Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One by Zev Chafets

feel any animus,” he told me years later. “If anything, it frightened me. The message for me in this story is my discovery of those very clichés [“conservatives” equal “racists,” “sexists,” “bigots,” “homophobes,” “anti-Semites”] attached to me when they weren’t true. Remember, this happened when I had only fifty-six radio stations . . . and in the following two years I felt the full force, nationwide, of being associated with those clichés simply because of my politics . . . I had no idea how to deal with it. And no one to advise me how to deal with it.”
    Limbaugh informed his listeners that he was the target of a campaign. But one day, a listener, Nathan Segal, an Orthodox rabbi from Staten Island, called the station and got Limbaugh on the phone. “I heard what you said; you haven’t done anything wrong,” Segal told him. “I will protect you.” It was the start of a friendship that has lasted more than twenty years.
    “One of the instigators of the campaign against Rush was the actor Ron Silver,” says Segal. That was ironic. Silver, who had been the president of the progressive Creative Coalition, eventually quit the group, in part because of its coolness toward Israel and its opposition to the war in Iraq. In 2004 he delivered a speech at the Republican National Convention endorsing President Bush’s Mideast policies, for which Silver was widely ostracized by the “artistic” community.
    An accusation of anti-Semitism, even an unfair one, was nothing to take lightly in the media world of New York. Limbaugh was right to be frightened by the damage it could do. The effort to smear him as a Jew-hater persisted, and eventually he confronted it head on, publicly offering a million dollars to anyone who could demonstrate that he was, in any way, an anti-Semite. Not long after that challenge, Abe Hirschfeld, an eccentric millionaire, bought the New York Post . It was a scandal—Hirschfeld was not only a kook but a lowlife; he eventually went to prison for trying to have his ex-business partner murdered. Limbaugh, in discussing the sale of the Post , mistakenly referred to Hirschfeld as “Irv.” When he was corrected by a member of his staff, he said, “Irv, Abe, what’s the difference?” A listener in California heard this and demanded to collect the million dollars. Limbaugh refused, the listener sued, and the case was laughed out of court.
    By 1990 Limbaugh’s national audience had grown to almost twenty million listeners, and imitators were springing up on local stations around the country. The national press began to take notice. Lewis Grossberger, in an early profile in the New York Times Magazine , described Limbaugh as “some odd combination of Teddy Roosevelt, Willard Scott and the old Jackie Gleason character, Reginald Van Gleason 3rd.” Vanity Fair ’s Peter Boyle compared him to Garrison Keillor and Paul Harvey, as someone who used radio as a theater of the mind and said his show was similar to David Letterman’s ironic takedown of the “phony decorum of the studio setting itself.” A profile in Cigar Aficionado written by a New York Times reporter presented Limbaugh as a modern-day W. C. Fields. Ted Koppel hosted him on Nightline and declared, “There is absolutely no one and nothing else out there like him, anywhere on the political spectrum.”
    In 1993 the New York Times ’ Maureen Dowd went out to a four-hour dinner with Rush Limbaugh at “21” and came away confused. She had been expecting a caveman, or at the very least a male chauvinist pig. “But oddly enough,” she reported, “beneath the bombast, there beats the heart of a romantic.”
    Limbaugh confessed to Dowd that he was very rarely invited out, a statement she found hard to believe. “New York loves celebrities, no matter what they are famous for,” she wrote, but, of course, that isn’t quite right. Billionaire tax cheats, debauched rock singers, crooked (Democratic) politicians,