PAUL HARVEY, GOOD DAYI
Aufderheide, Pat
Paul Harvey, Good Day! BY PAT AUFDERHEIDE Stand by ... for news!" It's not an announcement, it's an incantation. Paul Harvey is about to perform his daily ritual, sorting out the messy business...
...Harvey's a throwback to the days of the old radio commentators/ says an older broadcasting executive...
...He plays heavily on the personal endorsement: "Your Hoover dealer and I are as excited about this as you will be____I want you to at least see the Hoover 1000...
...and Angel pose with Paul for a family portrait...
...I can't take him seriously," says a thirty-two-year-old secretary...
...The story begins to go wrong during World War II when, after working for several years in the Office of War Information, twenty-six-year-old Paul Harvey Aurandt is drafted...
...The eager war correspondent turns into Sir Winston Churchill...
...He is looking into an independent satellite network for his shows, a notion that has ABC executives on edge as they anticipate contract negotiations set for 1988...
...Constant sniping at authority eats away at respect for people who are trying to do good...
...Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldrige expects our economy to grow another 4 per cent this year...
...He's so positive...
...the sales of Roach-Prufe, for instance, went up 40 per cent in ninety days...
...All are referred to his central office in Chicago, as are the thousands of letters he receives each week...
...Paul Harvey's American was somebody who was so intrepid, so trustworthy, so respectable that he didn't need the structure of government...
...He has repeatedly taken stands against U.S...
...he asked...
...To those who hear the caviling edge in his intonations, the calculated exasperation, the resentment toward professional authorities and bureaucrats, the multifarious charges of ungratefulness, it seems an odd claim...
...A weakness in our society...
...The result is some version of the slogan Harvey uses when he autographs books: "Paul Harvey...
...It could only get in the way of opportunity...
...I thought of myself as a conservative until I woke up one morning in 1966 [and] came out against the war in Vietnam...
...academic theorists...
...But Paul Harvey's popular Chicago broadcasts for ABC gave a network desperate for national advertising that increasingly rare item in radio: a program with a truly mass audience...
...It's between right and wrong...
...It was to stop, finally, at the garage door...
...He takes his stuff off the wires, and so do we, and many times we use it before he does, so you can see the difference," says Weaver...
...Only a month later, he was in an Army hospital, having wounded himself in an apparent fit of depression...
...But commentators were not bound by the treaties, and commentary shows flourished...
...Do I know who you are...
...Reporters go through the same channels that listeners do...
...He never counters his critics...
...But they have learned to be gentle with Harvey on the air...
...Anne Boleyn had six fingers on her left hand...
...Will you...
...His authority derives from being the voice of invisible Americans, the representative of their emotion in the face of cruel and complex pseudo-rationality...
...He was a crusader, drawing lessons from ancient imperial histories for Americans in danger of losing their spirit of freedom...
...He retails stories of pets who save their owners from certain death and brings alarming news that animals given as "unwanted Christmas gifts" are flooding the animal-welfare societies...
...He's not sensational," says another...
...For example, Harvey does not do pain-reliever commercials because he never gets headaches...
...He appears to lead the ultimate in open lives...
...When the program's done and the credits are run we're back in a world where Miami vice is nothing like 'Miami Vice' but skillful program producers have filled our need, providing us if only for a little while a refuge where right prevails and justice is being done and decent people live happily ever after...
...What makes America great, he would claim, long before Ronald Reagan did, is the capacity to get rich...
...he said...
...He gives you the nice side of the news," people say...
...But with the discouraging sight of American forces bogged down, of American support for yet another corrupt government—and, some say, the prospect of seeing his son drafted "while remembering his own experience in the Army—he began openly to express his disagreements...
...Harvey found a way to ride the tide of anticommunism, but to preach a still more fundamentalist message based on a vision of an America that could stand alone, at once world empire and nation of yeoman individualists...
...It is Paul Harvey who originally found the way to express the forlorn and embattled spirit of hope in a postwar America that in later years has made Reagan and Rambo its culture heroes, both of them as real as that remarkable phenomenon, "Paul Harvey...
...Harvey got his big break in broadcasting, he says, from friendly chats he and Angel had with Joe Kennedy, the owner of the Chicago Merchandise Mart, which housed the ABC studios...
...It's not important that it's not true," explained an older secretary to me...
...Behind the slick packaging is a story...
...America doesn't just listen...
...And then: "It's 1776 again...
...For years, Harden and Weaver have made affectionate fun of the commentator's conservatism, making remarks like "Harvey graduated from the Attila the Hun Military Academy...
...dominant news medium for most Americans, but it would soon be badly shaken by two forces: the advent of television, which accounted for a dramatic plunge in radio's ratings in the years 1948 to 1951, and anticommunist hysteria...
...A colorful range of political views clashed on the air, from the liberal Edward R. Murrow to the sober from-the-front voice of Lowell Thomas to the vituperative, up-from-the-gutter sound of Walter Winchell to the bulletins of Gabriel Heatter...
...are portrayed as yeomen or small entrepreneurs but treated as consumers...
...Harvey is a precursor of the "infotainers" who soothe the anxieties of working Americans, like NBC weatherman Willard Scott, Prairie Home Companion's Garrison Keillor, television talkmaster Phil Donahue, and—most of all—President Ronald Reagan...
...He finds amazing personal achievement stories: "She begins every day with twenty-five pushups and then jumps rope...
...In taking on Harvey, the News & Observer displayed a certain courage...
...In the investigation of Harvey himself that resulted, he needed the conservatives on his side, and they came through...
...He dropped his family name, under which the grim Army records were filed, and made friends with people who needed Harvey just as much as—or more than— he needed them...
...The man who hawks work gloves on the air dresses in silk at the office, goes home to one of several mansions—in the basement of one are complete broadcasting facilities—and travels in private jets to his thrice-weekly speaking engagements, which carry a five-figure price tag...
...He may have invented himself on the air, but the invention has integrity...
...Then came Vietnam—for him, an ugly replay of Korea...
...no price supports...
...And as the split between the myth of the yeoman American and the reality of the consumer caught in the spokes of late capitalism becomes ever wider, Paul Harvey paints over the contradictions with "good news," creating a refuge "where right prevails and justice is being done and decent people live happily ever after...
...sly naked-lady and toilet-humor jokes...
...Right after the broadcast, the calls start...
...In brief, Paul Harvey talks to America...
...Back in 1970, when his stand on the war in Southeast Asia shocked the nation, he frankly acknowledged that his approach was less political than evangelical...
...Cannot we conceivably hold back the clock...
...Pat Aufderheide is culture editor of In These Times...
...Paul Harvey often feels good...
...Less friction left and right, black and white, young and old...
...No job for sure...
...But what kind of news was it...
...While 40 per cent are retirement age, a surprising number—nearly half—are between twenty-five and forty-nine...
...he engulfs them...
...As an eager teen-age volunteer and then a low-paid staffer, he worked at a variety of local radio stations...
...Harvey's morning news comes on in the middle of their show...
...they stand in shining contrast to the worldly realities of lonely dinners, stress-related diseases, and divorce...
...He raised the ire of the FBI with his pursuit of a story about poor security at a nuclear installation near Chicago...
...But look to the history books, to the clip files, to the studies of the power of mass-media news, and the man who dominates the top of radio's ratings charts is nowhere to be found...
...It's like he's been frozen in ice and thawed out again' In recent years, Harvey has turned more often to animal stories to color his broadcasts...
...Paul Harvey is always in the air...
...He sees no jarring line between the news and advertising, and no need for one, because Paul Harvey is the citizen-consumer's authority on everything from hand cream to budget cuts...
...Harvey was building with political rhetoric a post-political position—inventing an attitude for people who wanted safe havens from the complexities of postwar empire...
...It's not that reporters want to lie...
...In the 1920s, radio's early news broadcasts threatened the then-dominant newspaper interests...
...The genius of Paul Harvey is that he is sincere...
...others vociferously joined the anticom-munist cause, and Harvey was one of them...
...Aside from the radio programs, which net ABC's information network some $10 million a year, he has a syndicated television show and several books...
...At one of them, he met his wife, Lynne Cooper, a school teacher with a radio program and a driving ambition: To quote Harvey today, she wanted "to be married to a network news commentator...
...Boy, do I know who you are...
...That is, unless it defames somebody, or gets them in trouble...
...But where Reagan has to work in the messy world of international diplomacy, Harvey indicts halfway measures and uses them as proof of bureaucratic bungling and untrustworthy alliances...
...Harvey's loyal listeners in fact began writing in righteous indignation to Harvey about Harden and Weaver's on-air joking...
...His audience is enormous: His radio shows have a weekly reach of twelve million...
...Eau de cologne started out as a medicine against the plague...
...Either commit yourself to the maximum and fight the moral battle with flags waving, or disentangle yourself from sordid military governments...
...Thirty-five years into the shaping of the Paul Harvey image, the routine has become ritual, the tone more chronically belligerent and less anguished...
...And he has stood by his principles—his fundamentalist populism—even when they run counter to orthodox conservatism...
...Men and women listen in equal proportions, and the bulk of his listeners make less than $30,000 a year...
...But what Paul Harvey is positive about is his conviction that it is still possible for America to be great, through a combination of little government and big people, if only the experts will get out of the way...
...The same voice that sells products with a combination of resentment and resignation ("You and your things were not meant to be moved around...
...And he underlined it with a historical parable: "They were not cowards...
...The right-wing Heritage Foundation published the first of two books compiled from his broadcasts...
...She says a day never passes that she's not thankful for the comical little companion who's made himself a member of the family," Harvey discourses...
...After all, a nation of listeners has shared a father's delight in the first steps and favorite toys of his son Paul Jr...
...For more exercise she moonlights as a hula dancer for a Hawaiian band...
...When Ronald Reagan recently visited there, Harvey celebrated the event, describing the invasion as the moment when Reagan "liberated the island from communists...
...Harvey's search for the moral beyond the political in the news has found rich material in terrorism stories...
...On the way home, they can relax into "The Rest of the Story," Harvey's common-man version of history...
...Then come the little stories that are pure Harvey: A couple in a nursing home has been unjustly separated by unfeeling bureaucrats, then reunited by their love and the outrage of their friends...
...Off the air, however, Mr...
...After years spent urging Americans on in broadcasts that made him the best friend of the hawks in Congress, he began to back off around 1966...
...Last time they did the radio ratings, Paul Harvey's four shows stubbornly stuck, as usual, to the top...
...Harvey used political rhetoric to build a post-political position-inventing an attitude for people who wanted safe havens from the complexities of postwar empire The Red Scare was on, and blacklists shadowed radio figures...
...It is Angel who runs the Harvey enterprises, who has pushed Harvey into new media and technologies...
...She says farmers have a lot of extra worries these days...
...On any given day on forty-odd places on planet Earth people are killing people in the name of religion...
...You can tell he believes what he says," explains still another...
...Terrorists sit on the same side of the moral and social fence as do criminals, the greedy rich, selfish pet owners, corrupt evangelists...
...When he told one of his apocryphal stories—this one about a Raleigh, North Carolina, cop who, while arresting a drunk, left his car for long enough to let the confused drunk drive home in it—the Raleigh News & Observer investigated the tale...
...In the spring of 1970, the United States invaded Cambodia...
...They want to know more about those tasty tidbits from small towns, and they want to talk to Paul Harvey...
...Big business interests and anticom-munist leaders cultivated the young man with the righteous radio voice...
...It is a precious time, carefully reserved at our house, but I thought it rare any more...
...Harvey also does advocacy advertising...
...He is relentlessly upbeat in his bulletins on economic revival: "Happy New Year...
...Behind the promise of social welfare he could smell communism, through the softening effect of affluence: "We have passed already from abundance to selfishness to complacency to apathy," he railed in 1954...
...And if his facts are wrong, his attitude is right...
...He still has the same economic policy he started with...
...But conservatives like to say that Harvey's change of heart was a more potent force on public opinion than the antiwar movement...
...For Harvey's supporters, there's a human being behind the voice...
...He engenders trust and affection...
...He'll embellish it to the point where it's hardly recognizable...
...The older half, though, has advertising clout: People over fifty account for half the discretionary spending in the United States...
...His news commentary simultaneously registered grievance and optimism...
...With his unique formula, Harvey has become the richest broadcaster in the nation and a one-man media empire...
...But it's not easy to find out who Paul Harvey is when he's not on the air...
...There's just no percentage—no market—in that side of Paul Harvey...
...They are sure he's at the station...
...My talks are planned as entertainment, not education...
...In the words of Lowell Thomas, "We're really entertainers...
...Harvey's listeners are fiercely loyal to the man who has become the voice of their ever-endangered pride...
...Every morning, as harried commuters rush to data-entry terminals, they catch a last-minute lift from his morning news...
...And what he did to a couple of "good-old-boy" broadcasters at a Washington radio station was better still: He incorporated them into his own folklore...
...Contine our technological progress without allowing our character to decay away...
...Some days, engulfed in the muddy, bloody, cruddy news, you and I reach out for some of the old values that used to stabilize us, and we find them unstable...
...But he is not after a place in the history books, especially those of historians who focus on the public and the political...
...And so we turn on the TV and turn off the news and tune in some fantasy, and if only for a little while we can feel we're conquering our nation's last frontier...
...He gives his fans headlines...
...Sixty-one per cent of American families are together each night for dinner," he discovers in a poll...
...Doctors declared him emotionally unstable...
...A hypochondriac woman, we discover, becomes Florence Nightingale...
...Kennedy had caught a whiff of Harvey's neopopulism on the air and recommended that he be promoted to a national show...
...In 1952, he explained it to his listeners in classic Harvey style: "No one came to this country originally or since to found a government...
...Despite repeated requests on behalf of The Progressive, I didn't even rate a press packet...
...Harvey can depend on that...
...calling the Chicago office, they must convince Harvey's stern secretary June Westgaard that the Harvey operation will benefit by paying them some attention...
...In the Paul Harvey world, where politics is an unpleasant intrusion, the listeners—whom he hails with his opening greeting, "Hello, Americans...
...He does, however, seem to have a roach problem (he promotes Copper Brite RoachPruf) and chapped skin (Neutrogena...
...The anticommun-ist newsletter Counterattack, founded in 1947, quickly became required reading for broadcasters...
...And that's what Pigby does for us as well...
...no guaranteed rocking chair," he intoned...
...It's like he's been frozen in ice and thawed out again...
...But if he's not checking his facts, you wonder if he should call himself something else...
...He's a trivia-type person," says one woman who catches him in the car on the way home from her aerobics class...
...He made friends with Joe McCarthy...
...Sitka, Alaska...
...The story of Pigby is a prime example of why Harvey loves animal news...
...After a couple of weeks in a veterans' hospital, he left to try his broadcasting luck in Chicago...
...A boy who wants to be an evangelist more than anything grows up to be Vincent Van Gogh...
...And the response is awesome...
...Custer was healthy until he left"), and country music lyrics ("And when your phone don't ring, it'll be me") spice the broadcast...
...Yet he goes unnoticed by media analysts and historians...
...That's the single most common reason people young and old give for listening to Paul Harvey...
...There was no TVA out there...
...Some commentators, such as Drew Pearson, bucked the tide...
...He tells you about the news you don't usually hear...
...I guess I'm a political fundamentalist," he told The New York Times, "although I'm not sure what that means...
...It's his own writing...
...He claims only to promote products he uses himself...
...And every day he answers that need with love and affection, with a supreme loyalty to the mass of people who suspect that those in charge somehow feel superior to them while taking advantage of them...
...tens of thousands of angry, wounded letters arrived within the week, and white feathers floated out of some of the envelopes...
...The crusader has become a kind of Cassandra, his sound of alarm now a cantankerous refrain...
...I'm supposed to be at my desk at 8:30," says one avid listener...
...They were successful men of business and agriculture, but they were scared...
...His persona melded victim and survivor...
...He will begin a news program with the words, "The following is a commercial announcement, but if it were not it might be the best news in the program...
...Pigby helps her forget hers...
...Paul Harvey is about to perform his daily ritual, sorting out the messy business of worldly events...
...Thank you...
...She also had sharply conservative political opinions: "If you think I'm right-wing," he likes to say, "you should see Angel...
...His spin on the news can set traditional reporters' teeth on edge...
...His decision was hard on his listeners...
...It has tracked the family's sojourns to its farm in the Ozarks and basked in Harvey's reverential affection for his wife, Lynne, a.k.a...
...Harvey was too smart to fall into the trap of politics-of-the-moment, however...
...But I'll sit in my car and listen to him...
...During the Korean war—or "police action"—Harvey developed his foreign-policy position: Bomb 'em or get out...
...Angel also brought to the marriage an ace business sense and a zest for high-style socializing...
...America is a state-of-the-art millionaire...
...When television began to take over, radio sought refuge in more narrowly targeted audiences...
...You don't call an evangelist a theologian...
...Korea left him deeply disillusioned, horrified at American support for a corrupt government—support that might contaminate America's innocent purity...
...We came here to get away from government...
...The Reagan Administration, too, has come under Harvey's fire, especially over Central America, where he argues that the anticommunist domino theorists are wrong, are building on the same misconceptions that "motivated our dead-end involvement in Vietnam...
...We're in the popularity business, you know, and we can't afford too much stuff like that...
...Whether or not the story is true, for her it is the insight that counts...
...He's like an evangelist...
...Harvey never saw a contradiction between his workshirt voice and his affection for the wealthy...
...She thought Douglas MacArthur should have been President...
...Paul Harvey—the man who invented the words "skyjacker," "guesstimate," and "Reaganomics"—is the hottest news commentator in America...
...Number one...
...And there he began to create a new man...
...She says she learns from him: "He gives you insight into people elsewhere in the world...
...Harvey's central constituency was the new lower middle class, a class learning to define itself not in terms of production but consumption, people with unprecedented postwar aspirations to a steady job, a suburban home, a car, a toolshed...
...Accuracy is a minor detail to him...
...He takes the question of consumer choice with a kind of seriousness other newsmen reserve for the headlines...
...With his gruff-grandfather style and curmudgeonly attitudes toward bureaucrats, intellectuals, and foreigners, Paul Harvey seems old-fashioned, a simple do-it-yourselfer...
...In this survey of "the United States of America, vintage 1986," he found as intense a need for something to assuage the pain of the search for "the old values that used to stabilize us" as when he arrived on the scene thirty-five years ago...
...Inter-media treaties were in place by 1933, barring advertising from radio news and allowing news only as a public service...
...Arecent broadcast featured a Harvey essay on the state of the national psychic health, one that strikingly revealed his understanding that American society has irrevocably changed and also demonstrated his faith in the power of the media to help ordinary Americans endure the transformations: "In my years as a professional observer I have never seen less polarization than now...
...But Guillory's readers by and large disagree...
...Bureaucrats of all kinds became his bad guys...
...Associate editor Farrell Guillory said, "He advertises what he does as news...
...The bruise is the uneasy fit between the mythic image of the individualist producer American and the reality of an emerging consumer society...
...Like Reagan, he inveighs against them...
...right-wing Congressman Fred Busbey testified for him, and Harvey's reputation and job were rescued...
...But for Harvey, the real war is still the one at home, in the hearts and minds of Americans...
...But I never remember his stories for more than a day...
...But the format remains the same and the audiences continue to grow...
...Angel, the icon of American wife-and-motherhood...
...And, while out shopping on Saturdays, they can listen to Harvey's weekend broadcast...
...At mid-day, as they run errands, open thermos jars, or rush home to make the kids' lunch, listeners hear Harvey's noon-hour broadcast, with more prefab folk humor buttressing the news bulletins...
...Harvey became the apostle of isolationism for new and would-be suburbanites...
...He's a throwback to the days of the old radio commentators," says an older broadcasting executive...
...He's so positive," says a long-time listener...
...He had become the major antiwar voice in the silent majority...
...but when for professional reasons you must, Mayflower is there") sells self-righteous resistance to social management...
...And J. Edgar Hoover became one of the show's heroes, especially after Harvey bungled his one foray into investigative reporting...
...Harvey opened his broadcast next day with the words, "Mr...
...Religion...
...By 1942, the treaties were relics, and 73 per cent of Americans polled said they got their news from radio...
...Even many regular listeners dismiss him...
...Harvey could recognize good publicity, and he could dish it out...
...After more bizarre episodes during the following two months, he got a medical discharge for psychological reasons...
...Raleigh police denied it, and the paper published news stories and an editorial condemning Harvey's piece as slipshod journalism...
...with] a nonprofit corporation...
...Right now...
...But Harvey's news and commentary is dramatically different from the genre of the generation that preceded him...
...Callers rarely ask about hard news, nor do they complain...
...In 1950, Counterattack issued a book, Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, listing 150 entertainment-industry figures tainted by political activities ranging from attendance at Communist Party-organized meetings to signing a Spanish Civil War petition...
...He brilliantly and intuitively discovered an audience and a need...
...I'd put him as an entertainer," says Harden...
...Grenada is a bright spot on his landscape...
...History becomes a collection of "Believe It or Not" facts...
...His message was not about villainy but decadence...
...In fact, this staunch defender of tradition is a thoroughly modern phenomenon of media-made reality...
...Nursed and raised among dogs, Pigby now thinks he is one and travels everywhere with the farmer's wife...
...Frank Harden and Jackson Weaver's morning drive-time program on WMAL is a cheerful amalgam of wire-service oddities, weather and traffic updates, and backchat...
...Paul Harvey ushered us into an age in which the difference between public and private information is fuzzy, in which the voice of authority has become a ventriloquist's trick, and what matters is not accuracy but attitude...
...President, I love you, but you are wrong...
...Or we reach out for the security of home and family and often they are not what they were...
...The Rest of the Story" is an expert mix of the arcane and the universal...
...His version of "no entangling alliances" was uniquely domestic...
...Off the air, they're both franker about Harvey, whom they describe as a savvy opportunist—"He's latched onto a real money maker"—but not a newsman...
...Harvey has always claimed the right to make his own commercials, and he has turned them into a vehicle for the Paul Harvey image...
...In a crazy world where crises erupt daily in countries we've never heard of and news anchors change lines and faces as if they were hair fashions, Paul Harvey is to list-ners a real person, a touchstone of the real home-grown America...
...They wanted little government...
...It starts in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1918, when Paul Harvey Aurandt is born into a family full of preachers, and it gets rocky with his father's death in a hunting accident when Paul is six...
...Research for this article was supported by a grant from Essential Information, Inc...
...Almost never does a story mention the upscale side of the Harvey life—the affluent trappings, the luxury hideaway in Arizona (the family never goes to the Ozarks any more), Angel's socialite friends and big-business deals, Paul Jr.'s adjoining mini-mansion, Paul's position on the board of the MacArthur Foundation...
...Today's sociological collision is not between colors, cultures, and convictions...
...I feel he speaks for me on some issues," the man says...
...Those who do get interviews share a common experience: After looking in on Harvey's preparations for the morning show, which begin at 5 a.m., the reporter visits the Harvey family in its plushly decorated home, where Paul Jr...
...Animals, especially house pets, have the values he treasures—loyalty, simplicity, generosity—in a world of constant betrayal...
...foreign policy, when imperial ambition runs afoul of his notion that nations, like people, should be do-it-yourselfers and that American moral purity must be preserved at all costs...
...as he put it in a recent and typically adulatory interview in USA Today, he was a supply-sider while Reagan was still a Democrat...
...Harvey exploits that sentiment with the passion of someone who feels it acutely himself...
...Rather than information for public debate, it is reinforcement, moral uplift, support for the understandable desire not to understand complexity...
...Sometimes they think it's deliberate sabotage," Harden explains...
...And if we've kidded him, someone will call up and holler, 'He's a better American than you are!' and slam the receiver down...
...He may get showered with grateful attention by the likes of the American Legion, and construction industry moguls may pay him big money to speak at their conventions, and the account managers at various advertising agencies may pray nightly for his continued health...
...No one should know better than Paul Harvey about the work of "skillful program producers...
...He would later claim that his father was killed in the line of duty as a police officer on Christmas Eve...
...It's as if he had discovered a bruise on America's conscience and learned how to poke it to get attention...
...he's featured Harden and Weaver and inserted their jokes into his broadcasts...
...big people...
...it talks back...
...no price control...
...At 1,200 radio stations around the country, staffers know the routine by heart...
...Pigby was the runt of a litter of pigs...
...Harvey is still a hawk...
...And four...
...Pulled without attribution from such sources as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the AP wires, they mingle international crises with murder-and-may-hem police reports...
...Paul and Angel Harvey catered to the right contacts...
...who now works with the Harvey operation, writing "The Rest of the Story...
...He sticks to the facts, and he's not fake like Dan Rather...
...The bad guys are as numerous as ever, and more effectively armed, whether they are foreign terrorists preying on political enemies or homegrown terrorists preying on our own elderly...
...He rejoiced in Richard Nixon's election and celebrated Spiro Agnew's attacks on the media...
...Nattie DeLera is ninety____" Sixty-year-old marriages get a glory mention on his broadcasts...
...Random information ("A baby killer whale was born yesterday...
...But keep it up...
...seems fine"), "bumpersnickers" ("Stay in North Dakota...
...He filled the drive-time of the new commuters with the sound of legitimacy...
...But like the rest of his news, the characters in the upbeat tales are embattled...
...That has been Harvey's constant theme...
...He told the newspaper that since the story didn't hurt anyone, it didn't matter whether it was true...
...Good News...
...One wonders how he manages to be home for dinner so often, what with his weekly speaking schedule...
...American Indians will move one big step away from welfare today...
...And the hero of the tale often has the poignant plight of the misunderstood innocent that the Harvey persona exemplifies...
...a dog that rescued a couple from certain death in a fire...
...When buffing the utility corporations' image for the Electric Information Council, he turns one of the biggest businesses in America into a populist celebration, praising the company linemen and hailing a wildlife rescue program sponsored by power companies...
...His target was the hardworking chemical engineer who told me he may often disagree with "Paul" but feels a kinship with him...
...The paper was besieged by readers who complained that all Harvey had done was to stretch the truth—and besides, they knew of a similar case in another county...
...Three...
...I love to listen to him because he makes me laugh...
...His demon was not so much communists—his isolationism already encompassed most foreigners—but Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal had begun an insidious process making us dependent on Big Government and sapping our independent spirit...
...Usually you'll hear about the man who died from cancer, but not the five who were saved...
...He wants the United States to stay out of unwinnable wars in Central America, to disentangle itself once again from untrustworthy allies and corrupt dictators...
...And with freedom in their hearts and an old buckskin shirt on their backs they headed off over the mountains...
...When Paul Harvey began broadcasting, radio was still the...
...men of failure and frustration...
...It's just that he wants to win...
...I don't think people should go hungry, but I'm against long-term welfare because I think it creates a weakness in our society...
...And Harvey's reach is national, with listenership in the Midwest and South slightly higher than average...
...His lessons from the past, the famous, the foolish, those who triumph from adversity and who are felled by underhanded foes are the gems of "The Rest of the Story...
...That's right...
...When Harvey says something that's particularly opinionated, he can expect to get 25,000 letters and calls...
...His listeners are very loyal—the switchboard will light up immediately if the time of his broadcast is changed for some reason...
...He was not then the homey curmudgeon of today...
...What bothers Guillory is that Harvey's stories—or "mythmaking," as he calls it-have political implications: "There's an undercurrent of anti-government, anti-authority in his stories...
...But Harvey's reaction, when they called him, was genial...
Vol. 50 • July 1986 • No. 7
