Read Online Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One by Zev Chafets - Free Book Online

all the way down there to play with me?’ he said. After all his success, he’s still a little bit insecure.”
    Just before Rush was fired by the Royals he got married for the second time. His bride was Michelle Sixta, a student at Central Missouri State University who was working her way through school as a stadium usher. They were married in a small ceremony at the Stadium Club.
    Out of work once more, Limbaugh caught on at KMBZ in Kansas City, where, for the first time, he began openly expressing his conservative opinions on the air and engaging in right-wing satire. This was controversial, and the owner of the station, Bonneville International, a company controlled by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was uncomfortable with controversy. Limbaugh drew a crowd but he also upset a lot of people.
    Shock radio, rude and irreverent, was catching on around the country at the time. Less than a decade earlier, Larry Lujack had been forced to publicly apologize for telling a listener that he would play more Jim Croce songs when Croce (who had been killed a few months earlier in a plane crash) went back into the studio and recorded some. Now, in New York, at WNBC, Don Imus and Howard Stern scored gigantic ratings with tasteless, offensive, often topical humor.
    Sacramento’s version was Morton Downey Jr., who was drawing big audiences and national attention for his show, broadcast on KFBK. Downey was a ranter with a taste for pushing boundaries. He reached his boundary when he told a joke about “a Chinaman,” an ethnic term that offended many, especially City Councilman Tom Chinn, who thought it had been aimed at him personally. Chinn complained to the owner of the station, C. K. McClatchy, who fired Downey. As luck would have it, Limbaugh was fired again right around the same time. He was done in by football. Unbeknownst to him, KMBZ was trying to get the rights to broadcast the Kansas City Chiefs games. Limbaugh, a fanatical football fan, had taken to blasting the team and its executives as price-gouging, incompetent cheapskates. That made him a liability, and he was canned. The pink slip came with a curt note. “Unfortunately,” the station manager wrote to him, “I cannot share your enthusiasm for your performance.”
    Norm Woodruff, who met Limbaugh while working as a consultant to KMBZ, was now the acting program director of Sacramento’s KFBK. He knew Limbaugh’s show, and he thought Rush would be an ideal replacement for Downey. Limbaugh had too much attitude for Kansas City, but compared with Downey he was a model of easy listening and good humor. Woodruff hired Limbaugh and gave him marching orders that Rush described in a speech in the summer of 2009: “We want controversy, but don’t make it up. If you actually think something—if you actually believe it, and you can tell people why—we’ll back you up. But if you’re going to say stuff just to make people mad—if all you want to do is rabble-rouse, if all you want to do is offend and get noticed—that’s not what we’re interested in, and we won’t back you up.”
    Limbaugh was a hit in Sacramento. He was using his real name now. The station let him go on the air solo, unencumbered by sidekicks or guests, and encouraged his highly personal, right-wing monologues. For the first time in his career he was marketed heavily and aggressively. There were billboards around town showing a finger hitting a button, captioned: “How Would You Like to Punch Rush Limbaugh?” Rush was so pleased by these that he sent Bryan a snapshot. Morton Downey Jr. had been a big star in Sacramento, with a 5 share of the market—5 percent of people listening to the radio in a given fifteen-minute segment. Limbaugh tripled that. He was sharp edged but good humored. “The new morning host espouses many of the same beliefs of his predecessor, Morton Downey Jr.,” reported the Sacramento Bee , “but he skates a little farther from the edge of the hole in the