{"id":25177,"date":"2007-04-02T01:01:01","date_gmt":"2011-05-19T05:45:04","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2011-05-19T05:45:04","modified_gmt":"2011-05-19T05:45:04","slug":"the_greatness_of_bill_buckley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/admin.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2007\/04\/02\/the_greatness_of_bill_buckley\/","title":{"rendered":"The Greatness of Bill Buckley"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

RUSH: Columbus, Ohio, this is Dan. You\u2019re up, sir, nice to have you with us first.<\/p>\n

CALLER: Rush, first I have to say, ‘Go Buckeyes tonight.\u2019 Secondly, you said you\u2019ve been number one radio show or radio program for, what did you say, 16, 17 years?<\/p>\n

RUSH: Yeah, 17 years. I\u2019ve been on the air 18 and a half.<\/p>\n

CALLER: I have been listening to you literally forever. Who do you take over number one from? Who was number one before you?<\/p>\n

RUSH: The reason I wanted to take your call is because I saw that up there, and it\u2019s actually a good question, and I think, being truthful here, there was no number one in the sense that I am now. You\u2019d have to go back to radio prior to television, to the Jack Benny days and when all people had was radio to find an audience of this size. When I started in 1988, there wasn\u2019t a national radio program. The national radio programs ran from midnight to six. Well, there were some at night. You had Sally Jessy Raphael and other people, but the audience was tiny. I guess you\u2019d have to say at some point they would have been number one by default.<\/p>\n

CALLER: Yeah.<\/p>\n

RUSH: But their audiences back then might have been significant, but they were nothing like the audience here today. So in the modern era, there probably hasn\u2019t been one this large.<\/p>\n

CALLER: So you\u2019re saying if I look up number one in the dictionary there will be a picture of you there?<\/p>\n

RUSH: Well, except I don\u2019t like to use that phrase because it\u2019s become a clich&eacute;, and besides, the people that write the dictionaries and all that are Rush Deniers.<\/p>\n

CALLER: Okay.<\/p>\n

RUSH: So you wouldn\u2019t see my picture next to a definition of #1 me in the dictionary. Actually, it\u2019s a good question, and I\u2019m glad you asked. Speaking of this, I got an e-mail, and to me, this is also an interesting question. You know, last week I received the William F. Buckley Award — the very first one bestowed — for Media Excellence, by the Media Research Center in Washington on Thursday night. I spent a lot of time on the program Friday explaining my pride and what an honor it was to win this, and some of my experiences in meeting Mr. Buckley. He\u2019s one of my idols. A guy writes me a note. His name is David Allen. He said, ‘Rush, you\u2019ve told us a lot about Bill Buckley over the years, and I\u2019ve read his column fairly regularly only recently. He\u2019s obviously a great thinker and has mastered the language. He was a courageous pioneer. But I\u2019d like to know what it is about him that means so much to you. Hope to hear from you. Thanks, David Allen, from West Friendship in Maryland.\u2019<\/p>\n

I thought, ‘This is a good question.\u2019 It\u2019s a good question because I\u2019ve probably made the mistake of assuming that most in this audience can trace a relationship back to the fifties and sixties like I can with Bill Buckley, and I realize that a lot of people who have only recently been interested in or turned on to programs like this featuring subject matter like we face, might not have anywhere near the breadth of understanding of the role Bill Buckley has played in a lot of people\u2019s lives and in the so-called conservative movement. But that\u2019s not the real reason. That, of course, goes without saying. Now, this may be tough to explain, but I believe that human beings are born, and it is assumed that they have a static brain, that they have a static IQ, that you\u2019re born with whatever ability to learn that you have, and once you\u2019ve reached that, you\u2019ve maxed it out. In other words, that you cannot exercise your brain. You can build up your body. You can change your body by gaining weight, losing weight, lifting weights, working out, whatever you want you had to. But your brain is your brain. <\/p>\n

A lot of people think the brain is the brain and your personality is your personality and whatever is what they are, and I happen to disagree with that aspect about the brain precisely because I think that I\u2019ve actually gotten not more informed and more educated, because that goes without saying. We all get more educated as we get older. Life experiences teach us things that we haven\u2019t experienced before, so that would qualify as an education. It\u2019s another thing whether you learn something from it or not, but clearly it happens, and I think people over the course of their lives not only become more educated, they obviously become more informed. But there\u2019s more to it than that, and I think the best way I can explain the effect that my father and Bill Buckley had on me was I wanted to be smarter than I thought I was, and that was the primary inspiration for being exposed to people like that, not just in terms of learning the language but being able to use it — and I\u2019m nowhere near Buckley\u2019s league. <\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t have an objective to do that. I didn\u2019t want to write a column of two or three words that nobody ever heard of before and had to go to the dictionary. It wasn\u2019t that. It was just a means of expressing myself, a means of being able to communicate. Everybody has a lot of thoughts, but how many people are able to actually put them in words in a cogent, understandable, and even persuasive way? Over the course of my life, I\u2019ve been persuaded, I have been influenced, and my mind, in my estimation… Now, there might be brain scientists, neurologists who think I\u2019m all wet, and I could be, on this. You hear they do brain exercises for people that have Alzheimer\u2019s and this sort of thing, and I don\u2019t think that they\u2019re casually mentioning that. I think there is a way to do it. I\u2019m just telling you: Mr. Buckley and my dad interested me in my brain growing, in my ability to comprehend and my ability to absorb and retain, as in my memory and this sort of thing, and I know this kind of thing is possible. <\/p>\n

We all start out as skulls full of mush, by definition. We start out want knowing anything, and the moment we\u2019re born and we start absorbing things even before we know we\u2019re absorbing them, and we end up going to school and we all end up being educated. We are able to be taught. I just think that a lot of people think that whatever their brain is, their IQ or their intelligence, they probably think that\u2019s it, that there\u2019s not any more they can do with it than what they\u2019re born with, the brain is such a mystery. What this led to in my case was almost a total lack of satisfaction at the first explanation I ever heard for anything. Some may call that skepticism, but it wasn\u2019t skepticism, and it wasn\u2019t distrust. It was a realization that there can\u2019t be just simply one source for all knowledge or for a point of view or what have you, other than me on this program for you. (Laughing.) That\u2019s where the exercise of my brain has come in. When you\u2019re around people smarter than you, some people get intimidated, and some people say, ‘Oh, I\u2019ll never be able to do that.\u2019<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t look at it that way. Around smart people, people that I admired, people whose ability to learn and absorb and be vastly educated over a wide variety of things, inspired me. Buckley is really a renaissance man. He\u2019s not had, until lately… I don\u2019t know of anyone who\u2019s life has been spent more actively in both recreation and sybaritic pursuits, serious pursuits. I don\u2019t know anybody. I cannot imagine William B. Buckley, Jr., in his prime or even prior to that having ‘downtime.\u2019 Everything in his life was pursuit of something pleasurable, or something important or what have you. You\u2019d never describe him as lazy. He is someone who made it a point to get as much out of the opportunity of life as possible, in the realm in which he worked, the people he was able to meet, the things that he learned to do. He piloted a sailboat around the world, or maybe just across the Atlantic, and almost lost it all during a storm. <\/p>\n

He\u2019s an expert on countless subjects. There\u2019s not one subject you can bring up in talking to him he doesn\u2019t know a lot about it, not that he\u2019s just heard about it. He\u2019s a former CIA agent. He\u2019s just tireless, indefatigable, and those are the kind of things that inspired me. So I\u2019m thankful for the question to be able to answer this, because, like anything else, I was assuming (like a lot of people) that everybody was familiar with his life and his history and his work, as I\u2019ve been since the time of my youth. I started reading his columns in the newspaper in the St. Louis Globe Democrat, which no longer exists, when I was ten or 11 years old, and I remember being mesmerized by him, not just because of the vocabulary being used. Everybody talks about Reagan and supply-side economics. I first learned it from Bill Buckley, in a newspaper column when I\u2019m a teenager. His explanation just made total sense. He was bouncing off something that had happened in the news, I forget what it was, of course, from way back then. <\/p>\n

There was also a book that he edited called, ‘Have You Ever Seen a Dream Walking?\u2019, and it featured essays by a number of people he had known, Whitaker Chambers and so forth over the course of his life, and that book — and I\u2019ve told him this. It was not a big book. It\u2019s obscure. I don\u2019t know if you can even find it anymore. My father happened to have it in his dusty old library, and I happened to go over this thing. When I first was exposed to it in 19, what would it be? The years. I went back to radio after five years with the Kansas City Royals, and I was doing commentary on KNBZ in Kansas City and was causing all kinds of ruckus, because nobody was expressing political opinions, and this was the primary campaign of 1984. So this would be the spring of 1984, and the Hawkeye Cauci were coming up, and newspaper critics were writing about how mean and harsh and intolerant and all that, and I was just nonplussed by it. ‘What is all this? I\u2019m just telling people what I think.\u2019 <\/p>\n

It was so unheard of then, particularly on radio, that it caused a lot of dander, and just by happenstance, one weekend I was home at Cape Girardeau visiting, and I ran across this book, and the first essay I turned to was an essay by Whitaker Chambers who was analyzing somebody that was too harsh and vitriolic in their writings and therefore not accomplishing things in the realm of persuasion. It didn\u2019t fit my situation to a T, but it was eye opening. It\u2019s these kinds of things that — and I was always oriented back then (even then) to doing what I\u2019m doing today, but doing it effectively, not just doing it to make people mad, not just doing it to get noticed, because anybody can do that and it doesn\u2019t take any talent. So, learning to tell people why I think what I think rather than just soak it up like a sponge and repeat that without any backup, all these things and much, much more would have to be the primary reasons why Buckley has meant so much, and he never knew any of this. I didn\u2019t meet Bill Buckley until 1991 or \u201992. He gets embarrassed when I tell him this stuff. He gets embarrassed when I imitate him. At the National Review 50th Anniversary he said, ‘You go up there and no imitations.\u2019 I said all right, ‘Fine, I won\u2019t imitate you.\u2019 But he\u2019s a prince of a guy. He\u2019s one of these people (I\u2019m sure you know them) you go in the room with him, you sit there and don\u2019t have to do anything for three hours and you\u2019ve just spent over a semester in a classroom equivalent. <\/p>\n

END TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n

Read the Background Material…<\/strong><\/line>Transcript: William F. Buckley ‘Greatest Conservative in the World\u2019 Award<\/a><\/line><\/p>\n

*Note: Links to content outside RushLimbaugh.com usually become inactive over time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

RUSH: Columbus, Ohio, this is Dan. You\u2019re up, sir, nice to have you with us first. CALLER: Rush, first I have to say, ‘Go Buckeyes tonight.\u2019 Secondly, you said you\u2019ve been number one radio show or radio program for, what did you say, 16, 17 years? RUSH: Yeah, 17 years. 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