Raider-in chief
David Fleming
'Citizen Nader Charles McCarry (Cape 0.50).
Ralph Nader refuses to sign autographs, won't walk past a building site in case he breathes in asbestos dust, harangues startled waitresses about the dangers of white sugar, gives speeches which go on and on until the room is practically empty, dresses like a sales Manager, clobbers industry with deadly effect, eats hugely, sleeps four hours a night, has nothing to do with women, and resists intrusions into what meagre privacy he has with bitter fanaticism. When he is intense, which is much of the time, he aims his body at the listener as if he were a gun; out of hundreds of temporary associates, only six
have been able to stand the pressure and be come permanent Raiders; and one of his Rai. ders put so much energy into an argument with him that he put his spine out and had to spend a week in hospitat in traction.
So far Nader's energy, and his genius for publicity, and his personal innocence, have st' lenced criticism and allowed him to reach 0 wider and more loyal audience than anY other non-political citizen in America's history. But now, after seven years during which opposition has seemed to melt away. Nader faces his first, and what could turn out to be a really crucial, crisis. Each of the sped' fic charges which he made against the Cot, vair in 1966, and which resulted finally in the car's being withdrawn from the market, has been refuted in the report of a two-and-a' half-year study on the car's safety features, and Nader has been instructed to defend hint: self against charges that he made a string el unsubstantiated accusations against General Motors.
This is therefore a good time to catch up on the story so far, and reading Charles McCarry's book is an excellent way of doing so. It is based on a year's research including three hundred interviews, which has the un• fortunate but unavoidable result of making it already a year out of date, but it provides 0 most valuable source-book for a judgement on the first five years of the Nader phenome' non, and for an answer to the question that many kings of American industry have been asking themselves in some bewilderment, " What htippened?"' Two things happened. The first was that Nader won his first and most important con' frontation with General Motors with such re* sounding success that the company's abilitY to defend itself on matters concerning the public interest has never been fully restored. Nader accused General Motors of spying on him after the publication of his book Unsafe at Any Speed, and was proved to be right. His ringing innocence and rightness on that has allowed him to reach a huge and believing audience on matters in which he has either exaggerated of been exceedingly obtuse. His accusations concerning reconditioned Vol. kswagens being sold as new, and rodent remains in supermarket sausages were more exaggeration than fact, and his contribution to the election of a new president for the United Mine Workers Union was simply vat ic. Nevertheless, he has maintained his reptt; tation for untarnished, selfless integrity, and has been repeatedly and publicly described in near-hagiographic language which would have made St Anthony himself blush with pleasure.
The second thing that happened is that, while on details Nader may have exagger' ated, on principles he was over and over again proved to be right. He has had an enor rnous influence on safety design in cars; he was right about the condition of intrastate meat processing stations, right about air poi' lution from Union Carbide, about conditions in the mines, about radiation and the safety of gas mains, and it is probably more Ralph Nader than anyone who has brought about, the revolution in companies' awareness or their wider responsibilities. Public opinion has been active in such matters for a long time; what Ralph Nader has shown is that public opinion may be turned with startling speed into law, and that companies may get hurt in the process. Now, after seven years during which Nader's assaults have been energetic but wildly fragmented and ad hoc, people are looking to him to develop some consistent lead in curing "institutional insanity." Even supposing that he survives his immediate cri' sis with General Motors, which he probablY, will, it does not look as though the lead wit' be forthcoming. He seems hesitant ("HOW long do I have to go on doing this?" he has, asked), and proposes facile, catch-a1' solutions, like making the coal magnateSIL
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work down a mine for two weeks a year. But perhaps his strength will be that he never actually does provide a lead. To do so would, involve formulating a code, another [mini-: book on corporate responsibility or an ap'proving nod in the direction of Marcuse or' Marx — and Nader would become static and vulnerable. By refusing (or being unable) to say, he might gropingly succeed in showing, becoming technology's much needed hero of vulnerability through being, on occasion, demonstrably and energetically wrong.
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