Michael Savage's long, strange trip

How a Jewish kid from the Bronx went from swimming naked with Allen Ginsberg to spewing the ugliest bile on talk radio.

By David Gilson

March 5, 2003 | At first glance, Michael Alan Weiner seems like an improbable candidate to be America's angriest, most vicious conservative radio host. Born 60 years ago in the Bronx, Weiner has lived in Northern California for most of his adult life, making a living as an herbalist and nutritionist. He communed with Fijian traditional healers, got married in a rain forest and studied ethno-medicine at the University of California at Berkeley. He swam naked with Allen Ginsberg, dreamed of being the next Lenny Bruce and wrote a rambling novel about a half-mad alter ego. His son's middle name is Goldencloud. For years, he made a name cranking out a pile of books on alternative medicine, recommending bizarre remedies such as using vitamin C to stop AIDS and kicking cocaine with coffee enemas.

These days, Weiner's more interested in purging the body politic. Using the pseudonym Michael Savage, he's launched a one-man mission to save America from its enemies at home and abroad, which on any given day includes liberals, gays, academics, the homeless, the Clintons, immigrants, feminists, CNN, the American Civil Liberties Union, Muslims and other minorities. Broadcasting three hours a day, five afternoons a week, from a rented studio in downtown San Francisco, he gives voice to the right wing's darkest fantasies. He muses about launching preemptive nuclear strikes on the Middle East ("I wish to God the hatches were open and the missiles were flying!"), suggests gunning down illegal immigrants ("If we had a government, we'd blow them out of the desert with airplanes!"), dreams of dispatching with "commies, pinkos and perverts" and other undesirables ("I say round them up and hang 'em high!") and even paraphrases a remark attributed to Nazi leader Hermann Goering ("When I hear someone's in the civil rights business, I oil up my AR-15!")

Woe be unto those who label him racist, sexist or homophobic -- or even worse, threaten his livelihood. When an Oregon group started a boycott of his advertisers last summer, he became downright apoplectic. "I'm more powerful than you are, you little hateful nothings!" he screeched, before intoning darkly in his trademark New-Yawk accent: "I'm gonna warn you again: If you harm me -- and I pray that no harm comes to you -- but I can't guarantee that it won't." Just last week, Savage fumed about the "brownshirt groups" who dare to criticize him: "You stinking rats who hide in the sewers! ... You think I'm going to roll over like a Kitty? You're wrong!" Such vitriolic ranting is over the top, even by the ever-declining standards of talk-radio decorum. Yet, in this time of war fever and hyperpatriotism, inflammatory rhetoric draws conservative ditto-heads and liberal rubberneckers alike, and that translates into big ratings. Since launching "The Savage Nation" on San Francisco's KSFO 560 AM more than eight years ago, Savage has gone from being just another right-winger with a big mouth, a hyperinflated ego and a sizable chip on his shoulder to becoming the nation's fifth most-popular talk-radio personality, a host with enough leverage to land Vice President Dick Cheney as a guest. His book, "The Savage Nation: Saving America From the Liberal Assault on Our Borders, Language and Culture," has been perched at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for over a month, and now he's slated to get his own program on MSNBC.

Michael Weiner's long and circuitous road has taken him from being a scientist and entrepreneur, through stints as a hipster, novelist and aspiring comedian, to becoming the personification of straight white male rage. Today he likes to play up his unconventional career path, to an extent. He's the kind of guy who never lets anyone forget he has a Ph.D. His Web site reminds visitors that he is a "World Famous Herbal Expert" and the author of 18 books. But just as his gap-toothed grin has been replaced by a row of airbrushed pearly whites on the front cover of his new book, he gives his audience a whitewashed version of his past. The real story is far more interesting, not just for its ironies and contradictions, but for the often disturbing clues it provides about the man now so well known as Michael Savage. He's gone through at least one political makeover. He's turned on old friends, or they've turned on him. If his semi-autobiographical novel is any guide to his own life, he's keeping a few skeletons in his closet.

In the end, the picture that emerges from his books, from interviews with past and current associates, and from his radio show is that "The Savage Nation" is just the latest undertaking of a man who's spent his life trying to get the world to notice him.

Savage's office said he was too busy preparing for his TV show to be interviewed for this article. Earlier interview requests by phone and e-mail prompted an irritated phone call from a woman named Janet, who announced that Savage would not speak with me. Asked if she was his wife -- who happens to be named Janet -- she said she was not. "I am not affiliated with him," she insisted. "I'm just a fan." After a few minutes of testy back and forth, she suggested that it would be unfortunate if my e-mail address and phone number were somehow posted across the Internet.

Savage has come a long way since he emceed school assemblies at P.S. 42 in the Bronx. His father, a Russian Jewish immigrant, made a living selling antique bronzes on Orchard Street. An imposing figure who died of a heart attack in the early 1970s, he is the frequent subject of his son's on-air stories. Speaking at a convention sponsored by the trade magazine Radio & Records in March 2001, Savage recalled getting his first lesson in politics -- and cynicism -- from his dad. "[H]e explained politics to me very clearly. He said, 'You see, this is how the world works ... In this beautiful country of ours there are two bands of thieves: the Republicans and the Democrats.'"

Though Savage waxes nostalgic about such father-and-son moments, it appears that his parents were no Ozzie and Harriet. "I was raised on neglect, anger, and hate," he writes in "The Savage Nation." But growing up with little parental approval or praise was a good thing, he says. "Frankly, that's why I'm driven the way I am."

Savage, who now decries "propaganda about America being the Land of Immigrants," isn't ashamed of his own immigrant parents. However, his Jewish upbringing is strictly taboo. And he often makes Joseph Lieberman, Barbra Streisand and Larry King the butt of stale ethnic jokes. Brad Kava, radio columnist for the San Jose Mercury News and a longtime Savage critic, thinks Savage's ambivalence toward Jews is a misguided attempt to pander to conservative Christians. "He's Jewish, but he always acts like he's Christian," he says. In his book "The Savage Nation," for example, he complains of an anti-Christian bias in America. When Kava, who is Jewish, "outed" Savage several years ago, Savage reported him to the Anti-Defamation League. Dr. Robert F. Cathcart, a longtime friend of the talk-show star, speculated in a telephone interview that Savage says little about his background so that he appears more "neutral" when he discusses Israel or religious topics.