June 4, 2024 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, born in small-town Oklahoma in 1918—Oklahoma had only been a state for 10 years—his rural roots would shape his career as would the murder of his father, a police officer.
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Up next, the story of a truly iconic name in
American broadcasting in a personal hero of mine, and we're
talking about Paul Harvey. Here to tell the story is
Stephen Mansfield, author of Paul Harvey's America. Now let's get
(00:34):
into it. As Paul Harvey would say, the rest of
the story.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
The breadth of the history that he interacted with is
one of the pillars of greatness of Paul Harvey's life.
He's born in nineteen eighteen, that's the year World War
One ended. He doesn't die until two thousand and nine
at the age of ninety. Think about the fact that
he was on the air almost every day from nineteen
(01:03):
forty five until the end of his life. He would
have talked about and this was a major part of
his rise. Would have talked about the returning Gis and
their need to get jobs. He would have talked about
the rise of communism and the Whittaker Chambers case. During
the Vietnam era, he would have commented daily on the
(01:24):
Meli massacre, on the Vietnam War. On every presidential campaign.
He was on the air and gave beautiful monologues around
the time of the Kennedy assassination, with riots, with the
rise of the civil rights movement, and certainly with Watergate.
He was commenting every day, comforting the country, chastising the evildoers.
(01:45):
Every single day for almost seventy years of American history
and a time of great change and up people, Paul
Harvey is commenting on everything from technology to politics, to
trends to religious themes. And again, think about this, every
single day. This was just what people looked Paul Harvey
to do. And you know he was opinionated, just like
(02:07):
the old man sitting in the town square giving his
opinions and whittling and smoking his pipe. You know, he
wasn't big on hippies. He was a conservative, so he
used language like hippies and long hairs and beat nicks,
what have you. But people looked to him for that.
He really was. Many people said the soul of America
on the air. But you have to understand his roots
in order to understand the impact he was attempting to
(02:28):
have upon the American people. Paul Harvey's upbringing is really
a typical small town America, even though he lived in Tulsa,
which we now think of as a bigger, prosperous city,
but at that time still had dirt streets and Oklahoma
had only been a state about a decade. He lived
(02:51):
close to the earth. There were Native Americans walking the
streets of Tulsa. As Paul Harvey grew up, he lived
in a rural farm, oil petroleum world that was about
grit and about your muscle, and about your immediate life.
And he listened to the older ones as they talked
(03:12):
about the things of life, and it was love and
marriage and what's being served for dinner, and you know
when mother died, and all those kinds of good rural,
almost Southern type stories. And he found all of them
to be of significance. They reflected character, they reflected values,
they reflected nobility, They reflected the tragedies and the sadnesses
(03:35):
of life. He didn't find meaning only in what the
queen was doing that day. And Paul Harvey was a
man deeply affected by the Christian faith, grew up in it,
stayed in all of his life. One of the things
he was known for, which was very unusual in his time,
is that he often quoted scripture. Now, he didn't do
it in a preachy way. He didn't do it heading
(03:56):
towards an offering or after a hymn. But he did
it in such a way as to apply Christian truth
and the nobility of the King James Bible to our society.
And it didn't sound weird, it didn't sound hackneyed, it
didn't sound like an overreach when he did it. So
he was a man of faith. He spoke about his faith,
(04:17):
He spoke about praying for people openly, and talked about
churches like they were just part of life at a
time when, especially when you hit the sixties, we're in
accounterculture here, we're in a decline of Christian influence. To
some degree, the Christian faith's being attacked. He didn't buy
into it. But he was born on September fourth, nineteen eighteen. Again,
that was the year that World War One ended. In fact,
(04:39):
Armisice Day was just another month or two after he
was born that year. His father was a policeman, his
mother was a homemaker. Good people, literate, deeply moral, committed
to church. So he would have lived in the home
of a law enforcement officer. He would have lived in
the home of people who talked about the world around
(05:01):
the table. But there was a tragedy that occurred early
in Paul's life that really I think shaped everything he
did afterwards. Exactly a week before Christmas in nineteen twenty one,
his father, a policeman, after finishing his day of service,
went rabbit hunting with a friend lately. Later in the evening,
(05:21):
it was cold. As they were coming back from the hunt,
they saw a car pulled off to the side of
a country road. They assumed it was in trouble, that
it had broken down, that somebody was in need on
that cold Tulsa night, and so these two men pulled
over to see what was needed. As soon as they
(05:41):
pulled up even with the car, they saw that there
were four men in it. The windows came down and
shotguns came out of the windows. These were criminals. These
were men who had just been robbing people, and those
shotguns fired into Officer A Rat's car that was Paul
Harvey's original last name, Rant, and Paul Harvey's father was
(06:06):
mortally wounded. He didn't die for another forty eight hours,
but he did die, and of pretty ghastly wounds. Well,
Paul was only three, but he without question was of
course impacted by this death, the grief that filled the house.
This was at a time when the community would have
pulled together, not just because Paul's father was a policeman,
(06:27):
but also because he was so respected in his part
of Tulsa. So Paul Harvey grew up with this legendary
father murdered by the side of the road a week
before Christmas. And one of the reasons I think he
was able to get in touch with the dark side,
the pain, the tragedy of life, is that he spent Christmases,
(06:49):
and especially that first Christmas when he was three, with
an empty house, so to speak, a father missing, a
mother in tears. Everything in his youth was diminished by
the tragic and needless, cruel murder of his father.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
And you're listening to Stephen Mansfield tell the story of
Paul Harvey, and what a story he's telling. Seventy years
there's a kind of voice and soul of America. One man,
one typewriter, one microphone, speaking into just about every triumphant
tragedy in our nation's history in the twentieth century, or
at least most of it. When we come back more
(07:26):
of this remarkable story filled with personal tragedy as you
just heard here on our American Stories. This is Lee Habib,
host of our American Stories, the show where America is
the star and the American people, and we do it
all from the heart of the South Oxford, Mississippi. But
we truly can't do this show without you. Our shows
(07:47):
will always be free to listen to, but they're not
free to make. Consider making a tax deductible donation. Go
to our American Stories dot com. Give a little, give
a lot. That's our American Stories dot com. And we
(08:09):
continue with our American Stories and this story of broadcast
legend Paul Harvey. When we last left off, Paul Harvey's father,
a police officer in Tulsa, had been shot and killed
a week before Christmas, when Harvey was three years old.
Let's continue with this story. Here again is Stephen Mansfield.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
I think that young boys who lose their fathers searched
the pages of history for father figures. This is psychologists
tell us this is true. This may have fed into
why Paul Harvey was such a student of history. Later
did the rest of the story broadcasts talking about American
heroes and telling tales of nobility that people did not know.
(08:57):
A fatherless boy found perhaps in the nation and its
leaders and its fathers and its great heroes, a bit
of a father figures that filled his soul. And so
he would speak of a Lincoln, or he would speak
of a Thomas Alva Edison, or he would speak of
a George Washington, almost as though he was a father
figure to young Paul Harvey. And I think also it's
(09:20):
what sent him to literature, It's what made him love words,
It's what made him love communicating. He was building in
his life community and fatherhood and connection that wasn't there
as naturally as it might have been had his father lived,
and made him a man given to a bit of
hero worship. He respected those in uniform, He respected those
(09:42):
who fought for the nation. Paul did become through his career,
really a voice for law enforcement.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
A policeman. Is it compositive? What all men are? I
guess a mingling of Satan, center, dust and deity called
wave the fan over stinkers underscore instances of dishonesty and
brutality because they are news. What that really means is
(10:10):
that they are exceptional, They are unusual. They are not commonplace.
Buried under the fraud is the fact.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Now, it's interesting, he wasn't blind. He knew there were
people of low character in uniform. He knew there were
people who abused their office, their position, their power, the trust,
and he spoke about that often. This is one of
the myths about him. He wasn't just blindly pro military,
blindly pro police. He knew that people of low character
could occupy those uniforms in those positions, and he castigated
(10:39):
them in his broadcast.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
The fact is that less than one half of one
percent of policemen misfit that uniform, and that is a
better average than you'd find among clergymen.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
He was while other news broadcasters were trying to be
objective and maybe trying to build audiences by talking about
the negatives, He didn't hesitate to advocate. He would describe
the life of a policeman. He would describe the sacrifice,
he would describe the low pay, he would describe the dangers.
And law enforcement revered him not just because he was
(11:14):
their advocate, but he brought understanding of their lives to
the American people at a time when there were some
calling policemen pigs and gunning for them, assassinating them.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
What is a policeman? He, of all men, is at
once the most needed and the most wanted, a strangely
nameless creature who is served to his face and pig
or worse behind his back. He must be such a
diplomat that he can settle differences between individuals so that
each will think he won. But if a policeman is neat,
(11:48):
he's conceited. If he's careless, he's a bum. If he's pleasant,
he's a flirt. If he's not, he's a grouch. He
must make instant decisions, which would require months for a lawyer.
But if he hurries, he's careless. If he is deliverate,
he's lazy. He must be first to an accident, infallible
with the diagnosis. He must be able to start breathing,
(12:09):
stop bleeding, tye splints, and above all, be sure the
victim goes home without a limp.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Or expect to be sued.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
The police officer must know every gun, draw on the
run and hit where it doesn't hurt. He must be
able to whip two men twice his size and half
his age without damaging his uniform, and without being brutal.
If you hit him, he's a coward. If he hits you,
he's a bully. A policeman must know everything and not tell.
(12:41):
He must know where all of the sin is and
not partake.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
He would describe the sacrifice, he would describe the low pay.
He would describe the dangers, And of course he knew
this because he had them recounted to him constantly by
his mother, though he couldn't have known much about it
his father from first hand contact.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
If I were the devil, if I were the devil,
if I were the prince of darkness, I'd want to
n go up the whole world in darkness, and I'd
have a third of its real estate and four fifths
of its population. But I wouldn't be happy until I
had seized the ripest apple on the tree.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
The the Tulsa Race Ride of nineteen twenty one is
profound in Paul Harvey's thinking, and it shapes him in
a couple of different ways. First of all, let's just
remember that the Tulsa Race Ride was a horrible moment.
Black Wall Street was completely wiped out in Tulsa. This
was one of the most successful black communities in the country.
(13:52):
It had all begun because a girl on an elevator
accused a black young man of molesting her. That largely
been proven untrue sense, and so a riot broke out.
Many many were killed. It may have been as much
as three thousand African Americans were killed, we don't know
for sure. And by the way, it's one of the
(14:12):
few times that bombs were dropped from airplanes on American civilians.
We now know that whites who owned planes went up
in those planes and dropped flaming tar balls onto the
black community. It was horrible. Now, Paul Harvey was only
three when this happened, but he grew up in the
wake of it, and yet it was woven into his
(14:33):
understanding and his worldview at the same time as a
love for America was being woven into his soul. This
created one of his gifts, which was an ability to
see the deformities and the warts on the American soul
as being just that a good country, a country well intentioned,
a country with high ideals, and yet one in which communities, people,
(14:57):
sometimes people in uniform, certainly people in high office, could
fall far below the high call, as he called it,
could live beneath their values, could live beneath their founding principles.
And this, I think became a guide for Americans. You know,
when the news is filled all with bad things, even
just for an evening, Americans can conclude, you know, our
(15:18):
country's falling apart. It's an experiment that didn't work. But
Paul Harvey would say, wait a minute. Now we've done
these things, We've done these good things. Let's remember who
we are, Let's remember our great stories, let's remember our
high founding values. Just because some racists do dastardly things
and Tulsa in nineteen twenty one doesn't mean that America
(15:39):
is abolished, or America is a lie, or that this
ought to be this is something that's going to pervade
the country. And that perspective was unique at a time
when you had the rise of American media. You had
tightly competitive journalism, and reporters often went to the dark side.
They often reported the bad news first. You bleeds. That
(16:00):
leads kind of attitude, and as a result, there was
a flood of negative about America, about Americans, about what
was going on in the world. So all of this
shaped him profoundly. And when you set all of that
into a still rural Tulsa's kind of context, you really
start to come close to understanding Paul Harvey. If we're
(16:24):
going to look at Paul Harvey as sort of a
motivational story for the young, we need to know that
he essentially was taken to his first job in radio
by a school teacher. There was a school teacher who
heard him speak, liked him, liked the timber of his voice,
liked his passion and his zeal and so as an
early teenager, Paul went and served at a radio station
(16:48):
there in Tulsa, basically cleaning up, basically sweeping, working nights,
working without pay. By the way, but she had said
to him, I think you may have a career in broadcasting.
Get close to it, get in the culture, understand it,
study it. So he began working at KOOH first, just
as an unpaid fourteen year old janitor.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
And you've been listening to Stephen Mansfield tell one heck
of a story, and periodically we hear from Harvey himself
in that combination of triumphalism and tragedy, deeply born out
of his experience with tragedy and triumph. It infuses everything,
and he has that rare sensitivity to understand the wounds
(17:36):
of life and the grief of life with that otherworldly
part of him that rises above it and finds the
hope and the love. This internal paradox, indeed, is what
made Harvey special. The story of Paul Harvey continues here
on our American Stories, and we continue with our American
(18:10):
stories in the story of Paul Harvey. When we last
left off, Paul Harvey had started his career in broadcasting
on the advice of a teacher sweeping floors in a
local radio station in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Let's continue with this
story here again is Stephen Mansfield, author of Paul Harvey's America.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
So he began working at KOO, first just as an
unpaid fourteen year old janitor, and in time he began
to learn the lore. They began to let him read
commercials and do the news from time to time, just
emulating what he'd already heard. But he was beginning to rise,
he was beginning to use his gifts. They even let
(18:55):
him write a few stories about some things that he
knew a bit more about than the other the reporters.
And so by being willing to serve, being willing to
work hard, being willing to work after hours late into
the night. He began to master the culture of radio
and eventually master his craft.
Speaker 3 (19:14):
American's preachers tell me that there is no sermon which
is looked forward to with less enthusiasm than a sermon
about sin. Well, that's probably true if we're talking about
a secular sermon on the subject of hard work. There
is no gospel less popular than the gospel of hard work.
(19:35):
The pregnant skyline of America was set in place one
brick at a time. Now that represents a lot of
callouses America. The beautiful is not an accomplished fact guaranteed
to remain intact. God shed his grace on thee to
be sure, but this was waste land. When God had
(19:57):
it to himself, he handed man a hoe and said,
do you want another Eden, I'll right earn it.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
I personally have always taken that as a great inspiration story,
because sometimes I know, certainly in my life, I might
not have been willing at the age of fourteen or
fifteen just to simply to serve in a business or
around a culture that I would want to learn. But
I think Paul Harvey had a sense that if he
got in there and he worked and he listened, and
he learned, and he stayed alert that the predictions of
(20:29):
his teacher, Isabelle Ronan, who had sent him to this job,
actually taken him to this first radio job, would come
true that one day he could rise and do significant
things in broadcasting. But I think we need to remember
as all because of a public school teacher and a
boy who was willing to serve in an unpaid role.
(20:49):
Paul Harvey graduates from high school, goes to the University
of Tulsa for a short while, but he does not
graduate from the University of Tulsa. Radio is just calling.
He said often that he fell in love with words
and ran off with the radio. That's very much the
way it was in his life. So he began to
work at other radio stations out there. Dane whitmass KOO
(21:13):
was a station that was of course based in Tulsa,
and it was one of Paul Harvey's first jobs. And
what's fascinating about this particular station is that there was
a valuing of their local context. It was a valuing
of their local culture. They would report local news, have
local commentary. They didn't just bring the news from the
(21:34):
east they didn't just parody or repeat blindly what came
out of New York. In fact, a story from Paul
Harvey's life a little bit later will help in illustrating this.
Later in Paul Harvey's broadcast life, he was clearly emulating
the broadcasters from the East that he knew Eastern reporters,
and station manager came to him and said, look, as
(21:56):
long as you're emulating everybody else, you'll always be only
second best. The only way you can be the best
is by being yourself. Well, that transformed Paul Harvey's broadcast.
That transformed his style. And he had a sister in
law who was a farm wife and her name was Betty,
(22:19):
And so during his career he had decided to measure
everything he broadcasted according to the Betty test. The question
was would this mean something to Betty? Would it impact her,
would it be of interest to her? Would it ennoble
her in some way? And so he constantly thought about
(22:40):
his sister in law, Betty, who was a Missouri farm wife. Well,
I think that that helped him not only have respect
for his audience high and low wherever they were in
America and around the world, but also to frame his
comments in a way they would appreciate. He would technical language,
(23:01):
he would drain out the political arcanea of what was
happening in Washington, DC. And he would just speak in
the way you would to a Missouri farm wife if
you ran on to her at the local store. That
appealed at people. They were living in a complex world.
They were living in an increasingly bureaucratic world. Knowledge was
increasing rapidly. Media was bringing everything in the universe right
(23:25):
to their door. But Paul Harvey spoke in simple, moral,
accurate terms that also filtered out what wouldn't be interesting
to Betty. He genuinely found interest in the common. He
thought that what was going on with farmer Jones in
Iowa was important, the moral decision that farmer Jones had made,
(23:48):
the barbershop quartet he had started, the way he tried
new crops. Sometimes he would go dark and say, farmer
Jones is a farmer no more, and he would describe
what shut down the family farm in Iowa for the
Jones family. In other words, he didn't just infuse the
common with meaning. He recognized it and drew it out
(24:09):
so it didn't sound strange that he was moving from
a description of a boy raising a deer in Missouri
and then switch over to a report about Watergate. Somehow
they seemed significant to the human spirit, they seemed significant
to America. It all seemed of a piece and he
(24:30):
did that masterfully. So picture it. Now. You've got the Betties,
his sister in law in Missouri, a farmwife, hearing about
complex matters in London in very simple terms. But then
you've also got the President of the United States hearing
about the boy raising the deer on his farm. It
fed a new culture, a new understanding of the world
(24:51):
into people who didn't daily live in those contexts, and
that's exactly how it impacted me. I really honor Paul
Harvey for that. He brought the world you weren't in
to your world and brought something of your world to
those who didn't know your world. And that was a
masterstroke on his part. But I think that was a
reflection of the culture of KVOO and some other stations
(25:14):
owned by that same network and the group of affiliates,
because they believed that they would have a greater impact
build a good audience if they were most authentic, that
their power came from being authentic and according to their culture,
and not just a repeater station for what came from
(25:34):
the East. This distinguished them and it shaped the career
of Paul Harvey, a man with one of the most
signature styles in American broadcasting. But it came about because
of this sort of proud, fierce Oklahoma, Midwest rural. We
are who we are. We're not living on Fifth Avenue
(25:55):
in New York, and we don't intend to. He often
said that he couldn't stay in New York for more
than th days, because if he did, he would begin
to believe that the Suns sat behind the un Building.
In other words, that the Sun rose and sat on
New York.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
And you're listening to Stephen Mansfield tell one heck of
his story. What frames Paul Harvey's life is that experience
at that station, that taught him that culture matters and
that it frames a point of view. And yet Harvey
never excluded big cities. He didn't see it as big
city versus rural Midwestern America. But he put and never
(26:33):
abandoned that framework forward in everything he did, unapologetically, not
with a chip on his shoulder, but out of sheer,
straightforward pride. The story of his Midwestern values and where
they sprang. And by the way, the values of this show,
they sprang from a station called WHO, one of our
(26:54):
prime stations and one of our most important ones, right
in Des Moines. And I grew up my entire life
in northern New Jersey, near New York City, but had
an attraction to rural America that I think sprang from
Paul Harvey now that I'm listening to this, and from
people like Bear Bryant. So many of the people whose
lives I emulated and admired came from this part of
(27:15):
the country, these parts of the country. The story of
Paul Harvey continues a broadcasting legend here on our American stories.
(27:37):
And we continue with our American stories and the final
portion of our story on broadcast legend Paul Harvey. When
we last left off, Harvey had developed what he called
the Betty Test, which distilled the news for those living
in America's heartland rather than the East. It was because
of this that Paul Harvey started to rise. Continue with
(28:00):
his story here again is Stephen Mansfield.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
Those early days prior to World War Two. His rise
really certainly is God given talent, but it's working hard.
It's studying. It's not assuming that he should be given something.
He's laboring. He's laboring in small stations. He's studying the
craft and doing it on his own. He hardly ever
went to any course that taught broadcasting. He hardly had
(28:31):
any formal instruction, but he just learned on the job
by paying close attention to what worked, what the station,
got cards and letters about what resonated with people, and
he built his career on that. It's interesting that in
his career people sometimes forget, given that he was such
a personality of what an astute and gifted reporter he was.
(28:53):
He could watch events, understand what was happening, anticipate what
might be coming, describe it, powerflee in a way that
would make you lean into your radio set and stick
with you long after. And he would stay with some
stories as long as they lived. Think about how long
he would have been reporting Watergate or Vietnam. And people
(29:13):
often said that they understood more of what was going
on in Vietnam than they did from the briefings of
generals on the air, from the speeches of presidents, from
the debates in Congress, and from print media. So it
was pretty stunning. Now. He leaned conservative in his broadcast
and in his politics. He was very concerned about communist
(29:33):
influence in America. He was very concerned, quite frankly, about
left leaning professors on American university campuses. One of the
things he became concerned about was lack security at some
of our nuclear and atomic facilities, at some of our
military facilities. This really sent him over the edge because
he felt like there might be some Communist collusion and undermining.
(29:56):
He felt like people were being lax. So, in one
of the most unusual moments of his life, he decided
to see if he could break into the Argonne National Laboratory.
This was not far from his home. He had gotten information,
as often happens with well known broadcasters, people bring them
information and leak things to them, and he had gotten
(30:19):
information that there was lack of security there, that people
were carrying information out, things of that nature, and as
a result, he decided with a couple of friends to
break in. Now it's hard to know in retrospect exactly
what prompted this. Only Paul got over the fence. His
friends did not. They didn't get over the fence before
jeep of security officials began to arrive, he was taken
(30:43):
into custody. The others ran away, and Paul claimed that
he had been advised and was working in league with
security forces and law enforcement forces. There were probably some
truth to that. He had probably been encouraged, perhaps by
some in common There's no question that some other folks
like this knew about what he was planning to do
(31:04):
and were encouraging him. And the fact that he got
off with no sentence at all, not even a serious hearing,
means probably he had some people who were maybe sponsors
in Washington, d c. But it says a lot about
Paul Harvey that he so cared about the state of
his nation, and so cared about lack of security at
(31:24):
some of our secure facilities that he actually climbed a
fence and tried to break into one of the most
secure and high level national research laboratories in the country.
It's not something he talked about a great deal later.
I think he was grateful to get by unscathed, but
he was trying to do what he considered to be
(31:46):
investigative journalism and perhaps make a turn in American history,
and certainly raised the concern about the influence of communists
in our security services. That's really where he was going.
So it's fascinating episode. It's still a bit of a mystery.
People still praise him and criticize him for it, but
I think it shows the intensity and the devoted patriotism
(32:06):
of Paul Harvey. However misguided this episode might be, but
once his managers and producers began to realize that he
was most powerful when he was commenting from a personal perspective,
bringing his moral grid to the air, slapping the hands
of some statesmen, encouraging others, celebrating the humor and the
(32:30):
poetry and the glory of it all. That's what he
was at his strength. Paul Harvey's numbers were stunning at
the time, and you get different estimates for different seasons,
but it's not wrong to say that Paul Harvey would
average about thirty five million listeners to his Paul Harvey
(32:50):
News and Comment. Now, you've got to realize that's in
an America. During his heyday, that's north of two hundred million.
People were in the three hundred millions. Now, so that's
thirty million, thirty five million adults in a nation of
arguably the low two hundred millions, and these are thinking people,
(33:13):
these are working people, these are people in DC. This
is unbelievably influential and far beyond some of the major
evening newscasts and so on that we would still talk about.
You know, Walter Cronkite, I don't know exactly what his
audience was, but I remember him commenting that he was
humorously in competition with Paul Harvey. So the influence of
(33:35):
those two men, Walter Kronkite and Paul Harvey, was huge.
He was arguably the most powerful, most influential broadcaster of
his age, a man who in his eighty signs one
hundred million dollar contract ten million a year for ten years.
And he was a brilliant businessman and one of the
great spokesman voices of commercials in American history. Part of
(33:57):
the reason was people knew a couple of things about him.
First of all, he used every product that he pitched.
He never spoke of a product that he didn't actually use.
For example, I recall from my own listening years that
he used a swin Eradyne bike that was the stationary
bike that had a big air wheel at the front
(34:17):
of it, and he used it and he talked about
his commercial was talking about losing weight and how he
liked it, and what he did while he wrote it,
and what time of day he wrote it, and how
Angel sometimes his wife would use it. Well, when you've
got the most popular broadcaster in America speaking of things,
he's used the refrigerator, a new way of doing ice cubes,
(34:38):
what have you. That's very influential. The other thing is
that he wove it into the broadcast, almost as though
it was part of the broadcast. People knew it was
a commercial, but he would say, so.
Speaker 3 (34:50):
Call your dad, tell him to tune in. I'll have
this for you on page.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
Two, page two, such and such refriger is just a
miracle of our time, Angel and I use it, And
he would go right on. People knew it was a commercial,
but it was done in the same Paul Harvey tones.
It was personal and he had a lot of respect
for his sponsors. He used to say, I have great
respect for those who put their money where my mouth is,
(35:19):
meaning they fund my show. He was known to be
unbelievably influential, and of course they would do studies to
see how he would impact sales of a given product
that it was off the charts, and so his sponsorships
were record breaking. But the reason was he would move
from the story of the moose in Montana and the
funny thing that happened with the hunter and go right
(35:40):
into talking about the Schwinn Aerodyne stationary bike, and people
were just as fascinated with the one as they were
with the other. And by the way, it wasn't always
certain that he would be so esteemed. Remember again, he
broke into a laborate and a secure laboratory facility, trying
to poke his finger in the eye a little bit
(36:03):
of the national government, which he considered to be lax.
He broke from presidents He said, Resident Nixon, I love you,
but you're wrong, And it was a huge moment in
American broadcasting. He risked, he criticized. It wasn't guaranteed he
would always be so beloved. It wasn't guaranteed that official
Washington would come to revere him as it did. But
(36:26):
ultimately he did receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which
is one of the highest honors a civilian can receive
in our country, and I think it was well deserved.
I think he had been the voice of America, perhaps
even more of a moral influence in America than, for example,
Billy Graham. I can tell you quickly that I listened
(36:47):
to Paul Harvey while when I was a military brat
living behind the Iron Curtain in Berlin, Germany, and I
would sometimes listen to Paul Harvey with my German friends.
So my German friends who spoke English English, and they
had never heard these things, They had no idea. All
of their knowledge about American and American history was pretty
(37:08):
much distilled through you know, German media and the German
education system. And even though Germans honored Americans, certainly for
their sacrifices in World War Two, etc. It wasn't the
heartfelt thing that Paul Harvey brought. And I remember looking
at those German young friends and being aware that they
were falling in love with America like I had through
(37:30):
the voice of Paul Harvey. And now you know.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
The rest of the story.
Speaker 1 (37:40):
And a beautiful job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Monty Montgomery. And a special thanks to
author Stephen Mansfield. His book Paul Harvey's America is available
wherever you buy your books. And what a story. Seventy
years on the year, every day since nineteen forty five
straight to two thousand and nine. Hurtle straight in to
(38:01):
the twenty first century, as modern and present a voice
as we've ever known. The story of Paul Harvey, the
story of modern American broadcasting. He was the best there
ever was on our American stories.
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Up next, the story of a truly iconic name in
American broadcasting in a personal hero of mine, and we're
talking about Paul Harvey. Here to tell the story is
Stephen Mansfield, author of Paul Harvey's America. Now let's get
(00:34):
into it. As Paul Harvey would say, the rest of
the story.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
The breadth of the history that he interacted with is
one of the pillars of greatness of Paul Harvey's life.
He's born in nineteen eighteen, that's the year World War
One ended. He doesn't die until two thousand and nine
at the age of ninety. Think about the fact that
he was on the air almost every day from nineteen
(01:03):
forty five until the end of his life. He would
have talked about and this was a major part of
his rise. Would have talked about the returning Gis and
their need to get jobs. He would have talked about
the rise of communism and the Whittaker Chambers case. During
the Vietnam era, he would have commented daily on the
(01:24):
Meli massacre, on the Vietnam War. On every presidential campaign.
He was on the air and gave beautiful monologues around
the time of the Kennedy assassination, with riots, with the
rise of the civil rights movement, and certainly with Watergate.
He was commenting every day, comforting the country, chastising the evildoers.
(01:45):
Every single day for almost seventy years of American history
and a time of great change and up people, Paul
Harvey is commenting on everything from technology to politics, to
trends to religious themes. And again, think about this, every
single day. This was just what people looked Paul Harvey
to do. And you know he was opinionated, just like
(02:07):
the old man sitting in the town square giving his
opinions and whittling and smoking his pipe. You know, he
wasn't big on hippies. He was a conservative, so he
used language like hippies and long hairs and beat nicks,
what have you. But people looked to him for that.
He really was. Many people said the soul of America
on the air. But you have to understand his roots
in order to understand the impact he was attempting to
(02:28):
have upon the American people. Paul Harvey's upbringing is really
a typical small town America, even though he lived in Tulsa,
which we now think of as a bigger, prosperous city,
but at that time still had dirt streets and Oklahoma
had only been a state about a decade. He lived
(02:51):
close to the earth. There were Native Americans walking the
streets of Tulsa. As Paul Harvey grew up, he lived
in a rural farm, oil petroleum world that was about
grit and about your muscle, and about your immediate life.
And he listened to the older ones as they talked
(03:12):
about the things of life, and it was love and
marriage and what's being served for dinner, and you know
when mother died, and all those kinds of good rural,
almost Southern type stories. And he found all of them
to be of significance. They reflected character, they reflected values,
they reflected nobility, They reflected the tragedies and the sadnesses
(03:35):
of life. He didn't find meaning only in what the
queen was doing that day. And Paul Harvey was a
man deeply affected by the Christian faith, grew up in it,
stayed in all of his life. One of the things
he was known for, which was very unusual in his time,
is that he often quoted scripture. Now, he didn't do
it in a preachy way. He didn't do it heading
(03:56):
towards an offering or after a hymn. But he did
it in such a way as to apply Christian truth
and the nobility of the King James Bible to our society.
And it didn't sound weird, it didn't sound hackneyed, it
didn't sound like an overreach when he did it. So
he was a man of faith. He spoke about his faith,
(04:17):
He spoke about praying for people openly, and talked about
churches like they were just part of life at a
time when, especially when you hit the sixties, we're in
accounterculture here, we're in a decline of Christian influence. To
some degree, the Christian faith's being attacked. He didn't buy
into it. But he was born on September fourth, nineteen eighteen. Again,
that was the year that World War One ended. In fact,
(04:39):
Armisice Day was just another month or two after he
was born that year. His father was a policeman, his
mother was a homemaker. Good people, literate, deeply moral, committed
to church. So he would have lived in the home
of a law enforcement officer. He would have lived in
the home of people who talked about the world around
(05:01):
the table. But there was a tragedy that occurred early
in Paul's life that really I think shaped everything he
did afterwards. Exactly a week before Christmas in nineteen twenty one,
his father, a policeman, after finishing his day of service,
went rabbit hunting with a friend lately. Later in the evening,
(05:21):
it was cold. As they were coming back from the hunt,
they saw a car pulled off to the side of
a country road. They assumed it was in trouble, that
it had broken down, that somebody was in need on
that cold Tulsa night, and so these two men pulled
over to see what was needed. As soon as they
(05:41):
pulled up even with the car, they saw that there
were four men in it. The windows came down and
shotguns came out of the windows. These were criminals. These
were men who had just been robbing people, and those
shotguns fired into Officer A Rat's car that was Paul
Harvey's original last name, Rant, and Paul Harvey's father was
(06:06):
mortally wounded. He didn't die for another forty eight hours,
but he did die, and of pretty ghastly wounds. Well,
Paul was only three, but he without question was of
course impacted by this death, the grief that filled the house.
This was at a time when the community would have
pulled together, not just because Paul's father was a policeman,
(06:27):
but also because he was so respected in his part
of Tulsa. So Paul Harvey grew up with this legendary
father murdered by the side of the road a week
before Christmas. And one of the reasons I think he
was able to get in touch with the dark side,
the pain, the tragedy of life, is that he spent Christmases,
(06:49):
and especially that first Christmas when he was three, with
an empty house, so to speak, a father missing, a
mother in tears. Everything in his youth was diminished by
the tragic and needless, cruel murder of his father.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
And you're listening to Stephen Mansfield tell the story of
Paul Harvey, and what a story he's telling. Seventy years
there's a kind of voice and soul of America. One man,
one typewriter, one microphone, speaking into just about every triumphant
tragedy in our nation's history in the twentieth century, or
at least most of it. When we come back more
(07:26):
of this remarkable story filled with personal tragedy as you
just heard here on our American Stories. This is Lee Habib,
host of our American Stories, the show where America is
the star and the American people, and we do it
all from the heart of the South Oxford, Mississippi. But
we truly can't do this show without you. Our shows
(07:47):
will always be free to listen to, but they're not
free to make. Consider making a tax deductible donation. Go
to our American Stories dot com. Give a little, give
a lot. That's our American Stories dot com. And we
(08:09):
continue with our American Stories and this story of broadcast
legend Paul Harvey. When we last left off, Paul Harvey's father,
a police officer in Tulsa, had been shot and killed
a week before Christmas, when Harvey was three years old.
Let's continue with this story. Here again is Stephen Mansfield.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
I think that young boys who lose their fathers searched
the pages of history for father figures. This is psychologists
tell us this is true. This may have fed into
why Paul Harvey was such a student of history. Later
did the rest of the story broadcasts talking about American
heroes and telling tales of nobility that people did not know.
(08:57):
A fatherless boy found perhaps in the nation and its
leaders and its fathers and its great heroes, a bit
of a father figures that filled his soul. And so
he would speak of a Lincoln, or he would speak
of a Thomas Alva Edison, or he would speak of
a George Washington, almost as though he was a father
figure to young Paul Harvey. And I think also it's
(09:20):
what sent him to literature, It's what made him love words,
It's what made him love communicating. He was building in
his life community and fatherhood and connection that wasn't there
as naturally as it might have been had his father lived,
and made him a man given to a bit of
hero worship. He respected those in uniform, He respected those
(09:42):
who fought for the nation. Paul did become through his career,
really a voice for law enforcement.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
A policeman. Is it compositive? What all men are? I
guess a mingling of Satan, center, dust and deity called
wave the fan over stinkers underscore instances of dishonesty and
brutality because they are news. What that really means is
(10:10):
that they are exceptional, They are unusual. They are not commonplace.
Buried under the fraud is the fact.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Now, it's interesting, he wasn't blind. He knew there were
people of low character in uniform. He knew there were
people who abused their office, their position, their power, the trust,
and he spoke about that often. This is one of
the myths about him. He wasn't just blindly pro military,
blindly pro police. He knew that people of low character
could occupy those uniforms in those positions, and he castigated
(10:39):
them in his broadcast.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
The fact is that less than one half of one
percent of policemen misfit that uniform, and that is a
better average than you'd find among clergymen.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
He was while other news broadcasters were trying to be
objective and maybe trying to build audiences by talking about
the negatives, He didn't hesitate to advocate. He would describe
the life of a policeman. He would describe the sacrifice,
he would describe the low pay, he would describe the dangers.
And law enforcement revered him not just because he was
(11:14):
their advocate, but he brought understanding of their lives to
the American people at a time when there were some
calling policemen pigs and gunning for them, assassinating them.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
What is a policeman? He, of all men, is at
once the most needed and the most wanted, a strangely
nameless creature who is served to his face and pig
or worse behind his back. He must be such a
diplomat that he can settle differences between individuals so that
each will think he won. But if a policeman is neat,
(11:48):
he's conceited. If he's careless, he's a bum. If he's pleasant,
he's a flirt. If he's not, he's a grouch. He
must make instant decisions, which would require months for a lawyer.
But if he hurries, he's careless. If he is deliverate,
he's lazy. He must be first to an accident, infallible
with the diagnosis. He must be able to start breathing,
(12:09):
stop bleeding, tye splints, and above all, be sure the
victim goes home without a limp.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Or expect to be sued.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
The police officer must know every gun, draw on the
run and hit where it doesn't hurt. He must be
able to whip two men twice his size and half
his age without damaging his uniform, and without being brutal.
If you hit him, he's a coward. If he hits you,
he's a bully. A policeman must know everything and not tell.
(12:41):
He must know where all of the sin is and
not partake.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
He would describe the sacrifice, he would describe the low pay.
He would describe the dangers, And of course he knew
this because he had them recounted to him constantly by
his mother, though he couldn't have known much about it
his father from first hand contact.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
If I were the devil, if I were the devil,
if I were the prince of darkness, I'd want to
n go up the whole world in darkness, and I'd
have a third of its real estate and four fifths
of its population. But I wouldn't be happy until I
had seized the ripest apple on the tree.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
The the Tulsa Race Ride of nineteen twenty one is
profound in Paul Harvey's thinking, and it shapes him in
a couple of different ways. First of all, let's just
remember that the Tulsa Race Ride was a horrible moment.
Black Wall Street was completely wiped out in Tulsa. This
was one of the most successful black communities in the country.
(13:52):
It had all begun because a girl on an elevator
accused a black young man of molesting her. That largely
been proven untrue sense, and so a riot broke out.
Many many were killed. It may have been as much
as three thousand African Americans were killed, we don't know
for sure. And by the way, it's one of the
(14:12):
few times that bombs were dropped from airplanes on American civilians.
We now know that whites who owned planes went up
in those planes and dropped flaming tar balls onto the
black community. It was horrible. Now, Paul Harvey was only
three when this happened, but he grew up in the
wake of it, and yet it was woven into his
(14:33):
understanding and his worldview at the same time as a
love for America was being woven into his soul. This
created one of his gifts, which was an ability to
see the deformities and the warts on the American soul
as being just that a good country, a country well intentioned,
a country with high ideals, and yet one in which communities, people,
(14:57):
sometimes people in uniform, certainly people in high office, could
fall far below the high call, as he called it,
could live beneath their values, could live beneath their founding principles.
And this, I think became a guide for Americans. You know,
when the news is filled all with bad things, even
just for an evening, Americans can conclude, you know, our
(15:18):
country's falling apart. It's an experiment that didn't work. But
Paul Harvey would say, wait a minute. Now we've done
these things, We've done these good things. Let's remember who
we are, Let's remember our great stories, let's remember our
high founding values. Just because some racists do dastardly things
and Tulsa in nineteen twenty one doesn't mean that America
(15:39):
is abolished, or America is a lie, or that this
ought to be this is something that's going to pervade
the country. And that perspective was unique at a time
when you had the rise of American media. You had
tightly competitive journalism, and reporters often went to the dark side.
They often reported the bad news first. You bleeds. That
(16:00):
leads kind of attitude, and as a result, there was
a flood of negative about America, about Americans, about what
was going on in the world. So all of this
shaped him profoundly. And when you set all of that
into a still rural Tulsa's kind of context, you really
start to come close to understanding Paul Harvey. If we're
(16:24):
going to look at Paul Harvey as sort of a
motivational story for the young, we need to know that
he essentially was taken to his first job in radio
by a school teacher. There was a school teacher who
heard him speak, liked him, liked the timber of his voice,
liked his passion and his zeal and so as an
early teenager, Paul went and served at a radio station
(16:48):
there in Tulsa, basically cleaning up, basically sweeping, working nights,
working without pay. By the way, but she had said
to him, I think you may have a career in broadcasting.
Get close to it, get in the culture, understand it,
study it. So he began working at KOOH first, just
as an unpaid fourteen year old janitor.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
And you've been listening to Stephen Mansfield tell one heck
of a story, and periodically we hear from Harvey himself
in that combination of triumphalism and tragedy, deeply born out
of his experience with tragedy and triumph. It infuses everything,
and he has that rare sensitivity to understand the wounds
(17:36):
of life and the grief of life with that otherworldly
part of him that rises above it and finds the
hope and the love. This internal paradox, indeed, is what
made Harvey special. The story of Paul Harvey continues here
on our American Stories, and we continue with our American
(18:10):
stories in the story of Paul Harvey. When we last
left off, Paul Harvey had started his career in broadcasting
on the advice of a teacher sweeping floors in a
local radio station in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Let's continue with this
story here again is Stephen Mansfield, author of Paul Harvey's America.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
So he began working at KOO, first just as an
unpaid fourteen year old janitor, and in time he began
to learn the lore. They began to let him read
commercials and do the news from time to time, just
emulating what he'd already heard. But he was beginning to rise,
he was beginning to use his gifts. They even let
(18:55):
him write a few stories about some things that he
knew a bit more about than the other the reporters.
And so by being willing to serve, being willing to
work hard, being willing to work after hours late into
the night. He began to master the culture of radio
and eventually master his craft.
Speaker 3 (19:14):
American's preachers tell me that there is no sermon which
is looked forward to with less enthusiasm than a sermon
about sin. Well, that's probably true if we're talking about
a secular sermon on the subject of hard work. There
is no gospel less popular than the gospel of hard work.
(19:35):
The pregnant skyline of America was set in place one
brick at a time. Now that represents a lot of
callouses America. The beautiful is not an accomplished fact guaranteed
to remain intact. God shed his grace on thee to
be sure, but this was waste land. When God had
(19:57):
it to himself, he handed man a hoe and said,
do you want another Eden, I'll right earn it.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
I personally have always taken that as a great inspiration story,
because sometimes I know, certainly in my life, I might
not have been willing at the age of fourteen or
fifteen just to simply to serve in a business or
around a culture that I would want to learn. But
I think Paul Harvey had a sense that if he
got in there and he worked and he listened, and
he learned, and he stayed alert that the predictions of
(20:29):
his teacher, Isabelle Ronan, who had sent him to this job,
actually taken him to this first radio job, would come
true that one day he could rise and do significant
things in broadcasting. But I think we need to remember
as all because of a public school teacher and a
boy who was willing to serve in an unpaid role.
(20:49):
Paul Harvey graduates from high school, goes to the University
of Tulsa for a short while, but he does not
graduate from the University of Tulsa. Radio is just calling.
He said often that he fell in love with words
and ran off with the radio. That's very much the
way it was in his life. So he began to
work at other radio stations out there. Dane whitmass KOO
(21:13):
was a station that was of course based in Tulsa,
and it was one of Paul Harvey's first jobs. And
what's fascinating about this particular station is that there was
a valuing of their local context. It was a valuing
of their local culture. They would report local news, have
local commentary. They didn't just bring the news from the
(21:34):
east they didn't just parody or repeat blindly what came
out of New York. In fact, a story from Paul
Harvey's life a little bit later will help in illustrating this.
Later in Paul Harvey's broadcast life, he was clearly emulating
the broadcasters from the East that he knew Eastern reporters,
and station manager came to him and said, look, as
(21:56):
long as you're emulating everybody else, you'll always be only
second best. The only way you can be the best
is by being yourself. Well, that transformed Paul Harvey's broadcast.
That transformed his style. And he had a sister in
law who was a farm wife and her name was Betty,
(22:19):
And so during his career he had decided to measure
everything he broadcasted according to the Betty test. The question
was would this mean something to Betty? Would it impact her,
would it be of interest to her? Would it ennoble
her in some way? And so he constantly thought about
(22:40):
his sister in law, Betty, who was a Missouri farm wife. Well,
I think that that helped him not only have respect
for his audience high and low wherever they were in
America and around the world, but also to frame his
comments in a way they would appreciate. He would technical language,
(23:01):
he would drain out the political arcanea of what was
happening in Washington, DC. And he would just speak in
the way you would to a Missouri farm wife if
you ran on to her at the local store. That
appealed at people. They were living in a complex world.
They were living in an increasingly bureaucratic world. Knowledge was
increasing rapidly. Media was bringing everything in the universe right
(23:25):
to their door. But Paul Harvey spoke in simple, moral,
accurate terms that also filtered out what wouldn't be interesting
to Betty. He genuinely found interest in the common. He
thought that what was going on with farmer Jones in
Iowa was important, the moral decision that farmer Jones had made,
(23:48):
the barbershop quartet he had started, the way he tried
new crops. Sometimes he would go dark and say, farmer
Jones is a farmer no more, and he would describe
what shut down the family farm in Iowa for the
Jones family. In other words, he didn't just infuse the
common with meaning. He recognized it and drew it out
(24:09):
so it didn't sound strange that he was moving from
a description of a boy raising a deer in Missouri
and then switch over to a report about Watergate. Somehow
they seemed significant to the human spirit, they seemed significant
to America. It all seemed of a piece and he
(24:30):
did that masterfully. So picture it. Now. You've got the Betties,
his sister in law in Missouri, a farmwife, hearing about
complex matters in London in very simple terms. But then
you've also got the President of the United States hearing
about the boy raising the deer on his farm. It
fed a new culture, a new understanding of the world
(24:51):
into people who didn't daily live in those contexts, and
that's exactly how it impacted me. I really honor Paul
Harvey for that. He brought the world you weren't in
to your world and brought something of your world to
those who didn't know your world. And that was a
masterstroke on his part. But I think that was a
reflection of the culture of KVOO and some other stations
(25:14):
owned by that same network and the group of affiliates,
because they believed that they would have a greater impact
build a good audience if they were most authentic, that
their power came from being authentic and according to their culture,
and not just a repeater station for what came from
(25:34):
the East. This distinguished them and it shaped the career
of Paul Harvey, a man with one of the most
signature styles in American broadcasting. But it came about because
of this sort of proud, fierce Oklahoma, Midwest rural. We
are who we are. We're not living on Fifth Avenue
(25:55):
in New York, and we don't intend to. He often
said that he couldn't stay in New York for more
than th days, because if he did, he would begin
to believe that the Suns sat behind the un Building.
In other words, that the Sun rose and sat on
New York.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
And you're listening to Stephen Mansfield tell one heck of
his story. What frames Paul Harvey's life is that experience
at that station, that taught him that culture matters and
that it frames a point of view. And yet Harvey
never excluded big cities. He didn't see it as big
city versus rural Midwestern America. But he put and never
(26:33):
abandoned that framework forward in everything he did, unapologetically, not
with a chip on his shoulder, but out of sheer,
straightforward pride. The story of his Midwestern values and where
they sprang. And by the way, the values of this show,
they sprang from a station called WHO, one of our
(26:54):
prime stations and one of our most important ones, right
in Des Moines. And I grew up my entire life
in northern New Jersey, near New York City, but had
an attraction to rural America that I think sprang from
Paul Harvey now that I'm listening to this, and from
people like Bear Bryant. So many of the people whose
lives I emulated and admired came from this part of
(27:15):
the country, these parts of the country. The story of
Paul Harvey continues a broadcasting legend here on our American stories.
(27:37):
And we continue with our American stories and the final
portion of our story on broadcast legend Paul Harvey. When
we last left off, Harvey had developed what he called
the Betty Test, which distilled the news for those living
in America's heartland rather than the East. It was because
of this that Paul Harvey started to rise. Continue with
(28:00):
his story here again is Stephen Mansfield.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
Those early days prior to World War Two. His rise
really certainly is God given talent, but it's working hard.
It's studying. It's not assuming that he should be given something.
He's laboring. He's laboring in small stations. He's studying the
craft and doing it on his own. He hardly ever
went to any course that taught broadcasting. He hardly had
(28:31):
any formal instruction, but he just learned on the job
by paying close attention to what worked, what the station,
got cards and letters about what resonated with people, and
he built his career on that. It's interesting that in
his career people sometimes forget, given that he was such
a personality of what an astute and gifted reporter he was.
(28:53):
He could watch events, understand what was happening, anticipate what
might be coming, describe it, powerflee in a way that
would make you lean into your radio set and stick
with you long after. And he would stay with some
stories as long as they lived. Think about how long
he would have been reporting Watergate or Vietnam. And people
(29:13):
often said that they understood more of what was going
on in Vietnam than they did from the briefings of
generals on the air, from the speeches of presidents, from
the debates in Congress, and from print media. So it
was pretty stunning. Now. He leaned conservative in his broadcast
and in his politics. He was very concerned about communist
(29:33):
influence in America. He was very concerned, quite frankly, about
left leaning professors on American university campuses. One of the
things he became concerned about was lack security at some
of our nuclear and atomic facilities, at some of our
military facilities. This really sent him over the edge because
he felt like there might be some Communist collusion and undermining.
(29:56):
He felt like people were being lax. So, in one
of the most unusual moments of his life, he decided
to see if he could break into the Argonne National Laboratory.
This was not far from his home. He had gotten information,
as often happens with well known broadcasters, people bring them
information and leak things to them, and he had gotten
(30:19):
information that there was lack of security there, that people
were carrying information out, things of that nature, and as
a result, he decided with a couple of friends to
break in. Now it's hard to know in retrospect exactly
what prompted this. Only Paul got over the fence. His
friends did not. They didn't get over the fence before
jeep of security officials began to arrive, he was taken
(30:43):
into custody. The others ran away, and Paul claimed that
he had been advised and was working in league with
security forces and law enforcement forces. There were probably some
truth to that. He had probably been encouraged, perhaps by
some in common There's no question that some other folks
like this knew about what he was planning to do
(31:04):
and were encouraging him. And the fact that he got
off with no sentence at all, not even a serious hearing,
means probably he had some people who were maybe sponsors
in Washington, d c. But it says a lot about
Paul Harvey that he so cared about the state of
his nation, and so cared about lack of security at
(31:24):
some of our secure facilities that he actually climbed a
fence and tried to break into one of the most
secure and high level national research laboratories in the country.
It's not something he talked about a great deal later.
I think he was grateful to get by unscathed, but
he was trying to do what he considered to be
(31:46):
investigative journalism and perhaps make a turn in American history,
and certainly raised the concern about the influence of communists
in our security services. That's really where he was going.
So it's fascinating episode. It's still a bit of a mystery.
People still praise him and criticize him for it, but
I think it shows the intensity and the devoted patriotism
(32:06):
of Paul Harvey. However misguided this episode might be, but
once his managers and producers began to realize that he
was most powerful when he was commenting from a personal perspective,
bringing his moral grid to the air, slapping the hands
of some statesmen, encouraging others, celebrating the humor and the
(32:30):
poetry and the glory of it all. That's what he
was at his strength. Paul Harvey's numbers were stunning at
the time, and you get different estimates for different seasons,
but it's not wrong to say that Paul Harvey would
average about thirty five million listeners to his Paul Harvey
(32:50):
News and Comment. Now, you've got to realize that's in
an America. During his heyday, that's north of two hundred million.
People were in the three hundred millions. Now, so that's
thirty million, thirty five million adults in a nation of
arguably the low two hundred millions, and these are thinking people,
(33:13):
these are working people, these are people in DC. This
is unbelievably influential and far beyond some of the major
evening newscasts and so on that we would still talk about.
You know, Walter Cronkite, I don't know exactly what his
audience was, but I remember him commenting that he was
humorously in competition with Paul Harvey. So the influence of
(33:35):
those two men, Walter Kronkite and Paul Harvey, was huge.
He was arguably the most powerful, most influential broadcaster of
his age, a man who in his eighty signs one
hundred million dollar contract ten million a year for ten years.
And he was a brilliant businessman and one of the
great spokesman voices of commercials in American history. Part of
(33:57):
the reason was people knew a couple of things about him.
First of all, he used every product that he pitched.
He never spoke of a product that he didn't actually use.
For example, I recall from my own listening years that
he used a swin Eradyne bike that was the stationary
bike that had a big air wheel at the front
(34:17):
of it, and he used it and he talked about
his commercial was talking about losing weight and how he
liked it, and what he did while he wrote it,
and what time of day he wrote it, and how
Angel sometimes his wife would use it. Well, when you've
got the most popular broadcaster in America speaking of things,
he's used the refrigerator, a new way of doing ice cubes,
(34:38):
what have you. That's very influential. The other thing is
that he wove it into the broadcast, almost as though
it was part of the broadcast. People knew it was
a commercial, but he would say, so.
Speaker 3 (34:50):
Call your dad, tell him to tune in. I'll have
this for you on page.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
Two, page two, such and such refriger is just a
miracle of our time, Angel and I use it, And
he would go right on. People knew it was a commercial,
but it was done in the same Paul Harvey tones.
It was personal and he had a lot of respect
for his sponsors. He used to say, I have great
respect for those who put their money where my mouth is,
(35:19):
meaning they fund my show. He was known to be
unbelievably influential, and of course they would do studies to
see how he would impact sales of a given product
that it was off the charts, and so his sponsorships
were record breaking. But the reason was he would move
from the story of the moose in Montana and the
funny thing that happened with the hunter and go right
(35:40):
into talking about the Schwinn Aerodyne stationary bike, and people
were just as fascinated with the one as they were
with the other. And by the way, it wasn't always
certain that he would be so esteemed. Remember again, he
broke into a laborate and a secure laboratory facility, trying
to poke his finger in the eye a little bit
(36:03):
of the national government, which he considered to be lax.
He broke from presidents He said, Resident Nixon, I love you,
but you're wrong, And it was a huge moment in
American broadcasting. He risked, he criticized. It wasn't guaranteed he
would always be so beloved. It wasn't guaranteed that official
Washington would come to revere him as it did. But
(36:26):
ultimately he did receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which
is one of the highest honors a civilian can receive
in our country, and I think it was well deserved.
I think he had been the voice of America, perhaps
even more of a moral influence in America than, for example,
Billy Graham. I can tell you quickly that I listened
(36:47):
to Paul Harvey while when I was a military brat
living behind the Iron Curtain in Berlin, Germany, and I
would sometimes listen to Paul Harvey with my German friends.
So my German friends who spoke English English, and they
had never heard these things, They had no idea. All
of their knowledge about American and American history was pretty
(37:08):
much distilled through you know, German media and the German
education system. And even though Germans honored Americans, certainly for
their sacrifices in World War Two, etc. It wasn't the
heartfelt thing that Paul Harvey brought. And I remember looking
at those German young friends and being aware that they
were falling in love with America like I had through
(37:30):
the voice of Paul Harvey. And now you know.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
The rest of the story.
Speaker 1 (37:40):
And a beautiful job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Monty Montgomery. And a special thanks to
author Stephen Mansfield. His book Paul Harvey's America is available
wherever you buy your books. And what a story. Seventy
years on the year, every day since nineteen forty five
straight to two thousand and nine. Hurtle straight in to
(38:01):
the twenty first century, as modern and present a voice
as we've ever known. The story of Paul Harvey, the
story of modern American broadcasting. He was the best there
ever was on our American stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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