A TV talk show host starts a book club and millions read the novels she recommends.

A baby doctor offers simple advice and his words become a bible to parents.

A president sits before a microphone and his calm authority soothes a worried nation.

Three voices of three generations - Oprah Winfrey, Dr. Benjamin Spock and Franklin D. Roosevelt - have little in common, except this:

We listened to them.

The voices of influence in the 20th century are more a cacophony than a chorus: Preachers and politicians, journalists and humorists, crooners and crusaders, all have permeated the nation's consciousness. Along the way, a few have even made history.

We know their names: Will Rogers, Billy Graham, Walter Winchell.

We recognize their faces: Martin Luther King, Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter Cronkite.

But more important, we remember how their words entertained us, guided us, inspired us, forced us to think.

These were people, for the most part, who were not elected at the ballot box but selected to enter our homes. Their words came to us as we read the newspaper, huddled around wooden radios, stared at the boob tube or clicked on our computer mouse.

And we listened. Especially in our most troubled times.

Though his name is rarely mentioned now, anyone who remembers the Depression remembers Father Charles Coughlin. In an era when people were homeless and jobless and wanted to know why, the priest-turned-broadcaster took to the air waves weekly, spouting isolationist, anti-Semitic tirades, attacking bankers and blaming the world's problems on capitalism and Communism.

Millions tuned in, thousands sent money.

Fast-forward a few decades to the turbulent Vietnam war years. Again, millions tuned in, this time to the nightly TV news broadcasts of Cronkite, the avuncular anchorman whose graying temples and resonant voice helped make him a symbol of moral authority. Polls consistently ranked him among the country's most trusted men.

We listened as Cronkite, returning from a reporting trip in Vietnam in 1968, declared the United States "mired in a stalemate." Negotiation, he said, was the only rational course.

The words shook President Lyndon Johnson. "If we have lost Walter, we have lost the country," he reportedly said.

"It was the first time in American history that a war had been declared over by a commentator," author David Halberstam wrote years later.

Throughout this, we listened to political leaders, whose words sometimes defined pivotal moments in history.

"Every crisis produces a great voice," says Marshall Fishwick, a professor who specializes in popular culture at Virginia Tech University.

FDR revolutionized politics and radio with his "fireside chats," in which he reassured and rallied a nation through the bleak years of the Depression and World War II.

"We are going to win the war and we are going to win the peace that follows," he vowed in a broadcast two days after Pearl Harbor was bombed. "And in the difficult hours of this day - through dark days that may be yet to come - we will know that the vast majority of the members of the human race are on our side."

Decades later, another president, John F. Kennedy, captivated the nation with his wit, eloquence and Boston-starched voice as he spoke of new frontiers and of a "torch ... passed to a new generation of Americans born in this ..."

The 1960s also brought forth voices of change, from Malcolm X, with his fiery black nationalist rhetoric, to Martin Luther King Jr., with his impassioned cry for racial equality and an end to intolerance.

"We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools," King, the preacher, thundered as blood flowed in the streets during the civil rights battles.

His words still echo 31 years after his assassination, says Char Miller, history department chairman at Trinity University in San Antonio. "What we remember are those extraordinary speeches that called into question the fundamental errors of American society and did so in a language that has an edge to it," he says.

Sometimes the people we listened to were guides for everyday life, such as Dr. Spock telling us how to care for our children.

Sometimes, the voices were spiritual guides - Aimee Semple McPherson on the radio, Archbishop Fulton Sheen in the early days of TV. And the Rev. Billy Graham, whose crusades around the globe were beamed into millions of homes.

Sometimes a president need offer only himself. President Reagan's voice, cultivated as a broadcaster before he entered politics, delivered gentle humor and sunny visions of morning in America that helped solidify his reputation as "the great communicator."

While Reagan often joked about himself, we liked hearing others poke fun at politics itself.

"Politics has become so expensive that it takes a lot of money even to be defeated." The grumbling of a presidential candidate? Nope. The words of Will Rogers, who combined homespun humor with a serious populist message.

Populism spoke to us, too, in pen and ink, which served as America's voice early in the century. Radio gave us a new breed of celebrity journalists, none more famous than Edward R. Murrow, the world-weary, chain-smoking foreign correspondent whose eyewitness accounts from rooftops as bombs fell brought the war into our living rooms. Later, on television, Murrow helped bring down Sen. Joseph McCarthy at the height of the Red Scare.

But entertainment has its place, too. Millions tuned in to George Burns and Jack Benny for laughs, Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley for music, Johnny Carson and his late-night successors for monologues with social and political commentary cloaked in one-liners.

Eleanor Roosevelt, both as a first lady and after, lectured and wrote, championing the causes of women, the poor and oppressed. Feminist Betty Friedan challenged us to reconsider our notions of a woman's role. Still, who could have imagined decades ago that millions of TV viewers would watch a woman TV host dish about her weight, then run out to buy the pajamas she wears, the cookbook she endorses, the novels she reads?

"Oprah is someone who most people could identify with," says Brian Lavelle, of Loyola University in Chicago. "She has an air of truthfulness and candor about her. She's a true voice for many, many women."

Though the way we listen has changed - we've progressed from a scratchy "wireless" to 24-hour cable channels - Miller says there has been a remarkable consistency in those we tune in.

"Part of what makes somebody famous or infamous is they speak directly to the needs of a large number of Americans," he says. "They pose a question that's been in our heads that we haven't articulated, or they provide an answer to a question that's been kicking around a long time and we haven't figured out a way to solve it. ... We use them as a mirror."

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