Reckoning

by David Halberstam

  Ralph Nader was born in Winsted, Connecticut, in 1934, the son of Lebanese immigrants who gravitated to that small mill town of eight thousand after their arrival in America. Native-born Americans might have taken the American dream for granted and become somewhat skeptical of its promise, but not Ralph’s father, Nathra Nader. “When I went past the Statue of Liberty,” he once said, “I took it seriously.” That was the understatement of the year. Nathra Nader was the most passionate of Americans, idealistic, involved, contentious in a joyous and enthusiastic way. He owned a small restaurant-bakery in Winsted, which he had started just at the bottom of the Depression, and to keep it going he had labored longer hours than anyone else in that small town. “I never thought of working for anyone but myself,” he once said. At almost any hour, anyone in Winsted wanting either fresh pie or an argument about civics needed only stop in. From that small shop during the worst of times he had managed to send three of his four children not only to college but to graduate school. Indeed, Nathra Nader, though he was hardly rich, refused to let Ralph, the youngest of the four, apply for a scholarship to Princeton, on the theory that scholarships should go to others far needier.

  It was, in the best sense, a completely politicized home. Nathra’s own example and that of his wife, Rose, were tangible ones. They led lives of involvement and sacrifice; they believed that the true dreams of their household would be realized by the children, once they were able to attend the best of American schools. If America failed to live up to its promise, Nathra Nader liked to say, then it was the job of Ralph’s generation to make it better. All of the young Naders worked in the store. “The children,” their father later said, “were made to understand that the family was a bank. They put in work, duty, and trust. Then they could take out what a child must have—education.” He and his wife taught his children that the more they were given, the more they were obligated to give to those less privileged.

  Ralph Nader had always done well in school. He was a serious, studious boy, somewhat apart from the others. In elementary school he had started bringing the Congressional Record home from the local library. He was easily admitted to Princeton. As an undergraduate he wrote letters to the Daily Princetonian, never published, criticizing the college for spraying DDT on the campus and thus endangering the birds. Princeton had been fun for him, a physically attractive, intellectually open school of endless academic resource and no narrow career focus. Harvard Law School, by contrast, he hated from the start. In the mid-fifties it was a fiercely competitive place with a self-consciously Darwinian culture of its own, dramatically at odds with everything Nader had known. “Look at the man on the right side of you and the one on the left of you,” first-year students were often told at an opening-day convocation. “One of the three of you will not be here at graduation.” It was about success in the meanest sense; the students were supposed to fight each other for their place in the class rankings. The highest-ranking graduates would go off first to serve the most famous judges and eventually to join the most powerful of American law firms. There, it was assumed, they would see to the needs of the largest companies in America. For all of his young life Nader had been taught a kind of American-civics-book idealism; now, at this most elegant trade school, he was being taught the inner secrets of American society. He was appalled.

  “Harvard Law School,” he said later, “never raised the question of sacrifice. Nothing!...The icons were Holmes and Cardozo and Learned Hand. Those were the heroes—the staid, the dry, those who were respected by the power structure. Who the hell says a lawyer has to be like that?” The success Harvard Law School offered had nothing to do with the kind of life Nader intended to live. (His mother, asked once what made her son tick, answered, “What is more important is why some other people do not tick.”) For the first time it was clear that in some way he was different. He would not seek material success, and he would not respond to the impulses that Harvard Law assumed he would. He became the outsider.

  An odd, somewhat skeptical, sober young man who had unorthodox interests, he would travel on his own to distant places without ever explaining even to his closest friends exactly where he was going or why. He compartmentalized his life so that no one knew much about him. He did not seek security—as did most successful young men, still touched by the Depression. He rejected his place in the mainstream, the certified kind of American success. Instead he sought involvement and, more than anything else, a role. A tall, ascetic person of great intelligence, he moved mysteriously in his own almost subterranean world and at his own pace, and had his own vision of America. To that vision he intended to sacrifice his life; he had never married because, as he later explained to friends, to be a husband and father would take too much time away from his causes. The normal material pleasures of life meant absolutely nothing to him.

  In 1985 one of his former employees, Michael Kinsley, wrote an affectionate tribute to Nader in the Washington Post, in which he asserted that no living American had done more to improve life for his fellow citizens. Kinsley went on to say that although Nader was warm and funny in person, “his is the classic zealot’s world view, paranoid and humorless, and his vision of the ideal society—regulations for all contingencies of life, warning labels on every French fry, and a citizenry on hair-trigger alert for violations of its personal space—is not one many others would care to share with him.” The pleasures of a hot dog, Kinsley added, meant nothing to Nader; “he tastes only the nitrates.”

  Upon graduation from Harvard Law, Nader worked briefly for a law firm in Hartford, but his interests were elsewhere. Whenever he could, he traveled, on his own, to underdeveloped parts of the world. He wrote articles for magazines, more often than not magazines that paid little. In the early sixties he became interested in, among other issues, auto safety; a classmate at Harvard Law School had been crippled in an auto accident, and Nader started writing about the subject. He began spending more time in Washington and became friends with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who, as an assistant secretary Of labor, was also interested in the subject. In the glamour of the early Kennedy years, Nader was a somewhat eccentric figure, living apart, in a rooming house, no mark of his education in his simple clothes, the epitome of which was what his friend Nick Kotz would later call “that ridiculous scarecrow raincoat.” It became his trademark.

  Washington, as far as he was concerned, was the perfect place to be. The country had changed; there were all kinds of burning new issues to which the society did not address itself. He scorned friends who told him that the great time for reform had been the thirties. The great time for social reform, he declared, was just arriving. There had been no genuine reformist zeal in Washington in some twenty-five years, since the early part of the New Deal, and in Nader’s opinion those New Deal agencies, which had originally been founded to help consumers, had gradually become part of the establishment, dominated by lobbyists from special-interest groups. Many of the old New Dealers, who had arrived in Washington to do good, had stayed on to do well. The city, he decided, was ripe for a new kind of challenge.

  He made contact with some of the new muckrakers who were beginning to assemble in Washington, and did some more writing. In 1964, for the grand sum of $2000, he signed a contract with a publisher named Richard Grossman to write a book on auto safety. Grossman had been looking for a writer to delve into the subject. A year later Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed, an unsparing critique of Detroit’s lack of concern for safety and its preoccupation with styling and profit. At first it appeared that the book would disappear with few traces. But it was extremely critical of the Corvair, GM’s latest compact, and its publication happened to coincide with a large number of suits filed against GM based on Corvair accidents.

  If Nader was looking for a larger constituency, then GM soon helped him find it. At the time that Nader was readying his book there were 103 Corvair lawsuits pending against GM. Already skittish about these suits, GM officials became even more nervous with the appearance of th
e book by this new troublemaker. They were suspicious: He was so passionate about the issue, and yet he did not hold a job. Whom, they wondered, did he really work for? What was he after? Was he in some way connected to these lawsuits? Failing to understand Nader’s motivation, sensing that he was in some unacceptable way different, GM inevitably concentrated on his personal life—sending out investigators to find something to discredit him. The investigation was unbelievably shabby and crude and provided an insight into the reaction of a mighty institution challenged in a way which it did not understand. It began rather innocuously by trying to learn about Nader through an insurance company in Boston that specialized in product-liability cases. That investigation turned up the fact that Nader was clearly a model of probity. Soon another investigation was made. Eileen Murphy, a member of the General Motors legal staff who had once worked in the Justice Department, called a man named Richard Danner, who worked in a Washington law firm. She asked him for a thorough probe of Nader. Danner in turn went to a private investigator named Vincent Gillen. Gillen, a suspicious man in a suspicious business, taped Danner’s instructions (which was fortunate for him, because later it appeared that GM wanted him to take the fall for the entire affair, and he was able to protect himself with his tapes). Gillen’s tapes recorded the following notes he made on his conversation with Danner:

  This is a new client....Could be a very important one. They came to me and I’m anxious to do a good job because they have had trouble getting investigators....They want me to work with someone I trust....It concerns this fellow who wrote this book....They have not found out much about him. His stuff there is pretty damaging to the auto industry....What are his motives?...Is he really interested in safety? Who are his backers, his supporters?...Some left-wing groups try to run down all industry. How does he support himself?...Who is paying him, if anyone, for this stuff?...Was he put there deliberately?...Is he an engineer?...No evidence of it: He went to Harvard Law....They made some half-baked investigation in Connecticut....He is not there and apparently is or has been in Washington....I don’t know where he is....Strange but he doesn’t show anywhere in any directory....Apparently he’s in his early thirties and unmarried....Interesting angle there....They said, “Who’s he laying? If it’s girls, who are they? If not girls, maybe boys, who?”...He seems to be a bit of a nut or some kind of a screwball....Well, they want to know no matter what....They want to get something, somewhere, on this guy to get him out of their hair and to shut him up.

  The ensuing investigation was almost comic, as if conducted by Keystone Kops. Nader, wary in the best of times, soon sensed he was being followed. Then friends of his phoned to report that private eyes seemed to be tracking him. He began to receive odd phone calls which, he was sure, were designed to discover whether or not he was at home. Then there were provocative approaches from young women. Two particularly inept investigators managed to follow the wrong man, a reporter for the Washington Post named Bryce Nelson. That put the Post onto the story. In time General Motors was obliged to admit that it had placed Nader under investigation. At the same time Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut was about to hold hearings on auto safety. Nader and Jim Roche of GM—the one voluntarily and the other involuntarily—became the stars of the show. GM found itself publicly apologizing to Nader, the man it had set out to discredit, and eventually settled with him out of court for $425,000 for invasion of privacy. It was an incident that reflected the worst of a giant institution and the best of a solitary American citizen.

  GM had made Ralph Nader a national figure. He was launched as a consumer advocate, and he soon expanded into other areas—to the delight of numbers of educated Americans angered by assaults on the quality of life and frustrated by dealing with large, impersonal institutions. Bright youngsters from this group became Nader’s shock troops, Nader’s Raiders, as they were called, and Nader became the consumerist-journalistic midwife of Washington.

  The Washington press corps in the sixties was growing fast as the nation began a communications revolution. People suddenly spoke of communications as an industry. A new generation of reporters and lawyers, some of whom shared the same interests that motivated Nader, were arriving in Washington, spurred by the excitement of the Kennedy years and their own desire to be a part of great events. Washington began to resemble the Washington of the early thirties, and Nader became a critical part of this new capital city. He found irate bureaucrats who were buried deep in federal institutions and who felt their work was being killed for political reasons by their superiors, and he connected them to an increasingly restless and iconoclastic press corps. Others, professional engineers, equally restless, became highly informed sources for him and were soon known as whistle-blowers. Nader used the Washington press corps with skill. He could focus on complicated issues and make them understandable. His influence constantly expanded.

  Ralph Nader brought Detroit kicking and screaming into the age of auto safety. Where it should have moved long before of its own volition, the industry now slowly and reluctantly moved, forced by mounting public demand as the Nader reform movement of the sixties became the government pressure of the seventies. For that he was not loved by Detroit; to that city he was alien, the symbol of a nation that was changing and that Detroit understood less and less. He was neither engineer nor businessman but a relentlessly attacking gadfly. Detroit’s reaction was similar to that of generals in Vietnam who were soon to find their versions of events contradicted by young reporters; it was as if privates and corporals were challenging the rightful leaders of the nation and getting away with it—insubordination. It was as if what was at stake was not just their professionalism—how good they were at making cars—but the very dignity of their station. They had worked hard all their lives, waited patiently until they finally headed these immense organizations, and now they were finding themselves, and their sacred word, judged by this strange, unsmiling young man whose only real job had been a brief tour as a lawyer in Hartford. Worse, to their dismay the press corps now seemed to take him more seriously than it did them.

  The government, prodded by Nader and his movement, was slowly but steadily beginning to impose new standards of safety and emissions controls on the auto industry. Soon after Nader’s charges, there was a series of recalls, most notably of the Ford Pinto, that not only were costly but seemed to validate the case of Nader and his disciples, that the companies were careless about safety as they were not careless about styling. The rise of Nader, the resonance that his charges found in the government and the press, added to the rising foreign competition, gave Detroit’s leaders the growing feeling that in some way or another they were coming under siege.

  At Ford in the late 1960s the manufacturing men regarded themselves as engaged in a constant struggle to get money for the plants. The plants were low-priority, and no one at the top seemed to speak for them. The company was immensely successful, for these were very good years, but there seemed to be so many demands on it—money for the stockholders, money for the bonuses, money for the workers—that in the end the factories were always shortchanged. Marvin Runyon, one of the top manufacturing executives, thought there was a certain defeatism among the men from the factories. They were not paid as well as the men in finance, they were not as well educated, and they had not risen as quickly or as high; they were, inevitably, always on the defensive in high-level meetings, trying to justify their expenditures, being cut down.

  Gradually they had come to doubt themselves. Repeatedly beaten on certain kinds of request for their plants over the years, they came to realize that some items would not go through, no matter how legitimate, and so they began to practice a form of self-censorship. They would think of something they needed, realize they could not get it through, and cut the request down so severely that the original purpose was sacrificed.

  They also learned how to use others to help them get what they wanted. Sometimes they used the UAW; they would take the union’s complaints about conditions at a pla
nt and offer them as a rationale for more spending. Or, noting that a good deal of money was going to product, they would piggyback their requests onto the budget for a new product. The moment a new product line was approved, they would jump in and use it as a means of upgrading the plant, diverting as much money as they could to the improvement of their facilities. Without that sort of maneuvering, Runyon knew, they would starve. The product people, of course were aware of this gambit, and it made them furious, for it pushed up the price of a new product line. They too felt themselves undernourished, and they were angry when they sensed that manufacturing was slicing into their part of the pie. “You son of a bitch,” Hal Sperlich, the chief product man, would say to Runyon, “you did it again,” and Runyon would simply smile. One of the worst things about those years and about being in a finance-driven company, Sperlich later decided, was that it took the men from manufacturing and product, men who should have been natural allies, and made them into constant antagonists.

  Part of it, Runyon understood, was finance’s need to keep the stock up, to create an adequate return on investment. Another part of it, never really spoken of but tacit among those in the upper regions of management, was the bonus system. The bonuses were based on profit, and for the men at the top they were the critical part of the annual reward, often greater than their salaries. Thus the bonus dynamic became implicit in the theology of the company, a powerful personal inducement for middle-level managers as well as the leading executives to go along with the push for maximum profit and not to fight either for product innovation or for better physical facilities. It was hard to get money for them unless the lines completely broke down. General Motors, by contrast, always seemed to have a lot of extra production lines, but at Ford the maxim seemed to be that when you had a hot product you just kept running the line, maximum amount of overtime, until the line—and the men—wore out. The policy was bad for the line, the workers on the line, and also the cars.