I’m SHOCKED!  SHOCKED!  SHOCKED!!!

For the better part of six decades, Paul Harvey spun tales on the radio in his staccato baritone, entertaining up to 24 million listeners a day with folksy vignettes ending in unexpected twists.

Previously confidential files show that Harvey, who died last February at 90, enjoyed a 20-year friendship with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, often submitting advance copies of his radio script for comment and approval. Harvey wrote Hoover and his deputies regularly. Hoover, in turn, helped Harvey with research, suggested changes in scripts and showered the broadcaster with effusive praise.

Okay, I’m not that shocked.

And then Joe Stephens describes the “Meet Cute” moment of the Romantic Comedy that is the story of Paul Harvey and his toolship as Bureau propagandizer, skiddadling past what you have to call an act of Journalistic Dishonesty on Paul Harvey’s part.  Moving right along.  Or, if you want to go to the hack newswriter cutesy quip being used for this story, now page 2.  (I myself already blew that line by not starting this blog post with something like “And now the rest of the story.”)

In 1956, Harvey sent tips about “known Reds” at a Texas Air Force base to McCarthy and his witch hunters, whose paranoiac anti-communist crusade destroyed the careers of federal bureaucrats, Hollywood intelligentsia and others before McCarthy’s demagoguery was challenged and exposed by pioneering CBS News correspondent Edward R. Murrow.  (In charater, naturally, and actually nothing particularly outlandish.)

In 1959, Harvey and the FBI colluded to go after author, psychiatrist, and educator Bruno Bettelheim after he had been critical of Hoover as well as U.S. law enforcement’s handling of juvenile delinquents.

“Meat to the bones”, we say.

Insert Bose Radio commercial.

“I think your words portray us very well but, as you requested, my staff has added a little ‘meat to the bones,’ ” Baker wrote. The resulting commentary, also distributed as Harvey’s syndicated newspaper column, included the FBI’s suggestions word for word.

Truth be told, this is all ancient history.  His most recent career is marked less by any odd government collusion, and more of the reading of carrot encrusted right wing forwarded email, in the evolution of the Urban Legend he sort of served as a conduit for for oh so many years.

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