That is substantially true. After being an unabashed hawk, Harvey came out against the war in 1970 (much to the consternation of the Nixon Adminstation). In fact, Harvey remained isolationist on matters of American military intervention until 9/11 when he resumed being a “bomb 'em back to the Stone Age” hawk.
Wether all the negative criticism here is warranted I don’t really know. I do remember him advertising for things in the style of his show, which seemed shady.
However, if nothing else it makes me sad that another institution from the distant past is gone. The guy was 90! It also reminds me that I’m no Spring chicken anymore. I remember being a little kid and my Dad would have talk radio on in the car and I would hear Paul Harvey. He was already a geezer. When I recently heard him on the radio about a year ago, I was heartened. “Well, some things never change, I guess he’ll go on forever.” Wrong!
Well, the guy is dead, but still I think some facts from his past should be raised.
His website previously stated that he joined the Army Air Corps after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. (They didn’t bother to say it was *Dec 1943 *when he joined). They also claimed 2 years of service which I suppose is true if you count 1943 and 1944 as entire years. (His service only lasted 4 months: Dec, 1943 to March, 1944).
Yes, Paul Harvey was rather conservative and supported the Vietnam War until Paul Jr declared conscientious objector status.
That too was Paul Harvey … good day.
Politically, Paul Harvey was a right wing bigot in my humble opinion.
And yes, it was most certainly glurge…and Snopes would have a field day with most of his stories.
That said, the man had a style that worked. He was a truly GREAT storyteller, and he could make anything sound true; no matter how bogus the story - Paul Harvey could make it seem real.
There was something reassuring about Paul Harvey stories…absolute bullshit, but comforting all the same; sort of like listening to your nutcase uncle at Thanksgiving dinner pontificating.
My first notice of Paul Harvey was when he was calling for Jimmy Carter to nuke Iran. His logic, as best as I can recollect, was that god would want you to hit your enemy with the biggest weapon you have; that is why god gave it to you. I thought at the time “what a nutcase”.
I have mixed feelings about him these days.
I had only thought of his show as vaguely pleasant but distant memories until a few years ago. I work in a hospital doing research, and somehow - certainly no one involved with the making of the particular experimental product, or anyone at our institution, sent out a press release or anything like that - Paul Harvey’s show came across some very preliminary results of a study that we were one of the few sites running. It was only tested on maybe a dozen humans before, and we were doing another trial of it, so he was going by the extremely early published results.
Of course, I didn’t know any of this. All I knew is that I came into work and my voice mail was stuffed full. My coworker’s was, too. It took a few messages of trying to figure out what “heard it on the radio” meant before someone mentioned Paul Harvey. I Googled the show’s website and found the recording online. Maybe 90 (?) seconds. Wild misrepresentation of this experimental thing being a near miracle cure for those with a particular condition, and mentioning the name of our institution as a testing site. I found out later that the callers weren’t only those with that condition (for which there pretty much aren’t any options) but others hoping it’d work on them too.
Calls kept coming in at a high rate for weeks, months. Tearful people from all over the country and other countries too, begging and sometimes crying to get in. We were only allowed to enroll about 10 people, and that limit had been met before the radio show! Some people got angry, saying we didn’t know what it was like.
Fielding the volume of calls - and gently explaining to each caller that Mr. Harvey was being a tad… optimistic, and that we couldn’t enroll anyone, but please contact the company to be put in their research database - made it tough to deal with the other work we had. Meanwhile, I kept thinking about my youth, listening to Harvey’s show at my grandpa’s house, at this calm and reassuring voice telling stories of hope. I can’t help but wonder how many other times people thought he was giving them hope and hit dead ends.
Not shady so much as old-fashioned. This sort of thing was pretty common in the early days of radio.
Exactly!
Oh really? Didn’t know that. I could imagine that, actually. Still SEEMED shady to me though, hangover from another era or not.
When I was very young, I heard a Paul Harvey broadcast where he was talking about baby seals being clubbed to death for their skins. But somehow, I missed the “seal” part and thought he was talking about people clubbing and skinning human babies. I was quite horrified.
ABC Radio is doing a tribute to him all week. The man met Winston Churchill, was married to his wife for 68 years, and had too many awards to count.
I think the radio world is a bit smaller tonight…not that anyone can ever hope to fill his shoes.
I was definitely sad to hear of his passing. While I haven’t listened to his ‘rest of the story’ broadcasts in a couple years, I listened to him every day in the morning on the way in to PT when I was in the Army in Germany (on AFN Radio). When I was a kid, my clock radio was set to our local AM news station (school closings upon wakeup!) Paul Harvey was on about two minutes after my alarm time, so I would wake up, leave the radio on…listen to The Rest of the Story…and get ready for school (yes, I was a geek from birth). It was a great way to start the day. Did that pretty much every day of high school.
I never listened to any of his political positions (which is probably a good thing, since I’m quite liberal)…and I’m glad I didn’t. I like remembering just the quirky tales that I heard from him. Gives me good feelings.
I’m going to miss him; but one thing you’ll never miss, is a good deal from your local Ace Hardware Store. Remember, Ace IS the place of your helpful hardware man.