The Power That Was

Long protected by the senators and journalistic satraps who paid him court, Imus found himself consumed by perhaps the only forces in American life more powerful than those that elevated him to his place of privilege: the politics of race and gender. With his double-barreled Rutgers remark, he inadvertently unleashed years of pent-up anger about his racial, ethnic, misogynist and homophobic antics. Suddenly some of America's largest media companies and most important corporate advertisers were confronted with the fact that they had been complicit in the rise and reign of a purveyor of ugly stereotypes. Mainstream figures and institutions that had chosen to compartmentalize the Imus kingdom—enjoying the salon while overlooking the slurs—realized they could no longer have it both ways.

The remark and its aftermath brought renewed attention to a perennial fissure in American life: the starkly different ways in which blacks and whites can see the world. (The Imus saga now joins the O. J. Simpson verdict and Hurricane Katrina as vivid chapters in the story of race in America.) Thirty-nine years after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis, racism remains a central issue in our national life. The story of Imus's long career sheds light on an uncomfortable fact: media power is still concentrated largely in white hands and, as a result, racism is sometimes tolerated and enabled in ways that many white Americans are unable, or unwilling, to acknowledge.

A crucial lesson of Imus's fall, however, is that power is a fluid thing. In earlier eras he would almost certainly have withstood the storm, but 2007 is a different time. A woman and a black man are the front runners for the Democratic presidential nomination. The country is growing ever more diverse. This is not Dr. King's promised land, but it is a changing land—a truth Don Imus, and his court, just learned in the hardest way possible, as the grace and dignity of female scholar-athletes toppled one of the media powerhouses of the age.

A self-styled cowboy who dropped out of college after a week, Imus was, in looks and temperament, as far from the mold of the Washington establishment as you could get. He was a pioneer in the shock-jock genre and sat at the top of the ratings ("Are you naked?" he asked women who called in to the show). By the time acts like Howard Stern started beating him at his own game, Imus was looking to expand beyond his repertoire of racial humor and toilet jokes. He kicked drugs and drink and, in 1988, began booking politicians and journalists on his show. At first it was slow going. Few of them wanted to get down in the gutter with the shock king. But the lure of free air time was hard to pass up, and before long people were asking to be let on the show. One of them was Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton. In 1992, he used his appearance on the show to get his name out and establish himself as a regular guy. Along the way, Imus became the kind of media celebrity he once mocked. He moved into a pricey apartment on New York's Upper West Side. He ridiculed politicians or journalists who snubbed his offers to appear on the show.

If some of Imus's material made his guests queasy, they reassured themselves that Imus was just putting on an act—an equal-opportunity abuser who went after everyone. "He occasionally accused me of being drunk or being queer," says NBC chief White House correspondent David Gregory, a frequent guest on the show. "Imus was living in two worlds. There was the risqué, sexually offensive, sometimes racially offensive, satire, and then there was this political salon about politics and books. Some of us tuned in to one part and tuned out the other ... Whether I was numb to the humor that offended people or in denial, I don't know."

Imus is a complicated man. He and his wife, Deirdre, run a ranch for kids with cancer and blood diseases in New Mexico during the summer, doing much of the work themselves. ("There aren't counselors, there's not someone else who is with these kids or responsible for these kids," Deirdre told NEWSWEEK. "We're their surrogate parents when they are there for nine days at a time"—and she says 50 percent of the young people are minorities; 10 percent are African-American.) For years Imus has raised millions for charity; pressed to put autism on the national agenda; championed the construction of a veterans' rehabilitation hospital in San Antonio, Texas; campaigned to raise the death benefit for families of fallen warriors, and raised awareness about sudden infant death syndrome and sickle-cell anemia, among other good causes.