Long John Nebel, a radio broadcaster, made a living listening to the wild imaginings of late-night America, but even he would probably have been startled by the rise of Donald Trump.PHOTOGRAPH BY SLIM AARONS / GETTY
Donald Trump and the Legacy of Long John Nebel
By Jeffrey Frank
Many years ago, a New York broadcaster known as Long John Nebel would go on the air at midnight and stay on until dawn, reaching an audience of insomniacs and others able to pick up the signal of a faraway AM station—WOR, WNBC, WMCA. Nebel's guests, often with odd biographies, included a man who said that when he left our planet he'd met "an exquisite miniature woman" who was five inches tall. Another visitor told Nebel that, as he was washing dishes in his London flat, a voice said, "Prepare yourself—you are about to become the voice of Interplanetary Parliament!" The program, which went on the air in the nineteen-fifties and ran for more than twenty years, became the place to learn about the "psychic doctor" Edgar Cayce, the emerging influence of L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology, and "regressive hypnosis," which claimed to reveal the secrets of past lives, such as that of a young American housewife who spoke with the brogue of a long-dead Irish girl named Bridey Murphy. It was perhaps best known for the time that it devoted to U.F.O.s and to people who claimed to have met, and sometimes travelled with, beings in flying saucers, along with the supposed coverup of their existence. Nebel, who didn't believe any of this, eventually wrote about it in a sort-of-memoir called "Way Out World" (1962), but he was a showman who'd once worked as a carnival pitchman. His audience was surprisingly sophisticated, and, for all the time that he devoted to celestial voyagers, an underlying theme was the irrationality, and susceptibility to conspiracy theory, that has always been part of American life.
Donald J. Trump, the reality-show star, litigious real-estate developer, and presumptive Republican nominee for President, would have been a mid-century late-night-radio natural. To see the world through his eyes never ceases to startle, though he has enough self-awareness to gingerly (or cannily) avoid making too many absolute assertions—he makes liberal use of the word "probably." If he were anyone else, he might already be known by a Trumpian nickname like "Loose-Screw Donald." Five months before the general election, he continues to show off a talent for throwing dark substances against a wall and hoping that they stick. Most of his tropes are familiar by now. He briefly focussed on the suicide, in 1993, of Vince Foster, an Arkansas friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton and a deputy White House counsel, but may have retreated after getting an informed scolding by CNN's Jake Tapper. By then, though, Trump had insinuated that Foster's death was "very fishy" and that "he knew everything that was going on, and then all of a sudden he committed suicide." Then, in a protective swerve, he added, "I will say there are people who continue to bring it up because they think it was absolutely a murder. I don't do that because I don't think it's fair."
Trump has an instinct for knowing when he hasn't struck gold, as when he hinted—actually did more than hint—at a connection between Rafael Cruz, the father of Senator Ted Cruz, his chief rival in the G.O.P. primaries, and Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of President John F. Kennedy: "Nobody even brings it up. They don't even talk about that. That was reported"—referring to a story in the _National Enquirer—__"_and nobody talks about it." After the death, in mid-February, of the Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Trump said, "It's a horrible topic, but they say they found the pillow on his face, which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow," then moved on when the suggestion of fishiness didn't take. It's a long list, and with all that it was refreshing to hear, last month, the very different way in which Hillary Clinton—who, between the Associated Press's count of superdelegates and the California and New Jersey primaries, became the presumptive Democratic nominee—ventured into Long John Nebel territory. Without a single lawyerly parse or intimation of a vast right- or left-wing conspiracy, Clinton, in an appearance on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!," straightforwardly called for opening government files on U.F.O.s. (Indeed, she informed Kimmel that the approved term of art was actually "unexplained aerial phenomenon," or "U.A.P.")
Nebel, and the psychologists and writers who sometimes joined him, could be amused by tales of miniature Venusian women and alien abduction, but after years on the air he understood that an attraction to the idea of hidden conspiracies is not so unlike an attraction to cults, or the belief that the government staged the lunar landing, or that it is secretly plotting to take away everyone's guns, or that, as Trump claimed, in one of his group libels, "thousands and thousands" of Muslims in Jersey City could be seen cheering the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center. Nebel made a living listening to the wild imaginings of late-night America, and may have wondered how a demagogue might shape them. But even Long John probably could not have imagined that we would be hearing that sort of thing from someone like Trump, who is about to be nominated by a major American political party as a candidate for President of the United States.
Jeffrey Frank, a senior editor at The New Yorker from 1995 to 2009, is a regular contributor to newyorker.com.
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