Remembering Paul Harvey, the invisibles' man

There was a time in my life when nothing excited me so much as a Paul Harvey news and comment. I wasn't riveted by the opinions, even though I was more conservative than I am now. It was just that, in the media universe of Montana in the 1970s, no one invested the news with such thrilling vigor and optimism as Paul Harvey.

A few years ago Marc Fisher captured that feeling perfectly in a profile of Paul Harvey. Fisher, who can be as biting and cynical as any newspaper writer, had come to Chicago to watch his subject do a broadcast. The two men chatted until right before the clock struck noon, and then:

A brief silence. Then a suddenly booming voice nearly rocks me out of my chair: "HELLO AMERICANS! THIS IS PAUL HARVEY! SSTTAANNDD BYYY FOR NEEEEEWS!!!!"

I very nearly stand to cheer.

When I learned last night that Paul Harvey had given up the fight at age 90 -- his wife Angel having preceded him in death by just 10 months -- I felt what Merle Haggard, another great communicator with ordinary Americans, described in one of his songs as "a closing chapter, to a way of life that I love within my heart."

Never again will conservative values be espoused by a major media figure who doesn't feel the immediate need to rip viciously into those who believe differently -- though Paul Harvey was a backer of Joe McCarthy. Never again will rural ways be celebrated so sincerely as superior to city ways -- though Paul Harvey became rich and famous broadcasting from the heart of America's third-largest metropolis.

One reason I like writing obituaries is that it's often the one and only opportunity for a media writer to ignore all the criticism and second-guessing and just flat-out appreciate someone, no apologies. And if you get caught up in the contradictions of Paul Harvey, you miss this chance to appreciate a type of broadcaster who has gone away and is not coming back.

I'll bet if you started to take a headcount you'd find many, many people from all walks of life who would say they owe a debt to Paul Harvey. Let me give you just two examples.

The first comes from Keith Olbermann, whom I emailed immediately upon hearing of Harvey's death. He writes,

"I was his official fill-in from 2001-03 and I was overwhelmed by the thought that went in to the selection and flow of stories. Even when he was off, his rules were in place: each segment began with hard news, moved on to commentary, ended with celebrity and then something light or silly. Then a commercial. Then repeat. Then another commercial, etc.

"I stole it almost entirely for 'Countdown.'"

The second example happened a few years ago, when Diane and I attended the 50th anniversary celebration of her uncle Everett. He was the last of a line of seven brothers and sisters born to a southeastern Minnesota farm family, all of whom were fortunate enough to mark their golden anniversaries. At one point during the celebration, the church basement fell silent, and someone played a tape. It was a 30-second clip from a recent Paul Harvey news and comment.

Paul Harvey was the nation's cheerleader for marriage longevity, so it figured that someone had sent him a clipping noting the remarkable milestone of the seven siblings. One day, he had decided to share the news with an audience of millions, in that familiar warm, reverent voice. It was way beyond cool. A local achievement had just been celebrated by Paul Harvey. If it had appeared on the front page of the New York Times it wouldn't have been half as impressive to those gathered in that room.

"Paul Harvey was an original" is about the least original thing you can say. "Idiosyncratic" doesn't begin to describe the combined effect of his voice, phrasing, news selection and worldview. In the America where I grew up, Paul Harvey was a uniter, not a divider. And yet he was anything but a centrist or a moderate. How did he do that?

Well, to understand the creation that was Paul Harvey you need to go back to the creation of the persona apart from the person (real name Paul Aurandt). Pat Aufderheide runs the Center for Social Media at American University and is a friend. When we first met, I surprised her by remembering a profile she'd written of Paul Harvey in 1983 for the Progressive magazine. I remembered it because it was such an eye-opener. She wrote:

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. Kennedy had caught a whiff of Harvey's neopopulism on the air and recommended that he be promoted to a national show. ... Harvey found a way to ride the tide of anti-Communism but to preach a still more fundamentalist message, based on a vision of America that could stand alone, at once world empire and nation of yeoman individualists. His version of (Washington's) "no entangling alliances" was uniquely domestic. It was to stop, finally, at the garage door. Harvey became the apostle of isolationism for new and would-be suburbanites.

And, as Aufderheide notes, he never wavered, never changed his economic or foreign policy to suit the times. I didn't know it at the time, but as I stood there in a suburban Chicago library reading that article just a few miles from his studio, I was changing. Paul Harvey never changed. Born into a family of fundamentalist preachers in Oklahoma, he understood the value of looking neither to your left nor right, but plowing straight ahead.

At times he would sound wildly out of the loop, while other pronouncements (in hindsight) were positively prescient. Like skinny neckties, his views just went in and out of style. To pick one thing, I loved his unfailing enthusiasm for biofuels. If scientists at Iowa State were working on a way to run electricity plants on pig manure, you could count on Paul to spread the good news. Which doesn't seem so weird nowadays.

In Montana I used to hear a lot of "The Rest of the Story," which he started doing in the '70s, and sometimes I would catch his morning newscast. But the flagship of "Paul Harvey News and Comment" was the four-page (five pages on Saturday) noon-hour newscast, which could have only taken on import in the Heartland, with its captive audience of farmers and housekeepers. In the years before Rush Limbaugh, this midday missive to the faithful allowed him to become hugely influential and, at the same time, hide in plain sight. As Aufderheide wrote in '83,

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. But look to the history books, to the clip files, to the studies of the power of mass-media news, and the man who strolls the top of AM radio's ratings charts is nowhere to be found. ...

But he is not after a place in the history books, especially those of historians who focus on the public and the political. His authority derives from being the voice of invisible Americans, the representative of their emotion in the face of cruel and complex pseudorationality.

Paul Harvey was awfully good at putting up a front -- media profiles of him were as well engineered as any corn crop, to deliver a predictable yield -- but he absolutely shared those fears of invisibility, even as he established himself as one of the 20th century's greatest persuaders. Olbermann again:

Having gained his slot by outshining a newscaster for whom he filled in, named H.R. Baukhage, he never took the full amount of vacation time offered to him.

Now here comes the stunner:

And though he liked my work, and consented to let ABC groom me to succeed him, when an executive flew to Chicago to get his consent to the network giving away free a Sunday version of his show, done by me, he immediately told them not only would he not agree, but if they did not find a different back-up and write it into a new contract, he would not go on the air the next day. Probably the most job-secure, most irreplacable man in broadcasting, without whom the franchise would sink to 10% of its value, and yet he was convinced he was about to be shown the door. The mind reels.

But of course, he was shown the door, in many places. He was dropped from Kansas City airwaves in 2006, as well as Mobile, Boston, Milwaukee, the list of cities grew longer. Sometimes a weaker station in the market would pick him up, sometimes not. Rural stations, the backbone of the Paul Harvey network, stayed faithful, but the Clear Channel chain tossed him aside like an empty soda can ... actually, a sack of empty cans, since Clear Channel owned so many stations.

Would he have moved more aggressively to hand on the franchise to Olbermann had he known the end was near? (Surely he knew that Paul Harvey Jr. wasn't cutting it.) That in five years Angel, his business partner and life partner, would be gone? That radio stocks would drop to 10 percent of their value and stations would stop valuing Paul Harvey like they once did? Something tells me he wouldn't have acted any differently. Creeping anachronism was simply not a worry to Paul Harvey. When I posted the news that Entercom had dropped the Harvey newscast after 30 years on "61 Country," a reader commented:

Paul Harvey no longer "fits" because he is pleasant, never shrill, doesn't name call anyone and tries to present all sides of an issue, even while making his personal beliefs clear.

But as I say, among media types, deep tribute continues to be paid by the appropriation and reinterpretation of the Harvey style. We've already mentioned "Countdown" (and, by extension, "The Rachel Maddow Show") appropriating the news-comment-oddball formula. If you listen to "This American Life" (another Chicago invention) you will hear unmistakable echoes of Paul Harvey, and his insistence on broadcasting his own stories, in his own voice. I'm sure there are more examples out there.

Finally, a word about Paul Harvey's non-verbal communication. No one in radio got away with the silences that he did. His pauses weren't just pregnant, they were Nadya Suleman pregnant. They were amazingly long, by radio standards. They challenged the listener's assumption that an interruption to the flow of continuous noise meant something was wrong. Nothing was wrong; Paul Harvey just wanted the listener's attention back, in case it had drifted. The great communicator was speaking to his invisible audience with invisible words. And they listened.

So now, as you finish this, don't just observe a moment of silence for Paul Harvey. Listen to the silence.

Update: And then, listen to Harry Shearer's terrific tribute on his March 1 "Le Show" broadcast podcast. Start at about the 26-minute mark. It's got some great vintage Paul Harvey audio.