THE MYTH OF THE 'GOOD' NADER Make You Ralph by Jonathan Chait
As Ralph Nader prepares for another spoiler run at the presidency, liberals are again wringing their hands at the damage he may do not only to Democrats' chances of retaking the White House but to his own reputation as well. "The most regrettable thing about Mr. Nader's new candidacy is not how it is likely to affect the election, but how it will affect Mr. Nader's own legacy," editorialized The New York Times this week. "Ralph Nader has been one of the giants of the American reform movement. ... [I]t would be a tragedy if Mr. Nader allowed [his anger] to give the story of his career a sad and bitter ending." The same theme was sounded in November of 2000. "Bernie Sanders is right. Ralph Nader is 'one of the heroes of contemporary American society,'" argued Eric Alterman in The Nation. "How sad, therefore, that he is helping to undo so much of his life's work in a misguided fit of political pique and ideological purity." As Robert Scheer lamented in the Los Angeles Times, "What Nader did was to impulsively betray a lifetime of painstaking, frustrating, but most often effective, efforts on his part to make a better world. He is a good man who went very wrong."
The good-man-who-went-wrong assessment of Nader is virtually unchallenged among liberals. But, if you think about it for a moment, it's awfully strange. Heroes of history do not normally reverse themselves out of the blue. George Washington did not end his days pining for a return of the British monarchy to U.S. shores. George Orwell did not suddenly warm to the virtues of totalitarianism. Nor, for that matter, did Ralph Nader go wrong after decades of doing good. The qualities that liberals have observed in him of late--the monomania, the vindictiveness, the rage against pragmatic liberalism--have been present all along. Indeed, an un-blinkered look at Nader's public life shows that his presidential campaigns represent not a betrayal of his earlier career but its apotheosis.
Nader made his name with the 1965 publication of Unsafe at Any Speed, an exposé of the Chevy Corvair. Today, people generally remember the ways in which Nader was right--the appalling lack of concern for safety in the automobile industry and the need for federal regulations. Few realize that Nader's campaign against the Corvair was only the most visible edge of an uncompromising, conspiratorial worldview. Nader believed not only that the Corvair was dangerous but that General Motors (GM) knew it was. Justin Martin, in his fair-minded 2002 biography, Nader: Crusader, Spoiler, Icon, shows how Nader hounded liberal Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff into investigating whether GM had lied about what it knew in testimony before Congress. In a letter to Ribicoff, Nader wrote, "Now comes decisive evidence which reveals a labyrinthic and systematic intra-company collusion, involving high General Motors officials, to sequester and suppress company data and films." Nader insisted he had an array of inside sources and documents that would reveal this conspiracy. Ribicoff dutifully assigned a pair of staffers to the case, and they spent two years chasing down Nader's leads. None of them panned out. The investigators found no evidence that GM knew of the Corvair's safety flaws. The failure to confirm Nader's suspicions enraged him. "He could not let go of the Corvair issue," one of the staffers told Martin. "He was fixated. And, if you didn't accept or believe the same things he did, you were either stupid or venal."
During the late '60s and early '70s, Nader developed a reputation as a wonk's wonk, a data-driven do-gooder with a stack of papers perpetually tucked under his arm. In fact, even then his work was driven by ideologically motivated fanaticism. In 1971, Nader pressured one of his associates, Lowell Dodge, to sex up his study "Small on Safety: The Designed-in Dangers of the Volkswagen." In his self-proclaimed 1976 hatchet job, Me & Ralph, former tnr managing editor David Sanford describes how Nader insisted that Dodge rewrite the conclusion of the study so that it began, "The Volkswagen is the most hazardous car in use in significant numbers in the U.S. today." Objecting that "the conclusion is not reflected in the data," Dodge left the project, allowing others to take credit as principal authors. "I have always carried around considerable guilt about what I regard as the extreme intellectual dishonesty of that conclusion," he told Sanford.
Nader's true fame came not from Unsafe at Any Speed but from the fact that its publication prompted GM to hire a private investigator to dig up damaging personal information that might discredit him. The irony is that Nader's grandiose paranoia predated this episode. Before publishing Unsafe at Any Speed, Nader worked as an obscure functionary at the Labor Department under then-Assistant Secretary Pat Moynihan. "Ralph was a very suspicious man," Moynihan told Charles McCarry in his 1972 biography Citizen Nader. "He used to warn me that the phones at the Labor Department might be tapped. I'd say, 'Fine! They'll learn that the unemployment rate for March is 5.3 percent, that's what they'll learn.'"
Nader's friends recalled that often he would act furtively, speaking in code, always convinced he was being monitored or phone-tapped. When he insisted in 1966 that he was being followed, one of his friends replied, according to Martin, "Ralph, your paranoia has grown to new extremes." Of course, it turned out that in that instance Nader was being followed. But this merely proved the old adage that sometimes even the paranoid have enemies plotting against them. <SNIP> http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20040308&s=chait030804