Nov. 29

Of course I’m in the history books for being the one who actually told him “Why not just start your own country? You can afford it.” It’s irrefutable because it was NightNews. But as I’ve said in every interview I’ve done about this, I wasn’t making a serious challenge. It wasn’t a joke either, as some have decided. I was simply the moderator of the program, and I wanted him to drop the subject and move along. The fact that it was true, that he was one of the few people in the world with the means to create a country, only made it a sharper remark. I wasn’t goading him… all right, I was. I was goading him to shut up, change the subject. But I wasn’t goading him to start a dictatorship and declare war on America.

I’ve spent much of my career clarifying those few seconds of broadcast tape so that I don’t come off as some sort of revolutionary. As far as I know, B.F. Rush never acknowledged me as any sort of inspiration for his country or its government. He certainly never offered me a cabinet post or anything. After that broadcast, I only saw him again once, at a White House press dinner. We didn’t speak. I only saw him. That’s how precise I’ve gotten to be with this information. Some of the “histories” would have you think I was already part of a shadow government he’d set up in the Virginia political underground, and that my question on that show was some multi-level coded threat meant to unsettle his colleagues in the bunker and also help plant the seed for him as a leader in the minds of his followers coast-to-coast.

All the charges and conspiracy theories used to bother me, then I learned to laugh at them, and now I just feel naïve. Maybe there wasn’t a bunker, but there was the third floor of the Monticello Hotel.

—Charles North, former NightNews correspondent, District of Columbia (interview with the author)