Legend had it that he lived in a rooming house where he shared a telephone with three other residents-and, of course, he didn’t own a car. Nader’s appeal was enhanced by the fact that he seemed completely indifferent to worldly possessions and creature comforts. Powell, Jr., soon to become a Supreme Court Justice, wrote a memo to the Chamber of Commerce titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” which helped lead to a new network of conservative organizations, he made the source of his alarm clear: “Perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business is Ralph Nader, who-thanks largely to the media-has become a legend in his own time and an idol of millions of Americans.” It’s hard to think of anyone in American history who achieved this kind of influence without holding any official position or leading a mass movement. Martin credits Nader with influencing around twenty-five pieces of federal legislation that were passed between 19. Four years after that, Jimmy Carter, during his successful Presidential campaign, met with Nader twice. The following year, Martin reports, George McGovern offered Nader the Democratic Vice-Presidential nomination, which he turned down. That year, by his calculations, the Times published a hundred and forty-eight stories about him. In a 2002 biography of Nader that had the subject’s coöperation, Justin Martin identifies 1971 as Nader’s zenith. A Pete Buttigieg of that generation would have gone to work for Nader instead of McKinsey. Nader’s parents were immigrants from Lebanon who operated a restaurant in the town of Winsted, Connecticut, but he had Ivy League degrees (Princeton, Harvard Law School), and in those days becoming a Nader’s Raider, as staff members at his organizations were known, was a glittering credential, a blazer-wearing way of participating in the culture of the sixties and seventies. for spying on him, and used the proceeds of the resulting settlement to start a series of organizations that investigated what government agencies did and failed to do. In the years following the Ribicoff hearings, Nader was able to make himself into far more than an auto-safety expert. The idea of the country’s paradigmatic giant business corporation going after a penniless, idealistic reformer was journalistically irresistible. There wasn’t any to be found, but Nader caught on and alerted first the Washington Post and then The New Republic. What helped elevate him from star witness to celebrity, though, was the fact that his principal target, General Motors, hired private investigators to dig up dirt on him. Nader, a young lawyer who had just published a book titled “Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile,” seemed to know everything about auto safety, and to be motivated by a pure moral passion. In 1966, he was the star witness at sensational hearings about automobile safety conducted by Senator Abraham Ribicoff, of Connecticut. “Nader cost us the election.”īut his real heyday was in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. “Ralph Nader is not going to be welcome anywhere near the corridors,” Joe Biden told the Times back then. Many people know him as a long-shot left-wing Presidential candidate in four successive elections, from 1996 to 2008, and as the possible spoiler of a Democratic victory in 2000, when he got almost a hundred thousand votes in Florida and Al Gore lost the state by five hundred and thirty-seven. Ralph Nader, now eighty-seven years old, has been a public figure for more than half a century.
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