By MARK LEIBOVICH
Published: September 29, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/magazine/03beck-t.html?pagewanted=all
Glenn Beck was sprawled out on his office couch a couple of weeks ago,
taking - as self-helpers like to say -- an inventory. "I think what the
country is going through right now is, in a way, what I went through
with my alcoholism," he told me. "You can either live or die. You have a
choice." Beck, who is 46, was in the Midtown Manhattan offices of his
production company, Mercury Radio Arts, which is named for Mercury
Theater, the company created by Orson Welles. He had just finished his
three-hour syndicated radio show and was a few hours away from his
television show. It was a Wednesday afternoon in the middle of
September, and Beck had just returned from a week's vacation in the
Grand Tetons followed by a quick hop to Anchorage, where he and Sarah
Palin appeared at an event on Sept. 11.
Beck has a square, boyish face, an alternately plagued and twinkle-eyed
demeanor that conjures (when Beck is wearing glasses) the comedian Drew
Carey. He is 6-foot-2, which is slightly jarring when you first meet
him, because he is all head and doughiness on television; I never
thought of Beck as big or small, just as someone who was suddenly
ubiquitous and who talked a lot and said some really astonishing things,
to a point where it made you wonder - constantly - whether he was being
serious.
At some point in the past few months, Beck ceased being just the guy who
cries a lot on Fox News or a "rodeo clown" (as he has described himself)
or simply a voice of the ultraconservative opposition to President
Obama. In record time, Beck has traveled the loop of curiosity to
ratings bonanza to self-parody to sage. It is remarkable to think he has
been on Fox News only since January 2009.
In person, Beck is sheepish and approachable, betraying none of the
grandiosity or bluster you might expect from a man who predicted "the
next Great Awakening" to a few hundred thousand people in late August at
the Lincoln Memorial or who declared last year that the president has a
"deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture." He wore a
blue dress shirt tucked into jeans and brown loafers, which he kicked
off as soon as he sat down. He showed little interest in the results
from primary elections held the day before - upsets in Delaware and New
York for Tea Party candidates whose followers often invoke Beck and
Palin as spiritual leaders and even promote them as a prospective
presidential ticket in 2012.
"Not involved with the Tea Party," Beck told me, shrugging. While many
identify Beck with a political insurgency - as Rush Limbaugh was
identified with the Republican sweep of 1994 - to believe that the
nation suffers from "a political problem" comically understates things,
in his view. "I stand with the Tea Party as long as they stand for
certain principles and values," Beck told me. He is a
principles-and-values guy.
Beck talks like someone who is accustomed to thinking out loud and
inflicting his revelations in real time. He speaks in the language of
therapy, in which he has been steeped through years of 12-step programs
and the Mormon-affiliated addiction-treatment center he and his wife run
in the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut region. As he lay on his
office couch, he recalled a very low moment. It was back in the
mid-1990s. He was newly divorced, lying on the olive green shag carpet
of a two-bedroom apartment in Hamden, Conn., that smelled like soup. It
had a tiny kitchen, and his young children slept in a bed together when
they visited on weekends. "It was the kind of place where loser guys who
just got divorced wind up," Beck said. "You'd see a new guy come in,
you'd say hello and he'd walk in alone, and you'd be like, 'Yeah, I
understand, brother.' "
Beck understands, brother. Communists in the White House are bent on
"fundamentally transforming" the country; progressives speak of putting
"the common good" before the individual, which "is exactly the kind of
talk that led to the death camps in Germany," as he said on his show in
May. Or, as he said in July of last year, "Everything that is getting
pushed through Congress, including this health care bill," is "driven by
President Obama's thinking on . . . reparations" and his desire to
"settle old racial scores." It sounds harsh, maybe, but this is the
rhetoric of crisis and desperation, and so much of the population is too
blind drunk to recognize the reality - which is that the country is
lying on an olive green shag carpet on the brink of ending it all. "Some
have to destroy their family and their job and their house and their
income," Beck told me. "Some don't get it, and they die."
Some do get it, and they revere Glenn Beck.
WHILE THE RIGHT has traditionally responded to its aggrieved sense of
alienation with anger, Beck is not particularly angry. He seems
sorrowful; his prevailing message is umbrage born of self-taught wisdom.
He is more agonized than mad. He is post-angry.
Beck rarely speaks with the squinty-eyed certainty or smugness of Rush
Limbaugh or his fellow Fox News hosts Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. He
often changes his mind or nakedly contradicts himself. "When you listen
and watch me, it's where I am in my thinking in the moment," Beck told
me. "I'm trying to figure it out as I go." He will sometimes stop
midsentence and recognize that something he is about to say could be
misunderstood and could cause him trouble. Then, more often than not, he
will say it anyway.
In the middle of his analogy to me about his own personal crash and the
country's need to heal itself, Beck looked at his publicist with a flash
of alarm about how I might construe what he was saying. "He is going to
write a story that I believe the whole country is alcoholics," he said.
And then he went on to essentially compare his "Restoring Honor" pageant
at the Lincoln Memorial to a large-scale A.A. meeting. "When I bottomed
out, I couldn't put it back together myself," Beck told me. "I could do
all the hard work. I could do the 12 steps. But I needed like-minded
people around me."
He needed support, just as responsible Americans need it now to
reinforce the principles and values that the founders instilled and
that, he says, have since decayed. "You need people to be able to reach
out and connect and say, 'Let me help hold you when you're stumbling,
and you hold me when I'm stumbling, because what we're going through now
is a storm of confusion.' " Fans approach Beck and give him hugs. Do
people feel they can hug Limbaugh?
There is something feminine about Beck - the soft features, the crying
on the air, the reflexive vulnerability. It sets him apart from the
standard, testosterone-addled rant artists of cable and talk radio.
Women tune into Beck's radio show more heavily than they do to other
conservative commentators, says Chris Balfe, the president and chief
operating officer of Mercury, which employs more than 40 people. And
Beck's television show is on at 5 p.m. Eastern, traditionally a slot
with more women viewers. (On a typical day, Beck's show is recorded on
more DVRs than any other cable-news program.) But Beck also appeals to a
more traditionally female sensibility. "He works through things in real
time," Balfe told me. "Maybe he'll come back tomorrow and say, 'You know
what, I've given this some thought, and here's what I'm thinking now.' "
Or maybe he'll come back sooner. Within a few sentences of proposing
Obama's "deep-seated hatred for white people," he added this caveat:
"I'm not saying that he doesn't like white people."
Beck's staff and loyalists love to compare Beck with Oprah Winfrey.
Balfe was the first to say it to me, adding the requisite faux apology.
As Winfrey does, Beck talks a great deal about himself and subscribes to
the pop-recovery ethic. "Part of Oprah's appeal is that people see her
as a real person," says Joel Cheatwood, the Fox executive who initially
brought Beck to CNN's Headline News and then to Fox. "She has struggled
with her weight; she is open about it. Glenn is not a pretty boy. He
comes off as a regular guy who has also been open about his struggles."
(Beck dabbled in Pilates recently, he disclosed on radio.)
The presumed Oprah parallel is corporate as well as stylistic. Beck,
like Winfrey, has a knack for making best sellers of books he mentions
on the air. He publishes a magazine, sells more than a million dollars
in merchandise and speaks of an array of possible multimedia ventures.
Beck's magazine, Fusion, is so named because it is a "fusion of
entertainment and enlightenment." Beck himself is a study in fusions. He
blends TV-ready empathy with push-the-edge conservative talk, as well as
self-doubt with the self-absorbed grandeur of a man whose hard-won
recovery grants him the power to speak from the steps of the Lincoln
Memorial.
Beck is constantly admitting his weaknesses and failures, which he
wields as both a crutch and a shield. "Maybe Glenn's transparency is
what keeps him out of trouble," says Robert Beath, Beck's drama teacher
at Sehome High School in Bellingham, Wash. Beath, who was fond of Beck
as a teenager, said Beck appears to now think that his revelations grant
him license. "When he says, 'I am not perfect,' he seems to escape
accountability for his various points of view. Yet he expects others to
be accountable for their point of view without seeming to allow them the
'I am not perfect' exception."
That's where the Winfrey comparison falls apart. You could never imagine
her joking about poisoning the speaker of the house or talking about
choking the life out of a filmmaker or fantasizing about beating a
congressman "to death with a shovel" (as Beck did for Nancy Pelosi,
Michael Moore and Charles Rangel, respectively). Beck is divisive.
"He has a spiritual connection to us; you can hear his heart speaking,"
Susan Trevethan, a psychiatric nurse from Milford, Conn., told me at the
"Restoring Honor" rally. "I believe he has been divinely guided to be
here in this place," she said. "He is doing the research. He is teaching
us."
Or if you prefer: "Even the leather-winged shouting heads at Fox News
look like intellectual giants next to this bleating, benighted
Cassandra," wrote The Buffalo Beast, in naming Beck one of the 50 most
loathsome people in America in 2006. (No. 24 then, but in January he
made it to No. 1.) "It's like someone found a manic, doom-prophesying
hobo in a sandwich board, shaved him, shot him full of Zoloft and gave
him a show."
O.K., the dude's polarizing. Got it.
The Mercury Radio Arts headquarters are a museum to Beck's quirks,
aspirations, successes and self. Poster-size color photos of Beck, taken
by his personal photographer, George Lange, dominate the lobby. One
features Beck wrapped up head to toe in yellow police tape; another has
him dressed and made up like a rodeo clown. The offices evoke the
self-image of a multimedia entrepreneur and would-be titan: portraits of
Orson Welles, Ronald Reagan and Walt Disney hang on the walls. Balfe,
the chief executive, keeps a massive red-and-blue "Capitalism" poster
above his desk - hand-painted by Beck.
Next door to Balfe's office is Beck's, which is spacious, sun-filled and
arrayed with family photos, books and a yellowed copy of The Boston Post
with the headline "Woodrow Wilson Is Dead." His computer flashes with
alternating screen savers of his second wife, Tania, and his four
children - two from each marriage - along with photos of landmarks like
Pike Place Market in Seattle, near where Beck grew up.
Beck can be difficult to get to. He is acutely conscious of his personal
safety. He feels targeted. Security guards trail him on the street. He
wears bulletproof vests at public events. He wanted to build a six-foot
barrier around his estate in New Canaan, Conn., running him afoul of
local zoning ordinances. The barrier would not stop those who would do
him harm, Beck's lawyer told New Canaan's zoning commission, but it
would slow them down. "It will stop anything people send into the
property, whether photographs or bullets," the lawyer said, according to
The New Canaan Advertiser.
Beck says he trusts very few people. He gives few interviews. I first
spoke to him by phone, a few days after the rally in Washington. He
sounded thrilled - on the phone, as he did on the air that week - with
how everything went on Aug. 28. But he never seems far from the
precipice of something. It is all precarious.
"I said to someone the other day," Beck told me, "I am as close today to
a complete and total collapse as I was on the first day of recovery." He
calls himself a "recovering dirtbag." There were many days, he said,
when he would avoid the bathroom mirror so he would not have to face
himself. He was in therapy with "Dr. Jack Daniels." He smoked marijuana
every day for about 15 years. He fired an underling for bringing him the
wrong pen. And, according to a Salon.com report, he once called the wife
of a radio rival to ridicule her - on the air - about her recent
miscarriage.
"You get to a place where you disgust yourself," Beck told me. "Where
you realize what a weak, pathetic and despicable person you have
become."
Beck grew up in Mount Vernon, Wash., about 50 miles north of Seattle. He
was an unfocused student with discrete passions and talents who could
have benefited from a more stable home environment - and a prescription
for Ritalin. His love affair with radio began, he says, when his mother
gave him an album set of radio classics that included Welles's "War of
the Worlds." He was 8 and spent much of his free time honing his radio
voice into a tape recorder.
Bill and Mary Beck, Glenn's parents, owned a bakery in Mount Vernon that
eventually closed. The couple divorced when Glenn was 13, and Mary Beck,
who battled alcoholism, drowned a few years later along with a male
companion on a boating expedition in 1979 on a bay near Tacoma. Beck
deemed her death a suicide (though local newspapers and government
records called it an accident, according to Salon.com's Alexander
Zaitchik). Beck was 15 then, and he says the episode sank him into
decades of misery, chemical dependence and misanthropic behavior that
played out on and off the air at a procession of FM stations across the
country - morning-D.J. jobs in markets like Provo, Utah; Phoenix; Corpus
Christi, Tex.; and New Haven, where he hit bottom.
I asked Beck if he could pinpoint the moment he decided to change his
life. "Here's something I haven't told anyone before," Beck said. "When
my mother was at her worst, she was dating a guy who was abusive. He was
a big Navy guy too." It was right at the end of her life. Glenn got
between his mother and the man during an ugly fight. "I just came in and
stood between them and said, 'Get out of our house.' " The man left, but
he came back a few days later and begged forgiveness. "When I sobered
up, I remember looking back to that point," Beck told me. "Something I
learned still kind of plays a role." He went on to say: "One of the
phrases I use is: You need to be who you were born to be, not the people
we have allowed ourselves to become. Don't let life and the world shape
us. That's not who we are."
I asked Beck how he knew that his mother's death was a suicide. The man
who drowned with her was that same abusive boyfriend, he said. Either
the two of them jumped overboard at the same time, or Mary fell in and
the Navy man jumped in to save her - and that was unlikely. Why? Beck
said he been out on a boat with the boyfriend before, and the man
preached to him never to jump in and save somebody who is drowning. It
only endangers the would-be rescuer. Throw in a life preserver instead.
Plus, the Navy man's clothes were found neatly folded, along with his
wallet and watch.
AT JUST 21, Beck took a job as a morning-drive impresario in Louisville.
His show, "Captain Beck and the A-Team," included the usual antics of
the genre: juvenile jokes, pranks, impersonations, sound effects and fat
jokes about a news reader for a rival station - anything to fill the
four hours.
By most accounts, Beck succeeded; but by his own, he was miserable.
"There was a bridge abutment in Louisville, Ky., that had my name on
it," Beck wrote in his 2003 book, "Real America: Messages From the Heart
and Heartland." "Every day I prayed for the strength to be able to drive
my car at 70 m.p.h. into that bridge abutment." He says he contemplated
only violent suicides ("like the bridge abutment thing and putting a gun
in my mouth while listening to Nirvana"). He attributes his inability to
off himself to cowardice and stupidity - qualities that also suited him
to his tour of Morning Zoo America. "I hated people," Beck wrote, waxing
pop-psychological, "because I hated myself."
By the mid-'90s, Beck had been married, divorced, pony tailed and
seemingly at a dead end. He joined Alcoholics Anonymous, reluctantly
attending his first meetings in a church basement in Cheshire, Conn. The
olive-green-carpet episode was formative but not a singular turning
point. "It was more a point of recognition," Beck told me. "Are you
going to stand or are you going to grow up? Are you going to succeed or
fail, live or die? What is it going to be? There weren't any angels or
the sky opening up." He embarked on a period of "searching" and
self-education. The process was largely haphazard. He tells of walking
into a bookstore and loading up on books by a hodgepodge that included
Alan Dershowitz, Pope John Paul II, Carl Sagan, Nietzsche, Billy Graham
and Adolf Hitler. "The library of a serial killer," he called it. He
even enrolled at Yale, with a written recommendation from an alum who
was a listener at the time, Senator Joe Lieberman. He took one class,
early Christology, but says he "spent more time trying to find a parking
space" than in class and quickly dropped out.
Beck met Tania in 1998. She walked into the New Haven radio station
where he was working to pick up a Sony Walkman she won in a contest.
They began dating. He wanted to marry, and she agreed, but only on the
condition that they find a religion together. They shopped around,
attended services and eventually settled on Mormonism - inspired in part
by Beck's best friend and radio sidekick, Pat Gray, who himself is
Mormon. Beck, who was brought up Roman Catholic, has called his faith
"the most important thing" in his life.
By the late 1990s, Beck had come to despise the FM zoo format. He was
becoming more spiritual, more engaged in news and current affairs and
more opinionated on the air about his political views (generally
conservative then, though not as much as now - he favored abortion
rights at the time). He was a connoisseur of talk radio and yearned to
break into the genre.
Beck moved to Tampa, Fla., in late 1999 - leaving his two daughters back
in Connecticut - to host his first talk-radio show, an afternoon slot on
WFLA. "I may have made the biggest mistake of my life in taking this
job," Beck recalls saying during his first segment on the air. "Because
I've just made a pact that I was going to leave my children in
Connecticut and move to Florida, and it's killing me. I may have traded
my children for this job."
Beck's radio show was heavily political but not exclusively. It was more
stream of consciousness - veering in unforeseen directions, as reflected
in the first segment. "I found it to be a very 'Seinfeld'-like radio
program," says Kraig Kitchin, the former president of Premiere Radio
Networks, who signed Beck to a national-syndication deal. "There was one
main plot streaming through the program and two or three subplots."
Joel Cheatwood, then the executive director of program development for
CNN and Headline News, heard Beck's radio show in late 2004, when Beck
was on the air in Philadelphia, and said he believed that the host could
translate to television. Cheatwood, a controversial innovator of
television news, pioneered the flashy "if it bleeds, it leads"
local-news formats. He persuaded Beck to join Headline News in 2006. As
with his first stint in Tampa, Beck had early doubts. "Glenn had been on
the air for about three weeks," recalled Cheatwood, who has one of the
most thrillingly sculptured waves of slicked-back hair I have ever seen.
"He came into my office and said something like, 'This is kind of a
disaster,' and he was right." Beck struggled to adapt his radio persona
to the regimented bites of television. "It was all over the board,"
Cheatwood says of the early Headline News show.
Beck compares his free-associative radio orientation to the real-time
oversharing ethic of today's culture. "My life is what I think our
children are going though with Facebook," he told me. "They're putting
things up there, because they're living their life, and everybody's
doing it." Eventually Beck learned to harness his talent to the demands
of television, at least somewhat. His best-known episode at Headline
News was a November 2006 interview with Keith Ellison, a Democrat from
Minnesota, who had just become the first Muslim elected to the House. "I
have to tell you, I have been nervous about this interview with you,"
Beck told Ellison to break the ice. "Because what I feel like saying is,
'Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.' And I know
you're not. I'm not accusing you of being an enemy, but that's the way I
feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way." Groups
complained, Beck expressed regret for "a poorly worded question" and Jon
Stewart played the clip on "The Daily Show." "Finally," Stewart said, "a
guy who says what people who aren't thinking are thinking."
BECK WAS LURED to Fox News by the prospect of more viewers and a
recruiting pitch by Cheatwood - who had since moved there - and the
network's president, Roger Ailes. He began his Fox News show the day
before Barack Obama's inauguration.
People watch Beck in remarkable numbers, at least by the standards of
his time slot on cable news - he averages more than two million viewers,
whether the topic is a founding father, an obscure president or a
little-known White House administrator.
"If you were in an imaginary meeting for a TV show," Bill Shine, Fox
News's programming director, says, "and someone said: 'I have an idea.
Let's spend a month talking about the founding fathers and get a bunch
of pictures of Benjamin Franklin and hang them up,' you'd be like,
'What?' But it works." Beck fashions himself a kind of self-teaching
populist for the Internet age. His characteristic chalkboard lends his
show an air of retro-professorial authority, despite the fact that Beck
did not attend college and says that before Sept. 11, 2001, "I didn't
know my butt from my elbow." He recommends books. He recently started
"Glenn Beck University," a special collection of "classes" on
GlennBeck.com to go with Beck's daily tutorials. Pat Gray said Beck was
"America's history professor."
"Beck offers a story about the American past for people who are feeling
right now very angry and alienated," says David Frum, a former
speechwriter for President George W. Bush and editor of the conservative
Web site Frum Forum. "It is different enough from the usual story in
that he makes them feel like they've got access to secret knowledge."
Beck's Fox News show intersperses history with weeping laments,
melodramatic calls to faith and vehement attacks on "progressives." He
also mixes in campy stage props and laughs straight from the Morning Zoo
playbook. One moment, he is giving an impassioned plea for the would-be
builder of Park51 to build elsewhere; the next moment, he is discussing
possible names for a hypothetical Islam-friendly gay bar next door
("Turban Cowboy," "You Mecca Me Hot").
"I find it riveting to watch," says Anita Dunn, the former White House
communications director whom Beck railed against prodigiously on the air
last year after she named Mother Teresa and Mao Zedong as her "favorite
political philosophers" (she says she was joking about Mao) in a
commencement address. "There is that edge where you are always thinking,
Is he going to totally lose it on camera?" Dunn told me.
The ethos of Beck's program is extreme doom and pessimism. In a lead-in
to Beck's show, Shepard Smith referred to his fellow host's studio as
"the Fear Chamber." This is another departure from the Limbaugh formula.
"Rush is basically of a quite optimistic creed," Frum says. "It's the
Reagan creed: America's best days are still to come. If we maintain the
free-enterprise system, we're all going to be richer and more united and
stronger. With Beck, there is no optimism."
On Fox News in early September, Beck stood in a mock doorway painted
gold. When the country's economic system reaches "the point of
insanity," he said, it is wise to invest in gold. "Gold prices are
climbing," Beck said, a point buttressed throughout the hour by
advertisements from gold dealers. On the other side of the golden
doorway is where things get really scary, he said. Who knows what dark,
apocalyptic things are there? "Is it bullets?" Beck wondered. "Is it
whiskey? Is it cigarettes?"
Beck often speaks of - and is teased about - his "bunker," where he will
retreat after the social fabric rends and the economic system collapses.
Some of his most devoted advertisers include companies that could thrive
in a period of total collapse - makers of emergency power generators,
for instance, or "survival seeds" (allowing citizens to grow their own
food).
I asked Beck if he actually had a bunker. No, he said, there is no
bunker. He does keep a great deal of food in reserve, although he says
that predates his fear that the world would melt down. Food storage is a
tenet of his Mormon faith, he said. It is for when tough times come.
"Am I actively engaged in survival training?" he told me. "No. Should I
be? Maybe."
BECK PERFORMS MORE than 20 live stage shows a year as part of what has
become a growing multimedia and merchandising empire that, according to
Forbes, earned $35 million between June 2009 and June 2010. At the end
of July, I paid $147 for a ticket to see him and Bill O'Reilly perform
together at a theater in the round in Westbury, N.Y., on Long Island -
part of Beck and O'Reilly's "Bold and Fresh" tour. The theater drew an
orderly suburban procession of khaki-wearing, Camry-driving Caucasians
who say they want their country back. The woman next to me complained
that her large oil can of Heineken and a pretzel cost $16. Air Supply
played there a few days earlier.
Beck and O'Reilly each spoke solo for about 40 minutes, followed by a
conversational duet by the two Fox News hosts. The sets mingled stand-up
comedy with political rants and, in Beck's case, a history sermon. It
included a call for America to return to the spirit of "divine
providence" that the founders intended - before it was perverted by
Manifest Destiny in the mid-19th century. "We've lost our way since
Andrew Jackson," said Beck, who wore an unlaced pair of black Chuck
Taylor sneakers. "Manifest Destiny is 'Get out of my way, I'm on a
mission from God.' That's where we went wrong. We must humble
ourselves."
Later, Beck and O'Reilly did a riff about Chelsea Clinton's wedding,
which was being held that night.
"What are the odds of Hillary Clinton inviting me to her daughter's
wedding?" O'Reilly asked Beck.
"What are the odds we have a Communist revolutionary in the White
House?" Beck replied, to loud applause.
A recurring theme of the evening was Beck and O'Reilly talking about how
despised they are by venomous critics bent on silencing them. Both wear
this "constant abuse" as a badge of honor and defiance, although, unlike
O'Reilly, Beck will betray vulnerability, even woundedness. "They want
to destroy you, get you off the air," O'Reilly told Beck. "And I want to
know if that bothers you?"
"It bothers me when I walk down the street with my children," Beck said,
"and my college-age daughter is holding my hand, and someone says
something horribly vicious. And my daughter hears them, cries and says
to me, 'Dad, all I wish is that people will remember that you are a dad
occasionally as well.' " (This was several weeks after Beck apologized
for doing an extended imitation of then-11-year-old Malia Obama on his
radio show. "Daddy," Beck said, mimicking the president's daughter, "why
do you hate black people so much?")
Beck seemed to draw more fans than O'Reilly, despite O'Reilly's
home-field advantage on his native Long Island. "He is a modern-day
prophet doing God's work," a man named Lee Hein told me. He resides in
Hawaii, where he wakes at 3 a.m. to hear a live stream of Beck's radio
show on the Internet. Hein, a plumbing contractor, recently purchased
three copies of Beck's novel "The Overton Window," five copies of his
book "Glenn Beck's Common Sense" and three copies of "Arguing With
Idiots." He likes to give the books out to educate his friends.
Several people at Beck's events described themselves as "students of
history" or "historians." When I asked one if he was affiliated with a
school or college, he said: "Yes. Glenn Beck University."
WHEN BECK MEETS his fans, he does so with the gusto of a public figure
engaging his constituents. People he meets often give him presents and
notes. He signs autographs, poses for photos. He has perfected the
Everyman shtick that presidential candidates spend years trying to
master in places like Iowa. No doubt, someone loyal to Beck will read
that and say, 'No, no, it's not a shtick.' Like many famous performers,
Beck is described by friends and supplicants as someone who is authentic
and real, that what you see is what you get. (It's usually their
public-relations person who says this.)
On the Thursday night before his Saturday bar mitzvah at the Lincoln
Memorial, Beck walked around the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
in anticipation of a "Divine Destiny" event he would host the next
night. "Divine Destiny" featured music, speeches and testimonials from a
procession of prominent spiritual teachers - priests, pastors, rabbis,
Chuck Norris.
Free tickets to "Divine Destiny" were triple hot, like the concert
passes Beck used to give away to the 23rd caller on the Morning Zoo.
People lined up outside in hopes of getting tickets. Beck came out to
say hello. Tania Beck handed out pizza. Beck wore a blue baseball cap,
pink shirt and thick-rimmed glasses. He looked like a square dad
checking in on the kids at a sleepover. "Do you smell the pizza?" he
asked. People greeted him with shrieks, whoops and gasps.
"Are you the first in line?" Beck asked a man with a crew cut and wispy
beard from Fayetteville, Ark.
"Yes, sir," the man said.
Beck had a special prize for the man. "I haven't given this to anybody,"
Beck said. It was a Badge of Merit, an award Beck modeled on the Purple
Heart-like token that George Washington bestowed for meritorious conduct
(for, say, valor in a war or the commitment required to score free
tickets).
Beck hugged his way through the line. People were moved, some tearful.
"It's such an honor," a woman said softly, hugging him. "God bless you,
man," a guy in a Dallas Cowboys shirt said. "Thank you for giving us a
voice," another woman added.
"We hate Woodrow Wilson," another woman called out. This is like a
secret handshake among Beck followers, who have heard his diatribes
about the evils of our 28th president, a father of the Progressive Era.
"I hate him," Beck affirmed for the Woodrow Wilson-hating women at the
Kennedy Center. "I hate that guy."
A mother asked him to pose for a photo with her and her autistic child
who, the mother says, watches Beck every day. Like Palin, Beck has a
special-needs child - a daughter, Mary, who has cerebral palsy - and he
often hears from parents who have dealt with similar circumstances.
Beck then stopped and addressed a section of the line. "Do you guys know
what's going on here tonight?" Beck asked them.
"Magic," answered a woman in an orange T-shirt. "Miracles."
"There are 2,400 seats," Beck explained. "Most of them will be pastors
and priests and rabbis. And it's the beginning."
He started to cry.
"It's the beginning of the. . . ." He choked up, making it hard to make
out his words.
"It's going to be neat," he finally mustered.
Beck seems able to cry on cue. He says he is a softie who is prone to
crying during television commercials. He is an emotional person, Balfe
says, which speaks to his sincerity and the reason that people are so
quick to identify with him.
As Beck worked the Kennedy Center, his every move was captured by a
videographer who was with him during his trip to Washington. I watched
the intimate event from my desktop - it was linked on GlennBeck.com and
available to premium "insider extreme" subscribers ($9.95 a month). It
was one of the many times I found myself wondering whether this was
real, part of the show or some fusion of both.
ON THE AIR and in person, Beck often goes on long stretches that are
warm, conciliatory and even plaintive. He says he yearns for the
cohesion in the country after Sept. 11, 2001, and will speak in
paragraphs that could fit into Barack Obama's plea for national unity in
his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. "There's a lot we
can disagree on, but our values and principles can unite us," Beck said
from the Lincoln Memorial.
But "standing together" can be a tough sell from someone who is so
willing to pick at some of the nation's most tender scabs. Beck's
statement that the president's legislative agenda is driven by Obama's
desire for "reparations" and his "desire to settle old racial scores" is
hardly a uniting message. While public figures tend to eventually learn
(some the hard way) that Nazi, Hitler and Holocaust comparisons
inevitably offend a lot of people, Beck seems not to care. In a
forthcoming book about Beck, "Tears of a Clown," the Washington Post
columnist Dana Milbank writes that in the first 14 months of Beck's Fox
News show, Beck and his guests mentioned fascism 172 times, Nazis 134
times, Hitler 115 times, the Holocaust 58 times and Joseph Goebbels 8
times.
In his quest to root out progressives, Beck compared himself to Israeli
Nazi-hunters. "To the day I die I am going to be a progressive-hunter,"
he vowed on his radio show earlier this year. "I'm going to find these
people that have done this to our country and expose them. I don't care
if they're in nursing homes."
"Raising questions" is Beck's favorite rhetorical method. Last year
during the health care debate, Beck compared Obama's economic agenda to
Nazi Germany - specifically he paralleled the White House chief of staff
Rahm Emanuel's statement that "you never want a serious crisis to go to
waste" with how Hitler used the world economic crisis as a pivot point.
Photos of Hitler, Stalin and Lenin then appeared on screen. "Is this
where we're headed?" Beck asked. He allowed that "I am not predicting
that we go down that road."
President Obama is not a Muslim, Beck has said, correctly. But Beck
can't help wondering aloud on his show: "He needlessly throws his hat
into the ring to defend the ground-zero mosque. He hosts Ramadan
dinners, which a president can do. But then you just add all of this
stuff up - his wife goes against the advice of the advisers, jets to
Spain for vacation. What does she do there? She hits up the Alhambra
palace mosque. Fine, it's a tourist attraction. But is there anything
more to this? Are they sending messages? I don't know. I don't know."
Beck and his friends emphasize that he is driven by principles, not
politics. He has been critical of Republicans as well as of Democrats,
of George W. Bush as well as of Obama. He says that American citizens
who are terrorist suspects should be read their Miranda rights, and he
opposes a Constitutional amendment that would ban flag-burning. His
friends object to any hint that Beck has merely fashioned his worldview
according to a marketplace that rewards shock, chutzpah and discord. "If
you know Glenn at all, you know he believes every word of what he says,"
Chris Balfe says. "And he believes it down to the core of who he is."
Beck is also a showman at his core and a workaholic. His insomniac mind
spins with ideas for segments and revenue streams (which he will duly
e-mail to his staff at 3 in the morning). He sleeps little: three, maybe
five hours a night if he is lucky, Beck told me. His Mormonism forbids
coffee, but he consumes a lot of Diet Coke and chocolate.
He begins his day with a 7:30 meeting with about six or seven writers,
researchers and producers split between the television and radio teams.
Beck, who runs the meeting, throws out ideas for the show, and the staff
will discuss them. "When he walks in, he has about 60 percent of what he
wants to talk about mapped out in his brain," says Steve Burguiere, a
Beck radio sidekick who goes by the name Stu. That, Burguiere says, will
form the basic kernel of what he will talk about on the air. I asked
Burguiere if Beck worked from a script, which made him chuckle. "If we
could only get him to work from a script," he said.
BECK IS A STRENUOUS cross-promoter. He spoke constantly on the air about
his Washington rally before and after the event. He invites viewers and
listeners to visit his Web site and, better yet, the Glenn Beck Store
("Restoring Honor" photograph books can be preordered for $35) and
become an "insider extreme" member for premium video and audio links. He
recently started a new Web site, the Blaze, which he also mentions on
his television and radio shows.
The cross-promotion can be a sore spot at Fox News, particularly for its
president, Roger Ailes, who has complained about Beck's hawking his
non-Fox ventures too much on his Fox show. Ailes has communicated this
to Beck himself and through intermediaries. It goes to a larger tension
between Fox News and Beck in what has been a mutually beneficial
relationship. Ailes, a former Republican media guru, runs his top-rated
cable-news network like a sharp-edged campaign, speaking with a single
voice and - ideally - for the benefit solely of Fox News's bottom line.
To some degree, all of Fox News's top opinion personalities have side
ventures - speeches, books, radio - that can invite static from the
network. In April, for instance, Fox News bosses vetoed a planned
appearance by Hannity at a fund-raiser for a Tea Party group in
Cincinnati. But more than any other person at Fox News, Beck operates as
a stand-alone entity. He is the only major personality at the network
whose office is not at Fox News headquarters in the News Corp building
(Mercury is a few blocks down Sixth Avenue). He employs his own
publicist, Matthew Hiltzik, a communications consultant who is the son
of Beck's agent, George Hiltzik. Beck receives a $2.5 million salary
from Fox News, which bumps to $2.7 million next year, the last of the
contract. It is a small fraction of Beck's revenues, the bulk of which
he brings in from his radio and print deals.
"There is always going to be the person within the organization who may
take issue with or doesn't like the way the network is programming
certain things," says Cheatwood, the Fox News executive who oversees
Beck's show. "I allow for that anywhere. But in terms of the
relationship between Fox and Glenn, it's extremely solid."
Ailes, who declined to comment for this article, has generally been
supportive of Beck. But he has also been vocal around the network about
how Beck does not fully appreciate the degree to which Fox News has made
him the sensation he has become in recent months. In the days following
Beck's Lincoln Memorial rally, which by Beck's estimate drew a
half-million people, Ailes told associates that if Beck were still at
Headline News, there would have been 30 people on the Mall. Fox News
devoted less news coverage to the rally than CNN and MSNBC did, which
Beck has pointed out himself on the air.
Off-the-record sniping shoots in both directions. You can view some of
this as positioning for what could be a contentious contract
negotiation. But the friction is evident in many areas. When I mentioned
Beck's name to several Fox reporters, personalities and staff members,
it reliably elicited either a sigh or an eye roll. Several Fox News
journalists have complained that Beck's antics are embarrassing Fox,
that his inflammatory rhetoric makes it difficult for the network to
present itself as a legitimate news outlet. Fearful that Beck was
becoming the perceived face of Fox News, some network insiders leaked
their dissatisfaction in March to The Washington Post's media critic,
Howard Kurtz, a highly unusual breach at a place where complaints of
internal strains rarely go public.
While Beck's personal ventures and exposure have soared this year, his
television ratings have declined sharply - perhaps another factor in the
network's impatience. His show now averages two million viewers, down
from a high of 2.8 million in 2009, according to the Nielsen Ratings.
And as of Sept. 21, 296 advertisers have asked that their commercials
not be shown on Beck's show (up from 26 in August 2009). Fox also has a
difficult time selling ads on "The O'Reilly Factor" and "Fox and
Friends" when Beck appears on those shows as a guest. Beck's show is
known in the TV sales world as "empty calories," meaning he draws great
ratings but is toxic for ad sales. If nothing else, I sensed that people
around Fox News have grown weary after months of "It's all about Glenn."
I was sitting with Bill Shine, the director of programming, on the
Wednesday after the "Restoring Honor" event, which was held on a
Saturday and still drawing analysis in the news media four days later.
At the end of a half-hour interview in which Shine spoke well of Beck, a
look of slight irritation flashed his face. He shook his head slightly.
"The president of the United States ends the war in Iraq," Shine said,
which Obama did the night before in a speech from the Oval Office, "and
on Wednesday we're still talking about Glenn Beck."
NO ONE SEEMS to quite know what to make of Beck these days. On "Fox News
Sunday" the day after the "Restoring Honor" gathering, Chris Wallace
asked him, "What are you?"
Beck appears conflicted over whether he wants to be the face of Honor
Restored or the voice of a Great American Freakout or whether some
fusion of the two is possible. He told me that he has enjoyed himself
more since Aug. 28, an event that included no references to contemporary
politics. It is not clear if this new tenor is a trend or phase or
whether Beck is in the midst of a fundamental transformation. "I'm a
work in progress, man," he told me. "I don't know how to make this
transition." It has become a nagging preoccupation. "I wrote Sarah Palin
a letter last night about 2 in the morning," Beck said on his radio show
in September. "And I said: 'Sarah, I don't know if I'm doing more harm
or more good. I don't know anymore.' "
Beck has made a determination in recent months, Cheatwood told me. "I
think what he's realizing is you have to be careful not to just be part
of the noise. You have to transcend the noise." In the weeks after the
"Restoring Honor" rally, Beck's Fox News show took a decidedly
spiritual, historic and even high-minded tone. But near the end of
September, Beck returned to a more accustomed noise level. He railed
against the "clear and present danger" of progressive ideology and
attacked the Obama administration more savagely than he had in some
time, singling out Cass Sunstein, the White House's regulatory czar, as
"the most dangerous man in America."
On Sept. 11, I traveled to Anchorage to watch Beck and Palin perform
together at a downtown civic center. A woman outside carried a sign
calling Beck and Palin "the dream team," while another dismissed them as
"lipstick and dipstick."
The crowd was loud and even festive, despite the somber anniversary.
Palin spoke first and then introduced Beck. The pair stage-chatted for
about 20 minutes before Palin turned over the stage to Beck. He spoke -
with chalkboards - for more than an hour. Sitting in the row behind me
was a truck driver named Jerry Cole, who was from Fairbanks and wore an
"I (heart) Woodrow Wilson" T-shirt with a slash through the heart. "He
was the start of the Progressive Era," Cole said of the long-dead
president. "He believed that college intellectuals should decide how the
world should be run."
Beck's Anchorage show started late - around 9 p.m. - and Beck was still
speaking as 11 o'clock approached. He kept going, and going, and
delivered a stem-winding ending about how George Washington became
terrified at the end of his life about doing something that would
dishonor himself and his country. I looked around the crowd of about
4,000, and it seemed no one had left. The room was perfectly silent
after two hours plus - late on a Saturday night - to hear a
self-described "recovering dirtbag" with not a single college credit to
his name teach them history.
Sitting in his Mercury Radio Arts office three days later, Beck told me
that he, too, noticed the silence and was astounded. "If someone had
told me, 'Hey, why don't you tell some history stories at the end, and
there will be dead silence,' I'd have said, 'No way.' " Beck has great
distrust of success, especially his own. Friends say he is terrified of
something going wrong, someone in his audience "doing something stupid"
(presumably code for violence). There is a certain boyish disbelief in
Beck as he engages in his real-time assessment, often on the air. "I
told my wife, 'I can't believe I actually have reporters following me to
Alaska,' " he said. (Note: reporter's wife said the same thing.)
Beck told me that he recently threw away all of his old tapes from his
Morning Zoo years, so his kids could not hear them. He has no idea what
his role is in the political firmament. The notion seems to bore him.
His most animated attacks on Obama in the days after the "Restoring
Honor" rally were over his take on the president's religious
convictions, which Beck called "a perversion of the Gospel of Jesus
Christ as most Christians know it."
He is fragile, on the edge. There is no template for him or for where he
is headed. "I have not prepared my whole life to be here," Beck told me
from his plush couch, his face turning bright pink. "I prepared my whole
life to be in a back alley." I expected him to cry, but he did not.
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