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The WXUR caper remains a masterpiece of McIntire's theatrics. After the FCC pulled the plug on his radio station on July 5, 1973, he set about to broadcast from another venue: international waters off the coast of his Christian Admiral hotel in Cape May, New Jersey.

"If there is not free speech any longer on the radio in the United States," McIntire declared, "it is still possible to have free speech out on the Atlantic Ocean." He obtained a World War II-era minesweeper from a scuba-diving outfit in Florida, rechristened it the Columbus, and equipped it with a radio transmitter. As a phalanx of reporters and tourists gathered in Cape May, McIntire repeatedly told them that Radio Free America would be "anti-communist and pro-American."

At 12:23 P.M. on September 19, 1973, McIntire announced, "This is Radio Free America. The silence of the sea is broken at 1160 on the AM dial."

Shortly thereafter a Coast Guard cutter from the Cape May station sliced through the water—"like a hawk or a buzzard," in McIntire's words—to monitor the Columbus. McIntire asked his listeners if they could hear him. They called the hotel from as far away as Cape Cod to confirm that he was coming across loud and clear.

Surrendering the microphone to a colleague, McIntire climbed to the deck and surveyed the sea around him. "We did it," he exulted to reporters. "It's going. It's working. We got our spiritual emphasis in, and our freedom emphasis. The Lord is giving us the opportunity we wanted. I've got a platform out here where we can really tear this country apart."

The FCC and the Coast Guard, however, were even then preparing to reel him in. Radio Free America's signal interfered with that of a station in Lakewood, New Jersey, and McIntire's pirate radio station was off the air shortly after ten o'clock that evening. The floating radio station had lasted less than 10 hours.

"I didn't know what a sensation it would be," McIntire told CT. "Then they killed it." He looked off into the middle distance. "I became a very famous man out of that."

When I remarked that, based on press accounts of the Radio Free America incident, McIntire seemed to have been enjoying himself, he replied emphatically, "I was!" He smiled. "People stood along the coast to see me. It was a crazy thing to do, but it was dramatic."

No one could have predicted that McIntire's life would have been so full of drama. Born in 1906, he spent most of his childhood in Oklahoma. He received a teaching certificate from Southeastern State Teachers College in Oklahoma, graduated from Park College in Missouri, and studied at Princeton Theological Seminary from 1927 until 1929.

He followed J. Gresham Machen to Westminster Theological Seminary as part of the separatist movement among northern Presbyterians. After graduating from Westminster in 1931, McIntire soon formed his own denomination, the Bible Presbyterian Church, which was more militantly fundamentalist than Machen's Orthodox Presbyterian Church. McIntire insisted on premillennialism, for example, and strictly proscribed any consumption of alcohol. He also formed Faith Theological Seminary as well as Shelton College and Highlands College.

In 1941 McIntire founded the American Council of Christian Churches as a counter to the Federal Council of Churches, which he considered too liberal. He also refused to join the National Association of Evangelicals, organized in 1942, deeming it too latitudinarian. In 1948 he organized the International Council of Christian Churches as a worldwide association of like-minded fundamentalists.

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May 21 2002, Vol. 46, No. 6