After his personal and professional meltdown in Houston, Beck found a new job in Baltimore at the city’s leading Top 40 station, WBSB, AKA B104. This time, however, he wanted a partner.

On the recommendation of a friend, he settled on a 27-year-old morning jock named Pat Gray. Although Gray and Beck had worked in Houston at the same time, they had never met. But the new team clicked. As Beck likes to tell it, it was DJ love at first sight, with the two bonding within minutes of meeting at the airport. Beck and Gray were unlikely bosom buddies. Gray was a Mormon who home-schooled his kids; Beck was a bong-ripping nihilist who could barely remember his kids’ names. But they shared a sense of humor and a love of morning-radio mischief. They also shared similar if inchoate politics. After their partnership ended in 1994, both men would go on to pursue careers in conservative talk radio. They now work together on Beck’s nationally broadcast radio show, The Glenn Beck Program.

In 1990, the duo had a once-great Top 40 station to revive. For much of the 1980s, Baltimore’s B104 had been among the best-regarded Top 40 stations in the country. But by end of the decade, a succession of program directors and overactive managers began running the station into the ground. Part of the wipeout included a self-destructive image makeover: from hard-driving and flame-throwing to a mellow adult-contemporary station that ran TV spots featuring former Orioles pitcher Jim Palmer.

When Beck and Gray were hired, some saw them as saviors.

“Glenn and Pat were brought in to restore the morning zoo feel to the station,” says Sean Hall, who read news at B104 during the ’80s and early ’90s. “I vividly remember the program director coming in early the first day, something he never did, and saying, ‘This place really needed this.’”

On Beck and Gray’s first show together, they held a contest that rewarded the first listener to buy 104 Slurpies at a 7-11. “They had obvious chemistry from go,” says Billie Brown, a DJ at the station.

Along with a new partner, Beck wanted a new mascot. He spent two weeks calling veterinarians and pet stores live on the air, getting advice on gerbils. After choosing one, he announced that he was going to train the world’s first bank-tube astronaut. Every day Beck would announce an update, some new detail about the gerbil’s first mission. One day, he made a little cape; the next, he named the animal “Gerry the Gerbil.” Each development was accompanied by a press release. When all the pieces were in place, Beck and Gray visited a local bank and sent the animal to a teller with a known fear of rodents.

“The build-up was amazing, masterful,” says a former director at the station. “PETA was flipping out, picketing the station every day. Beck’s on the local news. He took a stupid stunt and turned it into weeks of compelling high-publicity radio. He always knew how to get attention, how to get people talking about him.”

The undisputed high point of Beck’s tenure in Baltimore was an elaborate prank built around a nonexistent theme park. The idea was to run a promotional campaign for the fictional grand opening of the world’s first air-conditioned underground amusement park, called Magicland. According to Beck and Gray, it was being completed just outside Baltimore. During the build-up, the two created an intricate and convincing radio world of theme-park jingles and promotions, which were rolled out in a slow buildup to the nonexistent park’s grand opening. They then went to Kings Island in Cincinnati to record their voices over the sounds of a real theme park. On the day Magicland was supposed to throw open its air-conditioned doors, Beck and Gray took calls from enraged listeners who tried to find the park and failed. Among the disappointed and enraged was a woman who had canceled a no-refund cruise to attend the event.

“They never told a soul what they were doing,” says Sean Hall, the B104 newsreader. “I didn’t know until the morning it aired. People just drove around in circles on the beltway for hours trying to find the place. And that was exactly what it was supposed to elicit.”

* *

Beck was known at B104 as a pro’s pro in the studio but was becoming increasingly unraveled when not working. “Beck used to get hammered after every show at this little bar-café down the street,” remembers a music programmer who worked with Beck. “At first we thought he was going to get lunch.” The extent to which Beck was struggling to keep it together is highlighted by Beck’s arrest one afternoon just outside Baltimore. He was speeding in his DeLorean with one of the car’s gull-wing doors wide open when the cops pulled him over. According to a former colleague, Beck was “completely out of it” when a B104 manager went down to the station to bail him out. In his 2003 book, “Real America,” Beck refers to himself as a borderline schizophrenic. Whether that statement is matter-of-fact or intended for effect, he has spoken more than once about taking drugs for ADHD, and when he was at B104, Beck’s coworkers believed him to be taking prescription medication for some kind of mental or psychological ills. “He used to complain that his medication made him feel like he was ‘under wet blankets,’” remembers the former music programmer.

Today, when Beck wants to illustrate the jerk he used to be, he tells the story of the time he fired an employee for bringing him the wrong pen during a promotional event. According to former colleagues in Baltimore, Beck didn’t just fire people in fits of rage — he fired them slowly and publicly. “He used to take people to a bar and sit them down and just humiliate them in public. He was a sadist, the kind of guy who rips wings off of flies,” remembers a colleague.

Despite their on-air synergy, Beck and Gray were not a ratings smash. They had created Magicland out of thin air, but they couldn’t summon enough ratings magic to revive B104. After a year of struggling personally and professionally, Beck found himself working alone when Gray’s contract was cancelled. When Beck was fired also, the two men spent six months in Baltimore living off of their severance, unemployed and plotting their next move.

The Glenn and Pat Show found second life farther down the radio food chain at the New Haven Top 40 station KC101. Coming from Top 20 Markets like Houston and Baltimore, the southern Connecticut station — barely flirting with the Top 100 — was a sign of serious professional decline. Making matters worse, New Haven was the closest Beck had ever come in geographical terms to his boyhood dream of working in Rockefeller Center. But the Manhattan skyline had never been so far from his grasp as it was in New Haven. Now approaching 30, Beck was no longer a boy wonder destined for greatness. He was staring failure in the face.

“There’s nothing like being 18 years old in the fifth largest market in America, and then spending the next dozen years dropping 97 spots,” Beck later wrote. Even had he wanted to, Beck could not have ignored the daily reminders of failure represented by New Haven’s morning commuter rail service to Grand Central Station in midtown Manhattan. A New York complex was even woven into KC101′s public identity: A station promo mock-bragged about its outsized 50,000-watt signal, “Five states and the world’s greatest cities — from a dumpy little building in North Haven.”

Beck and Gray arrived at KC101′s dumpy little studio building in early 1992. They were morning-show bounty hunters, brought to town to capture the scalps of the dominant morning team in the market — the “bad boy” duo of Brian Smith and Bruce Barber of WPLR, which had established a lock on the prized 18-to-34 demo. Beck and Gray were famished for the success that had eluded them in Baltimore. A profile for the New Haven Register quoted their new boss, Faith Zila, marveling that the two spent up to eight hours prepping for every show. “I haven’t seen anyone spend that kind of time,” Zila said. “These guys would kill for a ratings win and I’m the same way.”

Shortly after Beck’s arrival in Connecticut in the winter of 1992, KC101 was purchased by Clear Channel. Although it was not immediately obvious, this would prove a momentous development in Beck’s career. At the time, Clear Channel was still a small player in radio, with just 16 radio stations nationally. This began to change the year after Beck’s arrival, when Congress relaxed ownership rules regulating the radio industry. By the year 2000, thanks to the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Clear Channel had become a behemoth of 1,200 stations.

In early 1992, Beck was practically in on the ground floor of Clear Channel’s national growth. Clear Channel’s appearance ensured a level of security that was new in Beck’s career. Clear Channel CEO Mark Mays told the New Haven Register that February that he had entered the market as a long-term “broadcasting operator, as opposed to just an investor” and stressed that he had “never sold a station.” As one of the company’s most experienced morning DJs, Beck got to know Mark Mays, who was on his way to becoming the most powerful man in radio.

Along with the purchase of KC101, Clear Channel picked up New Haven’s leading news and talk station, WELI. Having this sister station would prove crucial to Beck’s early start in talk radio. Before the end of the decade, a melding of the two stations’ content would also create what the country would come to know as The Glenn Beck Program.

* *

But if some of the elements that would later lead to the rebirth of Beck’s career were coming into alignment, that professional resurrection was still in the future. And his personal life was a mess. During his first two years in Connecticut, Beck slid further toward the abyss.

He was drinking and mixing recreational and prescription drugs. Once again, he earned a rep among his coworkers for being erratic and moody. “When Beck was not taking certain drugs he was supposed to be taking he could act very bizarre,” remembers Kelly Nash, who managed Beck in New Haven.

“He didn’t want anyone questioning his authority. I remember he fired our consultant and brought in his old friend Jim Sumpter. The two of them created and launched an in-house research project that made absolutely no sense. When I confronted him on the absurdity of his approach, he said, ‘This is above your head.’ Then he locked the door to his office. I thought, ‘This guy is out of control. He’s insane.’”

By 1994, Beck was suicidal. He imagined putting a gun inside his mouth and squeezing the trigger to the music of his fellow Washingtonian, Kurt Cobain, recently killed by his own hand. Everywhere Beck turned, things were falling apart. His marriage was failing. Pat Gray, his best friend and creative partner, was sick of Beck’s drama, and about to move his family to Salt Lake City. (He would later describe the station under Beck as “a pretty cancerous place to be.”) Beck saw his daughters only through a pot haze and in-between blackouts. Twisting the multiple knives in Beck’s gut was the regular humiliation of Top 40 promotional stunts. In a typical KC101 event, Beck dressed up as a banana and dove into a pool full of Styrofoam.

Whatever humiliations he suffered, Orson Welles never dressed up as a banana.

Alone and peering over the ledge, Beck pulled back. In November of 1994 he attended his first AA meeting. That month he became a dry drunk and stopped smoking weed. He chopped off his ponytail. As 1995 opened, a sober Beck began imagining a future outside of Top 40 radio.

After getting sober, Beck went on a spiritual quest. He sought out answers in churches and bookstores. Joe Amarante, a local New Haven reporter, remembers Beck wandering into his Catholic church during Mass looking “puzzled.” A similar confusion is reflected in Beck’s reading list from the period. As Beck has recounted it in his books and stage performances, his first attempt at self-education involved six writers that formed a strange sort of Great Books program. Beck’s curriculum included books by Alan Dershowitz, Pope John Paul II, Adolf Hitler, Billy Graham, Carl Sagan, and Friedrich Nietzsche. As he surrounded himself with this brain trust, his friend and former partner Pat Gray argued in favor of the comprehensive worldview offered by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Beck rejected Gray’s overtures, teasingly calling him “freak boy.”

Concurrent with Beck’s mid- and late-’90s spiritual journey was his self-education in talk radio. In early 1995, Time magazine published a cover story tackling one of the questions raised by the previous November’s midterm elections, in which talk radio helped fuel New Gingrich’s GOP insurgency. “Is Rush Limbaugh Good for America?” asked the magazine. “Electronic populism threatens to short-circuit representative democracy. Talk radio is only the beginning.” (Earlier this month, 15 years after the Limbaugh story, Time ran a feature entitled, “Is Glenn Beck Bad for America?”)

By then, Beck was already paying attention. “Beck was a close student of talk radio for years,” says Sue Treccase, later his first manager in talk radio. “Before he thought he was ready [to do it himself], Beck paid close attention to successful practitioners of the craft.” After finishing his morning show in New Haven, Beck would often tune into 77 WABC AM broadcasting from Manhattan, the nation’s biggest news and talk station. Along with Rush Limbaugh, Beck listened to Bob Grant, to whom he continues to pay daily homage by greeting listeners as “sick twisted freaks.”

Even before he cleaned up, Beck had waded into local Connecticut politics. Among his and Gray’s favorite early on-air targets was Connecticut’s Independent governor, Lowell Weicker, who had left the Republican Party after losing his Senate seat. Beck went after the liberal Weicker whenever he got the chance. “Governor Weicker had three teeth pulled the other day,” Beck said in a typical bit. “I’d hate to see him in pain. Really excruciating pain.”

One local politician who appreciated Beck’s regular digs at the governor was the man who had defeated Weicker in a bitterly contested 1988 senate race: Democrat Joe Lieberman. Beck and the senator were friendly throughout the ’90s, until they fell out over Lieberman’s refusal to back the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998. But before they parted ways, Lieberman would play a role in Beck’s search for a worldview and identity by helping Beck enroll part-time at Yale in the fall of 1996. The ADHD-diagnosed Beck didn’t last long at Yale. He took one class, “Early Christology,” and dropped out.

In the spring of 1997, a colleague of Beck’s suggested he do some bits with a local music columnist named Vinnie Penn. A fast-talking future stand-up artist with a bit of a goombah shtick, Penn was Beck’s first partner in radio who was more ethnic than Wonder Bread. Beck never clicked with Penn the way he had with Gray, but the two got on well enough to produce four hours of morning radio every day. The two would be on-air partners until Beck made the jump to talk radio in 1999. “When I showed up in ’97 Beck was in a sort of wasteland, looking for a partner,” says Penn.

Beck hadn’t yet given up on making it big in Top 40 radio. Within a month of teaming up with Penn, he began musing about the chances of syndicating their show. “Beck saw the syndication trend coming a mile away, I gotta give it to him,” says Penn. “But he came to realize that talk was the easier route for him and the better fit. When I got there he was already wondering how he was going to sustain a career in Top 40 radio when his heart wasn’t in it. He was like, ‘Where am I headed?’ At one point I remember him talking about joining the ministry.”

Beck wasn’t the only one beginning to chafe under the limits of a morning show based around raffling boy-band concert tickets for teenagers. In 1998, Beck and Penn were getting memos from management urging them to talk more about reality TV and pop culture as a way to attract young listeners. Penn, whom a local paper had dubbed  ”The Connecticut King of All Media,” wanted to do edgier stuff. As his partner began thinking about talk radio, Penn began exploring comedy, eventually landing some guest spots on the Howard Stern Show. Their morning show became a microcosm of these midcareer tensions, with both men straining against the format: Beck talking politics, Penn working blue.

The more Beck dragged politics into the morning show, the more  station managers grew alarmed. They told Penn it was his job to stop Beck from getting too deep with callers. Chastened by orders, Beck and Penn plotted ways to try and make politics entertaining. The attempt failed. By 1998, Beck realized he’d never be able to do what he wanted to do on FM radio, limited to talking fluff in between Britney Spears songs. Out of this failed experiment with Penn was born Beck’s idea of “fusing” morning radio wackiness and political debate.

His talk radio identity still larval, Beck was already displaying the skills that would make him a talk-radio lightning rod. “He always knew how to work people and situations for attention,” says Penn. “He could pick the most pointless story in the news that day and find a way to approach it to get phones lit up. That was his strong point — pissing people off. He was very shrewd on both the business and entertainment sides of radio. He’s built his empire on very calculated button pushing.”

Not that this empire was imaginable back then. Mostly people noticed the button-pushing and wanted nothing to do with it.

“Anyone in Connecticut who says they knew Beck was destined to run an entertainment empire is full of shit,” says one of Beck’s former coworkers in New Haven. “The guy had dozens of enemies. People thought he was an annoying, washed-up has-been. When I see people today bragging that they knew him back then, I’m like, ‘But you fucking hated him!’”

* *

The longer Beck stayed sober, the more his work depressed him. The high-flying zoo days were over, and he had no desire to compete with the new breed of shock jocks inspired by Howard Stern. If there were flashes of comedic brilliance on his show, they were not daily occurrences. With four hours to fill a day, it was mostly the radio equivalent of babysitting.

Beck did what he had to do, but his growing interest in talk radio was no secret to his colleagues and listeners. He wasn’t just talking about talk radio, he was trying to practice it on his morning show, despite Vinnie Penn’s best efforts to reign him in. Among those to spot the problem was Scott Shannon, the legendary zoo DJ who in the late ’90s consulted on morning programs for Clear Channel. Part of Shannon’s beat was monitoring morning programming at Beck’s station, KC101. Whenever he visited the studio, Shannon noticed Beck veering farther away from traditional Top 40 morning radio. By 1999, Beck’s desire to talk politics was seriously impacting his performance as a morning DJ.

“He’d get into these long, opinionated conversations with callers,” says Shannon. “I had to tell him to cut out the long raps, which were not at all appropriate to the format.” Beck acknowledged the problem and on Shannon’s advice cut a deal with Clear Channel. Beck would be allowed to host a weekday talk show on one of Clear Channel’s AM stations. In exchange, Beck promised to get back to bubble-gum-flavored Top 40 morning radio. “We needed to find a way for him to scratch his talk radio itch and do FM mornings at the same time,” says Shannon.

At first, the double-radio career strategy worked. But the more talk radio Beck did, the more he wanted to do. In 1998, he surprised colleagues by linking up with talk radio super-agent George Hiltzik, a Democrat and a heavy hitter with New York’s N.S. Bienstock agency who also repped Matt Drudge. (And whose son, Matt, now handles P.R. for Beck.)

“We were all shocked when he landed this big agent,” remembers Kelly Nash. “It was like, ‘Why is this guy with you?’” With Hiltzik making the phone calls, Beck landed some guest slots on “The Weekend” at New York’s WABC, home to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Bob Grant.

Within a decade, Beck would be mentioned in the same breath as the WABC all-stars. But first he needed to take a few trips around the block. He wasn’t going anywhere until he outgrew his talk radio training wheels.

* *

Beck’s first test in real-time topical talk radio came on Aug. 22, 1998, his second show on WABC. The broadcast aired two days after the U.S. launched cruise missiles at suspected terrorist facilities in Afghanistan and Sudan. Beck has archived the show on his website, and it is the earliest extant recording in the public domain of Beck doing political “hot talk” radio.

It is not a pretty sound. From start to finish, Beck seems unpolished and green as he limps through an attempt to put current events into context. While the show is technically amateurish, Beck displays, even at this early stage in his crossover period, a surprisingly mature command of being both obstinate and uninformed. Over the course of the show’s first hour, he manages to propagate dangerous myths about the Vietnam War and those who fought it, denigrate a major world religion, mock peace activists and call for displays of air-power against distant lands.

Beck begins with an ironic playing of Cat Steven’s “Peace Train.” With the song playing softly in the background, he moves into a trope made famous by Bob Grant: loudly flipping through that morning’s edition of the New York Post, the Bible of New York conservative talk radio.

But without his booming Top 40 voice, Beck seems lost. His first sentence is inaudible, followed by a mumbling dismissal of what he calls “hate rallies” taking place across the country in protest of Bill Clinton’s cruise missile attacks. Beck recovers from his opening stumble with a long pause. He then riffs on the contents of the Post:

The good news is, partial birth abortion is still legal … Sexual harassment is behind us. As long as they want it. I’m glad to know it’s okay for the most powerful man in the world to prey on a lowly intern … Best news in the Post today: 53 percent of us have come together to support our military tactics … Quotes Arab press claiming bombings were a diversion … Protests all around the United States … Seventy-five losers in San Francisco. Lo-sers.

A story about the missile attacks catches Beck’s attention. He stops to read the dispatch about the terrorist organization targeted by the recent missile strikes. Obviously encountering it for the first time, Beck attempts and fails to pronounce “Osama bin Laden.” Embarrassed, he launches into a kind of loopy scat:

A paper in Pakistan received a letter from the spokesperson from, uh … Asma … Asma Bin-Lay-deen? Is that his name? Bin Lay-deen? Bin Jelly Bean Green Bean? Mr. Clean? I love him. He’s hot. He says he’s ready for war with the U.S. Oh, yes. Thank you, Mr. Baked Bean. Loosen the turban! Mr. Clean, Dig-my-scene. Oh, yes! Look at the latrine …

That settled, Beck introduces himself to his listeners. “I don’t really consider myself a conservative,” he says, echoing Bob Grant’s self-description almost word for word. “I know I don’t consider myself a liberal. I have a brain and I like to use it sometimes.”

With that, Beck is ready to take some calls.

Someone says, “The only message these people in the Middle East get is brute force.” Beck agrees, likening that summer’s African embassy attacks to Pearl Harbor.

Another caller says he doubts Clinton would launch strikes just to deflect attention from the Lewinsky scandal, considering that action might cost lives. This confuses Beck, who asks, “Lives? We used cruise missiles.” It doesn’t occur to Beck that the caller is referring to the Sudanese working inside the medicine factory destroyed by U.S. missiles.

The next caller supports the military action, adding that he “respects Jews, Catholics and Muslims — everybody the same.” To which Beck responds, “I can’t go with you that far, Alan, but thanks for calling.”

The next caller thinks America needs to “take the fight to the enemy.” Beck agrees. “War has changed, it’s the way we have to fight it.” To drive home the point that “war has changed” and that America has entered a new and dangerous period in its history, Beck then segues to a commercial break with the chorus to “Danger Zone,” the 1986 Kenny Loggins hit and “Top Gun” theme song. Further proving you can take the man out of the 1980s, but not the 1980s out of the man, Beck returns from the break with Toto’s “Hold the Line.”

Back on air, Beck dives back into the subject of dastardly peace protestors. He raises what would become one of his favorite subjects in the coming years: the lessons of Vietnam. “The problem with Vietnam is we didn’t fight to win,” explains Beck. “When you declare a war, there are no rules. Have you learned the lesson of Vietnam that we can’t fight it half-assed? We need to fight it to the last body.”

Beck then goes for the emotional jugular for the first time. The move comes in the form of a story about an unnamed “friend” of Beck’s. This friend returned from Vietnam only to endure the abuse of protesting peaceniks. “He got off the plane from Vietnam and a woman spat in his face and called him ‘baby killer,’” explains Beck. “Then he left his medal of honor in a trash can.”

Whether Beck was aware that he was quoting almost verbatim from Sylvester Stallone’s closing monologue in “First Blood,” it is impossible to say. But whatever its source, the story is dubious. As documented by Jerry Lembcke in his book “The Spitting Image,” stories of Vietnam vets being spit upon didn’t gain currency until the 1980s. So many of those stories dissolved upon closer inspection that even after serious research efforts, not a single case of a Vietnam veteran being spat upon has ever been documented.

Beck’s story about his veteran buddy sounds so pat that even his conservative listeners have to wonder. Within minutes, a caller asks, “About your friend who threw away his medal — did that really happen?” Beck mutters, “Yes, but he regrets it now,” then changes the subject.

A few minutes later, toward the end of the first hour, Beck shifts gears. After expounding on war and peace with the certainty of someone who has spent a life thinking about these things — and not imitating Muppets between Bon Jovi songs — he swivels into a disarming Socratic stance of admitted ignorance. It is a move that would play a large role in his future appeal: the average guy who tells you the way it is, then shrugs innocently and says, “But what do I know?” The transition is obviously unpracticed, and it jars, but for the first time in the show, Beck’s words ring true.

“I don’t have a stinking answer to save my life,” he admits. “I don’t know what’s going on.”

* *

At the end of 1998, Kelly Nash called Beck into his office and informed him that his contract would not be renewed when it expired at the end of the following year. “He just couldn’t function as a Top 40 DJ anymore,” says Nash now. “I told him we’d try and help him get his talk career going, but he was no longer cutting it as a Top 40 morning guy.”

But as he honed his talk radio chops alongside his final year of morning radio work, a new Beck had been coming into focus. In 1998, he started dating Tania, the woman who would become his second wife. After they went on a church tour together, looking for a faith, they settled on Mormonism. In 1999, Pat Gray baptized his old friend a Mormon in an emotional ceremony. That same year, Tania and Beck were married. Toward the end of 1999, Clear Channel’s Atlanta-based director for talk radio programming, Gabe Hobbs, received a phone call from the company’s V.P. for programming in the Northeast. “He told me they had this morning guy in New Haven who wanted to get into talk,” recalls Hobbs. “They asked me to go up there and speak with him.”

Hobbs, who was also a longtime friend of Beck’s agent, George Hiltzik, agreed. During their first conversation, Beck impressed Hobbs with his intelligence and determination. “He told me he had simply outgrown the juvenile nature of Top 40 radio. He said he’d go wherever he had to for a talk show,” he says.

Hobbs immediately thought of Tampa, where liberal talk-radio legend Bob Lassiter was likely approaching the end of his career at 970 WFLA, Tampa Bay’s leading news-talk station. Hobbs passed Beck’s tapes to managers at WFLA, who were impressed enough to fly Beck down for an interview. Beck was torn over the possibility of leaving his young daughters back in Connecticut with his ex-wife Claire, but the chance was too good to pass up. Beck flew down. When the 35-year-old returned from sunny Tampa to a snowy New Haven, he was holding a two-year contract to host an afternoon talk show on WFLA.

“To switch formats like Beck did, and take it immediately to a top 20 market like Tampa, is almost unheard of,” notes Kelly Nash, Beck’s last boss in FM radio.

Not for the last time in talk radio, Beck beat the odds. At 3 p.m. on January 3, 2000, “The Glenn Beck Program” debuted in Tampa Bay.

“Beck’s Corpus show was just him, Clydie Clyde and the news reader,” says Tod Tucker, who hosted the slot following Beck’s at KZFM. “He was extremely talented and he knew it. At first we didn’t get along because he was so arrogant, but we became friends. He always talked about going to New York City and making it big. That was his dream.”

He didn’t advertise it, but at 19 Beck was the youngest morning zoo host and program director in the country. “At the time I thought he was in his mid- to late 20s,” says Barry Kaye, former program director at KITE, a rival station. “He was an incredible talent to be working at that level at that age.”

“Glenn was a talented young preppy kid with a bit of an attitude,” remembers Meryl Uranga, a program and music director at KZFM. “I had never smelled clove cigarettes before I met him. Hanging out with Beck was also the first time I ever saw certain drugs. He partied a lot.”

Along with giving Beck the space to develop creatively, Corpus Christi offered a crash course in the business side of radio. As a manager and programmer, Beck was responsible for tailoring KZFM’s appeal to Corpus Christi’s complicated market, a diverse population split between Hispanics, whites, blacks and active military. And there was enormous pressure to get the formula right. At the time, KZFM was engaged in a heated ratings war with its rival, KITE.

In the studio, the early ’80s were the age of the zoo. In the back office, they were the age of federal deregulation. In 1982, the FCC began removing constraints on radio ownership across a range of areas, from public-service content quotas to filing requirements. Among the most consequential changes was the revocation of an “anti-trafficking” rule that barred investors from quick flipping stations for profit. The result was a radio bubble fueled by a newly feverish market for properties. To pick just one example from Beck’s career, his future employer WKCI in Connecticut sold for $6 million in 1983. Three years later it went for $30 million. Between 1982 and 1990, almost half of the country’s stations would change hands at least once.

This new quick-sell culture affected radio pros in numerous ways. As owners came and went, experimenting with staff and formulas, turnover rates increased. The result was a caste of radio gypsies like Beck, who wore signs that declared, “Have mouth, will travel.” Increasingly, DJs did not know where they’d be at the end of the next Arbitron ratings quarter.

The new economics of radio also ushered in a new golden age of ratings wars. As station values and salaries ballooned, so did pressure for top ratings and media attention. Because morning shows were the biggest and most personality-driven piece of Top 40 programming, rival morning teams in the 1980s fought wars with entertaining, and occasionally bloody, ferocity. “Some radio people remember the radio battles of the 1980s for the off-air ugliness in the station parking lot,” says Sean Ross, who tracks the radio industry for Edison Research.

Beck landed in Corpus Christi in the middle of an old-style ratings war. He was hired by KZFM as part of a station-wide blood infusion to replenish a staff that was being picked apart by KITE. The owner of the station and Beck’s new boss was Arnold Malkan, a conservative Republican and attorney known for his hot temper and litigiousness. As Malkan hurled legal threats across town, the two stations’ morning teams did battle on the air and off. As often was the case, this war involved a heavy dose of camp. The military metaphor of a ratings war became literal when KITE’s morning zoo team christened itself the “KITE Killers” and began attending promotional events dressed in Army surplus camo fatigues and berets. “They’d roll up to promotional gigs and jump out of the limo in uniform, waving plastic machine guns,” remembers Barry Kaye, a programmer at the station.

Beck manned the KZFM war room in his civvies, but had a military bent of mind. His hard-nosed mentor and recruiter, Jim Sumpter, instructed Beck and his fellow DJs to fight to win. “Sumpter was one of the most vicious managers I ever competed against,” remembers Chuck Dunaway, a KITE staffer who arrived in Corpus Christi around the same time as Beck. “Our two stations would have bombed each other if we could have done it legally.”

“Jim Sumpter was a master at guerrilla war,” says Tucker, Beck’s fellow DJ at KZFM. “I like to say that God gave Beck his talent, and Sumpter taught him how to use it.” (Sumpter is now a “Birther” and syndicated right-wing talk show host.)

The morning mischief between the rival stations escalated following Beck’s arrival in Corpus. Dunaway recalls early in his tenure showing up to the KITE studio and finding each of the station’s front doors — the only exit in a converted storefront building — glued shut. A demolition crew had to knock the front door down so that the “KITE Killers” could get inside in time to start their show. Then there were other pranks that posed less of a fire hazard. Throughout 1983, Dunaway and his staff were anonymously placed on dozens of mailing lists for magazines and books delivered cash-on-delivery. The soundtrack for it all was a Beck-written “Ghostbusters” spoof that became a local hit during Beck’s morning show, called “KITE-busters.”

“We were the ‘good guys’ and didn’t do any vandalism,” says Dunaway, Beck’s now retired former rival. “In 50 years of broadcasting, I have never been in a market where those kinds of things were done. Who was behind the mischief I cannot identify, but it was during the time Beck was the morning competition.”

In pursuing a career in Top 40, Beck opted out of a college education. At least, the academic part of a college education. In the “Animal House”-inspired world of 1980s morning radio, Beck had found a real-world corollary to fraternity high jinx.

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Beck’s one-man zoo at KZFM held firm against KITE’s “Killers.” He had won his first ratings war. By 1985, he was a polished morning DJ in the zoo mold. He had programming experience and two years’ worth of tapes demonstrating “wacky” morning chops to broadcasters across the nation newly hungry for them.

One station looking to modernize was Louisville, Ky.’s WRKA. In mid-1985, the station tapped Beck — who at 21 now had eight years of radio experience — to headline the station’s morning-drive slot. Despite being No. 1 in morning drive four years running, Beck’s new bosses thought it was only a matter of time before the cultural curve came around to clobber them. The station had reason to worry. At the time of Beck’s arrival, the station’s on-air personalities and playlists were staid bordering on geriatric, as captured in the WRKA slogan, “Between Rock and the Rocking Chair.” Anticipating his future bosses at Clear Channel and CNN, WRKA saw Beck as the bright new thing capable of drawing younger listeners. A $70,000 salary made Beck the largest investment in the station’s makeover. As a signing bonus, Beck received a gold Rolex. 

Beck’s first full-scale zoo show was known as “Captain Beck and the A-Team.” For four hours every weekday morning, Beck sat in WRKA’s small, dimly lighted studio across from his producer and sidekick Bob Dries. Dries was Beck’s Ed McMahon and Artie Lange, who cackled like a hen every time Beck cracked wise. “It was Dries’ job to punch buttons to launch sound effects, and laugh like he’d just won the lottery at every single limp Glenn Beck joke,” remembers a former WRKA colleague.

With Dries across the console, Beck directed a rotating ensemble cast and wrote or co-wrote daily gags and skits. Among the show’s regular characters was Beck’s zoo alter ego, Clydie Clyde. But Clyde was just one of Beck’s unseen radio ventriloquist dolls. “He was amazing to watch when he was doing his cast of voices,” remembers Kathi Lincoln, Beck’s former newsreader. “Sometimes he’d prerecord different voices and talk back to the tape, or turn his head side to side while speaking them live on the air. He used to do a funny ‘black guy’ character, really over-the-top.”

“Black guy” impersonations were just one sign of the young Beck’s racial hang-ups. Among the few recordings of “Captain Beck and the A-Team” archived online is a show from February 1986 in which Beck discusses that night’s prime-time television schedule. When the subject turns to Peter Strauss, an actor known for starring in television’s first miniseries, Beck wryly observes, “They say without [Strauss' early work] the miniseries ‘Roots’ would never have happened.” Clydie Clyde then chimes in with an exaggerated and ironic, “Oh, darn.” The throwaway dig at “Roots,” which chronicled the life of a slave family, wins knowing chuckles from Beck’s co-hosts.

Beck’s real broadcasting innovation during his stay in Kentucky came in the realm of vicious personal assaults on fellow radio hosts. A frequent target of Beck’s in Louisville was Liz Curtis, obese host of an afternoon advice show on WHAS, a local AM news-talk station. It was no secret in Louisville that Curtis, whom Beck had never met and with whom he did not compete for ratings, was overweight. And Beck never let anyone forget it. For two years, he used “the big blonde” as fodder for drive-time fat jokes, often employing Godzilla sound effects to simulate Curtis walking across the city or crushing a rocking chair. Days before Curtis’ marriage, Beck penned a skit featuring a stolen menu card for the wedding reception. “The caterer says that instead of throwing rice after the ceremony, they are going to throw hot, buttered popcorn,” explains Beck’s fictional spy.

Despite the constant goading, Curtis never responded. But being ignored only seemed to fuel Beck’s hunger for a response. As his attacks escalated and grew more unhinged, a WHAS colleague of Curtis’ named Terry Meiners decided to intervene. He appeared one morning unannounced at Beck’s small office, which was filled with plaques, letters and news clippings — “a shrine to all that is Glenn Beck,” remembers Meiners. He told Beck to lay off Curtis, suggesting he instead attack a morning DJ like himself, who could return fire. “Beck told me, ‘Sorry, all’s fair in love and war,’” remembers Meiners. “He continued with the fat jokes, which were exceedingly cruel, pointless, and aimed at one of the nicest people in radio. Glenn Beck was over-the-top childish from Day One, a punk who tried to make a name for himself by being disruptive and vengeful.”

Louisville is where Beck began experimenting with another streak that would become more pronounced in later years: militaristic patriotism and calls for the bombing of Muslims.

The birth of Glenn Beck as Radio Super Patriot can be traced to the morning of April 15, 1986. This was the morning after Ronald Reagan ordered U.S. warplanes to bomb Moammar Gadhafi’s Tripoli palace in response to the bombing of a Berlin nightclub frequented by U.S. servicemen. Beck sounded stoned during the show — and given his later claim to have smoked pot every day for 15 years, might have been — but even then his politics were anything but tie-dyed. After opening the show with a prayer and Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” Beck played patriotic music through the morning. The only track receiving multiple plays was a New Wave-ish spoof titled “Qaddafi Sucks.” The song was a huge hit with listeners, dozens of whom called Beck to tell him how inspired they were by his patriotism. Caller after caller applauded him for “standing up for America.” When someone argued that Reagan should have dropped more bombs, Beck agreed. “I personally don’t think we did enough,” he says. “We should’ve went over there [sic] and bombed the hell out of ‘em.”

What’s most notable about this early version of Glenn Beck as Super Patriot is his near listlessness. There are none of the fire-breathing, teary-eyed histrionics that would come to define Beck’s future radio and TV persona. Even while offering up star-spangled red meat, Beck sounds as if he would rather be smacking Liz Curtis around. When a young male caller suggests kidnapping Libyan agents and then torturing them by sliding them down razor blades into waiting pools of alcohol, Beck simply replies, “Thanks for the call. Buh-bye.”

Whether Beck was tired or stoned that day, he was almost certainly depressed. Despite his creative freedom, local star status and high salary, Beck’s mental state was on a slide. By his own telling, he was drinking heavily, snorting coke and entertaining thoughts of suicide. “There was a bridge abutment in Louisville, Kentucky, that had my name on it,” Beck later wrote. “Every day I prayed for the strength to be able to drive my car at 70 mph into that bridge abutment. I’m only alive today because (a) I’m too cowardly to kill myself … and (b) I’m too stupid.”

Beck left Louisville at the end of 1986 a defeated man. His signature mix of Gadhafi songs, fat jokes and racial impersonations had made waves, but failed to produce numbers. With Beck at the helm during morning drive, WRKA slipped to third in the market. He was fired and the station brought its youth experiment to an end. As Beck and his wife packed their bags for Phoenix in early 1987, WRKA switched to an oldies format.

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Beck was hired once again as a strategic youth injection. This time the channel in need of fresh energy was the Phoenix Top 40 powerhouse KOY FM, known as Y95. The station brought in Beck to fill the morning shoes of a middle-aged DJ named Bill Heywood, whose mellow persona and long career made him a Phoenix institution, but one out of step with the times. Heywood may have interviewed everyone from JFK to Sinatra, but he lacked the zany chops needed to keep up with Beck’s old friend from D.C. Bruce Kelly, then hosting the market’s leading morning show on rival station KZZP. As ever, Kelly was a flamboyant master of publicity stunts as well as a top-rated morning jock. Since parting ways with Beck in D.C., he had completed the Boston Marathon on a custom pogo stick and convinced John McCain to dive into a pool of chocolate. To compete with Kelly, Y95 needed someone who could make a lot of noise. Beck was their man.

At first, Kelly was happy to have his old friend in the same town. “My wife and I were excited when Glenn and Claire told us they were moving to Phoenix,” says Kelly. But these warm feelings didn’t last long. Something had changed in Beck. In Phoenix, Beck became known for an outsize and mischievous ego — a reputation that would dog him for the rest of his Top 40 career. This new Beck was symbolized by the cars that stocked the garage of his Phoenix ranch house: a navy blue Cadillac, and that symbol of ’80s excess, a DeLorean. 

The station partnered Beck with a 26-year-old Arizona native named Tim Hattrick. More relaxed by nature than Beck, Hattrick expected that the two would share duties on the show as partners. But Beck had other ideas. His first day in the studio, Beck called Hattrick into his office and laid down the law. “I remember Beck sat me down and pulled out a notepad on which he had drawn a planet being orbited by satellites,” says Hattrick. “On the big planet, Glenn wrote ‘Me.’ Then he pointed to the orbiting satellites and wrote names on them, such as ‘Tim,’ ‘News,’ and ‘Clydie Clyde.’ I’ll never forget Beck telling me I was a satellite. He was younger than me but carried himself like he was 35 or 40.”

Dispelling any doubts about the station’s new direction, Y95 also rented a mascot monkey, named Zippy the Chimp. Station managers flew Beck and Hattrick to New York, where they watched Scott Shannon run his zoo at Z100. Back in Phoenix, the Beck-Hattrick show was announced in a local TV ad that marks the 23-year-old Beck’s television debut. In the 30-second spot, Beck appears puffy-faced in a brown leather jacket. Next to him is the slimmer Hattrick in a satin Phoenix Suns warmer. The two young DJs are sitting in the studio stirring each other’s coffee when an announcer’s voice declares: “The new Y95 morning zookeepers — Glenn Beck and Tim Hattrick!”

Beck: “We told our bosses right upfront, ‘We don’t need gimmicks to sell the new Y95.”

Hattrick: “We’ve got a better mix of music, great DJs who don’t yak too much — “

Beck: “Plenty of easy contests for you to win lots of free money — “

Hattrick: “Plus more continuous music, Y95 Airborne traffic report, and special guests!”

Beck: “With all that, who needs gimmicks?”

As Beck delivers this last line, balloons and cash fall from the ceiling, model airplanes zip by, and a loud cuckoo clock goes off, sight unseen. Zippy the Chimp jumps onto the table wearing a yellow “Y Morning Zoo” T-shirt. The ad summarizes in 30 seconds most of what you need to know about the first 15 years of Beck’s radio career.

Beck never grew close to Hattrick, who thought his new partner was talented but full of himself and incapable of thinking of anything but radio and ratings. “Beck lived, ate, drank and breathed radio,” says Hattrick, who still works as a DJ in Phoenix. “It was impossible to talk to him about anything without reference to how to bring it into the show. I never once saw any evidence that he could turn it off. In that sense he was a one-dimensional person. But he was great at being a grandstanding, pompous idiot and shaking the brushes for attention.”

Beck and Hattrick began their show far behind Kelly’s market-leading show on KZZP. As they continued to get clobbered, Beck grew obsessed with getting his name on the leading station. His first attempt to get Kelly to mention him on the air came shortly after his arrival. “I walked out to get the paper one Saturday morning,” remembers Kelly. “When I turned around, I saw that my entire house was covered in Y95 bumper stickers. The windows, the garage doors, the locks — everything. But I refused to mention Beck’s name on the air, which drove him nuts.”

Beck kept trying. When KZZP’s music director held his marriage at a Phoenix church, Beck loaded up Y95′s two Jeeps with boxes of bumper stickers and drove to the ceremony. As the service was coming to a close, Beck and his team ran crouching from car to car, slapping bumper stickers on anything with a fender. The service ended while Beck was running amok, and the KZZP morning team appeared just in time to see Beck jump into his getaway car. “Beck saw me standing in the way of the exit and gunned right for me. I threw a landscaping rock on his windshield and blocked him,” says Kelly. When his old friend demanded he roll down the window, Beck reluctantly obliged. Kelly then unloaded a mouthful of spit in his face.

“Glenn Beck was the king of dirty tricks,” says Guy Zapoleon, KZZP’s program director. “It may seem mild in retrospect, but at the time that wedding prank was nasty and over the line. Beck was always desperate for ratings and attention.”

The animosity between Beck and Kelly continued to deepen. When Beck and Hattrick produced a local version of Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” for Halloween — a recurring motif in Beck’s life and career — Kelly told a local reporter that the bit was a stupid rip-off of a syndicated gag. The slight outraged Beck, who got his revenge with what may rank as one of the cruelest bits in the history of morning radio. “A couple days after Kelly’s wife, Terry, had a miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, ‘We hear you had a miscarriage,’ ” remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. “When Terry said, ‘Yes,’ Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce [Kelly] apparently can’t do anything right — about he can’t even have a baby.”

“It was low class,” says Miller, now president of Open Stream Broadcasting. “There are certain places you just don’t go.”

“Beck turned Y95 into a guerrilla station,” says Kelly. “It was an example of the zoo thing getting out of control. It became just about pissing people off, part of the culture shift that gave us ‘Jackass.’” Among those who were appalled by Beck’s prank call was Beck’s own wife, Claire, who had been friends with Kelly’s wife since the two worked together at WPGC.

Their friendship soured, Beck continued with the stunts, some of which won the competition’s begrudging admiration. The most elaborate and successful of these neatly throws a double-spotlight on both the juvenile nature of morning radio competition and the culture of pop cheese in which Beck marinated for 20 years.

Toward the end of Beck’s time in Phoenix, KZZP sponsored a free Richard Marx concert at the Tempe El Diablo stadium in downtown Phoenix. Marx was at the time riding high on a triple-platinum album, and the show was a monster publicity coup for Beck’s rival. But Beck was in no mood to let KZZP bask in the concert’s glow without a fight. He and Hattrick arrived at the stadium early on the night of the show and gave the sound technician $500 to play a prerecorded Y95 promo moments before KZZP’s Bruce Kelly was scheduled to announce the show. As an audience of nearly 10,000 waited for the show to begin, the KZZP mics were cut and Beck’s voice suddenly boomed out of the stadium’s sound system: “The Y95 Zoo team is proud to present … Richard Marx!” As soon as he heard his name, an oblivious Marx walked onto the stage and began to play. As the KZZP crew stood stunned offstage, scattered Y95 agents popped up and began throwing “Y95 Zoo” T-shirts in every direction to a cheering crowd.

“It was brilliant,” remembers Kelly, who gave Beck his first lessons in the art of publicity. “Totally brilliant. He nailed us.”

In the winter of 1987, downtown Phoenix went without holiday decorations because of budget problems. Y95 was asked by the mayor to lead a fundraising effort to replace them. Beck and Hattrick came up with this idea to “steal” decorations from the City of Scottsdale. In the process, the pair was arrested. “It didn’t quite go as planned, but it resulted in a lot of news coverage and contributed to a successful fundraiser,” says Mike Horne, the station’s general manager.

The stunt was a textbook case of media marketing 101: Attention is good; controversy is better. Outrage is the gift that keeps on giving. By his mid-20s, Beck had become a canny and mature publicity hound. This is seen most clearly in Beck’s first national publicity coup. In September 1988, Beck and Hattrick invited Jessica Hahn onto the show. That month Playboy was featuring a pictorial of the former church secretary, who had become famous when televangelist Jim Bakker admitted to his affair with her.

“That evening, we took Jessica out to dinner,” remembers Mike Horne. “I got up to go to the men’s room and quickly found myself surrounded at the urinal by Glenn and Tim, who began lobbying me to hire Jessica as a permanent fixture of the morning show. They negotiated the deal, which was a rental car, an apartment and $2,000 a month.”

One is reminded of P.T. Barnum’s famous arrangement with his longtime prize midget, Tom Thumb, who received $4 a week plus board. And indeed Beck’s showman instincts were worthy of Barnum: The hiring of Hahn as the zoo team’s “prize-and-weather bunny” became an international story. Johnny Carson and David Letterman joked about it, editorial writers debated it, and as a result Y95 received a much-needed ratings jolt. When People magazine visited the station looking for a quote, Beck described Hahn’s radio debut as “awesome” and explained that she filled the void of a “prize bunny for our zoo.” The trio was short-lived, however. After a few weeks on the job, Hahn asked to be transferred to a nighttime slot. 

Toward the end of his time in Phoenix, Beck’s wife, Claire, gave birth to a daughter. As with the rest of his life, Beck had incorporated his wife’s pregnancy into his radio show. He asked listeners to guess when his wife would go into labor and the sex of the child. When Beck came back on the air after the birth, he announced that the delivery had been problematic and that there would be no more games around the subject. The baby girl had suffered from a series of strokes at birth resulting in cerebral palsy. Beck named her Mary, after his mother.

“After the public buildup about the baby, it was all very awkward and sad,” remembers Hattrick. “I thought it was a good lesson in being careful about personal issues on the air.”

Beck would later make his national name by turning that lesson on its head. But not yet. Shortly after the birth of his daughter, Beck resigned from Y95 to accept a job in Houston. Another also-ran Top 40 station needed a buzz-generator. Beck and his young family headed east, back to Texas.

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Beck arrived in Houston early in 1989. After years of moving forward professionally, the oil city would prove to be his Waterloo. Fueled by booze and cocaine, Beck would produce some of the worst radio of his life and tarnish his reputation in what one former colleague calls an “epic meltdown.”

In a reprise of Phoenix, a No. 2 Top 40 station had hired him to compete with the market’s leading station. His new employer, KRBE, aka Power 104, brought him on board at a salary well above that usually paid by its parent company, Susquehanna.

“There was a lot expected of him,” remembers his old program director Gary Wheeler. Beck’s salary, said to be around $300,000, reflected the scale of his task, which was something like the morning radio equivalent of a kamikaze mission. Beck was put up against KKBQ’s “Q-Zoo,” hosted by nationally syndicated zoo superstar John Lander. The mismatch was so great that nobody expected Beck to cut deeply into Lander’s royal ratings. It was enough that he generate buzz while going down in sacrificial flames.

“KRBE brought Beck in to make some noise and to create public awareness through promotions,” says Ed Shane, a Houston-based radio consultant. “They just wanted Beck to be Beck, because John Lander had cornered the zoo market.”

For the first time in four years, Beck was working without a supporting cast. He would succeed or fail on the strength of his own personality and his box of cartoon voices, especially Clydie Clyde. Alone in the studio, he struggled from the start. Defined by regular back-and-forth with Clydie Clyde, the show fell flat with listeners and industry pros. Guy Zapoleon, who as a program director competed with Beck in Phoenix and Houston, remembers marveling at how bad Beck sounded. “It was horrible,” says Zapoleon. “It was just Beck and Clyde talking to each other. No one could believe it was the same guy as in Phoenix.”

Beck doesn’t argue with this assessment. “It was the worst time in my broadcasting career, and I wish people would stop bringing it up,” Beck told the Houston Chronicle. “It’s the most embarrassing thing I ever did on radio. If I could make everybody forget about my time in Houston, it would be good.”

“Glenn took risks and was able to generate talk, but he never took off in ratings,” says Wheeler, Beck’s program director. “The thinking at the time was Glenn was misplaced as a Top 40 morning host. He was not very hip and tended to sway in content toward things that might appeal to an older or non-music listener.”

Among the lame stunts that Beck would like everyone to forget is his “breakfast meat” moment. On his first show, Clydie Clyde asked listeners to compete for cash prizes by mailing a slab of breakfast meat and a raw egg to the studio in standard issue envelopes. As Beck explained at the time to a Houston Chronicle reporter: “See, Wednesday was our first day and before that we had been running around like chickens with our heads cut off around here. And I had mentioned at one point that I wanted to meet the listeners at local malls. But Clyde took it in a completely different direction.”

It wasn’t just Beck who spoke to Clydie Clyde as if he were real. His conversations with the Muppet-voiced creature were so seamless and regular that listeners showed up at promotional events asking to meet the character. “People would arrive and ask, ‘Where’s Clyde?’” remembers Mark Schecterle, KRBE’s marketing director. “We’d always tell them Clyde just left the building, but would be at the next event. Beck was a creative, totally nonpolitical disc jockey back then.”

That judgment depends on how you define “nonpolitical.” It was in Houston, whose adopted son George H.W. Bush was about to become president, that something began stirring in Beck hinting of ambitions that could not be contained on the platform of local FM radio.

In Kentucky, Beck’s idea of supporting the military had been looping the words “Gadhafi Sucks” over a Duran Duran beat. Three years later, just a month into his new solo gig, Beck was playing phone tag with A-list publicists in New York and Los Angeles, laying the groundwork for a military-themed patriotic extravaganza. There was nothing zoo about it. It was an ode to Bob Hope by way of Casey Kasem.

The idea was grand in scope and classical in inspiration. During one week in February of 1989, Beck broadcast his morning show from the deck of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, an aircraft carrier patrolling the Mediterranean off the Libyan coast. After receiving clearance from the 6th Fleet, Beck began lining up prerecorded celebrity greetings and scheduled phone-in interviews with a dozen celebrities, which he then wove into the morning show, along with interviews with the Roosevelt’s crew. Beck’s handpicked celebrity guest list presents a family snapshot of 1980s American pop culture. Beck’s broadcasts from sea included voice cameos by musicians Jon Bon Jovi, Eddie Money, LaToya Jackson, Joan Jett and Cheap Trick; actors Martin Landau, Wil Wheaton, Kathleen Turner, Brooke Shields, Lesley Ann Warren and Tina Yothers; and icons Bob Hope, Mickey Mouse, Pat Sajak and Ronald Reagan.

Beck’s presentation, which hinted at his 2003 “Rallies for America,” didn’t stop there. He also hand-delivered thousands of homemade cookies and a giant white sneaker signed by thousands of Houstonites at a local mall. As Beck described it to a local reporter, the event was meant as “a gift from the people of Houston to the 6th Fleet to say, ‘thanks for being there.’”

No doubt the crew of the Roosevelt appreciated the free morning entertainment. The same could not be said for Houston’s radio audience. Not even Ronald Reagan and Tina Yothers could generate enough excitement around Beck’s show to justify his enormous salary. “Radio is about numbers, and Beck didn’t produce them,” says Schecterle, Beck’s KRBE colleague. “So they fired him.”

It was not an amicable split. Beck had been working under a multiyear contract and fought hard for the maximum severance. “He spent his last weeks in Houston battling on the payout with the corporate programmer,” says Wheeler. The battle was so drawn out it caught the attention of potential employers in the clubby world of Top 40 radio. According to a veteran morning radio hand, word spread that Beck was hard to work with and prone to wild behavioral swings. In industry terms, he had become “damaged goods.” He was still only 26. 

The county coroner found no evidence of violence on either body. Police investigators told Tacoma’s News Tribune that the double drowning appeared to be a classic man-overboard mishap — a failed rescue attempt in which both parties perished.

At the time of Beck’s death, she held custody of her 15-year-old son, Glenn, with whom she had moved to Puyallup. She had left her estranged husband William behind in Mt. Vernon, Wash., another small city 100 miles due north. After producing two daughters and a son, the Becks’ marriage had collapsed in 1977 under the weight of Mary’s chemical addictions and manic fits of depression. It was in the two years bridging this divorce and his mother’s drowning that a teenage Glenn Beck launched one of the most bizarre and unlikely careers in the history of American broadcasting.

Since launching his talk radio career in the late ’90s, Beck has constructed a persona anchored in a biography of struggle and redemption. It is a narrative with shades of another haunted Washingtonian who found entertainment fame, Kurt Cobain. Both men hailed from broken homes in the drizzly Pacific Northwest. Both men would find youthful fortune behind microphones while struggling with drugs, prescribed and recreational. Both would contemplate suicide before their tethers finally snapped in 1994. That year Cobain would wrap his mouth around a loaded shotgun. Beck, after contemplating doing the same while listening to a Nirvana album, would not.

Over the course of many retellings, the tragedy of Mary Beck would become the cornerstone event in her son’s personal narrative of redemption, and that tale of rebirth would became the cornerstone of his career. But the story Glenn Beck often tells about his mother is not quite the one recorded by the Tacoma paper. As Beck would later relate to millions of his listeners, his mother’s drowning was no boating accident. It was a suicide, he claimed, explained in a short note written on that fateful dawn and left on the mantel. And he said it happened in 1977, when he was 13, not 1979, when he was 15 (even though newspaper obits and government records confirm that a 41-year-old woman named Mary Beck died in Puyallup in 1979.) In fact, Beck’s first wife had never heard of Mary Beck’s alleged suicide until years after they married, when she heard her husband discussing it live on the radio.

Whether or not some of its details are reliable, the story of how Glenn Beck the teenage DJ became Glenn Beck the cultural phenomenon has both political and personal significance. But is Beck’s journey conservatism’s post-millennial crack-up writ small, complete with a preference for faith over fact? Is it simply a classic showbiz success story? Or, as Beck and his loyal legions would have it, is it a tale of resurrection, of a born-again patriot rescued from nihilism and now destined to save America from liberalism?

Whatever else it may be, the Glenn Beck Story is a radio story. It begins in the early 1980s, decades before Beck’s famous televised breakdowns, when a talented young DJ turned a fascination with Orson Welles into a successful career in the high-rolling here-today-gone-tomorrow world of Top 40 morning radio. It continues into the 1990s, when Beck made a name in talk radio by identifying the sole unoccupied niche in the industry: confessional, lighthearted, “independent” conservatism. Now, in the new century, Beck has taken his radio formula to TV, and with it his bipolar unpredictability and maudlin dramatics.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Twenty years before Glenn Beck had the power to enrage, bewilder and entertain a nation, he was a gangly and unpopular kid on a bedroom carpet, practicing his radio voice into a hand-held cassette recorder.

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Glenn Beck spent most of his childhood in Mount Vernon, Wash. Mount Vernon is a farm town on the scenic flatlands stretching along the Skagit River, in the shadow of the snow-capped Cascade Mountains. Mount Vernon is best known as America’s tulip-bulb capital. Each spring, the city hosts the Skagit County Tulip Festival, which brings hordes of tourists to the valley while the flowers are in full bloom. During the 1960s, Skagit Valley became a favored regional settling spot for hippies, the legacy of which can be seen in the food co-op on the Main Street that serves as a meeting point for local crunchy types, including the countercultural novelist Tom Robbins.

Perhaps because of this longhair lineage, Mount Vernon is known as something of a party town. Much of the nation’s best marijuana comes down through nearby British Columbia, some of it on fishing boats. Before the B.C. trade matured, Mount Vernon and the surrounding area was known for its bountiful high-grade local marijuana harvests. After he got clean in the mid-’90s, Beck would claim that he’d gotten high every day for 15 years, starting at age 16.

But the Becks were never a part of the valley’s counterculture. The family was best known among the town’s population of 15,000 for William Beck’s family bakery, the Sweet Tooth, which was located in the heart of downtown. The Becks were also active in the Immaculate Conception Catholic Church, whose day school Beck and his sisters attended. To this day, the face-to-face community of Mount Vernon and the watercolor backdrop of Skagit Valley remains the soft-focus template for Beck’s evocations of idealized small-town “real” America. He has also pointed to the area’s white demographic — made up of descendants of Swedish, German and Dutch settlers — as the source of his lingering discomfort around Jews and other ethnic minorities. “I’m the whitest guy you will ever meet,” Beck never tires of saying. “The first time I saw an African-American, my dad had to tell me to stop staring.” 

Religion is central to Beck’s current identity, but he didn’t grow up that way. Anticipating his own shotgun conversion to Mormonism, his father adopted Catholicism only because it was the precondition to sex and marriage with Mary. Before meeting his future wife, William Beck preferred a more modern form of spiritualism known as Religious Science. Developed by Ernest Shurtleff Holmes, the “science of mind” philosophy combined a Unitarian belief in god with a humanistic belief that man ultimately determines his own destiny through his thoughts and actions. Holmes is considered a proto-theorist of what would become the modern self-help movement, and his ideas early trickled down to the young Beck. Holmes has graced Beck’s recommended reading lists, and Holmesian ideas appear just two pages into Beck’s 2003 memoir cum manifesto, “The Real America,” which begins with dime store science-of-mind. “I have found there are four steps to change,” writes Beck. “1. You must want it. 2. You must believe it. 3. You must live it. 4. You will become it.”

In Beck’s telling, radio was his destiny. His mother sparked his initial fascination with the medium. On his 8th birthday, Mary Beck gave her son a double-record collection of comedic and dramatic radio productions from the Depression and war years. The record set was titled “The Golden Years of Radio.” It had an immediate and lasting impact. “[I was] mesmerized by the magic radio was, how it could create pictures in my head,” Beck later wrote.

The desire to create these pictures, or “theater of the mind,” led Beck to chase down local radio work wherever he could find it. He landed his first radio gig at Mount Vernon’s local AM station, KBRC, where the station manager held a contest in 1977 for an hour on-air as guest DJ. There was never much question that the 13-year-old Beck would win. For years, he had been practicing the art of the after-school bedroom DJ, imitating the voices he heard on the radio into a hand-held recorder. Still, he was green. “My voice hadn’t even changed,” he’s said of those first efforts. “I was sounding out words.”

Radio wasn’t Beck’s only childhood obsession that presaged a future in show business. When not practicing intonation with his cassette machine, he conquered his fear of audiences by performing magic tricks. During junior high he appeared on small local stages dressed in a tux. Behind him a hand-painted sign announced: “Now Showing The Magician Glenn Beck.”

As a teenager, Beck developed a love of sound. “Beck and his crew were audiophiles,” remembers a family friend of the Becks. “Glenn was big into stereophonics, home-stereo stuff like turntables, equalizers, the newest speakers.” A teenage Beck and his friends would get high and listen to bands like Cheap Trick, Supertramp and the Electric Light Orchestra.

But it wasn’t a love of music that originally drew Beck to radio. Years before he got his first headphones and rocked out to Cheap Trick, Beck caught the radio bug from his mother’s gift. Specifically, it was Orson Welles’ infamous news-report rendering of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds,” which he’d first heard on Mary’s “Golden Years of Radio” albums, that launched Beck’s imagination in the direction of radio. Welles’ production would become a recurring motif in Beck’s career. On Halloween night, 2002, Beck produced a live broadcast of the Welles script for XM radio, the first such radio drama broadcast in more than 40 years.

At 15, Beck enrolled in a drama class at a Bellingham, Wash., public high school (which he attended after moving in with his father following his mother’s death). Part of the class involved re-creating the lost world of dramatic radio at local station WGMI, where Beck and his classmates produced old-time radio with live scripts and sound effects.

Beck wasn’t just living in the radio past. At 15, he was already reading the local trade publications. It was in one of these that he saw a help wanted ad for KUBE 93, Seattle’s newly launched FM station. A high-school junior at the time, he was hired on the basis of an audition tape that station managers thought was the polished work of an older man. Beck’s radio voice had already matured well beyond his years. “When he showed up he didn’t even have a driver’s license and wasn’t eligible for a worker’s permit, but we hired him anyway,” says Michael O’Shea, Beck’s manager at the station.

From his father’s home in Bellingham, Beck took a series of buses every Friday after school to KUBE’s Seattle studio complex. There he spent entire weekends during high school, sleeping between shifts on the conference room floor. “He had a love of radio that reminded me of myself at his age, so I sort of became his mentor,” remembers O’Shea. “We’d listen to his show and critique it in the studio. We took him under our wing as a bright young guy.”

At KUBE, Beck befriended radio pros twice his age and learned about the multiple revolutions then transforming radio on both frequencies — revolutions that would make his future career possible. First among these was the abandonment of AM frequencies by music stations for the richer sound quality of FM. Out of this void emerged hundreds of AM stations organized around the format known as news-talk. Across the country, a new generation of talk hosts emulated New York’s right-wing talk pioneer Bob Grant by catering to white males confused and threatened by the cultural shifts of the 1960s and ’70s. On the technical side of the changes sweeping radio, the introduction of satellite technology in 1978 marked the beginning of radio’s syndication revolution.

When Beck graduated from high school in 1982, he was likely more familiar with these changes than most 18-year-olds. He had five years of on-air experience on his résumé and no doubts about what he wanted to do with his life. Since no one in his family had ever attended college, it was not a rebellious act when he chose to pursue a career in radio. Working, Beck reasoned, was the quickest way of fulfilling his childhood dream of reaching Rockefeller Plaza’s Radio City. Although Beck had never been east of Iowa, he had taken serious note of the mysterious Midtown Manhattan castle mentioned in the liner notes of “The Golden Years of Radio.” In late summer of 1982, Beck began a winding and unlikely quest to reach that storied address. 

Had Beck joined most of his classmates at Bellingham High on college campuses, he might have been exposed to that era’s roiling campus political debates: the arms race, the Contras, apartheid. It’s possible Beck might have been politicized and started his talk radio career on a college station, as Sean Hannity did after living and working in Santa Barbara, Calif. Or maybe he’d just have smoked a lot of dope, listened to music, and majored in marketing.

Beck’s first stop as a high school graduate actually was a university town, but one almost completely devoid of confrontational politics.

In Seattle, Beck worked for one of several stations owned by First Media, a Mormon company based in Washington, D.C., and run by the hotel empire scion Dick Marriott. Among First Media’s growing portfolio of FM frequencies in 1982 was K 96, a small adult-contemporary station in Provo, Utah, just south of Salt Lake City.

Provo was not what the young disc jockey had in mind when he left Washington state. Provo might be the least fun city of its size in America. It hosts both Brigham Young University and Utah’s largest missionary training center. With its 90 percent Mormon population, the town would have been a disappointment for any ambitious teenage “Gentile,” as Mormons refer to non-members of the Church of Latter-day Saints, but Beck, not yet a religious conservative, was a partyer. He smoked pot and drank beer at home; he smoked clove cigarettes and drank coffee at work.

The K 96 studios offered no refuge from the surrounding Mormon culture. The station played religious music on Sundays and maintained a G-rated playlist. The Mormons who staffed the station openly objected to Beck’s coffee and cigarette habits. He happily returned fire. “The first day I went to the radio station, I pulled out a cigarette and everybody said, ‘Oh … I thought you were Mormon,’” Beck later wrote. “And I said, ‘Oh … I thought you were normal.’” Beck openly called his Mormon colleagues “freaks,” quickly souring relationships with everyone around him. Years later, Beck would politely tell the Salt Lake City Deseret News, “I lived in Provo for six months [and] didn’t fit in.”

The shining Mormon city may have been a young Gentile’s purgatory, but there was career logic to paying dues at K 96. First Media’s other properties included WPGC, a respected Top 40 AM/FM powerhouse serving greater Washington, D.C. The station had “blowtorch” power, defined as 50,000-watts or higher, and in 1983, was famous in the industry for being among the last of the big old-style Top 40 stations to resist format fragmentation. As niche formats became the norm, WPGC stayed relatively free-form and inclusive, a last bastion of rock ‘n’ roll, broadly defined, past and present.

When a job opened up at WPGC in February of 1983, Beck seized it. More than just an escape from Utah, the transfer was a professional leap forward. The station didn’t look like much — the cramped pre-digital studio was housed in a dingy building by the Baltimore-Washington Parkway — but the transmitter reached a large urban market, crisp and clear. Just as important, it was staffed by hip, ambitious young radio pros. There was even a tinge of celebrity glamour at the station. Among the members of the WPGC morning team was Joe Theismann, then an active All-Pro quarterback for the Washington Redskins, fresh off a Super Bowl victory.

Beck soon gained a reputation at PGC for three things: punctuality, a serious demeanor streaked with mordant wit, and a closet full of skinny ties. “Glenn had a very dark sense of humor. And he sort of lurked. You often got the sense that he was observing us, soaking everything up, trying to learn the craft of radio,” remembers Dave Foxx, a morning colleague of Beck’s. “He never talked politics back then. He even used to chide Theismann for his political rants, telling him, ‘Well, don’t sugarcoat it, Joe.’” Which isn’t to say the young Beck was mousey. “He was a brash, outspoken guy off the air,” remembers a former member of the WPGC news team. “He was always smoking these really funky-smelling foreign cigarettes.”

Beck often says that he ran with a “bad crew” during his time at WPGC. It’s a strange judgment, considering that the center of his social life in Washington was Claire, a pretty redhead from WPGC accounting who would become his wife and the mother of his first two children. The other major figure in Beck’s social circle was a hard-living young DJ named Bruce Kelly. Arriving at WPGC from Miami around the same time as Beck, Kelly also met his first wife at the station. The four frequently double-dated and would remain friends for years.

The close friendship between Beck and Kelly began during a massive blizzard on Valentine’s Day weekend. Both new to the station, they were the only two people working an overnight shift. To kill time, they passed joints back and forth in the office of the station president, a strict Mormon. Throughout the night, the two struggled to keep from laughing on air and warned drivers to be careful on the roads. “When the manager came in that morning she thought we were laughing out of exhaustion, but we were just really stoned,” says Kelly. “She told us to go home and get some sleep.”

Like Beck, Bruce Kelly was precocious. (And also like him, he was a partier who would clean up a decade later.) Unlike Beck, Kelly had already mastered both the art of the publicity stunt and the marketing side of the business. As a 20-year-old DJ in Virginia, Kelly had donned a white tuxedo and dived into a 20,000-gallon tank of Jell-O. During the late ’70s, he had flown on private jets, toured Europe with Led Zeppelin, and partied with Bob Marley. In short, he was Beck’s first hip radio friend. It was at Kelly’s side that Beck began his decade-long relationship with cocaine.

Kelly not only gave Beck his first lessons in marketing and publicity, he also saved his life. During a softball game in the spring of 1983, Beck and Kelly were passing joints under their gloves in the outfield, beers at their feet. When a fly ball cruised out toward Beck, he ran for it and slipped. Upon hitting the ground, Beck swallowed his tongue and started to choke. “I had to reach all the way back into his throat to pull his tongue out,” remembers Kelly. 

As their bond deepened, the two started thinking aloud about hitting the big time together. While cutting up lines in Beck’s D.C. apartment, the pair talked about teaming up to do a show. Fame. The big money. “Glenn clearly had it,” says Kelly. “I wanted to work with him and we started making plans.”

It was not to be. Before the end of 1983, Beck’s biggest booster within First Media, a rough-edged Mormon and former Marine named Jim Sumpter, became vice-president of the Malkan radio chain in Texas. Among Sumpter’s first moves was to lure Beck southwest with the promise of his own morning show at Corpus Christi’s KZFM, the city’s leading Top 40 station. It was here, in southern Texas between 1983 and 1985, that Glenn Beck fought his first ratings war. In the process, a new Glenn Beck was born. It was a person Bruce Kelly would not recognize when the two friends were reunited in Phoenix in 1987.

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Beck rolled into Texas in 1983 driving a blue two-seater Datsun 280Z sports coupe. On the bumper, a Reagan-Bush ’84 reelection sticker. At his side, his wife, Claire. And taking form in Beck’s mind, an invisible character named Clydie Clyde who would define the next 10 years of his career as a Top 40 morning DJ.

Beck’s arrival in Corpus Christi coincided with a sea change in morning radio. It was known as the morning zoo revolution, and it is the key to understanding Glenn Beck’s career, both in Top 40 radio and beyond. Before the X-rated in-studio antics of the shock jocks, there were the skit-writing shlock jocks of the zoo. In it purest form, the wacky, zany, fast-paced zoo formula consisted of an ensemble cast employing fake voices, loosely scripted skits, adolescent pranks, short topical rants, and spoof songs, backed by a Top 40 soundtrack and peppered with news and traffic reports. Beck was not a pioneer of zoo radio, but he was a member of the founding generation. The influence on his approach to broadcasting endures.

If the zoo revolution had a Lenin and Trotsky, they were Scott Shannon and Cleveland Wheeler. The formula as envisioned by the two Tampa Djs was a mash-up of “Saturday Night Live,” “The Tonight Show,” “The Gong Show” and outrageous talk radio. The idea was not completely original. During the late ’70s, the “Ross and Wilson” morning team on Atlanta’s WZGC had built a reputation by performing pranks and acting out skits between songs and news reports. But Shannon and Wheeler sped up and built on the “Ross and Wilson” template. In the weeks before their first show, the duo formed a high-energy ensemble cast of the funniest, most creative people in Tampa.

“I was broadcasting my sports show live at a bar, and Shannon came up to me and tells me I’m going to quit my job and work for him,” remembers Tedd Webb, a founding member of Shannon’s zoo crew. “When I balked, he doubled my salary on the spot and told me it was going to be something very hot.”

It was. Within four months of launching the Q-Zoo, Shannon and Wheeler owned every demographic in Tampa Bay. The show was a phenomenon: No. 1 across the board, it produced unheard-of numbers and became the most talked about development in radio. Within a year, the Q-Zoo was earning the biggest share of adult listeners of any station in the country. The success was so complete and unprecedented that the impact was global. DJs from Australia and Europe made pilgrimages to observe Shannon and Wheeler live in-studio and take notes. They returned to spawn copycat zoo shows back home.

It is appropriate that the zoo was born in the age of cocaine. The essence of successful zoo radio was speed and rapid-fire creativity, creating a nonstop on-air party. Even when DJs were talking, Top 40 hits were playing in the background. Zoo DJs, often fueled by that decade’s iconic powder, pushed morning radio from peppy to manic. “We’d be out all night partying, then go straight to the studio at dawn, cut up some lines and start brainstorming skits based on news clippings from the early edition,” remembers a veteran of Shannon and Wheeler’s zoo. “It was a blast, but you had to be fast and you had to perform. Sometimes we’d sketch out a four-hour show in 30 minutes on no sleep.”

Another part of zoo culture, also reflecting the ethos of the era, was the DJ as high-flying and hard-partying local celebrity. Promotional events featuring morning zoo teams grew extravagant as the ’80s progressed. Bloated salaries and gilded perks fed egos. By the early ’80s, it was common for morning DJs to appear at station events in full-stretch limousines.

The zoo revolution that transformed morning radio in the 1980s is key to understanding Beck’s present-day shtick. Many of the audio and visual tropes Beck employs today — the Muppet voices, the outrageous statements, the props, the stunts, the fawning and giggling supporting cast — can be traced to the zoo and post-zoo radio culture that sustained him professionally for years.

“You can see the influence in everything Beck does,” says zoo pioneer Scott Shannon, now boss jock at New York’s WPLJ and the official voice of “The Sean Hannity Show.” “The timing, the voices, the inflections, the whole approach — so much of it is from the old Top 40 morning style.”

Brian Wilson, one of Shannon’s original inspirations for the zoo idea, likewise notes Beck’s successful adaptation and carry-over from 1980s morning radio. “His performance in talk radio and television is full of hangover of basic Top 40 elements, formats and principles,” says Wilson, now a libertarian talk show host. “The sound drops, the effects, the ‘wackiness’ — he’s doing the same thing, only minus the music.”

“The first time I heard him do talk radio, I knew he was updating what Limbaugh did when he brought Top 40 tricks into talk,” says Barry Kaye, who competed against Beck in Corpus and Houston in the ’80s. “Everything he does is basically a morning show. He was always great at it.” 

Even if the turnout wasn’t the 2 million that some conservatives tried, briefly, to claim, it was still enough to fill the streets near the Capitol. It was also ample testament to the strength of a certain strain of right-wing populist rage and the talking head who has harnessed it. The masses were summoned by Glenn Beck, Fox News host and organizer of the 912 Project, the civic initiative he pulled together six months ago to restore America to the sense of purpose and unity it had felt the day after the towers fell.

In reality, however, the so-called 912ers were summoned to D.C. by the man who changed Beck’s life, and that helps explain why the movement is not the nonpartisan lovefest that Beck first sold on air with his trademark tears. Beck has created a massive meet-up for the disaffected, paranoid Palin-ite “death panel” wing of the GOP, those ideologues most susceptible to conspiracy theories and prone to latch on to eccentric distortions of fact in the name of opposing “socialism.” In that, they are true disciples of the late W. Cleon Skousen, Beck’s favorite writer and the author of the bible of the 9/12 movement, “The 5,000 Year Leap.” A once-famous anti-communist “historian,” Skousen was too extreme even for the conservative activists of the Goldwater era, but Glenn Beck has now rescued him from the remainder pile of history, and introduced him to a receptive new audience.

Anyone who has followed Beck will recognize the book’s title. Beck has been furiously promoting “The 5,000 Year Leap” for the past year, a push that peaked in March when he launched the 912 Project. That month, a new edition of “The 5,000 Year Leap,” complete with a laudatory new foreword by none other than Glenn Beck, came out of nowhere to hit No. 1 on Amazon. It remained in the top 15 all summer, holding the No. 1 spot in the government category for months. The book tops Beck’s 912 Project “required reading” list, and is routinely sold at 912 Project meetings where guest speakers often use it as their primary source material. At one 912 meet-up I attended in Florida, copies were stacked high on a table against the back wall, available for the 912 nice price of $15. “Don’t bother trying to get it at the library,” one 912er told me. “The wait list is 40 deep.”

What has Beck been pushing on his legions? “Leap,” first published in 1981, is a heavily illustrated and factually challenged attempt to explain American history through an unspoken lens of Mormon theology. As such, it is an early entry in the ongoing attempt by the religious right to rewrite history. Fundamentalists want to define the United States as a Christian nation rather than a secular republic, and recast the Founding Fathers as devout Christians guided by the Bible rather than deists inspired by French and English philosophers. “Leap” argues that the U.S. Constitution is a godly document above all else, based on natural law, and owes more to the Old and New Testaments than to the secular and radical spirit of the Enlightenment. It lists 28 fundamental beliefs — based on the sayings and writings of Moses, Jesus, Cicero, John Locke, Montesquieu and Adam Smith — that Skousen says have resulted in more God-directed progress than was achieved in the previous 5,000 years of every other civilization combined. The book reads exactly like what it was until Glenn Beck dragged it out of Mormon obscurity: a textbook full of aggressively selective quotations intended for conservative religious schools like Utah’s George Wythe University, where it has been part of the core freshman curriculum for decades (and where Beck spoke at this year’s annual fundraiser).

But more interesting than the contents of “The 5,000 Year Leap,” and more revealing for what it says about 912ers and the Glenn Beck Nation, is the book’s author. W. Cleon Skousen was not a historian so much as a player in the history of the American far right; less a scholar of the republic than a threat to it. At least, that was the judgment of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which maintained a file on Skousen for years that eventually totaled some 2,000 pages. Before he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen’s own Mormon church publicly distanced itself from the foundation that Skousen founded and that has published previous editions of “The 5,000 Year Leap.”

As Beck knows, to focus solely on “The 5,000 Year Leap” is to sell the author short. When he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen had authored more than a dozen books and pamphlets on the Red Menace, New World Order conspiracy, Christian child rearing, and Mormon end-times prophecy. It is a body of work that does much to explain Glenn Beck’s bizarre conspiratorial mash-up of recent months, which decries a new darkness at noon and finds strange symbols carefully coded in the retired lobby art of Rockefeller Center. It also suggests that the modern base of the Republican Party is headed to a very strange place.

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Willard Cleon Skousen was born in 1913 to American parents in a small Mormon frontier town in Alberta, Canada. When he was 10 his family moved to California, where he remained until he shipped off to England and Ireland for Mormon missionary work. In 1935, after graduating from a California junior college, the 23-year-old Skousen moved to Washington, where he worked briefly for a New Deal farm agency. He then began a 15-year career with the FBI, also earning a law degree from George Washington University in 1940. His posts at the FBI were largely administrative and clerical in nature, first in Washington and later in Kansas.

After retiring from the FBI in 1951, Skousen joined the faculty of Brigham Young University, the Latter-day Saints university in Utah. He then enjoyed a tumultuous four years as chief of police in Salt Lake City. During his tenure he gained a reputation for cutting crime and ruthlessly enforcing Mormon morals. But Skousen was too earnest by half. The city’s ultraconservative mayor, J. Bracken Lee, fired him in 1960 for excessive zeal in raiding private clubs where the Mormon elite enjoyed their cards. “Skousen conducted his office as Chief of Police in exactly the same manner in which the Communists operate their government,” Lee wrote to a friend explaining his firing of Skousen. “The man is a master of half-truths. In at least three instances I have proven him to be a liar. He is a very dangerous man [and] one of the greatest spenders of public funds of anyone who ever served in any capacity in Salt Lake City government.”

During his stint as police chief, Skousen began laying the groundwork for his future career as a professional anti-communist. He published a bestselling expose-slash-history called “The Naked Communist.” In the late ’50s, America’s far right began to bubble with organizations peddling stories about the true state of the Red Menace. Groups like the Church League of America and the John Birch Society organized to channel, feed and satisfy Cold War paranoia. Members of these groups were the original postwar “domestic right-wing extremist threat.” Then as now, they were very much on the government’s radar.

After his firing from the police force, Skousen became a star on the profitable far-right speakers circuit. He worked for both the Bircher-operated American Opinion Speakers Bureau and Fred Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. The two groups competed in describing ever more terrifying threats posed by America’s enemies, foreign and domestic. As the scenarios became more and more outlandish, the feds grew concerned. In an internal memo, the FBI described Skousen’s friend and employer Fred Schwarz as “an opportunist,” the likes of which “are largely responsible for misinforming people and stirring them up emotionally … Schwartz [sic] and others like him can only do the country and the anticommunist work of the Bureau harm.” 

How did Skousen become an expert on communism? He claimed, as his apologists still do, that his years with the FBI exposed him to inside information. He also boasted that he worked closely with J. Edgar Hoover. But both claims are open to question. Skousen’s work at the Bureau was largely administrative, according to Ernie Lazar, an independent researcher of the far right who has examined Skousen’s nearly 2,000-page FBI file. “Skousen never worked in [the domestic intelligence division] and he never had significant exposure to data concerning communist matters,” says Lazar.

Skousen also trumpeted the insight he says he gained researching “The Naked Communist.” But this research was as shaky as his résumé. Among the theories Skousen charged a healthy fee to discuss was the alleged treason of FDR advisor Harry Hopkins. According to Skousen, Hopkins gave the Soviets “50 suitcases” worth of info on the Manhattan Project, along with nearly half of the nation’s supply of enriched uranium. This he told thousands of audiences across the country, sometimes giving five speeches a day.

When Skousen’s books started popping up in the nation’s high-school classrooms, panicked school board officials wrote the FBI asking if Skousen was reliable. The Bureau’s answer was an exasperated and resounding “no.” One 1962 FBI memo notes, “During the past year or so, Skousen has affiliated himself with the extreme right-wing ‘professional communists’ who are promoting their own anticommunism for obvious financial purposes.” Skousen’s “The Naked Communist,” said the Bureau official, is “another example of why a sound, scholarly textbook on communism is urgently and badly needed.”

Two years on the circuit made Skousen a nationally known figure. Aligned with the Birchers and Schwarz, he also founded his own Utah-based far-right organization, the All-American Society. Here’s how Time magazine described the outfit in a December 1961 feature on what it called the “rightwing ultras”:

The All-American Society, founded in Salt Lake City, has as its guiding light one of the busiest speakers in the rightist movement: W. Cleon Skousen, a balding, bespectacled onetime FBI man who hit the anti-Communist circuit in earnest in 1960 after being fired from his job as Salt Lake City’s police chief (“He operated the police department like a Gestapo,” says Salt Lake City’s conservative Mayor J. Bracken Lee). Skousen freely quotes the Bible, constantly plugs his book, The Naked Communist, [and] presses for a full congressional investigation of the State Department.

By 1963, Skousen’s extremism was costing him. No conservative organization with any mainstream credibility wanted anything to do with him. Members of the ultraconservative American Security Council kicked him out because they felt he had “gone off the deep end.” One ASC member who shared this opinion was William C. Mott, the judge advocate general of the U.S. Navy. Mott found Skousen “money mad … totally unqualified and interested solely in furthering his own personal ends.”

When Skousen aligned himself with Robert Welch’s charge that Dwight Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,” the last of Skousen’s dwindling corporate clients dumped him. The National Association of Manufacturers released a statement condemning the Birchers and distancing itself from “any individual or party” that subscribed to their views. Skousen, author of a pamphlet titled “The Communist Attack on the John Birch Society,” was the nation’s most prominent Birch defender.

Skousen laid low for much of the ’60s. But he reemerged at the end of the decade peddling a new and improved conspiracy that merged left with right: the global capitalist mega-plot of the “dynastic rich.” Families like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds, Skousen now believed, used left forces — from Ho Chi Minh to the American civil rights movement — to serve their own power.

In 1969, a 1,300-page book started appearing in faculty mailboxes at Brigham Young, where Skousen was back teaching part-time. The book, written by a Georgetown University historian named Carroll Quigley, was called “Tragedy and Hope.” Inside each copy, Skousen inserted handwritten notes urging his colleagues to read the book and embrace its truth. “Tragedy and Hope,” Skousen believed, exposed the details of what would come to be known as the New World Order (NWO). Quigley’s book so moved Skousen that in 1970 he self-published a breathless 144-page review essay called “The Naked Capitalist.” Nearly 40 years later, it remains a foundational document of America’s NWO conspiracy and survivalist scene (which includes Skousen’s nephew Joel).

In “The Naked Communist,” Skousen had argued that the communists wanted power for their own reasons. In “The Naked Capitalist,” Skousen argued that those reasons were really the reasons of the dynastic rich, who used front groups to do their dirty work and hide their tracks. The purpose of liberal internationalist groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations, argued Skousen, was to push “U.S. foreign policy toward the establishment of a world-wide collectivist society.” Skousen claimed the Anglo-American banking establishment had a long history of such activity going back to the Bolshevik Revolution. He substantiated this claim by citing the work of a former Czarist army officer named Arsene de Goulevitch. Among Goulevitch’s own sources is Boris Brasol, a pro-Nazi Russian émigré who provided Henry Ford with the first English translation of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

“The Naked Capitalist” does not seem like a text that would be part of the required reading list on any reputable college campus, but some BYU professors taught it out of allegiance to Skousen. Terrified, the editors of Dialogue: The Journal of Mormon Thought invited “Tragedy and Hope” author Carroll Quigley to comment on Skousen’s interpretation of his work. They also asked a highly respected BYU history professor named Louis C. Midgley to review Skousen’s latest pamphlet. Their judgment was not kind. In the Autumn/Winter 1971 issue of Dialogue, the two men accused Skousen of “inventing fantastic ideas and making inferences that go far beyond the bounds of honest commentary.” Skousen not only saw things that weren’t in Quigley’s book, they declared, he also missed what actually was there — namely, a critique of ultra-far-right conspiracists like Willard Cleon Skousen.

“Skousen’s personal position,” wrote a dismayed Quigley, “seems to me perilously close to the ‘exclusive uniformity’ which I see in Nazism and in the Radical Right in this country. In fact, his position has echoes of the original Nazi 25-point plan.”

Skousen was unbowed. In 1971, he founded the Freeman Institute, a research organization devoted to the study of the super-conspiracy directed by the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. (The institute later changed its name to the National Center for Constitutional Studies, which has offices in Malta, Idaho, and continues to publish Skousen’s books, including Glenn Beck’s favorite work of history, “The 5,000 Year Leap.”)

By the end of the 1970s, the death of Skousen’s biggest allies within the Mormon church hierarchy cleared the way for an official disavowal of his work. In 1979, LDS church president Spencer W. Kimball issued an order to every Mormon clergyman in the U.S. stating “no announcements should be made in Church meetings of Freemen Institute lectures or events that are not under the sponsorship of the Church. [This] is to make certain that neither Church facilities nor Church meetings are used to advertise such events and to avoid any implication that the Church endorses what is said during such lectures.”

Skousen may have been too extreme for the Quorum of the Twelve in Salt Lake City, but he soon found rehabilitation on the intellectual margins of Reagan’s Washington. In 1980, Skousen was appointed to the newly founded Council for National Policy, a think tank that brought together leading religious conservatives and served as the unofficial brain trust of the new administration. At the Council, Skousen distinguished himself by becoming an early proponent of privatizing Social Security. He also formed relationships with other evangelical church leaders and aligned the LDS church with an increasingly religious GOP.

“Skousen worked to change Mormonism from a new and unique American-born faith into an evangelical form of fundamentalist Christianity,” says Rob Lauer, a leader of the Reform Mormonism movement. “By arguing that biblical principles were the basis of the U.S. government, he was among those most responsible for the LDS church becoming part of the religious right political establishment over the past 25 years.” 

In 1981, Skousen published “The 5,000 Year Leap,” the book for which, thanks to Beck, he is now best known. But it wasn’t that Skousen book that made the biggest headline in the 1980s. Toward the end of Reagan’s second term, Skousen became the center of a minor controversy when state legislators in California approved the official use of another of his books, the 1982 history text “The Making of America.” Besides bursting with factual errors, Skousen’s book characterized African-American children as “pickaninnies” and described American slave owners as the “worst victims” of the slavery system. Quoting the historian Fred Albert Shannon, “The Making of America” explained that “[slave] gangs in transit were usually a cheerful lot, though the presence of a number of the more vicious type sometimes made it necessary for them all to go in chains.”

Skousen spent the 1990s in semi-retirement. He spoke occasionally around the country and welcomed visiting politicians to his Salt Lake City home on Berkeley Street. His death in January 2006 was little noticed outside Mormon circles. If LDS members debated his legacy, it was in mostly hushed tones. But by then, he was already poised for a posthumous revival.

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Glenn Beck’s first public reference to anything Skousen seems to have occurred in 2003. In his memoir-cum-manifesto, “The Real America,” was a chapter titled “The Enemy Within.” It consisted of a list titled “Communist Goals of 1963.” The list was originally published in Skousen’s 1958 book “The Naked Communist,” and was submitted to the Congressional Record by Florida Rep. Albert Herlong Jr., whom Beck identifies as the author. Beck asked readers of “The Real America” to ponder Skousen’s list, then “check off” those goals already achieved by America’s new enemies within. Replacing communists in Beck’s view: “liberals, special-interest groups, [and] the ACLU.”

It would be another few years before Beck really started boosting for Skousen’s books. Apparently, around about 2007, a friend of Beck’s sent him “The 5,000 Year Leap.” In the column linked here, Canadian newspaper columnist Nigel Hannaford says the friend was a Toronto lawyer. Paul Skousen, Skousen’s son, endorsed the outlines of the tale to Salon by e-mail, without giving dates: “As I understand it, Glenn Beck was given a copy of FYL by a friend in Canada. When Beck read it, suddenly the effusive and disembodied principles of freedom that he had been trying to dig up and put together all came together and he could make sense of them. He was so excited about the clarity it brought that he began mentioning it on his show.”

Whatever the circumstances, Beck really began touting Skousen in the latter half of 2007. The first brief mention of Skousen in the online archives of Beck’s radio show is Sept. 24, 2007. Less than two months later, Beck interviewed conservative pundit David Horowitz on his radio program. He asked him, “Have you ever read any Skousen? Have you read — do you remember ‘The Naked Communist’? I went back and reread that, it was printed in the 1950s. I reread that recently. You look at all the things the communists wanted to accomplish. It’s all been done.” Horowitz agreed.

The very next week, Bill Bennett appeared on Beck’s radio program and received the same question. “Are you familiar with Skousen?” asked Beck. When Bennett replied yes, Beck gushed. “He’s fantastic,” he said. “I went back and I read ‘The Naked Communist’ and at the end of that Skousen predicted [that] someday soon you won’t be able to find the truth in schools or in libraries or anywhere else because it won’t be in print anymore. So you must collect those books. It’s an idea I read from Cleon Skousen from his book in the 1950s, ‘The Naked Communist,’ and where he talked about someday the history of this country’s going to be lost because it’s going to be hijacked by intellectuals and communists and everything else. And I think we’re there.”

Beck continued to mention the book during 2008, but his Skousen obsession really kicked in as the 912 concept began to take shape. Even before Obama’s inauguration, Beck had a game plan for a movement with Skousen at the center. On his Dec. 18, 2008, radio show, one month before Obama took office, Beck introduced his audience to the idea of a “September twelfth person.”

“The first thing you could do,” he said, “is get ‘The 5,000 Year Leap.’ Over my book or anything else, get ‘The 5,000 Year Leap.’ You can probably find it in the book section of GlennBeck.com, but read that. It is the principle. Please, No. 1 thing: Inform yourself about who we are and what the other systems are all about. ‘The 5,000 Year Leap’ is the first part of that. Because it will help you understand American free enterprise … Make that dedication of becoming a Sept. 12 person and I will help you do it next year.”

By then, the Skousen family was ready to respond to the Beck-inspired demand. “We as a family,” Paul Skousen told Salon, “were preparing to publish another edition, so I contacted his office with the request that Glenn write a foreword. He was gracious and kind and did just that. That is the version we’re now publishing.

According to James Pratt of PowerThink Publishing, publishers of the new 30th anniversary edition of “Leap,” which has the Beck foreword,  it was intended to replace the version that the Beck show was already touting via links on its Web site. Pratt claimed in an e-mail to Salon that the previous version was not authorized by the family. “It was presumed by Mr. Beck and staff that copyright authority was in effect with that edition, and as an author I must say, I had also assumed the same thing … I was more than a little surprised this was going on, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of copies.”

PowerThink secured the agreement of the Skousen family to create the current edition of “The 5,000 Year Leap,” which was first published on March 1, 2009. Pratt says that a federal lawsuit “is in process, to secure the copyright authority in an ‘authoritative’ way” to stop anyone but PowerThink from publishing the book.

In March, with the new book available, Beck invited Skousen’s nephew Mark onto his Fox show, where the two men discussed splitting up the United States. (Mark would later say that between commercials, Beck told him that a friend had sent him “Leap” and that the book “changed his life.”) A week later, Beck issued his famously maudlin announcement introducing the 912 Project. The teary-eyed performance was accompanied by a clarion call for all 912ers to buy ” Leap.” “I beg you to read this book filled with words of wisdom which I can only describe as divinely inspired,” wrote Beck in his introduction to a recent edition. The result has been a publishing earthquake: More than 250,000 copies have been sold in the first half of 2009. James Pratt, the book’s publisher, says Beck “has done more to bring the work of Dr. Skousen to light than any other individual in America today.”

“The 5,000 Year Leap” is not the only Skousen title to find new life on the 912 circuit. The president of the National Center for Constitutional Studies, Dr. Earl Taylor Jr., is currently touring the country offering daylong seminars to 912 chapters based on Skousen’s “Making of America.” For $25, participants will receive a bagged lunch and stories about America’s religious Founders and their happy slaves. An ad for Taylor’s “Making of America” seminar, currently featured on the Web site of the Tampa 912 Project, claims that Skousen’s book is “considered a great masterpiece to Constitutional students [and is] the ‘granddaddy’ of all books on the United States Constitution.”

Like so much declaimed by W. Cleon Skousen and his 21st century acolyte Glenn Beck, this last statement is fantasy. But it is also a profitable and popular one. In coming to terms with a movement that has an ever more tenuous relationship with accepted fact, we relearn that perennial lesson grasped even by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Fantasies can have serious consequences.