Business: The Lonely Hero: Never Kowtow

HIS suits are shiny, his shoe heels generally worn. The nation’s No. 1 consumer guardian is a conspicuous non-consumer. Ralph Nader does not care much about goods or appearances, and his income rules out luxury. He earns nothing from most of his work and supports himself by writing magazine articles and making public speeches for fees of $50 to $2,500. He refuses to divulge how much he earns, lest corporations find out how many investigators, if any, he can afford to hire. He turns down occasional six-figure offers from law firms and regularly shuns pleas for product endorsements. Partly because he knows that his personal purchases might be interpreted as a stamp of approval, Nader owns no major appliances, no television set, no car. Yet he refuses to acknowledge sacrifice or unusual achievement. At a recent award ceremony in his honor, Nader gently scolded sponsors in his speech: “I should not be given an award for doing what I should be doing.”

Like a man possessed, Nader has forsworn any semblance of a normal life. His workdays last 16 to 20 hours, often seven days a week. He has no secretaries, no ghostwriters, no personal aides other than his summer volunteers. Nader operates from two little-known Washington addresses and two unlisted telephones—one in the hallway outside the $80-a-month furnished room that has been his home for the past five years, the other in his one-room office in the National Press Building. He rarely answers knocks on the door and sometimes lets the telephone ring; the surest way to reach him is to send a telegram.

Nader’s feeling for duty and constant study grew out of his family upbringing in Winsted, Conn., a gracious town of 8,000. His mother Rose used to ask friends all about films showing at the local movie house and would send her four children only to the few that had useful messages. Nightly dinner was more a course in forensics than food: it often lasted four or five hours, and everyone was expected to contribute his opinions to the topic of the evening. Nadra Nader, now 77, a Lebanese immigrant who built up a moderately prosperous restaurant business, presided over these Kennedy-like sessions, and he urged the children to stand up for their rights. “Never kowtow,” he taught—and they learned the lesson.

As a student at Princeton, Ralph settled into his lone, irregular lifestyle. Always a late-night worker, he was given a key to Woodrow Wilson Hall so that he could study after hours. He righteously refused to lend that key to envious friends who wished to visit the dark, vacant study hall with their dates.

On weekends, Nader hitchhiked out of town—just to see the U.S.—and learned, among many other things, that trucks were not built the way he and truck drivers thought they should be. For instance, a coat hanger in some truck cabs could puncture a driver’s skull in case of an accident. He graduated magna cum laude and won a Phi Beta Kappa key.

Later, at Harvard Law School, Nader was passed over for the staff of the prestigious Law Review, but became editor of the school’s issue-oriented newspaper. One of his articles was “American Cars: Designed for Death.” After graduation, he pursued his growing interest in highway safety while working as an aide to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an Assistant Secretary of Labor, and he later expanded his law-school article into Unsafe at Any Speed. The book, published in 1965, was dedicated to a friend who had been crippled in an auto accident. It is a shocking indictment of the auto industry, engineering groups, governmental agencies and traffic-safety organizations for failing to make automobiles more “crash-worthy.” Written by an unknown 31-year-old, the book did not make much of an impression at first. But G.M.’s investigation into Nader’s life—and the public apology to him by the president of the company—made Nader famous overnight.

A lanky six-footer who is constantly behind schedule and late for appointments, Nader can be painfully shy among strangers. When asked to give his name in hotels and on planes, he often tries to avoid recognition and replies, “Nader, initial R.” He even keeps his birthday secret lest admirers send him cakes or other gifts. His driving intensity about work can sometimes trap him into hasty accusations. When economists in the Johnson Administration once met with auto industry leaders in an effort to win voluntary price restraint, Nader was too quick to accuse the Administration of “acquiescing” to Detroit. In fact, L.B.J.’s emissaries had stood their ground.

Intimates relish his flashes of dinner-table wit, which are nearly always aimed at one of the establishments he is bucking. “The people at regulatory agencies are utterly confounded when we come to investigate them,” he says. “They have forgotten what citizens look like.” On rare evenings out at a party, he usually leaves early to get in a couple more hours of reading, writing or phoning at his office. Though Bachelor Nader has no antipathy to girls, he rarely has the time or inclination for dates. Says his father: “We’re very proud of Ralph. But we wish he would get married soon.”