Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One

by Zev Chafets

  Limbaugh bided his time. It came in early 1998, when the Drudge Report Web site broke the story of Bill Clinton’s affair with intern Monica Lewinsky. The president denied it, and his wife went on the Today show to stand by her man. The host, Matt Lauer, asked her if she had really told friends that this was “the last great battle,” and that “one side or the other is going down.”

  “Well, I don’t know if I’ve been that dramatic,” Mrs. Clinton replied. “That would sound like a good line from a movie. But I do believe that this is a battle . . . the great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.”

  It wasn’t Hillary’s finest moment. She looked foolish for denying what everyone else already knew. And the accusation about a right-wing conspiracy seemed paranoid. The mainstream media was with the Clintons; Newsweek had refrained from even publishing the Lewinsky story, which it had before Drudge, evidently out of a misguided belief that it could keep the story from going public. Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh and some Republican billionaires who wanted to see Clinton humiliated might be a lot of things, but they were hardly a vast conspiracy.

  In fact, Rush always saw what was charming about the president. He may even have been a little envious. He once said that Bill Clinton was the kind of guy it would be fun to chase women with or just hang out with. But the Lewinsky scandal was too good to pass up. Ever since the Gennifer Flowers “bimbo eruption” in the 1992 Clinton campaign, he had been jabbing at Clinton’s extracurricular sexual exploits in a series of skits and song parodies. Paula Jones inspired “Hey, Paula” and “Mrs. Jones You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter,” sung by a Clinton soundalike. Now, Monica got “The Ballad of the Black Beret” (“DNA upon her dress / War’s declared on terrorists / Hundreds more rolled in the hay / But only one wore a black beret” ) and “Mambo Number 5” became “Bimbo No. 5” (“A little bit of Monica, not my wife / A little Miss America on the side” ). Hillary got a song, too, “Stood By My Man” (“Sometimes it’s hard to be Missus Bill Clinton / Cleaning up the mess behind that man” ). No political conspiracy had ever been so public, no president subjected to such cruel, relentless ridicule, three hours a day, fifteen hours a week. He embraced the conceit of the conspiracy as he always embraced accusations against him. “Vast right-wing conspiracy?” Hell yeah. He even began peddling coffee mugs with the words emblazoned on them. Bill Clinton never came close to having as much fun with Monica Lewinsky as Rush did.

  CHAPTER SIX

  LIMBAUGH IN LIMBO

  In 1997 Rush Limbaugh moved to Palm Beach. He had been in New York for almost a decade, but it had never been a good match. The acceptance he sought from his peers didn’t materialize.

  After Clinton’s reelection, Rush was treated by the media as a has-been. It was wishful thinking—he still had his audience—but it bothered him to be discounted. The only New Yorkers who really seemed to care about him were the tax collectors.

  Florida seemed like a better location. The weather was great. He could drive his own car instead of being chauffeured around or forced to walk, which he found both tiring and frustrating. Like any entertainer, he appreciated recognition, but in the streets of Manhattan he was still relatively anonymous. When strangers did notice him they were often rude. Florida was different—a conservative state full of avid Dittoheads. Palm Beach, with its ostentatiously rich lifestyle, wasn’t reminiscent of Cape Girardeau, but it felt more like home to him than New York ever had. And, there is no state income tax in Florida.

  Limbaugh didn’t change his act when he left New York. He still went after Clinton almost every day and continued his war against the mainstream media. But very attentive listeners could hear a change: Limbaugh seemed slightly less aggressive. It was especially noticeable in the after-math of the 2000 presidential election. Rush was living and broadcasting from Palm Beach, the epicenter of the controversy. This should have been his moment, but strangely he didn’t really seize it. He supported Bush, of course, and made fun of his nemesis Al Gore (“Algore” in Rushian), but he didn’t dominate the right side of the story as he had in 1994 (and would again in 2008). There was also something different in Limbaugh’s voice. Sometimes he sounded a bit fuzzy, and occasionally he seemed distracted. He was increasingly absent from his show, replaced for a day or two at a time by a rotating roster of guest hosts. His fans asked: Was Rush getting tired after all these years?

  On October 9, 2001, Limbaugh provided an answer: He wasn’t tired, he was almost completely deaf. His hearing had been declining for a long time, and the previous spring he had lost it entirely in his left ear. Now it was gone in the right as well. There was genetic hearing loss in his family, but he told his stunned audience, it couldn’t really explain what had happened. “There’s something more going on,” he said. “All those times that you thought I was on vacation or playing golf, I’ve been in an MRI machine or getting blood drawn, or on a stress EKG machine or at a cardiologist, the hearing doctor, what have you.” The diagnosis, he said, was autoimmune inner ear disease.

  Limbaugh explained that he could sometimes hear people with a particular voice range, especially in one-on-one conversations, but he couldn’t hear radio, including his own voice, or the sound of music. “I am,” he said, “for all practical purposes, deaf.”

  Limbaugh had been using powerful hearing aids, but even though they no longer worked, he had continued to broadcast.

  “I’m not going to explain to you how we’re doing this,” he said. “Put two and two together, if you wish.” The answer was Dawn, a court stenographer whom he hired to type callers’ questions directly into Rush’s computer.

  Limbaugh had no intention of quitting just because the world had gone silent on him. “As long as the passion exists to do it, then we’ll find a way,” he said. He had decided to gamble on a cochlear implant. “It’s the last thing they do because it’s irreversible,” he explained on the air. “Once you do that you’re finished, and if it doesn’t work then there’s nothing they can do to put you back the way you were. So you must wait until you are entirely deaf for approval for this. The FDA even gets involved in this because it’s surgery which involves the brain . . . I’ve talked to a number of doctors who say that it would be an improvement over the situation I’m in now.”

  Limbaugh left the show in the hands of guest hosts and flew out to the House Ear Clinic in Los Angeles. Dr. Antonio De la Cruz installed the implant, which consists of a microphone capable of receiving sound and transmitting it to a speech processor. The processor converts mechanical sound into an electrical signal, which is then sent to the brain via electrodes implanted in the inner ear.

  The device worked. Limbaugh was back on the air full-time by the start of 2003. “This cochlear implant will reconnect Mr. Limbaugh to his environment, and that is an important benefit to his quality of life,” said Dr. De la Cruz. It did not have the same effect on Limbaugh-haters who had dared to hope that they had heard the last of him.

  That hope sprung anew the following October, when the National Enquirer broke a sensational story: Rush Limbaugh, the voice of America, was a drug addict who might be headed for prison.

  The source of the story was Wilma Cline, who worked for Limbaugh as a housekeeper between 1997 and 2001, and did some drug dealing on the side. As the Enquirer story reported, Limbaugh learned that Cline’s husband was taking hydrocodone pills and asked if she could get him some. She could, and soon she was supplying him with thirty a month. When her husband’s doctor cut off his prescription, Limbaugh told Cline to find another source, which she did. He hid his stash under the mattress (presumably a Select Comfort, one of his sponsors), to keep his wife Marta from finding out.

  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 Cli
ne 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

  “ W ”

  Limbaugh 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.’ ”