yeah, my father got me off. He just walked over to the draft board office, wrote them a check for three thousand dollars, and I got a 4-F.’ I was still laughing my ass off when my father called screaming and cursing. ‘Son, they’ll believe you,’ he said. He was just devastated at the thought that someone would take it seriously. The next day on the air I had to tell the audience I had been kidding.” That episode taught Limbaugh two important broadcast lessons: “First, you have to close the loop on satire. That means you can’t end a show with a joke. And second, you can fix your mistakes, but you have to apologize as soon as possible.”
The issue of Limbaugh’s draft status flared up again after Bush’s appearance. Bill Clinton’s draft dodging had been blatant, especially for someone who wanted to be commander in chief. Accusing a hawk like Limbaugh of the same thing might, the Democrats thought, take some sting out of the accusation. It didn’t. Limbaugh dutifully bashed Clinton as a draft dodger through election day, but his heart wasn’t in it. In a 1992 appearance at Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y, a bastion of left-wing sentiment, he was asked why he hadn’t served his country. “I did not want to go—just as Governor Clinton didn’t,” he replied.
Bush was the only candidate Limbaugh had, and he pumped hard for him on the air all through October and even introduced him at a rally in New Jersey. “The issue in this election is character,” he said. But he saw defeat coming, and when it did he was ready to frame it. On the day after the election, he pointed out that Bush had lost, but Clinton, who got just 43 percent of the vote, had no mandate. “Six out of ten people in this country did not vote for Bill Clinton,” he said. Limbaugh vowed to be the voice of the “loyal, honest, well-intentioned monolithic power which will descend on Washington, D.C.” He was, of course, being facetious—he had no plan to lead a march on the capital. His arena was the studio, not the barricades. It was behind the EIB microphone that he had become the most influential conservative spokesman in America. Any doubt about his status was removed by Ronald Reagan himself, who wrote to Rush after the election. “Thanks for all you’re doing to promote Republican and conservative principles,” Reagan said. “Now that I’ve retired from active politics, I don’t mind that you’ve become the number one voice for conservatism.” Limbaugh proudly read this to his audience. He hadn’t met his idol (and never did), but he had the next best thing, a coronation in writing.
The GOP’s situation after the 1992 defeat was similar to the after-math of the 2008 election. The Democrats had a young, attractive leader in the White House, and they controlled both houses of Congress. President Bush had been discredited and gone home to Texas, leaving his party with no obvious leader. Bob Dole of Kansas, the senate minority leader, was a saturnine, sharp-tongued deal maker. House Minority Leader Bob Michel of Illinois was an accommodating hack who believed that the GOP would be an eternal minority in the House and that it might as well learn to get along and enjoy life in D.C.
This sort of fatalism and passivity infuriated Limbaugh, and energized him. Did the Republicans lack charisma and fighting spirit? He would supply both.
Rush called the day before Clinton’s inaugural “the last day of freedom for most Americans,” and after Clinton took the oath of office he began each day with a portentous “America Held Hostage” takeoff on Nightline’s intro during the Iranian hostage crisis. Rush mocked the ceremony itself as a second Woodstock. In response to poet Maya Angelou’s free-verse tribute to the president, he had call screener James Golden, aka “Bo Snerdley,” recite a counterpoem about Clinton’s alleged slovenly habits. Nor did Rush forget old scores. Ron Silver, still a liberal at the time, remarked that when he first saw fighter jets overflying the Lincoln Memorial, he felt that a military show of force was inappropriate, but on second thought he realized that “those are our planes now.” “Those are American planes, Ron,” L
imbaugh corrected him.
Bill Clinton wanted to shut Limbaugh up from the day he reached the White House, but he lacked a legal means of doing it. Until 1987, the 1949 Fairness Doctrine required licensed broadcasters to present public issues in a manner that the Federal Communications Commission regarded as “honest, equitable and balanced.” Since liberalism was the consensus view of the American elite, the commission generally regarded expressions of liberal opinion as the essence of honesty, equity, and balance. But the Reagan administration had a different view of balance and honesty. Reagan believed that the Fairness Doctrine was not only prejudicial but a limitation of the First Amendment right to free speech, and in August 1987, the FCC abolished it. One year later, and not coincidentally, Rush Limbaugh began his national program.
Lacking legal recourse, Clinton decided to delegitimize Limbaugh as a racist, and to do the job personally. On May 1, 1993, the president was the featured speaker at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner at the Washington Hilton. The dinner was held in the shadow of the killing, by federal agents, of fifty-one members of the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas. The massacre was unintentional, but women and children had burned to death, and the country was in an uproar. Congressman John Conyers of Detroit, who is black, attacked Attorney General Janet Reno’s mishandling of the entire affair. On the air, Limbaugh came to her defense.
“Do you like the way Rush Limbaugh took up for Janet Reno?” Clinton asked the twenty-four hundred guests at the Correspondents’ Dinner. “He only did it because she was attacked by a black guy.” Clinton laughed in a good-natured way. “He’s here tonight, isn’t he?”
Limbaugh was there and he was livid; he was still angry sixteen years later when we discussed the incident with me in Florida. “If they can successfully tar you as a racist, you are David Duke,” he told me. He demanded an apology from the White House and got one, but Clinton’s attack, seen nationally on C-SPAN, stayed in the air. The last time a president had gone after a commentator in such a personal way, at a formal event, was at the 1934 Gridiron Club Dinner in Washington when FDR ambushed H. L. Mencken by reading Mencken’s own contemptuous comments about American journalists as he sat on the dais.5
The attack on Limbaugh inspired him to even sharper anti-Clinton invective. He centered his criticism on the new administration’s signature legislative proposal, universal health care. In September 1993, in a joint speech to the House and Senate, Clinton called for action:Millions of Americans are just a pink slip away from losing their health insurance, and one serious illness away from losing all their savings. Millions more are locked into the jobs they have now just because they or someone in their family has once been sick and they have what is called the preexisting condition. And on any given day, over 37 million Americans—most of them working people and their little children—have no health insurance at all. And in spite of all this, our medical bills are growing at over twice the rate of inflation, and the United States spends over a third more of its income on health care than any other nation on Earth.
Limbaugh insisted that the president was greatly exaggerating the number of uninsured and praised the American health care system as the best in the world. He charged that the Clinton plan was merely a way for the federal government to gain control of a large segment of the economy and seize the authority to force citizens to lead what “the smartest people in the room” regarded as healthy lives. (These same talking points, often framed in the same language, reemerged in Limbaugh’s critique of the Obama health care reform effort in 2009.) When the Clinton administration launched a bus tour to campaign for the reforms, Limbaugh ran a parody of the Who’s “Magic Bus” and updated his audience on the tour’s itinerary, enabling them to assemble and protest. He also read the Clinton plan on the air. When the bill was defeated in 1994, Limbaugh could take a major portion of the credit.
Clinton found such opposition infuriating. On June 24, 1994, bound for St. Louis aboard Air Force One, he aired his grievance in an interview with radio station KMOX, which carried Limbaugh’s show. “I’m not frustrated about [Limbaugh’s criticism] exactly, but I tell you I have determined that I’m going to be aggressive about it. After I get off the radio today with you, Rush Limbaugh will have three hours to say whatever he wants, and I won’t have any opportunity to respond. And there’s no truth detector. You won’t get on afterward and say what was true and what wasn’t.” Limbaugh scoffed loudly at this display of presidential petulance—since when did a liberal deconstructionist like Clinton even believe in “truth”?—and dubbed himself “America’s Truth Detector.”
The spectacular Republican gains of 1994 had an obvious influence on the Clinton agenda. The Democrats no longer controlled Congress, and both the president and the Congress had to consider the election of 1996 in light of what had happened. Clinton’s liberal agenda slid toward the center. Even before the 1994 election, he signed the Limbaughesque Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which built prisons, expanded the death penalty to dozens of federal offenses, and provided funding for one hundred thousand local cops. He went on to sign a welfare reform act aimed at forcing people back into the labor market, which he trumpeted as legislation that would “end welfare as we know it.” He also signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which formally defined marriage as between a man and a woman. The Congressional Black Caucus and gay Democrats were respectively dismayed and outraged by these bills, but Clinton was clearly following the advice of his campaign theme song: “Don’t Stop [Thinking About Tomorrow].”
Limbaugh was thinking about it, too. In 1993 he told Playboy that he didn’t intend to get caught up in selecting Clinton’s opponent. “I don’t involve myself in primaries,” he said. “After the party and the people have chosen the candidate, then it’s a different ball game.”
Would he endorse Dole?
“Well, who knows what Bob Dole’s going to learn,” Rush said airily. “It’s a long time till 1996.”
Dole did get the nomination, mostly because he was blessed with one of the least inspiring fields of rivals in the annals of modern American politics—inflammatory reactionaries Pat Buchanan and Alan Keyes and bland mediocrities such as Steve Forbes, Lamar Alexander, Richard Lugar, and Arlen Specter. In this group, Dole seemed like a towering figure. But he never had a chance to beat Clinton. The president was young and attractive. The economy was doing well. The Cold War was over and the country was enjoying a peacetime holiday. With the help of his adviser Dick Morris, Clinton had triangulated himself into the center of the political spectrum. Ross Perot was running again, but he was a spent force, and whatever votes he did pick up would probably be at the expense of the GOP. Even a terrific Republican candidate would have had a hard time winning.
Dole was not terrific. At age seventy-three, he was listless and sometimes disoriented. Campaigning in Chico, California, he lost his balance and toppled off a stage. He praised pitcher Hideo Nomo of the “Brooklyn Dodgers” (the Dodgers hadn’t played in Brooklyn since the Eisenhower administration). A reporter asked him why he was running, and he vacantly replied, “You know, a better man for a better America. That’s sort of our slogan.”
Dole’s running mate, Jack Kemp, was also a dud. Limbaugh was favorably disposed toward him at the start of the campaign; the candidate was, after all, both a Reaganite and a former pro quarterback. But Kemp flubbed his vice presidential debate against Al Gore in what Limbaugh described as “a disaster.” After Dole’s second debate with Clinton, Rush opened his show by admitting that he couldn’t tell if the Republican presidential candidate had won or lost. Dole himself called the show later that day and tried to do some damage control. “Rush,” he said, “I think we nailed him last night on a few things.” Limbaugh was polite but unconvinced.
Clinton’s reelection was less impressive than it should have been. Once more the Democrats failed to win a clear majority of the popular vote, a fact that Limbaugh stressed in his postmortem analysis. But he didn’t seem bro
kenhearted. The prospect of a Dole presidency had excited no one, not even Dole. Four more years of Clinton meant four more years of sparring with the president of the United States. And Limbaugh had a score to settle with Clinton that went back to April 19, 1995, when a massive bombing destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. One hundred and sixty-eight people had been killed in the worst domestic terror attack in American memory. Six hundred and eighty more were injured. Clinton vowed to find the bombers and bring them to justice. Two—Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols—were caught and convicted. Michael and Lori Fortier pled guilty to foreknowledge. McVeigh was put to death; Nichols got life in prison.6
The bombers were survivalists who denied the legitimacy of the federal government. During their trial it became clear that the immediate trigger for their act was outrage at the storming of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco.
On April 24, President Clinton was in Minnesota talking to a college group when he began to speculate about the motives of the killers. “We hear so many loud and angry voices in America today,” he said. Their sole goal “seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other. They spread hate. They leave the impression, by their very words, that violence is acceptable . . . Those of us who do not agree with the purveyors of hatred and division, with the promoters of paranoia, we have our responsibilities, too.” Clinton identified the promoters of paranoia as people who speak “over the airwaves.” New York Times columnist William Safire took Clinton to task for this extraordinary assertion. “The impression Mr. Clinton left, by his very words,” Safire wrote, “was that the Oklahoma bombing had been incited,” and that the phrase “over the airwaves” was simply a coded way of saying “conservative talk radio hosts.” At this time, Limbaugh was the only significant right-wing talk-show host in the country, and he was furious at what he saw as Clinton’s effort to smear him as an accomplice to mass murder. He demanded an apology, but none came.