Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One [Paperback]

"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 heardThe Rush Limbaugh Showon 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 is 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 ilC3