“Get me out there fast!” Roarke ran onto the end of the dock.
“But why?” the youngest asked.
By now the Community Boathouse manager had come out. He was an old sailor who had weathered a lot of storms off the North Shore seas, and handled his share of drunks in Gloucester bars. He carried a beaten-up Louisville Slugger baseball bat.
“Just hold up a minute there, mister. Leave those kids alone.”
“Guys! I can’t sail,” Roarke said, ignoring the man. “I need you to get me out there!” There was real urgency in his voice.
“I don’t know,” the older, more responsible boy said sheepishly.
“My girlfriend’s in trouble,” Roarke added. He turned his attention back to the water. “Katie!”
“I don’t know,” the boy said again.
The situation looked worse. The swimmer kept adjusting to Katie’s run.
“Look, I need your help!” Roarke bent down and grabbed their boat.
“You hold it there, mister.” It was the old skipper. He was on the dock, about ten feet from Roarke. His bat was up high, ready to take a swing at Roarke. “You’re not going anywhere with those boys.”
Roarke rose up quickly, his hands simultaneously slipping into opposite sides of his tweed jacket. He thought about removing his automatic with his right hand. Instead, he reached for his Secret Service ID with his left.
“Secret Service. Stop!”
The man froze in place, but mostly out of disbelief. “What?”
“I need this boat. These men will take me out right now.”
“Oh, boy,” Roarke heard the youngest say.
The manager didn’t really know what to do, so he did nothing.
“You’re really a Secret Service agent?” the boy questioned.
Roarke turned around. “Yes, now please!”
“Climb aboard.”
Roarke gingerly stepped into the 17-foot craft. The sailor now made a gesture toward them, but Roarke waved him off. At fifteen feet from the dock, Roarke tried to get his bearings.
“You should sit down, sir,” the older boy said.
Roarke didn’t need the encouragement.
“And you better take your shoes off.”
Chapter 30
This guy’s crazy, Bernie Bernstein said to himself. He put down a paper one of his students had written about the host of the radio show Strong Nation.
This was Bernstein’s first teaching assignment at BU. His office on Bay State Road overlooked the Charles River just west of the Mass. Ave. Bridge. He joined the faculty as a part-time professor after leaving the White House. After four years as Morgan Taylor’s chief of staff, he accepted a teaching job. He encouraged his Government and Ethics students to reach beyond law books to find foundation for their legal arguments. One of his students decided to tackle a challenging topic: Was the Fairness Doctrine Fair? He drew a thorough line between the debate over The Red Lion Case to the state of talk radio today. In doing so, he analyzed the phenomenal rise of Elliott Strong, or as the host considered himself, America’s leading “Voice of Reason.”
Bernstein was aware of Strong, but he hadn’t listened to his show in a long time. His student’s paper made the man Morgan Taylor affectionately called Bernsie more interested than ever.
According to the report, Strong’s radio show was having a domino effect: other broadcasters were listening to him and following his lead. Strong’s political bias made for good radio. And good radio, largely unregulated, made for great ratings. Since every radio host in the country lived for ratings, the Strong rhetoric appeared to be a formula worthy of imitation.
The student provided the statistics. Four hundred fifteen percent growth in audience in the six months dating back to January of the current year, according to the Arbitron rating’s service. Strong reached an estimated 21,450,000 listeners in late night, far more than King, Bell, or Nouri ever pulled. His daytime ratings trounced the competition. His audience remained with Strong for an average of forty-seven minutes, longer than any other talk host in the history of the business. The number of stations that carried Strong Nation continued to grow by the week.
Crazy like a fox. The ex-president’s chief of staff was learning from a graduate student the first rule of talk radio: Stay on the good side of the hosts. Somewhere along the line, the administration wasn’t. Now he wondered whether Strong could be stopped.
The student raised the same rhetorical question in his paper. The immediate answer was no. “Contemporary talk radio is the Frankenstein born out of deregulation,” the student maintained in his paper. “It took its first, unsure exploratory steps with the relaxation of laws that had previously guaranteed a multiple of opinions on the airwaves. It came of age with the demise of true local community ownership, and it matured with the encouragement and support of the political right.”
Even Bernstein had to admit he’d used people like Strong to help Morgan Taylor. Did he control them? No, he had to admit. It had worked for Bernstein as long as the president wasn’t the target. He believed, perhaps naively, that they’d never turn on the man who most closely represented their politics. But he was wrong. There was no loyalty among the thieves of the airwaves. They’d stolen the meaning of true political debate. It was all in the student’s report. It had happened years ago. Now it seemed that Morgan Taylor would be the catalyst for Strong’s highest ratings ever.
After reading the paper, Bernstein went on the Internet. It was all there. His student had done his research well. Bernstein considered calling Elliott Strong himself. Maybe he could get the talk host to ease up. But who was he now? A teacher with no political clout. Another former White House staffer.
Instead, he decided to phone an old Georgetown classmate: the CEO of the company which syndicated Strong Nation.
“You have to understand, the entire world of radio is different today. And it’s probably all due to one man,” Charlie Huddle explained.
“Limbaugh?”
“On the nose. And it’s not because he’s a blowhard. He was the first one to listen to an audience that felt unrepresented by the mainstream media.”
“Come on, Charlie, he doesn’t listen to anybody. Nor do—”
“You asked my opinion, Bernie, let me give it to you,” Huddle said, cutting him off. “Generally speaking, conservatives were always labeled. Liberals were not.”
“What do you mean?” Bernstein asked over the phone.
“Well, news anchors would read lines like, ‘Conservative firebrand Newt Gingrich clashed with Senator Kennedy.’ Gingrich had a negative branded to his name, while there was nothing for Kennedy. Why not?”
“Charlie, it’s just an adjective.”
“It’s more than just an adjective. It was a way of thinking. And guess what? This isn’t from me. Google ‘Brian Williams,’ you know, the anchorman. In a C-SPAN interview a few years back, Williams acknowledged that for decades many people felt like they were unrepresented. No one talked to them or about them: no one until Rush. Suddenly, the right had a savior for three hours a day: a voice that said what they were thinking. Limbaugh found that listeners, sick and tired of getting their news filtered through a liberal bias, were thrilled to have a spokesman who was one of them.”
“Come on, Charlie, it’s not that simple,” Bernstein argued.
“No? Then why did he catch on so successfully? Again, Williams said it. I’m surprised you missed it. There probably wouldn’t be a Fox News if Limbaugh didn’t give conservatives a voice.”
“That doesn’t give Strong the right to lie.”
“Lie?” The syndicator challenged him brazenly. “Is it a lie because you don’t agree with what he says?”