"A Thomas Dunne book."

Includes index.

The Rush Limbaugh Story is the first full-length account of the life and times of the conservative funny-man who has become America's most-listened-to radio host, a popular television commentator, a best-selling polemicist, and a political power in his own right. It is a no-holds-barred look at the public and private life of this huge media star. Rush Limbaugh's worldview was forged by a domineering, ardently Republican father and a small-town Missouri upbringing far removed from the tumult of the 1960s. Paul D. Colford, a New York media columnist who has covered him for five years, details young Rusty's entry into radio as a teenager, an enthusiasm that eventually prompted him to quit college and set out on the gypsy path of a rock-and-roll disc jockey.

Rush lost job after job, along with two wives, but found his calling when he switched to talk radio and his liberal-bashing pranks earned him a wildly receptive following on Sacramento's KFBK-AM. A shrewd syndicator spun him off to a national audience in 1988. The Rush Limbaugh Story sets his emergence against the changing landscape of network radio as it explores the foibles, the deals, the marriages, the controversies, the bombast, the riches, and the ego of the conservative pitbull whose influence was actively courted by President Bush in the 1992 campaign. Today he reaches more than sixteen million listeners a week via six hundred stations. And those numbers continue to grow while the question remains: Who is Rush Limbaugh?

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