Rush Limbaugh

NATIONAL BESTSELLER! The bestselling biography of America’s Anchorman by the journalist who knew him best

"Chafets has seen more of the pundit's personal world than any other journalist." -The Washington Post
 
People tend to remember the moment they first heard The Rush Limbaugh Show on the radio. For Zev Chafets, it was in a car in Detroit. The braggadocio, the outrageous satire, the slaughtering of liberal sacred cows performed with the verve of a rock and roll DJ-it seemed fresh, funny, and completely subversive. "They're never going to let this guy stay on the air," he thought.

Almost two decades later Chafets met Rush and they spent hours together talking on the record about politics, sports, music, show business, religion, and modern American history. Rush opened his home and his world, introducing Chafets to his family, his closest friends, even his psychologist.

What has emerged after months of correspondence revealing Rush Limbaugh's thoughts, fears, and ambitions, is a uniquely personal look at the man who was not only the most popular voice on the radio, but also one of the most influential figures in the conservative movement.

"Rush Limbaugh is a complicated man. There is some Sunday School boy in him, over from the Centenary Methodist Church in Cape Girardeau, Missouri and a touch of Hugh Hefner's Playboy Club; some of Bo Diddley's swaggering guitar, mixed with William F. Buckley's drawing-room harpsichord. Rush is an introvert with forty guests for dinner on Thanksgiving; a cynical romantic who doesn't understand women but keeps on trying; a polite, soft-spoken listener who, on the air, aims rude, sometimes vulgar personal insults at his ideological enemies; a sophisticated political satirist whose own taste in humor runs to corny mother- in-law jokes. He is a conservative revolutionary, the inventor of the talk-back radio industry, a school-hating college drop-out who turned into a "weapon of mass instruction." There probably isn't another man on planet earth whose role models and heroes include Ronald Reagan, Muhammad Ali, James Madison, Larry "Superjock" Lujack, Justice Antonin Scalia, and Professor Irwin Corey.

"People who dismiss Rush Limbaugh as an entertainer, a pitchman or a hot-air balloon are very wrong. He is a brilliant and tenacious advocate, a major political and cultural force who can't be wished away or shouted down or sniffed into irrelevance. Smart liberals will listen to his show, even if they hate what he has to say. The easily outraged, will be. Those with a sense of humor will find themselves laughing despite themselves. But nobody will fully understand American politics and media culture until they get who Rush Limbaugh really is, what he does, and how he does it."

—from LimbaughZev Chafets is the author of eleven books of fiction, media criticism, and social and political commentary. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine and a former columnist for the New York Daily News.