Ralph Nader Interview (page: 2 / 7) Consumer Crusader	Print Interview

In your early years, were there any teachers or books that influenced you in particular?

Ralph Nader: Yes, very much so.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I would be reading the early muckrakers' books. Ida Tarbell on Standard Oil, or Upton Sinclair on the meat plants in Chicago. And I would be quite young reading these books, ten, eleven, twelve, and trembling with excitement. I remember how exciting it was to read the books. Teachers? There were about five or six teachers who really had an impression on me. One history teacher, one day we were walking into the class and she had right on the blackboard a message. It said, "Gone: One minute, sixty seconds. Don't bother looking for it, for you will never find it again." And her point was, don't waste time because if you waste time, you are never going to recover that time that you wasted. A good lesson.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

You went on to Princeton, and to Harvard Law, and you clearly could have gone about this in a different way. You could have worked from within the power structure. Why this path?

Ralph Nader: First of all, I didn't believe in trivializing myself. As long as we are going to spend time and our respective talents, we shouldn't have a low estimate of our significance and what we can contribute.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Too many people who go to the best schools, and get great grades, are confronted with a choice of trivial work that is very high paid, and has some sort of surface status, like senior partner in a law firm, or corporate executive, but most of the work can be done by anybody. If they didn't do the work, there would be somebody sliding right in to do the same work. And, it's work where you don't often take your conscience to work with you every day. You leave your conscience at home, and you apply your talents to clients, or whatever demands the business or profession makes of you. On the other hand, there is an enormous amount of exciting work that needs to be done in this country. It may not pay as much, but it will still give you a decent standard of living, but you take your conscience to work so you apply your value system and your talents. That is real job enrichment. Nothing can compare with that one. I see senior partners at age 65 or 70, who have made millions of dollars in law firms, come up to me and say that they are pretty disappointed in their life and could they do something else in the years that they have post-retirement. You can just see that they look back, and basically they did it all for the money. They didn't really enjoy that much. They could rationalize it; it was intellectually challenging, and they met important people, but they didn't really come close to making the contribution they could have made, given their power, leverage, status, and intellect.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

What was the first big issue that you took on?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Ralph Nader: One day in the spring, at Princeton, where I went to college, I noticed there were dead birds on the pavement between the campus buildings, where very large trees were. At first I didn't think much of it, I just said, there's a blue bird or a robin. They weren't mutilated in any way, they just were on their back, dead. And, a few days later I saw more such birds, early in the morning before the grounds keepers picked them up. I noticed that during the day, we'd be going from one classroom to another, and the ground keepers would be spraying with huge hoses these trees. It turns out it was DDT. At the time, in the early '50s, no one thought DDT was dangerous to anybody but insects. Well, it turned out it was dangerous right there to birds. I went down to the Daily Princetonian, the college paper, and tried to persuade them to do a story. I had one of the birds with me to show them, and they said, "Naw, there's nothing wrong. We have some of the best science professors in the world," they told me. "Chemistry, Biology, if they had any idea it was harmful, it would be stopped." Well it continued on for years, into the 60s and even later. And the students would wipe some of it off their face, it would be so thick at times. But that taught me a very important lesson. One, that newspaper people can get very jaded. The editor was a senior, he had his feet on the desk, leaning back in his swivel chair, which is always a sign that curiosity might have dimmed. Second, that you might know something, like an expert chemistry professor, but if you are not interested in a problem, or if you have a dual allegiance like perhaps you might be a consultant to one of the chemical companies that produces the pesticide, you are not going to apply what you know. You are going to be in your little, pigeon-holed specialization, and become one of the world's experts on some tiny little item. But when it comes to applying it to a problem right where you live and work, you are not necessarily the best person to start the ball rolling. It could be someone who doesn't have a Ph.D., someone who has a sense of curiosity, and begins to ask questions. That's why I always say there's no ticket of admission for active citizenship. Anybody can get through that gate, and anybody can ask that basic question that gets the ball rolling.

You got out of Harvard Law school in the late '50s. That was the era of, "What's good for General Motors is good for America." Yet General Motors became pretty important in your life. What provoked you to write Unsafe At Any Speed.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Ralph Nader: I used to hitchhike a lot, all over the country. At the time I never met anybody who hitchhiked more. I always hitchhiked, for example, from Princeton to New York, or around the East Coast, and I saw a lot of accidents. Sometimes the car I was in or the truck I was in would get there first. So, it piqued my interest in it. You could see certain configurations, like the steering column rammed right back up through the roof. Of course, no one could have survived that kind of displacement of the steering column into them. When I went to Harvard Law School I became interested in the connection between legal standards for safety and automobile engineering design. At that time, it was all blamed on a nut behind the wheel so called, "the driver." But, I knew that the vehicle had a great deal to do with that because I had come across some Air Force-sponsored studies at medical schools. The Air Force found they were losing more men on the highways than in the Korean War, the highways in the US from traffic crashes. It began supporting research on how people can survive crashes if the immediate environment, say the vehicle around them, was crash-worthy. Padded dash panels, stronger door latches, collapsible steering columns, seat belts, shoulder harnesses, things like that. So I wrote a paper on automobile engineering design and legal liability and made recommendations. Lo and behold, the world didn't stand up and implement them. So, I started writing after I graduated from Harvard Law School. I'd write articles and I testified before the Connecticut and Massachusetts state legislatures. Nothing would happen. So, I finally came to Washington. That's when something happened. The Motor Vehicle Act of 1966, even though it was irregularly enforced -- sometimes very little under Nixon and Reagan -- it saved over 200,000 lives, millions of injuries prevented or reduced in severity.

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