Playboy Interview: Ralph Nader

Ralph Nader, whose headline-making indictments of auto safety angered Detroit, prompted one car company's abortive investigation of his private life and finally spurred passage of the 1966 Traffic Safety Act, would seem at first glance an unlikely nemesis for the auto--or any other--industry. Nader's parents emigrated from Lebanon to the United States in 1925 and gravitated to the small town of Winsted, Connecticut, a WASP-ishly conservative community of 10,000, where Ralph was born in 1934. His father, Nathra, transformed a seedy diner into a prosperous restaurant, the Highland Arms. and with Shaf. Ralph's 40-year-old brother, threw himself into local politics and such civic issues as banning parking meters from Main Street and creating a community college. Nader's parents also imbued him with a deep sense of the individual's responsibility to improve society. Ralph learned this lesson well, and a pattern of passionate idealism and uncompromising individualism was ingrained in him at an early age; by the time he was admitted to Princeton University in 1951, Nader was already a dropout from his "silent generation."

His first brush with Princetonian shibboleths came when he refused to succumb to what he called "while buckism --the unspoken rule that everybody has to wear white-buck shoes, white tennis socks, khaki slacks, etc., all of which are really just a symbol of Princeton's rigidly conformist behavioral code." Nader also opposed the inflexibility of the Princeton curriculum and the administration's right to arbitrary suspension and expulsion of students: but when he attempted to involve his classmates in a struggle for student rights, he was met with indifference; in 1953, as he puts it, "Berkeley was not even a gleam in Mario Savio's eye." While tilting at such academic windmills, Nader majored in Oriental studies and now speaks fluent Chinese, as well as Spanish. Russian. Portuguese and the Arabic he learned in childhood.

While at Princeton, Nader engaged in his first public controversy, a campaign to end the spraying of trees with DDT, which was killing off the campus song-birds--but Nader was dismissed by faculty and students alike as a harmless crank; this was eight years before the national furor over insecticides sparked by Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring." It was also at Princeton that Nader grew interested in a problem that still absorbs him --the dehumanization and exploitation of the American Indian. On his vacations, he traveled to Indian reservations in Montana. New Mexico, Arizona and California and wrote a long paper condemning the Department of the Interior, state governments and private industry for ignoring the Indian's problems "when they did not act in collusion to steal his land." Nader graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton in 1955 and entered Harvard Law School, which he found "just a high-priced tool factory." He believed the institution's main function was to produce "cogs for the corporate legal machinery." But it was at Harvard Law that Nader first became absorbed in the issue of auto safety that would subsequently propel him to national prominence. It was also at this time that Nader disposed of the only car he has ever owned, because of its safety defects.

After receiving his LL.B.: degree from Harvard in 1958. he stayed on as a research assistant, then served a six-month stint on active duty in the Army (most of it as a cook at Fort Dix), and left the Service to take a budget version of the grand tour, traveling from the U. S. to Ethiopia, eastern Europe and across Latin America before returning home to join a private law firm in Hartford. Nader handled accident-claim cases in court, continued his research on auto safety, wrote magazine articles and indignant letters to the editors, addressed civic and professional groups and testified-- with little effect--before Connecticut. New York and Massachusetts state senate committees on auto safety. He succeeded in winning the support of some voluntary organizations--junior chambers of commerce and women's groups --but their resolutions were not followed up by actions and had no impact. In 1961, despairing of progress on the local level. Nader decided to move to Washington and apply his efforts at the heart of what he terms "the power complex," "I had watched years go by and nothing happened." he explains. "Before that. decades had gone by. I decided that it tool: total commitment."

Nader's campaign against the auto industry began quietly and, at first inauspiciously. Urban-affairs authority Daniel P. Moynihan, then serving as Assistant Secretary of Labor, had corresponded with Nader ever since the two men wrote almost simultaneous articles on auto safety in 1959--Nader's in The Nation, Moynihan's in The Reporter--and he gave his young ally a job as consultant on traffic safety in the Labor Department's Office of Planning and Research. Nader continued writing and lobbying from his Washington beachhead, but made little headway until one of his letters reached Senator Abraham Ribicoff, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization, who invited him to serve as an unpaid consultant on auto safety. Nader eagerly resigned his position in the Labor Department to prepare well-reasoned and exhaustively researched position papers for subcommittee members and worked tirelessly to initiate hearings on auto safety. Finally, Ribicoff announced an investigation of the "fantastic carnage" on the nation's highways, and extensive hearings began in the summer of 1965. The first salvo in Nader's barrage against Detroit had been filed.

In late 1965, he issued his second blast: "Unsafe at Any Speed," a carefully documented expose castigating Detroit for building "deathtraps" that kill 50,000 people annually and maim or injure 4,500,000 more. It was instantly hailed as a major contribution to auto safety. The Wall Street Journal called it "powerful and persuasive," and Road Test magazine termed it required reading," "Unsafe" hit the best-seller lists and stayed there for 15 weeks; it has since sold over 150,000 copies in hardcover and paperback editions, been translated into Dutch. French, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Danish and Japanese, and earned Nader $53,000 before taxes--money that he promptly poured back into his fight for auto safety. The book also won Nader a citation from the ultraprestigious Nieman fellows at Harvard, and even inspired a cartoon in The New Yorker. depicting a used-car salesman zeroing in on a buyer with the caption. "I happen to know Ralph Nader's mother drives this model."

The commercial success of "Unsafe at Any Speed" had an instant and profoundly traumatic impact on the auto industry. "In Detroit." Life reported in early 1966, "practically every auto executive has a copy of Ralph Nader's book on his desk [and] when they discuss it they can rarely avoid raising their voices." But Detroit's anger was not restricted to executive board rooms. With near hearings on auto safely coming up. General Motors hired a small army of private detectives, led by ex-FBI agent Vincent Gillen, to dig deeply into Nader's background. Gillen's investigators interviewed 60 of Nader's friends and relatives, always under the pretext of a pre-employment investigation, and inquired if he were a homosexual, an alcoholic, a drug addict or an anti-Semite.

Gillen was also ordered to keep Nader under surveillance--a move that eventually blew the whistle on the entire operation when two of Gillen's agents lost track of Nader in the New Senate Office Building and incurred the suspicion of guards, who took their names and asked them to leave. News of the incident reached Congress and Senator Ribicoff instructed GM officials to appear before his subcommittee to explain their actions. Under Senatorial cross-examination, GM President those board chairman) James Roche made his famous public apology to Nader and pledged that "It will not be our policy in the future to undertake investigation of those who speak or write critically of our products." One Senator expressed an opinion prevalent on Capitol Hill when he told a New York Times reporter: "Everybody was outraged that a great corporation was out to clobber a guy because he wrote critically about them. At that point everybody said. 'The hell with them.' " The resultant Traffic Safety Act required the establishment of Federal safety standards far all vehicles sold after January 31, 1968. President Johnson termed the act "landmark legislation," adding that "for the first time in our history we can mount a truly comprehensive attack on the rising toll of death and destruction on the nation's highways."

Nader has not been content to test on the laurels won in his auto-safety crusade. While he still keeps Detroit under close critical scrutiny, he has added a number of other consumer issues to his list, including sanitary conditions in the meat and fish industries, the dangers of radiation overexposure in the course of medical and dental X rays, industrial safety conditions, gas-pipeline safety and environmental hazards such as air and water pollution. Nader's corporate enemies, along with their Congressional and journalistic allies, have multiplied commensurately with the widening of his own horizons. Syndicated columnist John Chamberlain, writing in the conservative Nation Review. has charged that "Mr. Nader's anticapitalist bias is apparent when he urges a general encroachment of government on the old managerial prerogatives of big corporations." and warns that "Naderism ... could turn out to be a positive danger." And another critic, talking to a reporter for the New York Daily News. characterized Nader as "an egghead. even a fuss-budget."

When Nader testified on auto safety before the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee, pro-Detroit Representative Glenn Cunningham challenged his qualifications and charged he was engaged in "a clever way of representing trial lawyers, so-called ambulance chasers, by picking on big industry." (Nader replied quietly: "I am not concerned with ambulance chasers. I am concerned with the people in the ambulances.") Rumors are continuously floated in Washington that Nader is salting away fat profits by referring accident-claim cases to a private law firm or is being secretly subsidized by labor unions. The lobbyists are particularly incensed by Nader's personal asceticism. "That 880-a-month room of his must be just a front." one lobbyist grumbled. "He's got to have a deluxe hideaway somewhere." Almost plaintively he added. "Doesn't he?"

He doesn't. Nader lives monklike in his drab furnished room in a boarding-house on a tree-lined street near Washington's Dupont Circle, surrounded by magazines, newspapers. Government reports, technical and legal journals and copies of the Congressional Record. Working 20 hours a day. he also maintains a dingy 897-a-month office in down-town Washington, but keeps the address and telephone numbers a closely guarded secret. ("If people knew where to find me, I'd never get any work done.") Nader's efforts are underwritten solely by his own earnings--which. in News-week's words, "by the standards of most of Washington's lobbyists ... would support perhaps one medium-sized cocktail party at the Shoreham." Royalties from "Unsafe at Any Speed" are now petering out and the main sources of Nader's income are speaking engagement and an occasional article for The New Republic. His biggest expense is his telephone bill, which runs an average of $250 to $350 a month: to meet it, he eats in cheap cafeterias., wears inexpensive off-the-rack clothes and often walks long distances to save on cab and bus fare.

This ascetic way of life--which Nader's critics explain as a deep-seated disapproval and mistrust of affluence--fits in with their view of him as a puritan whose self-righteous conscience will not let him or his corporate enemies rest. They label him a zealot deluded into believing that his reformatory motives are purely altruistic. Nader sees himself, according to one industry spokesman, "as a lone Saint George protecting the lamblike consumer from the ravening dragon of big business." What his admirers consider crusaders, his detractors call vendellas: in either case, both concede that his effectiveness in waging them is remarkable, indeed, Seldom, if ever, in official Washington has one man done so much with so little "Many others have shared his dim view of corporate America." comments The New York Times. "and have expressed their doubts in more detail and more persuasively. What sets Nader apart is that he has moved beyond social criticism to effective political action." One secret of Nader's success lies in his ability to work smoothly with such influential Senators as Ribicoff of Connecticut and Magnuson of Washington-- often behind the scenes. Nader frequently digs up the information on a consumer issue and then allows a particular Congressman to take all the Credit, "I reformer can't afford to have an ego." he says, "That's not modesty, just tactics. It I can get three Senators to say something, it's better than for me to say it." Nader has also developed a good working relationship with the press; and when he feeds a newsman a story, it is almost always printed. One reason is that Nader has established an untarnished credibility record. "When I get a story from Ralph," one reporter says, "I don't have to double-check his facts." Upon examination, concedes The New York Times. "Nader's all allegations almost aheavs prove to be based on Government reports ... or on expert opinion."

As a result, when Nader speaks. Congress listens. Almost singlehandedly, he has induced a new Congressional receptivity to consumer issues. When President Johnson signed the Flammable Fabrics Act at the White House in 1967, he exhorted the assembled Congressmen: "You better get with it, because women are tired of meat with worms in it, blouses that burn and pipelines that blow up under their houses." It could have been Ralph Nader speaking--and perhaps it was. The New York Times Magazine recently summarized Nader's career as super-Ombudsman: "When Ralph Nader came to Washington in 1961 and began a one-man crusade for automobile safety, he was widely regarded as a high-minded Crackpot... . Today, as he moves quietly about town as a self-appointed lobbyist for the for the public interest, he shoes signs of becoming an institution."

In order to explore his motivations and aspirations, and probe more deeply into the issues he has articulated in the past and plans to raise in the future. Playboy interviewed Nader in his furnished room in Washington. The interview, conducted by Eric Norden, began with a question about the results of Nader's crusade for safer cars.

Playboy: How effective has the 1966 Traffic Safety Act been--and how much real progress has there been in auto safety since the Congressional hearings?

Nader: There has been genuine progress. The passage of the Traffic Safety law has created the scaffolding within which a truly safe car can be built. Basic safety features that have been technologically and economically feasible for several decades have finally been taken off the shelf by the industry and added to cars: safer windshields, collapsible steering columns, seat belts and safer dashboards, shorn of many hazardous knobs and sharp edges. The basic progress, however, is that auto-safety issues are now public issues and not the private domain of the auto manufacturers: there is now research and development outside the industry, by Government, universities and institutes. The forthcoming establishment of Federal vehicle inspection standards and the reporting of defects to the Government by the industry are similar forward steps, which mean that issues affecting millions of Americans are no longer decided behind closed doors in a Detroit board room.

This is all good, but it isn't nearly enough. We will have to allocate far more resources to traffic safety--at least several hundred million dollars a years in the immediate future. In this fiscal year, the Government is spending only $46,000,000 on traffic safety--a virtual pittance in light of the of the gravity of the problem and its billion-dollar-a-month cost. So there has been limited progress, but there's a long way yet to go. There is still a level of slaughter on our highways that strains credulity: if it continues at the present rate, one out of every two Americans will be either killed or hospitalized by auto crashes. So this is a problem that obviously touches all of us and cannot simply be delegated to a few timid bureaucrats and then forgotten. The fight doesn't end with the passage of a law: it just begins there. Without daily concrete support from the private sector, the law could be rendered a dead letter.

Playboy: Until recent years, the auto industry did not disclose to the public its recall of cars discovered after sale to be defective; but the Traffic Safety Act requires the manufacturer to notify the National Motor Vehicle Safety Bureau whenever a recall campaign is initiated, thus subjecting the repairs and the original hazard to Federal supervision. Does the act place an obligation on the buyer to return his car to Detroit once he has been notified of the defect?

Nader: No, it doesn't. In fact, the recall law doesn't even require the car's return to the automobile dealer for correction -- and if the defect is complex, a local franchised dealer may not do the job adequately or receive the parts from the manufacturer without long delays. Unfortunately, many motorists are negligent and do not return their vehicles to their dealers after the manufacturer sends them a certified notification of the defect. Therefore, we should amend the law to provide penalties for noncompliance, either by fining the owner or by deregistering the car until it's repaired.

Playboy: Let's take a look at some specific vehicle features. The 1968 standards issued by the National Traffic Safety Bureau require Detroit to improve the crashworthiness of windshields. Is windshield glass now shatterproof?

Nader: No, but it's substantially improved. Windshields now have a double vinyl layer between the glass that stretches on impact and thus attenuates energy force and lessens the chance of the glass smashing if you hit it with your head. But if hit with suthcient force, the windshield will still shatter, and in such a jagged manner around the edges that it can severely cut the occupant around the neck as his head retracts, once the collision force subsides-- the so-called windshield collar. So the situation is far from perfect; but I'm hopeful that we will see substantial improvements in the next few years.

Playboy: You're also been critical of tinted windshields. Why?

Nader: Because while ordinary glass reduces light transmittance by roughly 12 percent, fully tinted windshields reduce it by 30 percent or more. The driver faces enough problems on the road without such a reduction of his visibility, which is particularly serious at dusk and night or in bad weather or in the case of older drivers. Of Course, no salesman ever mentions reduced visibility when he makes his pitch for a timed windshield; he peddles it because it gives that cool, soothing greenhouse aura. He also claims it's an adjunct to air conditioning, since it allegedly reduces heat absorption, although the preponderant amount of heat is actually absorbed through the roof of the car. It's become almost impossible to buy an air-conditioned car without a tinted windshield. The dealer frequently tells a buyer that unless he accepts a tinted windshield, he will have to wait several weeks or months for his car to come through. The ironic twist to all this is that, since tinted windshields are sold as extras, the consumer is paying more for less visibility--and thus less safety.

Playboy: You've said that power windows are still a safety hazard. In what way?

Nader: When power windows first came on the market, they operated with excessive force. This force has been reduced in most models, but the power is still sufficient to cause strangulation. I've had cases brought to my attention of children who would be playing in a car parked in the driveway or garage with the ignition turned off, and a playmate presses the power button while another child is looking out the window; the child will be hoisted up, strangled and left hanging out of the car. In early April of this year, a two-year-old boy was strangled in West Los Angeles as he played with his one year-old sister in their father's 1967. Lincoln: the ignition was off and the boy had his head out the window when his sister accidentally pressed the button. In late April, an eight-year-old boy in Dunsmuir, California, was strangled when one of his playmates accidentally pushed the button activating the rear window of his family's station wagon. I know of one case where a woman was sitting in the front seat smoking and reached out the window to tap away some ash just as her husband hit the power button: the window snapped shut and chopped her finger off. These are hazards that can be remedied by a simple engineering modification that will stop a window whenever it encounters an obstruction, such as an arm or a hand. But that hasn't been done. And many models still allow such windows to be operated on the driver's side with the ignition off, and the rest of the windows can be operated by turning a special switch. The National Highway Safety Bureau recently warned the public about power-window dangers and urged motorists to have a "mechanic or dealer adjust the wiring so that the windows cannot operate unless the ignition switch is on." This is a fairly simple and inexpensive modification, yet the manufacturers are still allowed to produce cars without it.

Playboy: Are you satisfied with the padded dashboards added to all the new models?

Nader: This is one area where improvement has been encouraging. There are still, however, dangerous interior features in many cars. For example, in numerous models, the ignition key still just out at knee level, and upon even low-speed impact, can stab through the driver's kneecap. Many cars also have sharp coathooks that can cause serious injuries in a crash. And the over-all energy absorption or yielding qualities of dash panels could be much more effective in diminishing the severity of injuries. The 1969-model standards will offer little new, except for head supports to diminish neck injuries in rear-end collisions. I also know of one case--a 25-mile-an-hour collision--in which a little girl was virtually decapitated when the glove compartment sprung open on impact and, in effect, guillotined her. This type of hazard is easily avoidable by the simplest and least expensive alteration of engineering design--a change the auto companies have never bothered to make.

Playboy: A crucial element in any car's handling is its suspension. How good--or bad--is suspension in American cars?

Nader: A car's suspension system, which determines how the vehicle interacts with the shocks produced by road travel, has a twofold function: directional and shock-absorbing. As you point out, it performs a critical role in the car's handling and is thus an important factor in auto safety.

Unfortunately, suspension in American cars is still quite poor and not as stable as in many European cars; compare the handling of a better European car with an American station wagon and you'll feel the difference. American auto manufacturers have opted for the soft, squishy ride, as exemplified by advertising that promises that driving a particular car is like floating on air. This type of suspension is associated with serious handling and high-speed cornering problems for drivers, particularly in quasi-emergency situations. Suspension must be improved, and I hope sufficient research and development will be done in this area so that by 1970, the first Federal safety standards on suspension can be issued.

Playboy: Do sports cars tend to be less safe than standard four-door models?

Nader: Well, you certainly wouldn't want to be driving one in a collision: the smaller the car--and this applies to the smaller European sedans as well as to sports cars--the less the protection for the driver on impact. And even apart from size, they're pretty low on the scale as far as general crashworthiness goes. But some sports car handle very well and have the added advantage of maneuverability, which is the one plus factor for a small car. In a collision between a small car and a heavier car, the generally larger, heavier American car will prove considerably safer. Certain specific features--dashboard design or brakes--are better in some models than in others; tires and braking systems on European cars, for example are generally superior, relative to the demands made on them. But about the only way to be informed of the superiority or inferiority of such features, and thus to make an over-all decision on any car, is to read the test studies and commentary published in Consumer Reports or an independent auto magazine called Road Test. But this is far from enough. Eventually, the Federal Government is going to have to institute a computerized auto-rating system under which each model is exhaustively tested, a comparative analysis made and the public then told which is the best and which is the worst. Dr. William Haddon, head of the National Highway Safety Bureau, has said that this is the ultimate objective of the Federal Government.

Playboy: Some auto-industry critics have alleged that Detroit's resistance to safety innovations stems from the fact that obsolescence is built into cars and that a truly safe car would also be a longer-lasting one. Do you agree?

Nader: The primary reason the industry has been against safety is that it has always found it easier to sell visible style than engineering substance. But there is a correlation between safety and durability, and there's no doubt that the manufacturers build their cars to deteriorate after three or four years and thus increase the market turnover. The current spate of safety accouterments--seat belts, padded dashboards, etc.--hasn't yet affected durability: this will be the case, however, when real brake, handling, tire and structural carshworthiness standards are mandated. But to really understand why the industry never voluntarily introduced safety features such as collapsible steering wheels and shatterproof windshields, you've got to ask the questions: From their perspective, why should they? What incentive did they have to change? Only an ethical incentive. Big corporations seldom, if ever, act out of altruism.

Playboy: Of the 53,000 people who die in auto accidents each year, has it been possible to break down the percentage who die from vehicle defects, as opposed to carelessness, drunken driving, bad weather conditions or poor roads?

Nader: No, we don't have that kind of precise statistical analysis and perhaps we never will, since there are so many contributing factors leading to accidents, deaths and injuries. You should also remember that not only are the occupants buried in the wreckage but evidence of the specific vehicle defect is hidden destroyed. Of course, the problem is compounded by the fact that in the past 40 years, nobody has pored over the remains to determine if or how faulty construction caused the accident, unlike the situation in aviation, where Government and company investigators sift through every bit of debris to see if mechanical malfunctions were responsible. There have been some studies in this area recently: a report from a research team at the Harvard Medical School concluded that vehicle defects and deteriorations were the number-one cause of deaths in the accidents that they investigated over a five-year period. However, drunken driving is definitely a very serious problem; an exhaustive study by a professor at Indiana University reveals that if you eliminated all drunken driving, you'd reduce fatalities by at least 13 percent, which is a very significant figure. So it would appear that better detection of and harsher penalties for drunks behind the wheel are also needed. But controlling drunks is much more difficult than controlling the safe design of vehicles, which will protect you and your family against drunks or any other cause of vehicles going out of control.

Playboy: You appear, here and elsewhere, to place what many consider a disproportionate emphasis on vehicle as opposed to driver safety. Why do you stress the necessity of so-called safety cars but virtually ignore the problem of the driver? Couldn't much tougher licensing requirements, perhaps Federalized and made uniform across the country, ensure that potentially lethal cars are more expertly and soberly driven?

Nader: I'm all in favor of tougher licensing tests and improved driving skills; the concepts of driver and vehicle safety, far from being mutually exclusive, are actually complementary. But for 40 years, all the emphasis in the area of auto safety has been placed on the driver, and still the death and injury rate spirals upward every year. At our present level of technological proficiency, it's much easier to make a safe car than it is to create a safe driver, and it's far more feasible to change the engineering to adapt to the needs of vehicle safety than to expect drivers to behave properly at all times and under all conditions--particularly when operating a vehicle that is often unstable and unsafe. I certainly don't mean to minimize the very real problem of poor driving; but if your objective is to reduce deaths and injuries on the highways, then we must develop the most practical and effective remedy. Whatever causes accidents and casualties, vehicle safety is the most sensible and efficient means of preventing them. If you wish to avoid the locking of brakes, for example, you could subject 95,000,000 drivers to training courses that would teach them how not to lock their brakes, particularly in emergency stops on wet and slippery pavement. And after they have learned all this in a special driving school, you can hope that they will remember it five weeks or five years in the future. But if you take the engineering approach, you could easily build an antilocking brake system into the vehicle so that the driver can't lock his brakes even if he passionately desires to do so.

I also can't stress enough that with proper design, accidents can be safe. A car can skid off the road, crash head on into a tree and be constructed in such a way that the occupants are not injured. What we are confronting in this area is a Pavlovian-type advertising indoctrination over the past two generations that has brainwashed the public into believing it is the driver who must adapt to the vehicle and not the vehicle that must adapt to the driver. I'm all in favor of good driving, but even a race driver like Graham Hill couldn't escape unscathed if his brakes failed at high speeds because of an engineering or structural defect. Let's have good drivers--but above all, let's have good cars for them to drive. We'll always have accidents and, human nature being what it is, we'll always have bad driving--but with a safer car, there is no reason the two must converge in the death or maiming of the driver or of those in another car.

Playboy: New York State has subsidized the feasibility study of a prototype safety car. How successful has this effort been?

Nader: The progress has been very encouraging--but it has largely stopped. The subcontractor, Republic Aviation, has completed two engineering feasibility studies that conclude that a safe, attractive and reasonably priced car suitable for mass production can be developed--one that would protect the driver from almost any injuries at collision-impact speeds of up to 50 miles an hour and make higher-speed collisions at least survivable. Just how significant this is can be seen by the fact that about 70 percent of all motorist deaths and serious injuries occur at impact speeds of 55 mph or less. So this is extremely good news. What is rather discouraging is that New York State will no longer fund the project, which was originally planned to cost $5,000,000 for research, development, construction and testing of about 15 prototype safety vehicles, and the Federal Government has granted only $70,000 for its continuations. This is particularly unfortunate because New York authorities estimate that such a research project could have been completed in 18 months if the $5,000,000 had been available from the outset. And yet the U.S. Government, which spends three billion dollars every month in Vietnam, which spends $120,000,000 for an atomic submarine, which spends $6,000,000 for one F-III jet plane, which spends at least $200,000,000 a year for a civilian supersonic-aircraft project, which spends $100,000,000 a year for the safety of migratory birds, cannot invest $5,000,000 in a vehicle vaccine that could prevent the deaths and injuries of millions of Americans every year--many times the number of those killed in any of our wars. What a tragic distortion of priorities! But the exclusive control of automotive technology by the auto companies is nevertheless being gradually broken down. and the future funding of many projects in design safety by the Federal Government may speed up the arrival of an age of exciting automotive innovation--and safety.

Playboy: Despite your claim that complete automobile safety would not be inconsistent with good design and high performance, many of your critics suspect that your proposed safety can would have all the style, speed and maneuverability of a tank. How would your answer them?

Nader: The concept of attractive design and good performance and the concept of a safety car are far from incompatible. Various prototype feasibility studies on a safety car show that it can be every bit as attractive stylistically and have just as smooth performance as the current models. There isn't an automotive (continued on page 196) Playboy Interview (continued from page 84) stylist worth a dime who wouldn't agree that a safe car could be attractive and perform well. Why should enhanced aerodynamic characteristics, better brakes, better handling, better cornering ability adversely affect a car's performance? Quite the opposite; all these safety innovations would enhance performance. A safety car would not be a lumbering monster with a top speed of 30 miles per hour, fit only for 80-year-old grandmothers; it would be just as sleek, just as handsome and just as fast as current models. And for the sports-car aficionado, driving would be just as thrilling--the only difference being that accidents would be far less likely, and when they did occur, the occupants of the car would be far less likely to end up in the hospital or the cemetery.

Playboy: Wouldn't the cost of incorporating all the safety features you propose necessarily inflate retail auto prices?

Nader: The industry's claim that a safe car, in addition to being tanklike, would cost many thousands of dollars is as phony as the simulated air scoops on many American automobiles. There is no reason why a safety car should cost any more than the present unsafe models; it could, in fact, cost less. The manufacturers would have to retool, of course--which is why they have resisted safety innovations--but their profits are already so astronomical, and their markups so high, that all the basic safety innovations could be introduced without significantly denting their prosperity. Remember, in each succeeding year, the productivity of the auto industry is increasing, and costs are decreasing per unit, all of which will make it far easier to produce a safety car at minimal production cost. And let me stress here that production and labor costs are really far less than the industry has long claimed. Labor cost is actually a very minor component of over-all retail cost; this year, for the first time in automotive history, one major domestic manufacturer made public the basic raw cost of its cars and revealed that a model with a retail price ranging from $2500 to $3000 has a direct and indirect labor cost of no more than $300. On a conventional popular car, the engine will cost the manufacturer less than $70 to produce; a radio, less than $20; a seat belt with attached shoulder harnesses, less than three dollars at purchase price from the suppliers. When you add the cost of sheet metals, glass, etc., that comes to a total labor, parts and production cost of less than $1300 for a standard four-door, fully equipped model now retailing for $2800.

So the industry can easily afford to introduce safety innovations--some of which would actually reduce the cost of production. For example, if you eliminate sharp ornaments in a car, or the type of chrome stripping over the back of the front seat that exposes a passenger to added probability of injury in a crash, you're saving money. There are other measures, such as using nonglow paint instead of glow-producing body paint--which causes glare--that would neither add to nor detract from the production cost. And where safety innovations do add to the cost of production--head rests or an antilocking brake system, for example--it would be possible to offset the cost by eliminating some expensive and unnecessary stylistic changes intended only to differentiate this year's model from last year's. This is an important point, because some years ago, a study by a team of Harvard and MIT economists estimated that out of the retail price of the average car, approximately $700 is paid by the consumer for the annual style change--a change that is generally trivial and superficial.

But even if the manufacturer does have to increase his production costs to increase safety, I see no reason why the cost should be passed on to the consumer--as the industry, for obvious reasons, always warns will be the case. The auto industry, as I've already indicated, has such high markups and such huge profits--since World War Two, it has averaged approximately double the rate of return on investment received by American industry in general--that it could easily afford to absorb the added costs of these long-overdue safety features. When considering the cost of a safety car to the consumer, you must also remember that the over-all price of the vehicle includes insurance premiums; and if safer cars reduce accidents and deaths and injuries, thus leading to lower loss claims, the insurance companies should be required to reflect this lower loss incidence and commensurately lower their premiums. You can just imagine what a one-third premium reduction would mean in a major city; it would involve a saving of anywhere from $400 to $1000 over a five-or-six-year life period for the car.

Playboy: If Detroit refused to absorb the cost of all the safety features you recommended, how much would they cost the car buyer?

Nader: That's hard to estimate, but let's say that a totally crashproof car might cost the consumer $1000 more than present models; that's an extremely high figure, since Republic Aviation, the firm that did the feasibility studies for the New York State prototype safety car, concluded that a fully safe car could be sold within the price range of today's models. But let's say that it did cost $1000 more; this would still amount to less than three dollars a day over a one-year period. If you ask yourself what you would pay to preserve your life or to keep from being crippled or maimed--not to mention the cost of hospitalization--this should strike you as a considerable bargain. Whoever pays the additional cost for a safe car, is there any price too high to pay to preserve life and limb in an auto accident?

Playboy: What specific features would your proposed safety car incorporate?

Nader: There are literally hundreds of features in the automobile that can and should be improved for greater safety. It should have improved nonskid or anti-locking braking systems, with nonfade characteristics; Ford is offering its version of this on its 1969 Continentals and Thunderbirds. A safe car should also have improved tire performance to give better traction, durability, cornering and anti-blowout resistance. It should have vastly improved suspension and handling, thus allowing the driver to make effective evasive maneuvers in an emergency. It should have improved visibility. The interior of the car should be designed to eliminate all sharp edges and protruding knobs; and all surfaces--not only dashboard but steering assembly, doors and windshield--should be yielding, in order to absorb an impact blow and attenuate or dissipate the energy forces. For example, the windshield could have an elastic characteristic and thus stretch before it begins to shatter, thus absorbing part of the collision forces that would normally be absorbed by the head of the driver or occupant as it strikes the windshield. Some progress has been made in this area already--padded dashboards, improved windshield glass--but much remains to be done.

All seats in the car, furthermore, should be fully integrated systems designed to forestall driver fatigue over long periods on the road and to protect the driver and occupants against side collision, prevent passengers from being thrown into the front of the car as a result of seat uprooting, and give neck-and-head-restraint protection in the common rear-end collision. Again, since the passage of the Traffic Safety Act, we've been moving in the right direction with headrests and seat belts, but the progress remains halting. The side structure of the car would be so designed as to reduce the penetrating probability of vehicles crashing at right angles--currently an extremely exposed area in all foreign and domestic models. Various energy-absorbing characteristics would be built into the front and rear of the car; Ford says it plans to introduce these improvements on some 1969 models; and GM is putting a steel band through the door structures of some 1969 models, which they claim provides protection in the event of a side collision.

The fuel tank of a safety car should be so designed and situated as to greatly reduce the probability of rupturing and igniting upon impact, and the motor should be modified to prevent the introduction of deadly carbon monoxide into the passenger compartment. All carpeting and upholstery should be nonflammable and nonmeltable, in order to reduce the secondary fire characteristics that today burn or asphyxiate many occupants who survive the initial crash. These are all safety innovations that could be introduced immediately and at minimal cost.

On the horizon within the next decade. I can see laser or radar detection systems built into the front of cars to detect impending collisions and automatically activate the brakes to avoid them, thus allowing crashes to be prevented independently of the driver's motions. Another innovation that should be on the boards within three or four years is an automatic restraint system. The most refined concept is a plastic-air-bag restraint system that was laughed at by the industry when it was first suggested some 15 years ago. Upon impact with another car--or with a wall or a telephone pole--the air bag is triggered within 20 milliseconds from its compartment, which for the driver may be located in the steering assembly, for front-seat passengers in the dashboard area and for rear passengers in the back of the front seat. Once triggered, the air bag expands in front of each occupant and swells to about the size of a football dummy. The occupant will be thrust forward into this air cushion, which will cover and protect him from head to foot. The moment the car is stationary, the air bags withdraw automatically into their compartments. This system, which was developed by Eaton Yale & Towne, is within the realm of immediate fail-safe practicality and is now being studied by the National Highway Safety Bureau with great interest. This would eliminate the necessity for individual compliance with seat belts and would be a far more effective protective device in case of a crash. There are scores of other imaginative safety plans already on the drawing boards; so there is practically nothing we cannot do in the safety area at our present level of technological and engineering proficiency.

Playboy: One automotive innovation already on the boards is the electric car. How far are we from developing a functional model?

Nader: Not nearly so far away as the auto industry would like us to believe. The auto and petroleum industries have delayed the technological innovations that would lead to an effective electric car, because such a car would displace their tremendous capital investment in the internal-combustion engine. I think it's time somebody blew the whistle on the vestigial internal--or infernal--combustion engine: It's outdated and inefficient, a technological anachronism that should be replaced by either an electric or a steam engine. Such cars would also greatly reduce the air-pollution problem, since automotive pollution accounts for more than 50 percent of the total air pollution in the United States.

Now, the main obstacle to getting the electric car into mass production has been the problem of recharging; but General Electric, which has been the leader in developing the electric car, has now developed a very advanced hybrid fuel cell that, within two or three years, will allow the production of electric cars with a top speed of 80 miles an hour and a range of 200 miles without recharging. The recharging process itself would take only ten minutes. Such a car could, of course, displace many cars on the roads today because of its range, speed and recharging flexibility, as well as the bonus of not having to buy gasoline. There's nothing eternal about the internal-combustion engine.

Playboy: How close are we to a steamcar?

Nader: Very close. Without in any way downgrading the electric car, which is a big step forward, I believe that the car of the near future should have a steam engine. This is the ideal alternative to the internal-combustion engine, and the technology is so perfected that we could put a steamcar into mass production within two years. The steam engine in its current advanced form has a great many attributes: It is at least the equal of the internal-combustion engine in response, acceleration and peak power; it is almost noiseless; it emits less than one percent of the pollution; it burns kerosene--thereby cutting the motorist's fuel bill in half and totally eliminating the lead pollution inherent in leaded gasoline--in a far more efficient manner than internal-combustion engines now burn gasoline; and it would be much cheaper to construct, since you could eliminate the transmission, the clutch and all the other cumbersome components of the internal-combustion engine that add to the latter's complexity, weight, cost and maintenance. One additional attribute of the steam engine is the fact that, since it burns kerosene or other fuels, it is far less likely to incur bitter industrial opposition from the petroleum lobby, which is a very potent force in Washington. Steam engines would permit the oil companies to recover more salable fuel per barrel of crude, due to the absence of current refining complexities. What is most needed now is Government allocation of funds to develop alternative automotive propulsion systems, steam or electric, by private industry. If rationality and efficiency prevail in the auto industry, the last third of the 20th Century can be the age of the steamcar--and cleaner air.

Playboy: When President Johnson named 17 members to the National Motor Vehicle Safety Advisory Council in 1967, your name was conspicuously absent from the list, which contained many pro-industry names. Why do you think you weren't appointed?

Nader: Because the Administration wanted to avoid the controversy of appointing consumer advocates to counteract the industry advocates on the Council. Of the 17 members appointed, a majority must, by law, be drawn from the public; the rest are representatives of the industry and the dealers. As a pro-consumer advocate. I was obviously deemed too controversial, but it was eminently proper to appoint executives who support the auto industry. This is the basic problem we have to solve before the Government will be an ally of the consumer rather than a toady of big business.

Playboy: Isn't that a rather sweeping generalization?

Nader: Yes, but not an unjustified one, when you consider that the Federal regulatory and subsidizing agencies that are charged with protecting the public interest have largely been taken over by the industries they are supposed to be supervising and or subsidizing and are ignoring, or relegating to secondary status, the interests of the consumer. The Interstate Commerce Commission, for example, has long appeared to be a pliable instrument of the railroads, the bus lines and the trucking industry. The Department of the Interior has ladled out at shockingly low prices rich leases of public land to the oil and gas industries, which it further protects by imposing rigid quotas on cheap oil imports that could save homeowners and motorists billions of dollars every year. The Department of the Interior serves the oil and gas industries in a host of ways that shield them from public scrutiny and accountability. The American Petroleum Institute, an industry organization, has even hired professional writers to prepare promotional brochures for the industry that are then printed free of charge by the Department of the Interior and distributed all across the country as if they were official Government publications. The Federal Communications Commission does little to encourage the broadcasting industry to bring its performance up to its potential. The Atomic Energy Commission, subordinating its responsibility to set vigorous safety standards over what could be America's most destructive domestic catastrophe, should there be a radioactive disaster in public or private atomic-energy plants, instead vigorously promotes and subsidizes private atomic-energy interests. And the Department of Agriculture--better renamed the Department of Agro-Business--is a faithful lap dog of the great grain, meat and poultry interests; so it goes, all the way down the line.

Big business has waxed fatter on Big Government. It's not that the officials of Federal agencies have been bought off by industry--although I wouldn't entirely rule that out in some cases--but primarily that the agency becomes identified with the interests of the industry it is supposed to be supervising and, in order to "bolster the economy" by increasing that industry's profits, becomes little more than a public-relations agent for big business. Another problem is that agency officials often come from the very industries under purported regulation or leave the agency to take a job in that industry. Repeated shuttling back and forth between business and Government is not uncommon. Remember, a Government regulatory agency is really just a mediator, a referee between business and the consumer; it reacts to pressures brought to bear on it, rather than seizing the initiative. And most of the power comes from industry's side of the street. Inevitably, if industry is the only one knocking on the door, it will receive all the attention and deference, and the unorganized and unrepresented consumer will be left out in the cold. That's why I spend so much of my time trying to mobilize consumer pressure to bring the regulatory agencies closer to the people they are supposed to serve first.

Playboy: You seem to feel that all the Government's industrial regulatory agencies are corrupt and venal.

Nader: Very often, even with the agencies that fail the public most egregiously, it's not a problem of corruption or venality but of shortsightedness, weakness and a misconception of Government's responsibility to the consumer. In a way, this is even more serious than venality, because corruption can be discovered and corrected; myopia and timidity can't. The regulatory agencies are in a pretty sorry state; one of the better ones is the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has taken positive steps to reduce the sharp practices of the stock-brokerage houses, despite the latter's strong and politically potent opposition. But even the SEC's record is, I'm sorry to say, spotty. I originally came to Washington with a great deal of hope that the regulatory agencies would champion the consumers' interests, but it didn't take me very long to become disillusioned. Nobody seriously challenges the fact that the regulatory agencies have made an accommodation with the businesses they are supposed to regulate--and that they've done so at the expense of the public; every journalist, politician and Government official in Washington knows it. Only agency spokesmen deny the fact. You don't need to stay in Washington more than one week to discover how apathetic, how bureaucratized, how chatteled to big business and how indifferent to the public these agencies are.

But I don't despair of changing the agencies' present anticonsumer bias and injecting them with new blood and new purpose. It's fully understandable why the agencies act as they do; after all, for years thousands of lobbyists have manned the barricades of business in Washington, using their considerable influence, by means of an assortment of quasi-legal methods, to sway agency officials and legislators to look favorably on the interests of their clients. The consumer's side of the fence, meanwhile, has been represented full time by virtually nobody. This situation is now changing, and the Federal regulatory agencies will eventually change with it.

Playboy: Until the regulatory agencies live up to your expectations, who are you proposing should assume their functions? Ralph Nader?

Nader: The public must exercise its power and influence through its elected representatives in Washington, through consumer organizations and through private individuals, such as myself, who are able to generate political action. There is, of course, considerable public apathy, but I'm constantly heartened by the thousands of letters I get from concerned citizens--many of them including valuable, and sometimes confidential, information. I've been particularly fortunate in having been able to develop sources of information within different industries; where necessary, I protect their identity to avoid their being fired. Some people in the corporate machinery do. I'm happy to say, have a social conscience and reject the notion that corporate loyalty encompasses all human values and responsibilities. I think that if more people within industry would disclose material that is vital to public safety, we would be able to attack the specific problems before they reached crisis proportions. I'm not suggesting that an employee subvert or be disloyal to his corporate employer; but if he brings a particular safety or health hazard to the attention of his superiors and they ignore it because they place profit above public safety, then I think it's his duty as a citizen to go outside the corporate structure and reveal it to the authorities, or to private citizens such as myself, who are in a position to expose the situation and to correct it. But to simply rationalize by saying that they just "took orders" is inexcusable. The code of professional ethics of the National Society of Professional Engineers, for example, specifically tells them that if sufficient attention isn't being given by management to their disclosures, then they must go outside the corporate structure and appeal to the public authorities, because human life is at stake.

Playboy: You mentioned the "methods" used by industry representatives and lobbyists to influence members of the regulatory agencies and other Government officials. Would you be more specific?

Nader: There are numerous means open to them; the implicit promise of jobs in industry when an official leaves Government, as I've indicated; leverage at the top of Governmental departments to turn the heat on a lower-level official who sticks his neck out for the public; donations to a Congressman's campaign fund or industry business for some who have law firms; and the forging of social friendships at the golf club, country club or professional organization. There are many specific techniques tailored to specific industries. The auto companies, for example, have "special plans" that allow important people to buy new cars at low prices. A manufacturer will select groups of influential people--newspaper editors and reporters, politicians, racing drivers, prominent clergymen--who they believe could promote the image and interests of their corporation in one way or another; the particular individual chosen is then given a new car at least 25 to 30 percent off the dealer's list price. He receives even more than that, however; his car has been given a particularly careful inspection on the assembly line and a thorough road test, unlike the cars sold on the open market, which are driven about 100 yards from the factory to the auto trailer in the parking lot. So this is just one elementary way that the manufacturers make friends and influence opinion makers.

Playboy: Your opponents in Washington have reportedly hinted to journalists that you've been receiving sizable kickbacks by referring negligence cases to a private law firm. Is this true?

Nader: It's demonstrably false, and calculatedly so. I have never accepted a referral fee. I provide a lot of free advice on auto safety and other consumer issues to anyone who asks me, but I do not receive remuneration of any kind. If my accusers can prove that I have ever received such a material reward, I'll gladly quadruple the sum and donate it to their favorite charity. Let me emphasize that there is nothing even remotely wrong with a lawyer receiving compensation for such legal and technical services, any more than it's wrong for a doctor, an accountant or an engineer to receive compensation for his professional services. It's just that I don't wish to do so. The industry rumormongers apparently believe that only material incentives motivate men, and they try vainly to spread that notion so as to reduce my effectiveness. But the more they try, the more they have reduced their own effectiveness with the Government officials they work to influence.

Playboy: Some of these same critics charge that you are basically opposed to the free-enterprise system and virulently hostile to business. Is it possible that your position might lead to Government intervention in every area of the economy--and inevitably to total socialism?

Nader: No. There is still much that is positive in a free-enterprise system, and I have little faith in the automatic power of Government to right all wrongs; in any area of Government control, there is always the danger of inaction, overbureaucratization, under-imagination and surrender to special interests. Some form of socialism may very well be a solution for poverty-ridden countries of the "third world"; but in America, the answer is not to scrap the free-enterprise system but to reform it--by correcting the abuses committed in its name and ensuring that it operates responsibly and effectively.

The two essential elements of any healthy capitalist system are the free market and competition, and I see value in both concepts; but too many of the huge corporations, while paying them ritualistic lip service, are in practice opposed to the free market and competition and seek a controlled market; they prefer closed enterprise to free enterprise and price- and product-fixing to competition. The essential prerequisites of the free-market system are that the consumer have a meaningful choice of products and that he be supplied the information on which to intelligently base that choice. But the consumer does not have access to such information; and in the highly concentrated industries, the top manufacturers deliberately produce products that are virtually identical, thus eliminating effective competition. In the auto industry, for example, the only fundamental distinction between this year's model and last's is often whether or not a grille pattern grimaces or grins or whether there is a fake air scoop on the side of the car or a strip of chrome. What we need here, to quote from Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign, is a choice and not an echo--a choice that a healthy free-market system should and must provide. Unfortunately, the megacorporations are basically anti--free market, and thus actually antithetical to capitalism, whereas I am all in favor of fostering genuine free enterprise and putting the people back into people's capitalism.

Of course, I do believe that some degree of enlightened Government regulation is necessary in such a complex and interacting economy as ours. But the real question is not whether such a Governmental role is desirable--it is inevitable--but whether the Government will intervene on the side of the public or, as is all too often the case today, on the side of big business, whenever the interests of each fail to coincide. Governmental control of industry--as opposed to prudent supervision--becomes necessary only when industry fails to respond to the public interest; drastic state interventions in the private sector, like revolutions, are precipitated by a public demand for the correction of long-standing abuses. Socialism will come to America only if the huge corporations succeed in subverting the free market while extolling it at stockholder meetings. It is this kind of breakdown that consumer advocates such as myself are trying to prevent.

Playboy: Despite what you've said, some critics feel that your Government-regulated approach to the protection of consumer interests is essentially coercive. They accuse you of being contemptuous of the consumer's ability to discern good products and services from bad and to exercise his free choice in the market place. Do you think that's valid?

Nader: As I've already indicated, before the consumer can exercise an intelligent free choice and thus encourage more and better competition, he must be supplied with relevant information about the product he buys; unless there is a full disclosure of this information, and a full disclosure of available alternatives, such free choice is only a sham--as it is today in many areas. The only way a consumer can now make a free choice without outside assistance--from consumer groups or Federal agencies--is to train himself as a mechanic and structural engineer before he buys a car, to carry a spectrograph when he buys home appliances or a Geiger counter when he buys a color-TV set. I don't want to force him to buy anything--but he can't make up his mind in a vacuum. Is it "coercion" if the Government sets standards to prevent the public from consuming diseased meat, or driving dangerous cars, or being overexposed to X radiation through medical and dental X rays? I don't think so; and if you have ever seen any of the horribly mutilated corpses of those who have been struck down on the highways due to engineering defects in their cars, you would consider the question of "coercing" them into buying a safe car rather academic.

Playboy: If you realized all your aims, according to some of your opponents, we might find ourselves living in a dull, homogenized consumers' utopia in which all products would be blandly standardized, all services uniform. Do you consider that a fanciful prediction?

Nader: Totally. In a healthy free market system--which, as I've pointed out, we don't have today--competition would be a vibrant reality instead of banquet rhetoric, and manufacturers would vie with one another to produce new, better and more exciting products. The whole point of consumer safety movements is to generate change, to stimulate innovation, which means more alternatives, not fewer. Cars don't all have to look drably alike just because safety is engineered into them, any more than all food products have to taste the same simply because putrescent fish is outlawed. Is there anything exciting about being mutilated in an auto crash? Would it be epicurean to eat meat from diseased animals? Would it be boring to live without the possibility of burning to death in a suit made from a flammable fabric? I find it difficult to visualize a time when many people will be lamenting to their psychiatrists. "Doctor, there are no more unsafe cars, diseased meat, air and water pollution or radiation overexposure around. Life has lost all its zest!"

Playboy: You have recently widened your critical sights to include other branches of the transportation system besides the auto industry. Not long ago, for example, you criticized safety conditions on Greyhound buses. Why?

Nader: Because Greyhound, which is the largest commercial bus company in the United States, has used regrooved tires on the rear of its buses, of a pattern and tread wear that makes them extremely unreliable on wet, slippery pavements. Whenever the treads on a Greyhound rear tire wear down, they have been poorly regrooved--not just once but repeatedly--and replaced on the bus. A UCLA tire specialist revealed recently that Greyhound's regrooving patterns give no more traction than if the tires were absolutely bald. Numerous accidents have resulted from this practice. A Greyhound bus will be rounding a curve on a slightly wet highway, the driver will brake, the tires will fail to grip and the bus will go skidding right off the highway. Such crashes have occurred in various parts of the country. In New Jersey in May 1967, a Greyhound careened off a rain-slicked highway near Hackettstown and plunged 50 feet down an embankment, killing one passenger, a 73-year-old woman, and injuring 12 others. The state police found that the regrooved rear tires had worn so thin that the canvas was showing through. The case was referred to the Department of Transportation, which recommended criminal prosecution of Greyhound for knowingly violating the Motor Carrier Safety Act. Unfortunately, even if convicted. Greyhound is only subject to a $1000 fine, since there are no other penal provisions under the law--which is just one more reason for making all knowing and willful violations of safety regulations criminal rather than civil offenses. What is particularly repugnant about this is that Greyhound uses such tires for only one reason; to cut costs and swell profits. No one can ever say that Greyhound had its back up against the financial wall and, therefore, had to cut costs for reasons of economic survival; this is a mammoth outfit that is immensely profitable and has so much liquid capital that it owns 28 multimillion-dollar Boeing 707 and 727 jets for leasing to the commercial airlines. And yet, to save a few dollars on new tires, it is willing to jeopardize the lives of its passengers. This provides quite an insight into the ethics of a modern corporation.

But tires aren't the only area where Greyhound is at fault. Consider a recent major Greyhound accident in Baker. California, which took 20 lives. The bus was struck by a car traveling in the wrong lane and flipped over on its door side. The fragile exposed fuel tank of the bus ruptured, the fuel ignited and incinerated 20 occupants trapped in a bus with no emergency exists. The few who escaped were either ejected by the initial impact or managed to climb out the shattered front windshield. Proper design of buses for safety would have saved many lives in such a collision. Greyhound management poured pressure on the National Highway Safety Bureau and UCLA to keep a highly critical report by UCLA specialists on Greyhound bus design from being made public. One reason for this is that Greyhound has a new bus design being examined by the Department of Transportation--a design, incidentally, that shows virtually no safety improvements. Greyhound obviously fears that critiques of its design and performance may jeopardize approval of this "new" design.

Playboy: Is Trailways, Greyhound's main competitor, any safer?

Nader: Trailways has had a generally lower accident record than Greyhound. On the Washington--New York run, which I'm acquainted with, some Greyhound drivers consistently violate the speed limits; their driving methods, particularly in the early-morning hours, would turn your hair white. I've been trying for over a year to get a precise statistical comparison of Greyhound and Trailways accidents made public, but the Bureau of Motor Carriers of the Department of Transportation has refused to release the comparative figures. Their explanation is that it would serve no useful purpose. Well, it might serve the purpose of informing the traveler which bus line he's less likely to get killed on--and rewarding the safer line for its incentive and responsibility by giving it business. It's quite obvious that the BMC is covering up for Greyhound, as it has done for years; the BMC has never released the full contents of its investigations of accidents involving Greyhound or other bus companies. The BMC has also been sitting for three years on a proposal to require seat belts in buses. I would urge a Congressional investigation of the relationship between the BMC and Greyhound, which amounts to a merger of business and Government in a joint venture to protect each other and delude the public. Here again, we have the problem of a regulatory agency whose duty is to protect the public deciding that its first allegiance is to the industry.

Playboy: How safe are the railroads?

Nader: Railroad accidents are sharply increasing. If you read your newspapers carefully, you'll find that hardly a week goes by without some report of a railroad crash, or derailment, or a head-on collision between two trains somewhere in the country. As our railroad system continues to deteriorate, casualties and railroad accidents are rising, and efforts to strengthen railroad safety run into the same technological and bureaucratic obstacles that we find in the field of auto safety. The Department of Transportation proposed the first railroad safety bill in decades to Congress last May, but it hasn't been acted upon.

Playboy: What about airline safety?

Nader: Commercial aviation faces a problem, in the aggregate, that is not nearly as serious as auto safety--not yet, anyway. But aviation safety will present serious challenges in the coming years because of the growing congestion not only in the skies but at our airports: so we had better begin right now to allocate more resources and more public attention to this area. As it stands today, roughly 1200 people die in air accidents in this country each year, as compared with more than 50,000 in automobile accidents. But there is still considerable room for improvement.

For one thing, our planes are far from being as crashworthy as they could be: much more attention should be given to the kind of engineering improvements that would increase the likelihood of survival after a crash landing by strengthening the plane's structure so that it wouldn't always disintegrate on impact and would also reduce the energy forces before they're transmitted to the passengers. In addition, a great deal of work is need to improve our jet fuel systems, in order to reduce the possibility of ruptures and fire. One remarkably neglected area of aviation safety is this whole question of fire after a crash. Many air-crash victims don't die from impact but are burned to death or asphyxiated before they can escape the wreckage. There is no reason today, technologically or even economically, why this should happen. It is now perfectly feasible to adopt protective systems developed by the Air Force that trigger on impact and prevent the fuel from igniting.

Additional lives could be saved by making stronger seats that are securely anchored to the body of the plane: today, many seats just snap off on impact, propelling themselves and their seat-belted occupants through the compartment. Few people realize that airplane seats are even less adequately secured than automobile seats. Of course, as we go on to higher speeds and supersonic transports, the problems of safety will become even more urgent--but far less susceptible to simple solutions. I think the situation in general would be considerably improved, however, if the commercial airlines and the plane manufacturers would channel some of their multimillion-dollar revenues into safety research and saler planes.

Playboy: Have the commercial carriers and airplane manufactures responded to demands for improved air safety?

Nader: Let me give you a concrete example. The Allison company, a major airplane manufacturer, discovered in 1967 that a number of Convair 580s it had sold to commercial airlines had defective engines. The specific defect was a soft piston, which leads to the separation of the propeller, which will then cut into the fuselage and destroy the plane. This is such a serious problem that any aeronautical engineer would urge the immediate notification of the operators of such planes to ground, disassemble and repair them. Allison didn't do this, nor did it inform the Federal Aviation Agency of the defect. Some time after Allison's discovery of the problem, one of the Convair 580s they had sold to Lake-Central crashed in Ohio, killing all 38 persons aboard. A subsequent investigation proved beyond doubt that the plane crash was caused by a soft piston: and as a result, the FAA fined Allison the staggering sum of $8000--which works out to approximately $200 per fatality. Allison fought valiantly to have the fine reduced to $4000, but it did not succeed. The trivial nature of this fine and of the deterrent proceeding from it is accentuated by the fact that in the prior six years, Allison had been cited by the Federal Aviation Agency over 100 times for manufacturing irregularities in propeller production.

There are, unfortunately, no criminal penalties regarding aircraft hazards in the Federal Aviation Act, not even for airline or manufacturers that willfully and knowingly allow defective planes to be sent from their plants without warning the purchaser. If someone had planted a bomb on that plane to kill a relative and collect insurance money, he would have been sentenced to death or life imprisonment for the murder of 38 people; Allison was fined $8000. Another long-standing violation on which the FAA has remained silent involves fire-detection systems on many aircraft, including many Boeing 707s and 727s, which have not met the FAA's requirement of a five-second response time to warn the pilot of a fire in the power plant. These systems now take up to 15 seconds to signal an alarm, which in modern aircraft is a critical delay.

Playboy: Are the legal penalties meted out to other firms that violate the law as lenient as the one levied on Allison?

Nader: Lenient is hardly the word: if we were as lenient toward individual crime as we are toward big-business crime, we'd empty the prisons, dissolve the police forces and subsidize the criminals. The basic problem here is that we adopt a double standard in dealing with individual crime and business crime. Take two men, both criminals: One has stolen a car and the other is a drug-company executive who has knowingly failed to warn the Food and Drug Administration or the medical profession of serious health dangers from a particular drug product. The car thief, who has caused no physical injury to anybody, will be dealt with severely by the courts; while the drug executive, whose illegal action may have resulted in many injuries and even death, is let off with a rap on the wrist--if he's reprimanded at all. Coal-mine companies, for example, have been cited for thousands of recurring safety violations by the U.S. Bureau of Mines: but with one minor exception, no penalties have ever been levied for such violations, which are killing or injuring hundreds of miners. To correct this double standard, we've got to redefine and recodify criminal law, which is almost wholly oriented to acts of individual crime and rarely, if at all, addresses itself to corporate crime and corporate executive. The problem is particularly severe today, because ethical standards in industry are, more often than not, distressingly low. A Harvard Business Review survey found that four out of every seven business executives polled said they "would violate a code of ethics whenever they thought they could avoid detection." We're always hearing about "crime in the streets" today, but crime in the executive conference room affects far more Americans.

Buried in the most recent task-force report of the President's National Crime Commission is a brief section on business crime, which reveals that every year, the public is mulcted of from $500,000,000 to one billion dollars by securities frauds alone. Dishonest and illegal practices in the area of drugs, therapeutic aids and home repairs rob the consumer of even more untold hundreds of millions of dollars annually. The automobile industry has knowingly permitted cars with safety defects to reach the market, with no effort to recall them or to inform the unwitting buyer. Irresponsible use of pesticides and chemicals poison and kill thousands of human beings every year. Yet willful violations in all these areas are punished only by mild civil fines that will never deter corporate malpractice. The civil penalties generally meted out are so modest that the big corporation won't even blink an eye at them: and on the rare occasions when the fines are stiff, the corporations just pass the cost on to the consumer in the form of higher retail prices.

In order to correct this situation, we must amend the laws so that all willful business violations of Federal safety codes come under criminal rather than civil law and convictions are punishable by imprisonment. Such criminal penalties would pierce the corporate veil and reach the particular executive or official responsible for the violations and thus make the company more careful in the future. We already have criminal penalties in the area of price-fixing; as you may remember, several GE and Westinghouse executives were subject to brief jail sentences in the early Sixties for systematically fixing prices over the period of a decade, a practice that led to overcharging consumers by hundreds of millions of dollars. So I see no reason why we should exempt the auto, gas-pipeline and electronics industries, or any other big corporation, from similar criminal penalties, when their illegal practices jeopardize the health and safety of the consuming public. In the case of General Electric, the deterrent to price-fixing was not the fine but the jail sentence, and this is true in every industry. This is the one penalty that can reach the culpable executive. He cannot elude it by interposing a buffer of corporate privilege or by hiding behind some company bylaws that indemnify him from any fines or liabilities, civil or criminal.

Playboy: Why are economic crimes such as price-fixing more likely to be punished by criminal sanctions than violations of safety and health laws?

Nader: Because the latter laws are of more recent origin and industry lobbyist-lawyers have been successful thus far in averting most proposed criminal penalties in this field. As far as the law is concerned, we were much more stringent toward corporations at the turn of the century than we are today. I don't believe there will ever be real progress in corporate reform until we put teeth into legislation by providing for criminal sanctions whenever the law is deliberately violated to the detriment of human life. I can't overestimate the importance of this; not only are Americans being injured or falling ill because of business crime; not only are future generations being subjected to higher risks of physical and mental deformity and debilitation as a result of today's chemical and radiation hazards; but people are also being fleeced of millions and millions of dollars.

One authority in the field. Professor Sanford Kadish, told the President's National Crime Commission that "It is possible to reason convincingly that the harm done to economic order by violations of ... regulatory laws is of a magnitude that dwarfs into insignificance the lower-class property offenses." If one looks at all the big corporations that are abusing the consumer and getting away with it, the bank robber who steals $10,000 and is hunted down by the whole machinery of state, local and Federal police and spends 20 years in prison looks almost pathetic by comparison. Next to the executives of our large corporations, he is a pretty small fish, indeed. The same bank might have made more than that in the same day with concealed interest rates on its loans.

Playboy: Who are the "lobbyist-lawyers" you criticize for persuading Congress to go easy on corporate crime?

Nader: First of all, let me explain that there are two basic strata in the legal profession in this country. On the one hand, you have a majority of lone lawyers who work with poor or middle-class clients; you can have serious ethical problems with this type of lawyer in the accident, estate or loan area, but the abuses generally affect only individual clients who are exploited in one way or another. This is the more petty type of legal chicanery, which, while it must be corrected, does not create a legitimizing legal framework for itself. But you also have the wealthy Wall Street--Washington law firms that represent the huge corporations, and here the ethical problems become really acute. The worst problem is at the top, not the bottom; the legal profession, like a fish, rots from the head down. My interest, consequently, is primarily focused on these mega--law firms, because they are among the strongest power brokers in our society, particularly between industry and Government; and they are also the least understood power elite in the nation.

These law firms, as the legal agents of the large corporations, are involved directly in preserving and extending corporate exploitation of the consumer, often under Government protection via laws they draft. Such lawyers have abdicated or distorted their legal ethics and their responsibility to the public interest for million-dollar retainers. The behavior of these firms is particularly irresponsible because they also set the ethical tone for the little lawyer who works with individual clients; as he gazes up at the Olympian peaks of the Wall Street--Washington law firms and witness the squalid blue-chip cavorting of the country's best-paid and most respected lawyers, it's inevitable that he will want his slice of the pie, too. After all, he'll say to himself, if they're rewarded with $500,000 homes and invitations to the White House, why shouldn't he, in his own little practice, emulate their example? And so the whole sordid ethical code of these large firms filters down the line and helps create the same kind of operational atmosphere for other lawyers.

Playboy: What specific unethical acts do you claim these large law firms commit?

Nader: Let me give you two examples. And let me stress at the outset that their activities, while profoundly unethical, are rarely illegal; they stay within the strict letter of the law--which they or their predecessors often helped write. As a case in point, let's take the cigarette-labeling legislation that passed Congress in 1965. Here you had a question of great and lasting significance for public health: What should Congress do, if anything, in the light of the Surgeon General's report on the health hazards of smoking? There was a considerable demand, voiced by the public and echoed in Congress, that strict legislation be passed, warning the consumer of the dangers of smoking and initiating antismoking campaigns and research for safer cigarettes on a large scale. As this controversy got under way, the tobacco industry began marshalling its forces in Washing on through it lobby, the Tobacco Institute, headed by ex-Senator Earle C. Clements, which mobilized legal support for the industry.

Now, you've got to remember that whenever a major industry gets into real trouble, it doesn't go to its trade association or its house counsel, but to these Washington--Wall Street firms that are staffed by men who have served in Government, who have penetrated the interstices of power and who are thus eminently qualified to mediate and resolve problems--who are, in short, masters of preconflict resolution, or the art of settling problems in the back room before they burst into the public limelight and generate democratizing pressures that cannot be controlled. In this case, the Tobacco Institute, the industry spokesman, enlisted a number of top Washington law firms, the most important of which were Arnold, Fortas & Porter--at which Abe Fortas, now a Supreme Court Justice and a longtime friend of L. B. J., was a senior partner--and Covington & Burling, led by Thomas Austern, a veteran lawyer and backslapping Washington contact man. These lawyers, with the occasional help of Mr. Fortas, met daily to plot a strategy that would decide the Government's public policy on a major health problem for years to come, and they lobbied relentlessly with Congressmen, bringing to bear all their influence and all the economic power of the tobacco industry.

What was the result? Congress passed a Cigarette labeling Bill--spearheaded by Dixiecrat legislators from tobacco states--that was completely without teeth; a bill, in fact, that the tobacco industry had desired desperately and which fulfilled its every corporate need. The bill did three major things for the industry. First, by requiring that each cigarette pack be labeled on the side with the message "Smoking may be hazardous to your health," it put the smoker on notice and gave the industry a persuasive defense against potential liability suits. Now they can say to the plaintiff in court, "Since we warned you before you assumed the risk, we are absolved of all responsibility." Let me add parenthetically that even the wording of this warning was weak; "Smoking may be hazardous to your health." instead of, as the Surgeon General's report and every other serious study demonstrates. "Smoking is dangerous to your health." The second boon the bill gave the industry was that it headed off the states from taking any action to protect consumers from smoking hazards at least until 1969. This was very important to the industry, because legislators in New York State, under the leadership of state senator Edward Spino, were on the verge of passing very tough legislation against cigarette advertising, and a number of other states seemed ready to follow New York's lead. So the bill gave the industry a five-year breathing space, during which time its products could continue to be sold while innovations such as the 100-millimeter cigarette could be introduced. The third thing the bill did for the industry was to preclude the Federal Trade Commission, which had just issued some stringent proposed rules concerning cigarette advertising, from acting in any way again, at least until 1969. So this bill, which many naïve citizens viewed as a blow to the tobacco industry, actually constituted a Congressional surrender to the industry. And who were the architects of this remarkable tour de force? Washington corporate attorneys who listen to after-dinner pontifications about lawyers' being the soul and conscience of society.

Let me give you just one more example of this type of thing. One of the smallest but most powerful Washington law firms, which is also most adept at defeating the public interest, was Clifford & Miller, headed by the redoubtable Clark Clifford, friend of presidents and presently our Secretary of Defense. As a result of the conviction of General Electric. Westinghouse. Allis-Chalmers and other companies for violation of the antitrust act by collusive long-term price-fixing, which was designed to maintain high wholesale prices for GE's and other corporations' electrical equipment, a number of municipalities and other customers demanded repayment of overcharges. After a good deal of grumbling, the companies agreed to pay out about $500,000,000 in punitive damages. Prior to most of these settlements, GE called in Clark Clifford, who knows his way around Washington, and asked him to use his considerable influence to persuade the Internal Revenue Service to rule that the money GE and the other culpable companies had to pay out in damages was tax-deductible. After some persuasive representation by Clifford, believe it or not, the IRS ruled just that--which meant that the punitive damages GE and its price-fixing partners paid out as restitution for their own criminal activities were written off as "ordinary and necessary" business expenses; and as a result, the amounts were offset against profits an the Federal Government got 50 percent less in tax payments from the electrical companies involved--a difference ultimately underwritten by the American tax-payer. So Clark Clifford saved GE over $100,000,000: even a one-percent fee for such services would amount to $1,000,000. This is the kind of leverage--and incentive--these top Washington lawyers have. Even if the public interest is sacrificed in the process, no criticism is leveled at these attorneys.

Playboy: How do the top corporation lawyers gain such influence?

Nader: By skillfully coordinating the influence of their corporate client with their own personal influence in Washington. They have done this in many ways, but the most important factor has been their ability to curry Presidential or Cabinet-level favor--by helping the President, for example, get business support for his tax legislation and balance-of-payments policies, by lobbying in Congress for his legislative programs, by working for the party organization and raising campaign funds, by setting up key task-force advisory committees, by persuading prominent businessmen to accept high-level Government appointments and by frequently assisting the Chief Executive and other high officials on a wide range of ticklish policy matters. Now, all of these nouremumerative "public services," of course, have an implicit quid pro quo. The lawyer is repaid with special early access to Government information that will be of use to his corporate clients on rulings, regulations, licensing or quotas; or the Government will take a stand favorably disposed to a particular economic interest represented by such a lawyer: or a Federal agency will delay in acting contrary to that economic interest.

Playboy: Wouldn't lawyers such as Clifford and Fortas answer you with the argument that they are only serving their client and that in a free society everyone has a right to legal representation?

Nader: No one questions a company's an industry's right to legal representation. It's how they're represented, and for what purpose, that is the issue. If there were law firms on the other side to represent the consumer, to make secret information public, to engage in meticulous advocacy, to expose pay-offs and other undesirable practices, then lawyers like Clark Clifford would not be such influential industry lobbyists. There's nothing reprehensible or unethical, for example, about a criminal lawyer representing a crime chieftain, because his efforts are countered and the public protected by the district attorney's office, the police and the whole prosecuting machinery of the state. There are, unfortunately, no such countervailing forces in Washington.

It has to be driven home to the American people that the relationship between big business and these top law firms is not a normal attorney-client one but a partnership extending far beyond the court process into legislation, administration, political and diplomatic lobbying, business investments and directorships. The American people must know how much power these lawyers have and how that power is frequently exercised to the public detriment. During the 1966 auto-safety battle in Congress, for example, the four U. S. auto companies hired attorney Lloyd Cutler to represent them. Cutler had the special task of preventing the law from including criminal penalties for willful and knowing violations that would endanger human life. Somehow, he persuaded Congress that criminal sanctions for such acts as knowingly putting defective vehicles on the market and not recalling them, watering down or adulterating brake fluids, etc., would be punitive, unnecessary and impossible to enforce. Before Congress caved in to Cutler, who applied a good deal of pressure. Senator Vance Hartke, who had introduced the criminal-sanctions provision, asked why there was such desperate lobbying by the auto industry to forestall a sanction that would apply only to knowing and willful violations of the law and not to structural Ilaws or failure to innovate safety improvements. he didn't get an answer. Did Mr. Cutler have an ethical and professional responsibility to consider the human and social effects of his services? Did he appreciate the fact that he was exempting from criminal penalties not only his four auto-company clients but also thousands of suppliers and distributors whose integrity Mr. Cutler might not so easily vouch for? Apparently, he lost little sleep over this dilemma.

Playboy: Which Congressmen do you feel are the most receptive to pressure from these lawyer-lobbyists?

Nader: Well, by far the most dedicated anticonsumer legislator in Congress, and the one with the most power, is Everett McKinley Dirksen, the G. O. P. Minority Leader. The honey-lunged Senator has made quite a hit in pop music recently, but he's been singing the tune of the corporations for years, and with considerable clout. Dirksen is really a great boon to every business lobbyist in Washington. His office is packed with them: he spends much of his time ministering to their demands. And he is a direct pipeline from the lobbyists to the Congressional Record: he doesn't even bother to filter the speeches and statements they write for him, but delivers them verbatim on the Senate floor, with all the power and prestige of his office behind them. Dirksen has been an errand boy for the auto industry, the railroads, the pipeline industry, the private utilities, the atomic-power industry, the drug industry, the steel and aluminum industries, the oil industry: you name any large corporate interest and Everett Dirksen is its faithful emissary.

Playboy: What other Senators do you consider anticonsumer legislators?

Nader: Some others are Senators Carl Curtis and Roman Hruska of Nebraska. Spessard Holland of Florida and Jack Miller of Iowa. But the blue-chip Senator whom many business interests are most anxious to win over is Jacob Javits of New York. His liberal image, secure electoral position within the nation's most powerful state and his convincing advocacy of an issue are all premium attributes, in their eyes. And Senator Javits has not been reluctant to bend these talents in the interests of the big corporations to a point that even some of his admirers believe thwarts the public interest. Other Senators, while not across-the-board foes of the consumer, have vigorously promoted the interests of specific industries that are important political and economic factors within their own states. Senate Majority Whip Russell Long of Louisiana, for example, who is strategically placed to influence legislation, proudly admits that he represents oil and other industries operating in his state. I've heard lobbyists wryly remark that the way to neutralize Senator Long's opposition or even gain his support is to build a plant in Louisiana: at the present rate of construction. Louisiana will be industrialized within the next decade and the erstwhile populist Senator may have forgotten the consumer completely. A similar attitudinal evolution has occurred. I'm sorry to say, with other Senators who initially championed consumer issues but then "mellowed" in office.

Playboy: In order to at least partially counteract the influence of the lawyers who work as lobbyists for the big corporations, we understand you plan to organize a public-interest law firm. How will it operate?

Nader: It will be exactly what its name implies: a law firm--the first of several. I would hope--to represent the interests of the public whenever and wherever they are jeopardized by corporate irresponsibility and Government inertia. The firm will be composed of attorneys but will also eventually encompass talents from the medical, scientific, engineering, economic and accounting professions. It will be based here in Washington, so that we can keep our finger on the pulse beat of power, and will handle no individual cases but, instead, represent the consumer by unearthing evidence of corporate abuses, cooperating with Congressional committees and appearing before regulatory agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission and the National Highway Safety Bureau. Whenever consumer-related issue have been considered up till now, industry spokesmen and lobbyists have turned up in droves and dominated the proceedings. because there has been no organized countervailing force representing the consumer. I hope that this public-interest law firm will start to fill that large gap.

Playboy: Isn't what you're proposing less a law firm than a consumers' lobby?

Nader: You could call it that. Although there will be other skills supportive of the attorneys', my emphasis will be on the legal aspect. I believe it is urgent to attract bright and idealistic young law graduates into the service of the public before they are absorbed into establishmentarian law firms. I believe the concept of a public-interest law firm could add a new and positive dimension to the legal profession and help orient it to its primary purpose of serving the public--not just pushing for commercial interests, as it is today. The real distinction between these public-interest lawyers and traditional lawyers is that these are lawyers without specific clients, without retainers. Their only client will be the American public.

Playboy: How much will it cost to establish such a law firm?

Nader: To begin a firm at a modest level of 12 professional people, with secretarial and other overhead, I would estimate that the cost will run in the neighborhood of $300,000 a year.

Playboy: Where will you get the money?

Nader: I hope it will come from public-spirited individuals or loundations.

Playboy: Along these lines, in the past two years you have broadened your horizons to encompass a wide range of issues affecting the public's health and well-being, from conditions in meat-processing plants to radiation overexposure during medical X rays. Taking them one at a time, why have you added sanitary conditions in the meat industry to your list of consumer causes?

Nader: In 1906. Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, a graphic novel about shockingly bad health conditions in Chicago's packing houses. There was a vast public outcry; Sinclair's charges were broadcast on the front page of every newspaper in the country; and Teddy Roosevelt invited him to the White House to map strategy to correct the situation. As a direct result of that one book, Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act of 1906, providing for Federal inspection of slaughterhouses engaged in interstate commerce, and the nation heaved a collective sigh of relief that a glaring abuse was on the way to amelioration. Civic textbooks still cite The Jungle as a classic case of a galvanized public rising up to stamp out corporate abuse. But today, 62 years later, health conditions in much of the meat industry have actually deteriorated. At the turn of the century, plants were undeniably foul, but it wasn't as easy to pass off meat from cancerous or diseased pigs to the public: the stench of decay alone was a give-away to the buyer. Today, however, thanks to the marvels of chemical doctoring and deep-freeze storage, the consumer can no longer depend on his sense of taste, smell or sight to warn him. As a result, the American public is consuming large quantities of putrescent and disease-ridden meat.

Playboy: Could you give us some examples?

Nader: You have to break the problem down into three distinct but interrelated areas. First, take the animal on the hoof. Are diseased animals utilized for human consumption? The evidence is that hundreds of thousands of "ID" animals --"Dead. Dying. Diseased, Disabled"--are processed in meat plants across the country. There are "specialty buyers" of such 4D animals at livestock auctions, who buy them at low cost and then process them inexpensively in plants immune to Federal inspection. These buyers--who are not just fly-by-night operators but often represent substantial firms--have, of course, a big competitive edge over the buyer of healthy meat: and a kind of Gresham's law comes into play, whereby diseased meat forces wholesome meat out of a market. Once they get these animals to the stockyards, all they do is carve out the diseased portion of the steer and process the remains for your dining table--after proper doctoring by artificial preservatives, seasoning agents, antibiotics and even detergents. So the 4D animal is one major factor in the situation.

The second area of importance is the sanitary condition of the slaughterhouse and packing house: here, a realistic description becomes so nauseating as to strain credulity. If you examine the reports of Federal or state inspectors--most of which are not acted upon by the relevant regulatory agency--you'll read of plants where rats, roaches and other vermin have free run of the premises: where paint flakes off ceiling and walls and falls into the processing vats; where conditions are so filthy that carcasses are contaminated by cobwebs, worms, stale blood and decomposing fat caught in table crevices: where the machines are unwashed and rusty: where workers with hairy forearms pause as they mix the meat to scrape it off their arms and into the vat, with their hair and sweat as a bonus to the consumer.

The Department of Agriculture recently supplied me--reluctantly--with an unpublished state-by-state study of intrastate meat-processing plants, which are not subject to Federal inspection. There are 15,000 such plants and they account for 25 percent of all meat sold in the United States, or almost eight billion pounds--enough meat to feed 50,000,000 people annually. This study, prepared by Dr. M. R. Clarkson, had been gathering dust in the department's files--and it's not designed for bedtime reading. Let me read you its conclusion, which condemns the meat processors and packers for "allowing edible portions of carcasses to come in contact with manure, pus and other source of contamination during the dressing operations of carcasses to come in contact with manure, pus and other sources of contamination during the dressing operations; allowing meat food products during preparation to become contaminated with filth from improperly cleaned equipment and facilities: failing to use procedures to detect or control parasites transmitted to man that could lead to diseases such as trichinosis and cysticercosis: failure to supervise destruction of obviously diseased tissues and spoiled, putrid and filthy materials."

This report was prepared in 1963, and recently. Representative Purcell requested the Department of Agriculture to launch a new study of intrastate plants to determine if there had been any change in conditions. A Department official subsequently confessed that there had, indeed, been changes: the rats and roaches of 1963 had shuffled off this mortal coil, but their descendants were carrying on business as usual. In 1966 alone. Federal inspectors condemned 250,000,000 pounds of diseased, decaying or contaminated meat, but it was only a drop in the vat. Parenthetically, let me add that while this type of meat is sold across the counter all over the country, the most unwholesome meat of all finds it way to the black ghettos, where it is sold at reduced rates to unscrupulous retailers, who then peddle it at inflated prices to the Negro slum dweller.

But the third and final major factor in meat processing, the "additive stage," is in some ways even more insidious than the use of 4D animals and the prevalence of unsanitary health conditions. Additives are very convenient when you have a situation where diseased animals are being processed and even healthy animals are contaminated by filthy conditions in the plants. The consumer is obviously not going to be thrilled with maggoty or putrescent meat, so something has to be done to mask its real state. Enter the additives, seasoning agents, preservatives, antibiotics, coloring agents and a supplementary battery of chemical adulterants that effectively prevent the consumer's nose or eye from spotting the true condition of the meat sold to him. This is probably the most fundamental type of consumer deception prevalent in the market place. Not only do these additives neutralize our senses of detection, some of them are themselves patently unsafe, and others present unknown risks.

As a corollary to these three basic areas of abuse, there is also an additional health problem in the meat industry: the effect of the animal's own organic condition on our bodies. If too much fertilizer has been used in growing the grain or grass eaten by a particular animal, for example, we ingest inordinate amounts of nitrates when we eat a portion of that animal. And what of the insecticides an animal absorbs through its diet? And what about all the antibiotics that are injected into the animal while it's alive and are frequently used as additives while it's being processed? Anyone on a steady diet of such meat is, in effect, immunizing himself against antibiotics--so that they'll have little effect on him when he really needs them--as well as absorbing whatever undesirable cumulative effects they may have on his system. The food and Drug Administration is now proposing to tighten safeguards on antibiotic ingestion prior to slaughter. Basically, you see, the consumer is just not aware of what is really happening to him when he sits down to that juicy steak or munches on a hamburger. The more we find out about what goes into out foods, the more concerned biologists and nutritionists are becoming. A recent conference of leading geneticists and biologists brought forth expressions of deep concern about the effect of food additives on our chromosome structure. But thanks to the meat industry's subordination of health to profits and the Government's indifference, little has been done to improve the situation.

Playboy: Is there any meat product you would single out as the most dangerous?

Nader: The worst offenders are hamburgers, hot dogs, sausages and all luncheon meats, such as bologna, salami and liverwurst. All these processed meats constitute an imaginative food innovation; they are often used as a handy and profitable chump that allows the packers to get rid of their scrap meat, substandard or diseased meat and their less desirable cuts. All they do is douse all these inferior leftovers with coloring and seasoning agents and market them to an unsuspecting public. Court evidence has shown that contaminated meat, horse meat and meat from diseased animals that were originally slatted for dog or cat food have often wound up as hamburger or sausage: while lungs eyeballs, pig blood and chopped hides are mixed into hot dogs and luncheon meats.

To reduce the stench and foul taste, such hamburger is frequently impregnated with sulfite, an illegal additive that gives old and decaying meat a healthy pink blush; a recent survey in New York discovered sulfite additives in 26 out of every 30 hamburgers sampled. Since the meat used is often filthy, detergents are frequently used to wash off the dirt and, to stretch the profit, so-called binders are added to hold the shreds of meat together--generally cereals, but occasionally sawdust. Not surprisingly. I would personally never eat a hamburger, a hot dog, a sausage or any luncheon meat: it's not beyond the realm of possibility that you could get a good hamburger, hot dog or sausage, but why take a chance?

Playboy: Are you saying that such well-known meat processors as Swift. Wilson and Armour--and such well-known retailers as Safeway. Kroger and A. & P.--sell contaminated meat to their customers?

Nader: Yes. Surveys made by the U. S. Department of Agriculture indicate that even these large and well-known firms have often engaged in purchase and sale of contaminated meat products. One must ascribe to these companies a certain degree of awareness and knowledge about the products they are selling to their customers--particularly when Government reports have brought the situation to their attention.

Playboy: Yet most of the abuses you've cited have occurred in intrastate meat-processing and packaging plants, which are immune to Federal inspection. How effective has Federal inspection been in interstate plants?

Nader: Federal inspection is certainly much better than state inspection, but that's not really saying a great deal, because most of the state inspectors are snugly in the pocket of the meat industry. State inspection agencies are heavily larded with patronage appointments who have political ambitions and view their posts as sinecures, and the industry handles them with the requisite friendship, courtesy, persuasion and generosity to make the whole system an empty façade. But there is a professional corps of veterinarians working as Federal inspectors, and in general they do their best: but there are too few of them to adequately inspect the thousands of plants across the country. The inspection agency cannot assemble an effective staff because it has been undersubsidized by Congress, which in the past has been altogether too receptive to lobbyists for the meat industry. Not only do we need more inspectors, we need a better rotation system so they don't get too chummy with the industry and close their eyes to violations; and, above all, we need to train far more veterinarians as inspectors. But there will be no real improvement until all met-packing and processing plants, intra- as well as interstate, are brought under strict Federal supervision. The meat packers and processors and state departments of agriculture are, predictably, against any extension of Federal inspection--and, unfortunately for the consumer, they have a strange ally in the U. S. Department of Agriculture, which has avoided voluntary release of the evidence of its own investigators about conditions in the meat industry.

Playboy: Why?

Nader: Because the Department is primarily concerned with "helping the economy" by promoting meat sales and fears that any bad publicity would hurt business. Of course, the Department's promotional and regulatory roles frequently clash--but the regulatory role always seems to come out on the short end. Over the years, Congressional hearings on health conditions in the meat industry could have been called at any time the Department requested them--but it never did. And the Department requested them--but it never did. And the Department is now moving to let certified state inspectors approve meat shipped in interstate commerce, which could seriously erode the Federal inspection system. Here is a situation where responsible Government action could protect the health of millions of citizens--yet the Government has chosen to sit on the facts, hold the hand of the meat industry and shudder whenever the state commissioners of agriculture bellow. Only continuous public vigilance by Congress and interested citizens will change this situation.

Playboy: Your exposure of abuses in the industry over the past few years was largely responsible for the passage in 1967 of toughened amendments to the Federal Meat Inspection Act, which compels the states to enforce on intrastate packers and processors the same hygienic code imposed by Federal inspection standards. Have sanitary conditions improved since then?

Nader: To some extent, but much remains to be done. Under the new law, the states have about two years to bring their inspection programs up to Federal standards or face a Federal take-over. Already, hundreds of plants considered a threat to health have been closed down permanently or suspended pending clean-up. What is really needed now, however is to galvanize the Agriculture Department into enforcement and compel it to sever its Damon-Pythias relationship with the meat industry. The tragedy is that all we really need to develop a comprehensive nationwide inspection service that would ensure a wholesome meat supply is $35,000,000 more than we're now spending--roughly a third the cost of one atomic submarine.

Playboy: After unsanitary conditions in the meat industry were widely publicized, primarily due to your own efforts, many health-conscious consumers turned to fish as an alternative. Are fish products safer than meat?

Nader: Fish are substantially less susceptible to disease than animals: so in that respect, you start with a plus. Nevertheless, millions of Americans are eating poor-quality and polluted fish products today. Deterioration, lack of proper sanitation in the fisheries, contamination of shellfish by polluted waters and application of chemical additives affect the quality of all fish sold on the market today--canned, jarred, frozen or fresh. One problem is the manner in which the fish are caught: fishing boats are frequently old and shockingly unsanitary, and even on the most modern boats, fish deteriorate in "hold pens" for five to fourteen days before they reach the fishery, with no refrigeration other than a few blocks of ice. Any fish stored at a temperature above freezing begins to deteriorate almost immediately and presents a health problem, and very few fishing boats have anywhere near adequate refrigeration.

The second problem concerns the fishery plant itself. There are 2200 fish-processing plants selling interstate in the United States, and sanitary conditions in many of them are bad. This situation hasn't changed since the days when I saw some of these plants in New England as a boy. I've spent a good deal of time studying surveys of fish-processing plants by the Food and Drug Administration: here is a mild extract from some recent reports: "The fish were hung on wooden sticks for the processing operation. The sticks and nails were encrusted with rotten fish scales and particles from previous batches. Debris from previous batches of fish was trapped in the nicked tabletop, since no attempt was made to clean and sanitize the table between operations. These residues served to contaminate all batches of fish that passed over the table. No attempt was made to clean the rusty wire dip nets that were used to remove the fish from the thawing and brining casks. The nets had build-ups of bits of rotten fish flesh and entrails... . A rusty perforated metal scoop was generally used to mix the brine solutions. In one instance, an employee picked a stick off the floor and used it to mix the brine... . After smoking, the fish were allowed to stand at room temperature for approximately four and one half hours before they were placed in a refrigerator."

Fish contaminated by such grossly unsanitary conditions have led to serious outbreaks of illness and disease: people have died from botulism, salmonellosis and shigellosis caused by infected fish products. During the 1966 Memorial Day weekend, for example, 400 people in New York City suffered Salmonella poisoning as a result of eating smoked fish processed in unsanitary fisheries; and in 1963, nine people died of botulism poisoning after eating canned tuna. Defectively sealed cans of salmon or tuna frequently cause secretion of the deadly botulism organism: in 1967, the Food and Drug Administration had to recall and test over 2,000,000 cases of Alaskan salmon before they detected several thousand cans with unsealed seams.

A related but slightly different problem is the rising incidence of infectious hepatitis, which in significant measure is due to the consumption of shellfish from waters polluted by sewage, garbage and industrial waste. This last hazard is the responsibility of groups other than owners of the fishing vessels; but it could be avoided, wherever possible, by alert fishermen. Professor John Nickerson of MIT recently appeared before a Senate committee investigating sanitary conditions in the fisheries and recounted his experiences with a typical fishery owner who said flatly that he "could make just as much money selling bad fish as he could selling good fish." This, unfortunately, appears to be too common an attitude in the industry, even when there is no problem of actual disease present.

So much of the fish we eat is of substandard quality--as has been demonstrated by studies conducted by both the Department of the Interior and Consumers Union--that it's perfectly accurate to say the public is being systematically swindled. Fishery products are highly nutritious and tasty foods, but average consumption per capita is less than seven percent of meat consumption; cleaning up conditions in this industry would serve not only to save lives but to increase fish consumption; so it would be in the industry's own self-interest.

Playboy: After your exposure of unsanitary conditions in the meat and fish industries. Congress held hearings on the subject and the prospect for remedial action brightened. You had already turned your attention to safety conditions in natural-gas pipelines. Why did you become involved in what seems to be such a marginal issue?

Nader: It's hardly marginal, when you consider that some 800,000 miles of gas transmission and distribution pipelines wend their unobtrusive way under woods and fields, by schools, homes and businesses and right into the heart of our cities and towns. Corrosion, inadequate welding, lack of sufficient installation depth, brittle and thin pipe--sometimes only one tenth of an inch thick--and other deterioration have caused numerous leaks and ruptures and created the potential for catastrophes caused by ignition of this gas, which is propelled through these pipelines at extremely high pressures, ranging up to 1300 pounds per square inch. Under such substantial pressure, there is always the danger of leakages that lead to explosions and to a particularly dangerous kind of fire, one that feeds on itself as the gas mixes with oxygen and rages like a giant flame thrower.

To prevent this, of course, you need to have extremely strong and durable pipe, properly installed and regularly inspected, to make sure it stays in good condition--neither of which universally obtains today. To give just one example, sections of pipe were recently dug up beneath St. Louis and taken to a Congressional hearing on the subject. They had deteriorated drastically; pockmarks and small holes abounded and many gaping fissures in the pipe had been wrapped around with cloth as a stopgap measure to prevent leakages. It's a miracle that with the pipes in such condition, there has not been a major explosion and/or conflagration in St. Louis.

But these conditions exist all over the country. Sources on the Federal Power Commission estimate that up to four percent of the gas transmitted regularly leaks out of pipelines underneath our major cities, which means that there are thousands of cubic feet of highly volatile gas floating around waiting for somebody to strike a match. Actually, it's quite remarkable, considering conditions in the pipelines, that there haven't been more accidents. The Federal Power Commission was told by the industry of only 64 deaths and 222 injuries from transmission pipeline blowouts and fire over the 15-year period ending in 1965. Other observers think these figures, particularly the injuries, are greatly understated. Casualties for the much larger distribution line mileage are not compiled by the Government, astonishingly enough. But there have been too many close calls for comfort. A rural school was blown up by a gas explosion only a few hours before it would have been packed with children: and in Queens, there was a tremendous gas explosion last year that totally destroyed nine homes and seriously damaged eight others. Miraculously, there were no injuries--thanks to prompt evacuation.

Others haven't been so lucky. In Naugaoutouches, Louisiana, last year, a pipeline fire incinerated 18 people in their homes. The total damage settlement was $750,000, which the industry considered a cheap price to pay when compared with the cost of replacing old pipe with new. Since January of this year, explosions have taken the lives of seven children at a Georgia nursery and seven people near Pittsburgh: gas was also critically involved in a Richmond, Indiana, blast that incinerated several city blocks, killing 43 and injuring scores more. Numerous other gas fires this year have destroyed property and injured people. We now have an opportunity, before the situation reaches crisis proportions, to develop the type of safety procedures that will foresee and forestall such disasters. Must we, as in auto safety point to a mountain of dead bodies before the Federal Government or industry takes even the most halting action? No industry should be granted the right to a free major disaster. The time to act is now.

Playboy: Another issue you have recently championed is health conditions in uranium mines. But the uranium-mine workers who are exposed to radiation constitute only a tiny percentage of the population. You have warned that a much larger number of people are being overexposed to X radiation in the course of medical and dental X rays. What led you into this area--and how serious is it?

Nader: Early in 1967, I came across a technical paper by Dr. Karl Z. Morgan, director of health physics at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, that warned of dangers to patients from overexposure to X radiation in medical diagnosis. I began corresponding with Dr. Morgan and I amassed a good deal of data on the subject, most of it from Federal and state health bureaus, health physicists and radiologists. What I found was shocking. Dr. Morgan, an acknowledged expert in the X-ray field, estimates that there are approximately 3600 deaths each year due to X radiation and, in his own words, "probably thousands of injuries for every death." X radiation, of course, comes from our natural environmental background--from rocks and from cosmic rays filtered through the atmosphere--as well as from man-made sources. We can do little about natural radiation, but most of the man-made radiation to which we're exposed comes from medical and dental X rays: in 1966 alone, 150,000,000 X rays and 7,000,000 fluoroscope films were taken in U.S. hospitals and doctors' and dentists' offices. The fluoroscope, incidentally, is a kind of X-ray movie camera that gives exposures of radiation from 100 to 200 percent greater than comparable radiographic X rays. Dr. Morgan points out that "no matter how great the medical benefits derived from X rays, this is no justification of the fact that because of poor techniques with obsolete and improperly operated equipment, many X-ray exposures are ten or more times that needed for the best diagnostic results."

The problem is compounded by the fact that the radiation doses received during medical or dental diagnosis in America are far higher than those in other industrialized nations. The consensus of scientific opinion today rejects the previously held belief that there is a limit beyond which radiation is not harmful; it's now conceded that radiation damage is cumulative, that the more X radiation you absorb, starting from point zero, the greater the deteriorative effect on your physiology and genetic structure. It's only relatively recently that we've discovered how dangerous such X radiation can be; it can induce cataracts, leukemia, other forms of cancer and lesser symptoms, such as the loss of hair--and we're just beginning to observe the results of overexposure to radiation a generation ago.

You may remember that starting before World War Two and continuing till the Fifties, many physicians tried to remove acne with X rays--some dermatologists still do--and it was a common practice to treat children's tonsils with X radiation to avoid surgery. Doctors would subject a child's thalamus gland to radiation, in the belief that its reduction was necessary to relieve the child's respiratory problem. They profligately employed X rays to treat a wide range of problems, some of them quite trivial, without any concept of the long-term consequences of such treatments. A research group at the University of California's Medical Center recently studied the medical records of patients over the past 45 years and found that incidence of thyroid cancer had grown "at an unprecedented rate," from two percent in the Twenties to 15 percent for the 1955--1965 period. These findings have been echoed by studies conducted by the New York State Department of Health and appear related to indiscriminate use of X rays over the past 30 years.

Playboy: You also mentioned the genetic effects of X rays.

Nader: I did, indeed. In addition to its somatic effects, X radiation can alter the genetic inheritance and increase the risk of mutations. A patient who gets his teeth X-rayed in a dentist's chair often has other parts of his body irradiated. The average dose of X radiation absorbed by the gonads during medical diagnosis is 100 times the dose from radioactive fallout. A pregnant woman overexposed to X rays in a doctor's office may give birth to a deformed or retarded child: Dr. Morgan believes that X-ray overexposures cause "hundreds and perhaps thousands of children to be born each year with mental and physical handicaps of varying degrees." And the great majority of these defects go undetected throughout the child's life. How, for example, do you measure a 10 or 15 percent reduction in a child's potential mental acuity or physical coordination? Dr. Morgan warns that "there may be as many as 10,000 nonvisible mutations for each of the visible variety [and] these more subtle forms of damage ... may in the long run do greater damage and place a greater burden on our society than those forms of radiation damage that result in the death of the individual." We are living in an increasingly radioactive environment--thanks to man--with emissions from many sources; something has to be done about this situation, and soon.

Playboy: What do you suggest?

Nader: Well, since 90 percent of all man-made X radiation comes from medical and dental diagnosis, we obviously have to start in the office of the doctor or the dentist. Dr. Morgan has pointed out that by properly shielding the patient and adding simple improvements to the machine, it is possible to receive even better diagnostic information from X rays with 90 percent less radiation exposure. He has prepared a detailed list of 65 specific measures that can be taken--none of them unduly complex or expensive--to reduce radiation overexposure in dental and medical X rays. The use of "slow" versus "fast" film is just one example: if you take fast film--at one-half- or one-quarter-second exposures--as opposed to slow four-second exposures, which are widely used today, there's a tremendous reduction in the dose of radiation the patient receives. Such new high-speed X-ray film is available, but most doctors and dentists refuse to buy it because it's a fraction more expensive and they would have to spend a few dollars to modify their machine for its use. Proper shielding is also vital; Dr. Hanson Blatz of the New York City Office of Radiation Control recently reported knowing of instances when defectively shielded X-ray machines sprayed doses of radiation not only on the patient but on people working in other offices of the same building. The encouraging thing about this situation is that it is so easy to solve: a few simple and inexpensive safety applications--along with better training for X-ray technicians, which is presently superficial and desultory--would markedly alleviate the problem. And yet the medical and dental professions remain unresponsive and refuse to concede publicly that a problem exists.

Playboy: Why, in your opinion?

Nader: They are afraid that their public professional image will be tarnished if they suddenly admit that for years they have lacked competence in radiation safety--and they view a tightening of safety procedures as a tacit admission of this failure. In addition, there is a basic problem of changing established ways of doing business. The other aspect of this is, of course, economic. Stricter safety standards would require dentists and doctors to hire proficient X-ray technicians, which would add to their payroll; and if a machine has to be modified, it will cost money. Though less than a day's revenue will add a timer for film speed to a dental X-ray machine that would substantially reduce radiation overexposure, many dentists don't want to make even that minimal investment: but, of course, everyone knows that doctors and dentists, next to Negroes, American Indians and a few pockets of Appalachian miners, are the most impoverished economic groups in America. So in order to preserve the status quo, leaders of the medical and dental professions have just pooh-poohed the dangers of radiation and they have gotten away with it, because there is seldom a direct, dramatic, clearly demonstrable link between overexposure to radiation and subsequent somatic and genetic damage. And they'll continue to get away with it until the public demands change.

Playboy: You have charged that another common source of radiation overexposure is the color-TV set. How much radiation do such sets emit, and how dangerous is it?

Nader: Color-television sets require higher voltage than black and white, and unless the high-voltage tubes are adequately shielded, there will be an emission of X radiation. The radiation can come, depending on the defects of the particular set, from its sides, from its front or from its bottom. Now, the radiation is not sufficiently strong to have a harmful effect on an average adult sitting ten or fifteen feet from the set; but children have the habit not only of watching many hours of TV each day but of sitting within two or three feet of the set--which exposes their eyes, a particularly sensitive area, to a dangerous level of radiation from unshielded sets. Exposure to such radiation may not have immediate deleterious effects on the child, but it can induce cataracts in later life, and many scientists also fear that a child who suffers sustained bodily exposure to X radiation may suffer severe physical and genetic damage.

Playboy: Were the manufacturers aware of the danger before you pointed it out?

Nader: Oh, they were aware of the danger, all right. But correcting it with protective shielding might cost approximately a dollar per set, and we all know that the big television manufacturers, like the medical profession, are walking a fiscal tightrope over perennial bankruptcy. This whole problem of radiation in color-TV sets came to public notice only after GE was forced to admit, after prodding by a newspaper and the U.S. Public Health Service, that 92,000 sets already in the hands of their customers emitted encessive X radiation and that some of these sets were irradiating the public at levels up to 100 or 1000 times higher than the safety levels established by the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurement. As a result of the publicity, GE was forced to dispatch repairmen to modify the dangerous sets.

Playboy: As things stand today, would you own a color-television set?

Nader: Only if a radiation check were made on the set--a very simple test.

Playboy: Has the Federal Government enforced safety standards in this area?

Nader: Not directly, but legislation has just been passed by Congress that authorizes the setting of Federal standards for all electronic components emitting X radiation. I just hope the hobbyists for the electronics industry won't succeed, with their customary finesse, in sidetracking or markedly weakening the enforcement of the law. This is becoming an increasingly important problem, because we're moving into an age when more and more of our working and household environment--home microwave ovens, for example--will involve machinery and appliances that emit radiation. Unless we take stringent action now to reduce the hazards of X radiation from all sources--including nuclear power plants, which should be built below ground and away from metropolitan areas, unlike the current practice--millions of people will suffer serious somatic and genetic damage in the future.

Playboy: Recently, you concerned yourself with another safety issue--flammable fabrics. Is this a serious problem?

Nader: Well over 12,000 people lose their lives in fires in this country every year and, according to insurance data, a substantial number of them die because various fabrics and materials in their homes catch on fire and are so flammable that the fire quickly spreads. The clothes we wear and our household environment--drapes, slip covers, bedspreads and rugs, among other things--are not only too often flammable but emit gases that can asphyxiate the victim before he has even been burned by the fire itself. The situation has become more acute with the mass marketing of synthetic-fiber products in both clothing and decorator items. This problem is also serious in auto safety, because over a decade ago, the industry decided to cut a few corners and began switching its upholstery and coverings from wool, which is highly fire-resistant, to synthetic materials that not only are flammable and emit gases but also melt, creating a molten liquid that produces the most horrible kinds of burns. The Flammable Fabrics Act is so grossly ineffective--there were so many exemptions, including auto and airplane fabrics--and so unenforced that Congress this year was finally compelled to pass amendments that should force the textile manufacturers to reduce the flammability of their fabrics.

Playboy: Is industry pressure the only reason the Federal Government has tended to resist corrective legislation and enlorcement in the areas of health and safety we've been discussing? Or--as some commentators have observed--doesn't Big Government also tend to develop a kind of bureaucratic inertia that causes it to act only after a situation has reached crisis proportions?

Nader: That's part of it, but it's also a basic misallocation of resources and energy. Let me give you a specific example: Considering the billions of dollars the Federal Government is spending to protect and enlarge our defenses against nuclear attack, one might think that it would spend a few million dollars to understand and detect the imminence of major earthquakes in this country. I'm referring particularly to the situation in California, which in recent months has been alarming earthquake specialists to an unprecedented degree. The problem is the same, basically, as that which resulted in the great California earthquakes in 1857 and 1906. It stems from the San Andreas Fault, which shows dangerous signs of increasing instability. It was the release of strain, through a big slippage in this fault, that led to the crumbling of much of San Francisco in the earthquake of 1906; and recent measurements have indicated that in some areas south of San Francisco, the terrain is being seriously warped again.

Earlier this year, Dr. Peter A. Franken, a physics professor at the University of Michigan and formerly special-projects director at the Pentagon and director of the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency, cautioned that the strained level along the fault probably exceeds that prior to the 1906 earthquake, and warned of a catastrophe that could severely damage both San Francisco and Los Angeles. And he's only one of many scientists who are predicting that some time in the next 30 years there will be a really serious earthquake in California that could lead to the crumbling of the Golden Gate and Oakland Bay bridges, the disintegration of freeways and untold loss of life and damage to housing and other buildings. Such an earthquake could be so disastrous that it would render trivial by comparison any of the disasters that have hit the North American continent in the past two centuries.

As an indication of the kind of destruction that a sudden shift would entail, there are huge housing projects right over the fault. If such a quake came without any warning, it could easily take the lives of 1,000,000 people. If it came with adequate warning, it's not likely that there could be any substantial saving of property, but the fatality count could be drastically cut. Until recently, the Federal Government has been deaf to pleas by seismologists and other earthquake specialists that there be greater financial support of research in this area, so that earthquakes could be predicted and advance warnings given to prepare for an emergency. But at the present time, less than $3,000,000 is being spent on this entire project--a relative pittance, when you consider the gravity of the problem and the work that has to be done. Here is an example of the really irrational, if not insane, allocation of resources in this country.

Playboy: All of these problems, from safer cars to prevention of loss of life in earthquakes, are incontestably of social importance. But while you attack our national order of priorities, couldn't you be accused of misallocating your own priorities? Most of your consumer causes address themselves to economic injustices directed against the affluent white middle class that can afford automobiles, color-TV sets, and the like. Don't the problems of the black ghetto--which are at the root of the explosive racial situation in this country today--seem to you more urgent than earthquakes and auto safety?

Nader: The problems I deal with intimately affect most Negroes, as well as the rest of the population. As a matter of fact, in many areas with which the consumer movement is concerned, Negroes are far more exploited than the white population. As I said earlier, the worst meat always finds its way into the ghettos; and Negroes are systematically overcharged for a wide range of products and services. A poor ghetto dweller can afford the exorbitant markup on a box of detergent or tooth paste or on a container of milk far less than a white suburbanite; they're both being cheated, but the Negro feels it more, because he has less to spend and thus more to lose. The consumer movement in which I'm involved deals not only with the safety of the product, which affects rich and poor alike, but with overcharging and low-quality merchandising, both of which involuntarily reduce a man's income and both of which are particularly flagrant and acute problems in the nation's ghettos. The consumer-protection movement also deals with the contamination of our environment--air and water pollution, soil contamination, chemical and radiation hazards, etc.--which obviously affects Negroes as much as whites. All these points--product safety, reasonable prices, quality merchandising and environmental purity--are related as much to the quality of life in the ghetto as to the quality of life in Scarsdale or Grosse Pointe.

But the problems to which I've been addressing myself are related to the welfare of the ghetto on a much deeper level. This is a corporate society, and the thrust of the consumer-protection movement is toward structural corporate reform. It is such reform that must be undertaken if we are going to solve the basic problem of allocating our resources--which will determine how much money and effort we give to the grossly underprivileged sectors of the economy, such as the urban slums: without this reform, the Negro's lot will never improve. As it stands today, 200 of the largest corporations in the land own approximately two thirds of the manufacturing assets; they are the ones who control our allocation of economic resources. To the degree that poverty is allowed to continue unchecked in this country: to the degree that huge pockets of unemployment remain; to the degree that regions like Appalachia are kept poor because the coal interests have discouraged other diversified industries from entering and improving the region's economy because they want to maintain their iron grip on the labor pool: to the degree that corporate power influences Federal, state and local governments to stand pat with the status quo and avoid necessary public investment in the ghettos: to the degree to which industrial lobbyists have cultivated regulatory and enforcement officials and enticed, bribed or intimidated them into not enforcing Government laws, such as the building codes--to this degree is corporate power directly responsible for the continuing plight of the poor. More than any other single factor, corporate reform could contribute to the alleviation of that plight.

Thus, the consumer movement, in both its immediate and its long-range impacts, is intimately related to the problems of the poor and to the problem of the urban ghettos. I have not addressed myself to specific areas of the civil rights struggle, because there are many people working in this area already, and with considerable political muscle. My prime abilities are as a lawyer and as an investigative reporter, discovering new facts in areas in which no action is being taken and in generating momentum for policy changes. In the area of civil rights, at least, no one denies the basic facts about poverty and exploitation: but that's certainly not the case in auto safety, overexposure to X radiation, health conditions in the meat and fish industries, worker safety conditions in the coal and uranium mines, and a host of other crises with which I'm concerned. The basic problem in civil rights is to create the volition and momentum to make life livable for the black population. The people in the slums are aspiring to a society that I would like to make worthy of their aspirations.

Playboy: The problem of the American Indian is in many ways analogous to that of the Negro. You were concerned with the Indian's plight as early as your days at Princeton. Are you still?

Nader: Yes. The plight of the Indian has become even more desperate than when I first became concerned about it, and public apathy and bureaucratic indifference and mismanagement are directly responsible for it. The American Indian is the most economically and culturally deprived minority group in the United States: The Indian has a life expectancy of 45, a tuberculosis incidence seven times the nationwide average, an annual family income one fourth that of the white majority--or about $1500--and a shockingly high infant-mortality rate. The Indian population receives dismal health care, lives in substandard housing, has a 40-percent unemployment rate and a 30-percent illiteracy rate. The average Indian receives only five years of schooling, and the high school dropout rate among Indian children is over 50 percent--and for good reason. Recent Senate hearings have shown that reservation schools are severely inadequate and nurture despair and psychologically corrosive feelings of cultural inferiority and alienation; it's no coincidence that Indians under 17 have the highest suicide rate of any group in America.

The children who attend these institutions are never taught anything about their own culture and heritage; whenever Indians are discussed at all in classrooms, it's in terms of the stock Hollywood stereotype. And most Americans are unaware of the deep and bitter anti-Indian prejudice among whites in areas surrounding the reservations; Indians are despised as subhumans, denied jobs and thwarted at every conceivable step when they try to earn a decent living. As a result, 200,000 Indians have left the reservations and migrated to the urban slums--where, with inadequate education and no job training, and their cultural roots torn up, they are even worse off than before. All this is a graphic and depressing commentary on our unwillingness to deal humanely with the first Americans.

Playboy: Is the Bureau of Indian Affairs doing anything about this situation?

Nader: Yes. Perpetuating it. The Bureau, which has 15,000 employees, is one of the most moribund, unimaginative and ineffectual bureaucracies ever created by the Federal Government. The Indian's lot would improve vastly if the Bureau's annual appropriation of some $280,000,000 were paid directly to Indian heads-of-family, instead of undergoing its customary bureaucratic attrition. For public consumption, its mission is to improve conditions for the Indians: in reality, its task for 119 years has been to help private interests encroach on Indian territory and exploit their natural resources. As a result, since the Bureau's establishment, the total Indian land area has diminished from 150,000,000 acres to 53,000,000 acres. The basic problem here is that the Bureau is part of the Department of the Interior, which has always viewed its primary mission as the protection of the big mining, timber and grazing interests.

The President's Task Force on American Indians issued a fine report in 1966 on the Indian situation, but all its basic recommendations, including a call to transfer responsibility for Indian affairs from the Secretary of the Interior to the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, were rejected by the White House, which still keeps secret the Task Force's 104-page report. I have been able to see the report, however, and it reflects the disgust with which many members viewed the Bureau of Indian Affairs' treatment of its "wards." The report revealed that everywhere they went, Indians believed, with justification, that "too many BIA employees were simply timeservers of mediocre or poor competence who remained indefinitely because they were willing to serve in unattractive posts at low rates of pay for long periods of time: that many had unconsciously anti-Indian attitudes and are convinced that Indians are really hopelessly incompetent; and their behavior reflects this assumption." The overwhelming majority of reservation Indians--and I've traveled to many reservations since I wrote my first article on this subject. "People Without a Future." in 1956--view the BIA with despair and contempt. At the same time, they feel it is a butler against further encroachments on their tribal land base. Even so, only a few Indians on the reservations associate with the Bureau, eager for the material benefits deriving from it: militant young Indians call them "Uncle Tomahawks."

Playboy: What could the Government do to help the Indian?

Nader: The awful thing about this situation is that, like so many of the other wrongs I've talked about, it could be so easily improved. There are only 400,000 Indians on the reservations and 200,000 in the cities--many of them in Los Angeles. Denver and Minneapolis. The opening up of only 45,000 new reservation jobs could put the Indians on the road to economic self-sufficiency and social health. The Government could provide some of these jobs, and others could be created by an imaginative program spearheaded by the Government and the private sector. The cost for one year would probably be no more than we spend in Vietnam in one week--and yet nothing is done. The Indian continues to live in squalor, his children continue to be robbed of their self-respect by smugly ignorant white teachers, and this shame of America continues. And it is our shame: we have left them to rot in camps of human degradation while our gross national product swells to astronomical heights year after year.

Before it's too late, we must have a massive infusion of intelligently directed funds to improve education, health and housing on the reservations and, above all, to create jobs. The solution is not to get rid of the reservation system and "absorb" the Indian into American life, because that would destroy his culture, which is land based, and would constitute the ultimate annihilation of the Indian, even if his assimilated descendants survived. It would be the final cruelty. Another question here is: How can we ever expect to deal compassionately or rationally with the underdeveloped areas of the world, much less comprehend their cultures, when we cannot even treat decently the first inhabitants of our own land? The Indian, like the Negro, is a mirror for American society, and his despair is our guilt.

Playboy: You are working to generate Congressional action on behalf of the Indian. Isn't this a departure from your traditional consumer causes?

Nader: No, because consumers are people, and helping people in any area of society is the whole point of the consumer movement. I'm working on the Indian question because, unlike civil rights or peace, it is an issue that has been neglected by reformers, and there has been little or no political muscle brought to bear in Washington on behalf of the Indian. I hope that situation will change within the next year.

Playboy: Because of your dedication to the exposure and correction of such social problems, your press image has been that of a humorless fanatic, a tireless crusader with little or no time for other human beings. Do you think that describes you?

Nader: No--but I do feel intensely about social issues and I tend to place the human needs of our society above my own particular needs and ambitions: for some reason, that seems to baflle people. I'm afraid the public tends to have a greater tolerance for someone who utters ringing phrases but doesn't follow through, someone who professes idealism but practices expediency. Perhaps, in a life where little compromises are the rule, it's easier to understand such a person and identify with him. But when somebody persistently pursues a course of reform, an image of him as a fanatic crusader evolves. Is it so unusual, so implausible, so distasteful, that a man would believe deeply enough in the worth-whileness of his work to dedicate his life to it? If it is, I think that's more of a commentary on the alienation of our society than it is on the zeal of Ralph Nader.

Playboy: A great deal has been made in the press about your alleged asceticism. Are you as oblivious to creature comforts as such reports indicate?

Nader: It seems to amaze my critics--even to disappoint them--that I don't live in a palatial penthouse, wear $500 custom suits or dine sumptuously in chic restaurants. I just prefer to utilize my resources, which aren't exactly endless, in such a manner as to maximize the effectiveness of my work. For example, if I have a choice of eating an eight-dollar dinner or making a seven-dollar phone call to get some information, I'll eat a one-dollar dinner and use the remaining money to make the exorbitantly priced phone call. But I certainly don't believe I live an ascetic life; at least, it certainly wouldn't be judged ascetic by 97 percent of the world's population.

Playboy: If you receive a substantial amount in damages from your invasion-of-privacy suit against GM, will it change your mode of life?

Nader: No, because anything I receive from General Motors I plan to put right back into the cause of consumer safety.

Playboy: How are your current efforts financed?

Nader: I'm self-financed; my sole income is from my book, my lectures and my magazine articles, and everything I earn goes to support the consumer issues I'm espousing.

Playboy: Have there ever been moments when you became discouraged by lack of progress and thought of retiring to a placid private law practice?

Nader: Not even remotely. Of course, there are many times when you fail to achieve anywhere near what you want to: but you've just got to adopt the attitude that the tougher the going, the more you have to persevere. Once you come to look at things in that light, temporary defeats become nourishment for additional effort. The only real defeat is giving up, just as the only real aging is the erosion of one's ideals.

Playboy: You have a rough working schedule. When do you relax?

Nader: Well, relaxing is a subjective term: to some people, it means lying on the beach, or getting drunk, or frugging in a discothèque, or sleeping 12 hours a day. But I don't create an artificial distinction between work and leisure. I find my work so imperative, so stimulating, so demanding of those qualities within me that I value, that it's really, in the deepest sense, fun. A love of labor proceeds from a labor of love. I don't have any concept of vacation, of dividing my life between tiresome periods of work and pleasant periods of relaxation. To me, writing, researching, unearthing information and articulating and advocating important issues constitutes a kind of laborious leisure. Perhaps it's this attitude toward my work that causes so many people to consider me a priggish puritan. I really feel sorry for such people, because they must loathe their own work--and perhaps also themselves for not having the guts or the motivation to find something more meaningful to do with their lives. I just couldn't live that way. I would rather work 20 hours a day on something that absorbs me than three hours a day in a job that gives me no satisfaction.

I think one of the things at fault here is the acculturation progress that brings young people into adulthood down rigid pathways over which they have no say and which propels them into career patterns almost automatically, without allowing them to ever really challenge the parental restrictions and societal assumptions that force them into jobs they have no feeling for. I think it's tragic to see so many bright young people signing away their lives by pursuing predetermined career patterns without ever examining what kinds of lives they really want to lead. Nobody can be creative and responsible and interested in what he's doing under these circumstances, and I think the way youngsters blindly let themselves be absorbed into the dehumanizing corporate machinery is a major reason for the malaise in our society. If you hate your work, you're bound to lead a life of quiet desperation.

Playboy:The New York Times has described you as existing "in a state of constant, barely controlled outrage," Is this accurate?

Nader: It's an accurate partial description. I do feel deeply about social issues and I am outraged when other human beings lose their lives or are permanently maimed by the negligence of the auto, tobacco and drug industries; and I find it repugnant that our food and our natural environment are poisoned by sewage, pesticides, chemical and radioactive pollutants, with the terminal effects being explained away by medical diagnoses such as cancer, heart disease and respiratory ailments; and I'm shocked at the institutionalized cruelty to which the American Negro and the American Indian are subjected; and I'm repelled by the conditions in which miners are forced to work. I don't pretend to be detached about these and other problems, but I do try to be rational and objective in attempting to ameliorate them. Too many reformers become grim and humorless and allow the abuses they deal with daily to sour their outlook on the world and alienate them. I don't.

Playboy: Many professional reformers are motivated at least partially by personal political ambition. Are you?

Nader: No. I'm not. I've been approached to run for Congress from my native Connecticut, but I've declined. There is, of course, a great deal a legislator can do for the cause of consumer safety, but I believe I can be most effective in the private sector, articulating the issues and helping create the kind of consumer constituency that will attract more good men to Government and keep Congress at the forefront of public needs.

Playboy: Do you resent being compared, as you have been, with the muckrakers of the early 20th Century?

Nader: No. In fact. I consider it a compliment. Many of the leading muckrakers, such as Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Stellens, were very effective stimuli for social reform, and in a sense. I'm working in their tradition. But I try to go further than they did. The muckraking tradition entailed investigating a specific area diligently, digging up the facts that had been suppressed or ignored and then presenting them to the public, which would demand remedial action. I feel my responsibilities go beyond this, because exposure is only the first step: next comes the hard job of persuading Congress to take remedial action, and then pursuing the problem from the legislative process to the administrative and enforcement stages and to the specific application of public policy at the grass-roots level. It's not enough just to unmask a nasty situation and then sit back and wait for change. H. L. Meneken once described a reformer as a man who sails through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat. What he meant was that too many commentators sit smugly in their Morris chairs, enjoying the leisure of the theoried class.

Playboy: How do you feel about the "consumer crusader" label that's been applied to you?

Nader: I don't mind it, as long as it doesn't interfere with my work; and it does have a certain rhythmic ring to it. But I dislike the tendency to encapsulate a man by labels--philosophical, political, religious or otherwise. If pressed, however. I suppose I would call myself a humanist. I believe the emphasis of society must be on man, on man's needs and potentialities, on the means by which he can fulfill his individual role while remaining responsive to the requirements of a complex, interacting society, While we all pay lip service to this, of course, the tendency is to subordinate the individual to abstractions--the state, the ideology, the religion, the corporation--that render him expendable or redundant. My motivating factor is respect for the individual--from the motorist whose life is sacrificed through corporate neglect to the sharecropper ground down by our oppressive heritage of racism and a plantation economy.

Playboy: Are you a Democrat or a Republican?

Nader: Neither. I shun political ideologies of all sorts, because they always reflect a rigidity, an inability to judge each issue on its own merits, irrespective of prior conditioning. The inherent authoritarianism deriving from this inflexibility inhibits our freedom of choice and blinkers our creative imagination. Besides, no extant ideology even comes close to fulfilling the needs and aspirations of man today. So I approach a particular issue from the perspective of my own ethical principles, but with openness and flexibility.

My critics call me a radical, but I think the real radical in the United States today is the corporation manager who, for all his facile prattle about free enterprise, has really helped create an increasingly controlled economy dominated by a few dozen giant corporations. And yet the average citizen would tend to classify big-business executives as belonging, with a few isolated exceptions, on the conservative right. What they fail to realize is that the concentration of power and its arbitrary use can occur in corporate structures as well as Government agencies. This concentration, when coupled with legally protected privileges and immunities, affects the destiny of the land in profound ways.

When it comes to American lives, to give one example, the war in Vietnam has not even closely approximated the carnage that occurs on our highways: 28,000 American Servicemen have been killed in Vietnam since 1961; this is roughly the total that die on our highways in an average 27-week period. I'm not saying this to minimize in any way the terrible human suffering the war has caused, but to emphasize another kind of violence that is generally ignored by the public. As I've said, my mission has always been to apply my efforts in those areas where virtually nothing is being done at the public policy level.

Playboy: How do you select these areas?

Nader: I've developed three criteria to determine my selection of an issue; I ask myself first how important it is: second, what kind of contribution I can make; and third, how many people are already working in the area. It's this last point that has kept me from throwing myself into the antiwar struggle, because we have considerable talent--from students and professors to political leaders like Senators Fulbright and McCarthy--striving to terminate this war. But when I look around at such issues as auto safety, the safety of our foods, the safety of our man-made environment from air and water pollution and soil contamination, then I find very few people working skillfully outside Government with the requisite independence to protect the consumers' interests. So I have to make a choice of where I can mobilize my limited individual resources to the maximum on behalf of the public interest. And that means that I can only handle four, or, at the very most, five major issues at one time without dissipating whatever effectiveness I may have.

Playboy: You've been extremely critical of nearly every aspect of American society, from business and Government to the medical, dental and legal professions. Are you completely pessimistic about the prospects for this country--or do you find grounds for optimism?

Nader: I'm definitely not a pessimist, or I wouldn't be working in the areas I am. I wouldn't call myself an optimist, either, but I am hopeful about this country and I am encouraged that we will return someday to a positive and productive path, both socially and politically. There are still vast reservoirs of idealism and commitment in this society, particularly among our youth: and despite the terrible crises afflicting us--the racial unrest deriving from our exploitation of the Negro, the unconscionable poverty, the dehumanizing trends within big business and Big Government that transform men into automata--I still believe there is a genuine potential for contructive and redeeming change.

Even after all the inequities I've seen in Washington, I know there are many public officials genuinely dedicated to the public service, and a growing number of Americans are demanding basic reforms in our society. It would be a mistake to underestimate the intelligence--or overestimate the patience--of the American electorate; the people will stand just so much before they take remedial action, at the polls and through voluntary orgnaizations. So there are many domestic areas that offer options for progress and fundamental change. I'm less optimistic about our foreign policy, which shows little indication of being open and candid with the American people and every indication of continuing to pursue an aggressive and unrealistic path in Latin America. Southeast Asia and other areas of the world. But I have faith that the American people will ultimately find the will to overcome the grave ills in our society. Unlike most nations, we already have the means.

Playboy: Would you elaborate on your much-publicized statement that your objective is "nothing less than the qualitative reform of the Industrial Revolution"?

Nader: Well, it boils down to a single basic problem: We have failed to adapt our technological advances to our human needs. In the industrialized Western world, we are entering an age of considerable redundancy in terms of the total aggregate of goods and services produced: our task now is not just to increase the pile but to ensure a more equitable distribution of the goods we produce and to organize the allocation of our resources in such a way that they contribute to reducing and preventing the man-made environmental hazards that threaten life on earth. Most of the progress in science and technology since World War Two has been in areas remote from the average citizen: space, defense systems, computers and automated machinery. It's time to apply science and technology to the immediate needs of the public: in transportation, housing, hospitals, schools.

We have the technological capacity to avoid most air and water pollution and carnage on the highways, to cure the blight infecting our cities, to produce wholesome food for all the people, to provide adequate health care for everyone, to give real security and continuing participation to the aged and incapacitated, to end unemployment and open up an unparalled era of prosperity and creativity. We can do all these things, with a sufficient application of energy and imagination--but we aren't, and one of the basic reasons is that the huge corporations spawned by the Industrial Revolution have concentrated too much of the nation's wealth and power in a manner that insulates them from real involvement in and responsibility for many of the great issues of our times. While cities burn, the large corporations reap record profits. The pain of the slums must become the pain of corporate America if this widening sore is to be removed. Congress would not fiddle long in appropriating funds for necessary programs if it were given a "go" signal by determined corporate leadership.

But beyond this. I'm concerned that uncontrolled and undirected technological development has served to retard rather than advance genuine human progress. Just look at the various satisfactions preindustrial man derived from his relatively primitive environment: peace and quiet, fresh air, clean water, unpolluted food--all of which are now becoming rare in our society, so much so that their provision commands extremely high prices. We are now witnessing the commercialization of the basic things that preindustrial man took for granted, but which modern man has so descrated that they are now becoming luxuries. Seemingly infinite human wants and needs are on a collision course with the earth's finite natural resources--particularly air, water and soil. The burgeoning man-made assaults on the human biosphere result from the contempt industrial man has shown toward nature. Unfortunately, this cumulative contempt is beginning to boomerang onto the people of this planet. Nature abused too much soon turns on its abusers.

That's why I plan to continue to publicize the facts about the problems and issues that affect every American intimately but over which he has too little decision-making power, in the hope that popular pressures and vigorous consumer representation will transform industry and Government into expressions, rather than adversaries, of the public interest. Broad public participation in the decision-making process, both political and economic, is indispensable to a truly viable democracy. But the fight doesn't end once the public is aware of the facts and involved in the issues; we must also forge new techniques and institutions to ensure that the public interest is achieved as well as recognized.

Playboy: Adding up a box score of the causes you've championed and the battles you've won, lost or drawn, do you feel that your efforts have been successful?

Nader: It's too early to make such a tally, The struggle for consumer democracy is just beginning.