Rush Limbaugh was not the first American radio personality to gain fame and fortune and exert influence by talking into a microphone. But by any measure, he was in a category of his own: For three decades, his syndicated Rush Limbaugh Show was broadcast for three hours every weekday afternoon on hundreds of stations and heard by millions of listeners, earning him considerable wealth and unprecedented influence in national politics.
When he died last week of lung cancer in Palm Beach, Florida, at the age of 70, neither his reach nor his authority nor his loyal audience’s attachment had diminished, even as his terminal illness slowed him down. From the late 1980s until the end of 2020, his exuberant conservatism dominated talk radio and helped to shape the post-Cold War Republican Party.
But he had no liberal equivalent or any close competitors on the Right. There was only one Rush Limbaugh.
His was not exactly a rags-to-riches story. Born in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, Rush Hudson Limbaugh III was the son, grandson, nephew, and cousin of prominent local lawyers and judges, and from an early age, he was steeped in public affairs. But he was crazy about radio, not the law, and lasted less than two semesters in college before embarking on a long and decidedly uneven apprenticeship in broadcasting. Working under various pseudonyms, including “Rusty Sharpe” and “Jeff Christie,” he spent a decade as a self-described “moderate failure” as an AM disc jockey and drive-time personality in Pittsburgh and Kansas City before abandoning radio and working as a sales representative for the Kansas City Royals.
The detour to baseball was brief. Returning in 1983 to a Kansas City radio station, he embraced his given name, and the following year, he succeeded Morton Downey Jr. at KFBK in Sacramento. He found his formula, too. Combining Downey’s penchant for controversy with his own growing interest in ideology and politics, the next four years on the air in California enabled him to perfect his blend of verbal pyrotechnics, extended monologue, banter, and mostly good-natured debate with callers while polishing his talent for translating news into popular programming.
In 1988, New York’s powerful WABC came calling. Limbaugh was ready. He moved his show to Manhattan and national syndication, conducted what he called a nationwide “Rush to Excellence Tour” in big markets, and within two years had the largest audience of any talk show host in the United States. By the time President Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, Limbaugh was Clinton’s principal nemesis in the media, heard on some 650 stations and the Armed Forces Radio Service. Even in Washington, D.C., restaurants set aside “Rush Rooms” for lunch-hour listeners.
Two factors, in particular, determined his enduring success. The first was the Federal Communications Commission’s repeal in 1987 of the 38-year-old “fairness doctrine,” which mandated a semblance of “balance” in the presentation of political issues. Of course, the rule’s practical effect was not to promote “fairness,” however defined, but to discourage commercial stations from broadcasting political content in any form.
The other factor was personal. Limbaugh was routinely criticized for a bellowing, spiteful, raging persona that he didn’t possess. He was certainly capable of impatience and exasperation on the air, as well as the occasional rough neologism (“feminazis”). But his politics were largely conventional Republican, his “anger” more closely resembled indignation, and his humor was largely self-deprecating. He was, at heart, an entertainer, respectful of his faithful audience and disinclined to take himself unduly seriously.
Above all, Limbaugh had a self-taught gift for converting complex issues into lucid, accessible, conversational terms, which, in turn, conveyed knowledge and empowered his audience. He could talk for hours, over successive days, on federal budgets, foreign affairs, healthcare, and social policy to millions of people who were more accustomed to being harangued than informed. Even his personal demons, including chronic obesity, four marriages and three divorces, and a well-publicized addiction to painkillers, deepened the personal bond between speaker and listeners.
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
