On October 1, 1984, the Washington Post ran a letter to the editor that lit a fuse. Dr. John O. Nestor, an FDA medical officer, was responding to coverage of a horrific Beltway accident earlier that fall. His remedy was short.
On divided highways I drive in the left lane with my cruise control set at the speed limit of 55 miles per hour because it is usually the smoothest lane. I avoid slower traffic coming in and out from the right, and I avoid resetting the cruise control with every lane change.
Then the kicker:
Why should I inconvenience myself for someone who wants to speed?
Letters poured in for months. D.C. drivers had been griping at each other since at least 1940, but this one hit a nerve. One reader, Paul J. Leonard, coined a verb for the practice: “Nestoring.” It stuck.
Nestor doubled down in early November. “It became obvious that the police couldn’t or wouldn’t control speeders,” he told the Post. “I feel it’s up to the public to protect themselves.” Then came the line that kept commuters arguing into 1985.
The American public are like sheep.
The Post ran a profile on November 21, 1984. The headline: “John Nestor: Strife in the Fast Lane.”
What most of his fellow drivers didn’t know is that Nestor wasn’t a casual contrarian. By 1984, he was already known inside federal Washington as the FDA medical officer who blew the whistle on senior agency leaders pressuring reviewers to approve drugs without adequate testing. He testified to Congress, was reassigned to a backwater compliance office in 1972, and was restored to his post five years later.
Nestoring wasn’t just left-lane stubbornness. It was a worldview built on a career.
Dr. Nestor died in May 1999 at 86. His Washington Post obituary led with the verb, not the FDA. Jonah Goldberg revived the term in a 2013 Los Angeles Times column on gun control, defining it as “an absolute adherence to the rules, regardless of the larger consequences.” The Wikipedia entry for Nestor still mentions it.
If you’ve ever crawled behind a Buick at 55 in the fast lane of the Capital Beltway, wondering what is wrong with that person: the answer is they are Nestoring. Whether they know it or not.
This is a guest post by Jason Baum.