CITIZEN NADER | PAGE 1, 2, 3
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Ralph Nader was born in 1934 into a loving middle-class family of Lebanese descent in Winsted, Conn. His dad, Nathra, ran a restaurant called the Highland Arms, and he and his wife, Rose, raised Ralph and two daughters, Claire and Laura, and another son, Shafeek. The family talked politics and good citizenship over dinner, and Mr. and Mrs. Nader felt responsible, as do many immigrants, for seeing that their children should do better than they had.

Even while growing up in the self-satisfied 1950s, Nader was eager to launch crusades. He majored in economics and Far Eastern regional studies at Princeton, where he fought to ban DDT from the school after he found dead birds on the lawns. He attended Harvard Law School in 1955 but, after becoming disillusioned with the complacency there, started writing freelance articles for the Nation and other publications. After the 1959 piece on auto safety he started practicing law and began research for a book that was published in 1965 called "Unsafe at Any Speed," which was to his career what "Born to Run" was to Bruce Springsteen's. The book detailed the flagrant carelessness of the American auto industry, especially General Motors with its fragile Corvair. In it Nader wrote, "A great problem of contemporary life is how to control the power of economic interests which ignore the harmful effects of their applied science and technology."

After GM tried (and failed) to get dirt on Ralph by sending call girls to ambush him in the cookie section of a grocery store, he sued and became the Nader we know today -- the white knight who goes to battle for all of us against the corporate dragons who abuse their power.

He won the GM suit, got $425,000 in the settlement and used it to start the first Public Interest Research Group in Washington, D.C. (they are now tilting at windmills in most states). He came up with a plan for recruiting young idealists from all over the country. He spoke to college students many times a year and appeared on lots of television shows such as "Donahue," "Merv Griffin," "Saturday Night Live" and "Dick Cavett," talking about sexy subjects like auto safety, job safety and utility rates. In 1966 he led almost a one-man crusade for the Traffic Safety Act that called for mandatory seat belts in American cars. Since then countless lives have been saved because of his tenacity.

Once upon a time, this kind of passion for justice and safety got young people excited. We watched as Nader in all his geeky glory walked into college gyms and got standing ovations from the same kids who'd been cheering rock stars the night before. He inspired wave after wave of what one writer termed "tweedy acolytes" to head off to Washington to help. It's true, you had to be at least middle class to afford to live on the meager salary Ralph paid (about $500 a month when I worked for him). That was part of the plan: He paid very little, so people would stay for an average of six to nine months and then move on, inculcated with Nader's spirit, vigor and distrust of those in power. It was a training ground for activists. And they helped him crusade for some of the most important reforms this country has seen in the last half-century, including the Freedom of Information Act (1966), the Clean Air Act (1970) and the Consumer Protection Agency (1978).

He also started groups to oversee the public officials who are supposed to work for us. In 1971 he began the Congress Project (which later became Congress Watch), a comprehensive examination of all members of Congress that ended up as a 21,000-page report drawing on the labor of nearly 1,000 volunteers. That same year, he started the Health Research Group and Public Citizen by sending out two mailings to 62,000 contributors that raised more than $1 million.

Some Naderites have gone on to high-profile careers in politics and media. Ray Bonner is an intrepid foreign correspondent for the New York Times; Mark Green is the elected public advocate of New York and widely touted as a leading contender for Mayor Rudy Giuliani's job; Ron Brownstein is a nationally prominent political reporter for the Los Angeles Times; Bill Taylor (who was editor of Ralph's Multinational Monitor) started the magazine Fast Company; and Joan Claybrook, who now runs Public Citizen, served as head of Jimmy Carter's National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. A strange kind of alpha male

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