Caveat Vendor

Ralph Nader is best known as the man who made Americans afraid of their cars; yet the scope of his crusading zeal extends far beyond defective mufflers and inadequate suspension systems. In a scant 18 months, he has piqued national concern over the side effects of medical X rays, the dangers inherent in leaky natural-gas pipelines, and the threat of damaging radiation from several models of color television sets. Last week Nader was a major force behind what Lyndon Johnson called "another victory for the American consumer."

The President endorsed a long-stalled law ordering states to raise their meat hygiene codes in conformity with strict federal inspection standards. The measure, which had lain dormant in congressional committees despite efforts of its Democratic sponsors, was given the impetus of national publicity by Nader. He pointed out in a series of freelance articles that many meat-processing plants throughout the country, which handle a full 15% of the beef, pork, lamb and poultry consumed in the U.S., escape federal inspection because the meat does not cross state lines.

Slogans Sell. At 33, the gaunt, olive-skinned attorney (Harvard Law, '58) is a new kind of lobbyist on the Washington legislative scene. As chief caveat caller to Emptor Americanus, he has no constituency but the American consumer, no financial backing beyond what he can generate from lectures and writing (his auto-safety book, Unsafe at Any Speed, sold 450,000 hard-cover and paperback copies, earned him $55,000). Nader's success is largely due to his unerring flair for phrasemaking, backed by diligent research. A self-taught speed reader, he flips through thousands of pages of Government reports and technical journals, then distills his findings into mind-grabbing slogans. One article on meat, for example, was titled "Watch That Hamburger!"; his most effective apothegm during the automobile ruckus, "They Can't Sell Safety," was a telling put-down of Detroit's ad language.

No one took Nader seriously at first. Indeed, his first crusade against the auto industry might have gone the way of all muckraking had not General Motors inadvertently created nationwide sympathy for him in 1966 when clumsy detectives hired by G.M. tried to dig up dirt on his private life in hopes of discrediting him. Now Nader's vigorous campaigns are aided by a burgeoning force of Congressmen eager to cash in on his crusades. Nader is only too happy to feed them his meticulously accurate intelligence.

Unbrainwashing. The son of a Lebanese-immigrant restaurateur, Nader had the usual American experience with shoddy goods as a boy in Winsted, Conn. He worked in a meat market, had a close friend who was seriously injured in an auto wreck (though not through any fault of Detroit: the friend fell asleep at the wheel). Later, he was horrified during his undergraduate years at Princeton when songbirds on the campus began dying as a result of DDT spray--long before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring raised an anti-pesticide furor.

Nader has not stopped being horrified --or outraged--since then. His 100-hour work weeks exclude dating, as well as the basketball, chess or stamp collecting he once enjoyed. ''I don't need to relax," he snaps. He lives in a single, $20-a-week room on the edge of Washington's hippie enclave, eats in cheap restaurants, has not owned a car since 1956, and departs from his penny-squeezing regimen only to pay the bill for his telephone, which can run to $80 a night for long-distance calls. Thus far, Nader has paid his own way, but now he is seeking cash to found a law firm to fight for consumers, a venture that he estimates will cost $300,000 a year.

Heartened by his achievements, Nader believes that "the consumer is going through a massive program of unbrain-washing himself." His next targets: "our friendly oil industry" and the deafening boom of supersonic transports that will be flying by 1974.

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