(still) Unsafe At Any Speed

Ralph Nader, the man who killed the Corvair, is now organizing buyers' collaboratives to make big-volume purchases from fuel dealers, and spotting the consumer needs that entrepreneurs have yet to fill.

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He is, himself, the most minimalist of consumers. Threads from the frayed cuffs of his olive-green trousers hang down over ankles laid bare by socks that have slipped, exhausted, into the tops of his plain black shoes. He is in an office in Washington, D.C., where stacked cartons of books and dog-eared telephone directories serve to partition individual work areas. Occasionally, when listening to a question, he sips grapefruit juice from a paper cup.

It is more than an eccentricity, this asceticism: It got him his start in the world. When Unsafe at Any Speed was published on November 30, 1965, it might very well have passed out of print, totally ignored, if General Motors had not hired a private detective to look for dirt in the author's private life. There was no dirt. There was no private life. The man lived monastically in a rented room that contained more papers than possessions. GM's embarrassed apology, delivered in front of a Senate committee, handed Nader notoriety; the $425,000 out-of-court settlement launched his career.

He quickly expanded his exposes of alleged corporate abuses beyond the single issue of automobile safety and repairability. His advocacy helped push through wide-ranging legislation: to upgrade inspection standards for meat and poultry, to promote natural-gas pipeline safety and underground mine safety, and to establish the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. He founded both the Center for the Study of Responsive Law and the Public Citizen, which then spawned dozens of organizations and projects to study and expose wrongdoing in, among other things, California land policies, the U.S. Civil Service Commission, Citibank, federal irrigation projects, E. I. du Pont de Nemours, and Congress itself.

Even his friends have criticized Nader for behaving as if he held a monopoly on truth and for arrogating the duty to defend the public interest as he presumes to define it. His enemies have been less generous. "Nader's consumerism," wrote conservative columnist Ralph De Toledano, "is an ideologically motivated effort to take control of industry from the producers and to turn it over to government and to the Naderites."

But neither friend nor foe denies that Nader, however obnoxious he might be, has forever changed the assumptions that underlie the relationships between sellers and buyers in this country. The ghost of caveat emptor is still occasionally seen, but its substance has departed this world.

Personally, he is fiercely self-protective. Born in 1934 of Lebanese parents in northwestern Connecticut, educated at Princeton University ('55) and at Harvard Law School ('58), his preoccupation with privacy has always titillated speculation about what lies behind the public advocate. In the background, however, there is only more foreground. A sympathetic biographer, Charles McCarry, wrote in 1972 that Nader "dislikes any descent below the surface of behavior, his own or anyone else's. Men are what they do. There is nothing about himself that cannot be explained by what he does in full view of the world. The rest is unimportant."

What is Nader up to today? Has he won the consumer war? INC. sent senior writer Tom Richman to Washington to find out. His report follows.

He hasn't won the war in his own view. Today Ralph Nader is organizing CUBs -- consumer utility boards. They will represent customers' interests when electric, gas, and telephone companies go to state regulatory commissions for rate increases. The twist is that Nader wants to use stuffers in the utilities' own billing envelopes to recruit dues-paying CUB members. Eventually he would like to do the same for postal patrons and for users of financial services. "It doesn't cost taxpayers anything," he says, "and it's voluntary to consumers. It doesn't create another government agency, see. All we're trying to do is correct the imbalance of power in the private sector between buyers and sellers."

In Washington, where he still lives, Nader has created a fuel-buyers collaborative.It is not a co-op. In a co-op, members own business assets and may get involved themselves in the buying and delivery of their own home heating oil. The collaborative, called Buyers Up, is a group that pools its buying power and puts contracts out to bid by local fuel oil companies.

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