From Chapter 9 of Paul Harvey’s America–”The Great Unraveling” . . .

Four days after his broadcast from Savannah, Georgia, Paul Harvey has run through his daily routine precisely as usual—up until 12:36 p.m., anyway:

Rising at 3:30 a.m. and quickly dressing in slacks, shirt, tie and sport coat. He is occasionally teased about “dressing up for radio,” but he doesn’t care. When he first started in the business, no self-respecting man would have considered showing up for work without a jacket and tie. In later years, as trends brought a much more relaxed atmosphere to radio newsrooms, Paul briefly tried the shirtsleeves and open collar approach. But one day after a broadcast his longtime engineer for “Paul Harvey News and Comment,” Bob Benninghoff, off-handedly mentioned, “You’re starting to sound as casual as you dress.” That did it.

It’s a quick bowl of oatmeal followed by the short drive into downtown Chicago to the studios of ABC Radio News at the corner of Wacker Drive and Michigan Avenue. The wire services and newspapers are scoured for material for the morning’s first broadcast, the five-minute newscast at 9:00 a.m. that will be fed to more than 1,200 radio stations around the country and 400 or so Armed Forces Network affiliates around the globe. On this morning, as on most mornings in the latter half of the 20th Century, more Americans will hear Paul than any other person in broadcasting. Once at a 1991 New York City luncheon to honor Billy Graham, Paul was present, as were two of the top three network television news anchors—Dan Rather and Peter Jennings. There, ABC’s Leonard Goldenson was speaking and had the temerity to point out that Paul Harvey spoke to more people on most days than either Rather, Jennings, or Tom Brokaw. Peter Jennings added loudly, “Combined.” And everyone in the room laughed.

By 7:30 a.m., Angel has arrived and has joined the production process. At five minutes before 9:00 a.m., the engineer cues up the William Tell Overture, more familiar to children of the 1950s and 1960s as the theme from The Lone Ranger. This is Paul’s cue to begin those vocal warm-up exercises learned from Miss Ronan back at Tulsa’s Central High those many years ago. Nganga, nganga, nganga . . . Wolf, one, two, three . . .

Once the nine o’clock newscast is complete, work begins on the longer, fifteen-minute version that will air at noon. On this day, one of the big stories making headlines is President Kennedy’s two-day whirlwind tour of Texas and the internal squabbling going on there between the liberal and moderate wings of the state Democratic Party. Ralph Yarborough, the liberal U.S. senator from Texas, was furious at being left off a presidential dinner invitation list by the more conservative Democrat, Governor John Connelly.

Paul delivers his second newscast of the day, finishing precisely at 12:15. At that moment, President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade is making its way from Love Field airport toward downtown Dallas. It is running a few minutes behind because Kennedy had stopped the procession twice—once to shake hands with some nuns who had gathered along the route and then again to greet some schoolchildren.

At 12:39, Dallas listeners of station KLIF hear the song “I Have A Boyfriend” by The Chiffons interrupted by the station’s “bulletin alert” sounder—a frightening, high-pitched alarm that sounds like an air-raid warning. Over the jarring sound of the tone, KLIF reporter Gary Delaune delivers this terse announcement:

This KLIF Bulletin from Dallas: Three shots reportedly were fired at the motorcade of President Kennedy today near the downtown section. KLIF News is checking out the report, we will have further reports. Stay tuned.

This is the first anyone in America outside of Dealey Plaza learns that something awful has happened in Dallas.

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From Chapter 6 of Paul Harvey’s America–”Un-American Activities”:

America received a unique gift on Christmas Day, 1950. Anyone listening to an ABC Radio affiliate at noon that Monday, December 25, heard the words, “Hello, Americans, this is Paul Harvey. Stand by . . . for news!” The boy who “fell in love with words and ran away to join the radio” had been speaking into microphones since he was a gangly teenager in 1933. But he had never been able to say, “Hello, Americans” before. Hello, “Tulsans,” yes. “Missoulans,” indeed. And he had been greeting Chicagoans at night for six years. But this was the big leagues.

In addition to that trademark sign on, any regular listener from the year 2000 would have heard much that was familiar were it possible to go back in time fifty years and hear that first nationwide broadcast. In the weeks leading up to this debut, Paul and Angel had settled on the straightforward name “Paul Harvey News and Comment” to identify the program. It remained the name of his primary newscast until the day he died. If he was going to be offering his opinions on the news—and that’s precisely what he had been hired to do—he wanted that “Comment” sign hanging conspicuously on the storefront. He didn’t have much use for journalists who feigned objectivity while selectively reporting only facts that fit their agenda.

Our time traveler would have heard “Page Two” and “Page Three” to identify the sponsorship commercial segments. And near the end of many of these network broadcasts, that same traveler would have heard a surprising or little-known item followed by the words, “And now you know  . . . the rest of the story.”

You can order Paul Harvey’s America: The Life, Art, and Faith of a Man Who Transformed Radio and Inspired a Nation at your favorite bookseller, including:

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Paul Harvey’s America co-author David A. Holland was recently interviewed by host David McMillan on his Strategies for Living radio broadcast. You can listen to the hour-long interview here.

Our thanks to David McMillan. He does a wonderful program and is a outstanding conversationalist.

He graciously blogged about his impressions of the book over at the WorldMagBlog. An excerpt:

You will find this book an easy and enjoyable read, a great gift for an older reader who listened to Harvey for decades. The moral lessons of Harvey’s life make an impact in a winsome way, much like the man himself.

[B]y 1955 Paul believed the most fundamental threat to America’s continued strong existence was twofold. First, there were many in our midst who wanted to take America down the road of big-government socialism and who made promises of security, “equality,” and comfort before the masses to sell the deal. The second threat was that prosperity was making Americans soft, complacent, and greedy, and therefore susceptible to the allure of government dependency.

A deeply moral man, Paul saw our internal vulnerability as a moral problem:

“If the old pioneering fire has died out of us, if we will hang onto new deals, fair deals and raw deals at the sacrifice of our I-deals, then we deserve to be trapped by our own clutching fingers because we are animals, nothing more.

In other words, the first threat was the presence of siren-song singers in our midst. The second was our universal attraction to such songs.

History, for six thousand years, is the record of free people made slaves trying to get the free lunch out of the bottle.”

And on Mike Huckabee’s show Saturday evening at 7 p.m. EDT.

Paul Harvey’s America should be arriving in stores any day now. The foreword by Sean Hannity is wonderful and the team at Tyndale House did an amazing job on the cover design and page layout. It is one cool looking book.

Of course, I’m convinced you’ll find it a great read as well. In Paul Harvey’s America, you not only get surprising insights into one of the most fascinating lives of the 20th Century, you get a stark and stirring reminder of the attributes and beliefs that made our nation great; and of what’s at stake in our current debates over healthcare and the economy.

Ask for Paul Harvey’s America at your local bookstore now. Or order online at any of these fine booksellers:

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For one thing, the men share an unshakable belief in what some call “American exceptionalism.” It is a belief that there is something unique and wonderful about this nation, and that God ordained both her birth and her rise to preeminence. Ronald Reagan spoke of an America that was “a land of hope, a light unto nations, a shining city on a hill.” And it wasn’t just campaign rhetoric. Read his personal diaries and letters and you discover a man who believed those words were true.
Paul viewed America as a miracle of history, as well—impossible to replicate or, if lost, impossible to restore:

I know well from what has gone before, if all this [nation] stands for dies, it will not rise again. Daniel Webster said, “That which has happened but once in six thousand years cannot be expected to happen twice.”
This magnificent accident, government under God, will not happen twice.
One day the trumpet is going to blow, and we shall shout Hallelujah! . . . which way to Paradise?
And the soft, calm voice of Final Authority will say, “You have had it, mister; you have had it.”

Somewhere along the way, postmodern educations, creeping agnosticism, and what Reagan famously labeled a “blame America first” mentality had robbed many Americans of any belief that their country was special or even particularly good. In the decades since Reagan left office, that faith has fallen even farther out of fashion.
Today most of the bully pulpits belong to the multiculturalism-obsessed sophisticates who view belief in American exceptionalism as quaint or racist or arrogant or even dangerous. But in 1981 the two most prominent pulpits in the nation belonged to men who preached “America the Beautiful” and that God had indeed shed His grace on her in a unique way.

You can pre-order Paul Harvey’s America now.

In this little, bitty instant as historical time is measured, our seven percent of the earth’s population has come to possess more than half of all the world’s good things. How come?

Well sir, when that early pioneer turned his eyes toward the West he didn’t demand that someone else look after him. He didn’t demand a free education. He didn’t demand a guaranteed rocking chair at eventide. He didn’t demand that somebody else take care of him if he got ill or got old.

There was an old-fashioned philosophy in those days that a man was supposed to provide for his own . . . and for his own future.
He didn’t demand a maximum amount of money for a minimum amount of work. Nor did he expect pay for no work at all. Come to think of it, he didn’t demand anything.

That hard-handed pioneer just looked out there at the rolling plains stretching away to the tall green mountains, and then lifted his eyes to the blue skies and said, “Thank you, God . . . Now I can take it from here.”

That pioneer spirit isn’t dead in our country . . . it’s dormant, it’s been discredited in some circles, driven underground . . . but it isn’t dead. It’s just that a few seasons ago politicians, baiting their hooks with free barbecue and trading a Ponzi promise for votes, begin to tell us we don’t want opportunity anymore, we want security. We don’t want opportunity, they said, we want security. And they said it so often we came to believe them.

We wanted security. And they gave us chains. And we were “secure.”

If we can revive in ourselves, then in our youth, something of that basic American’s creed—the horizon has never ever been so limitless. For man stands now on the threshold of its highest adventure of all, his first faltering footsteps into space. Twenty years from today, half of the products you will be using in your everyday living aren’t even in the dictionary yet. We’ve got it made. If we just keep on keeping on.

History promises only this for certain: We will get . . . exactly what we deserve.

Paul Harvey broadcast those words back in 1960. But don’t you think the American people need to hear them now more than ever?

Pre-order Paul Harvey’s America here.