Two

Nader

Present at the Creation of the Consumer Movement

Law Student: “How do you live up to your image?”

Ralph Nader: “I don’t. My image lives up to me.”

—Ralph Nader, Harvard Law School, 1977

Patriotism is not a short and frenzied burst of emotion but the long and studied dedication of a lifetime.

—Governor Adlai Stevenson

The Boy from Winsted

It’s 1937, and Rose Nader of Winsted, Connecticut, is taking her four young children to visit their homeland of Lebanon. While the three oldest have struggled to learn the Lebanese national anthem in Arabic to impress relatives, it’s the youngest, four-year-old Ralph, who unexpectedly steps forward and sings it flawlessly to his astonished extended family. He shyly admits that he had been listening in a nearby room during his siblings’ lessons.

That same trip, the Nader family is in line to meet an archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church in the city of Zahle. But when it’s Ralph’s turn to kiss the ring, he refuses. “I don’t have to. I’m an American!” he announces. An unruffled archbishop looks down, pats Ralph’s short black hair, and says, “A lot of ideas are going to come from this boy’s head.”

Nineteen-year-old Nathra Nader arrives in America in 1912 with a sixth-grade education and $20. The thin, diligent tradesman works in various jobs and places—the Maxwell Auto Works in Detroit, a machine shop in Newark—before returning to Zahle to wed Rose Bouziane in an arranged marriage. They eventually settle in the mid-1920s in Winsted, Connecticut—a Capra-esque New England town of under 10,000 nestled 26 miles above Hartford in the Berkshires near the Massachusetts border. It’s a place of lush, sloping lawns, small shops, and local mills, where everyone seems to know everyone. Eventually, Nathra saves enough to buy a two-story, ten-room white clapboard house as well as a building in town that becomes the Highland Arms, the Nader family restaurant where all four of his children work at one time or another.

The father serves food with a side of civics, as the restaurant becomes a sort of town square where his views are as strong as the coffee. “When I went by the Statue of Liberty,” he tells one Nader biographer, “I took it seriously.” Rose too has firm views, in particular about parenting. When a child complains about something they think unfair, she says, “I believe it’s you. Go do something about it.” According to sister Laura Nader in a 2015 interview, “Ralph is a combination of our father’s idealism and vision and our mother’s practicality.”

Early on Rose spots unusual things about young Ralph. Without instruction, he starts telling time at age three. When he comes home late from school around age eight, she asks where he’s been: “In court. I like to listen to the arguments.” At age 14, he carries home armfuls of the small-type Congressional Record, which he reads from start to finish. “You have a very good storage space,” she tells him, touching his forehead. “You should fill it up and take it out when you need it.”

Ralph is a newspaper boy for the Winsted Register Citizen, plays sandlot ball for hours on end with, among others, classmate David Halberstam, develops an ardor for “Iron Man” Lou Gehrig because of his durability and dependability, displays an encyclopedic knowledge of baseball stats, reads Hardy Boys books and biographies about turn-of-the-century muckrakers, and especially enjoys working the cash register at the Highland Arms. He compulsively engages customers to satisfy his developing curiosity. (Similarly, after Winsted, he would hitchhike to and from college and law school because “it was [one of the] greatest educations in the world. You meet all kinds of people: executives, tree surgeons, bricklayers, doctors, truck drivers. Not only did I learn a lot but you had to adapt to all kinds of personalities.”)

Tall, thin, with an angular face and deep-set eyes, the shy student leaves Winsted for Princeton in 1951. Ralph is attracted by its declared mission—“Princeton in the Nation’s Service”—and its excellence in foreign affairs and Oriental Studies, then his passions. And he falls for, in his words, “its beautiful open stack library” where he reads an average of a book a day outside of his required course work. Classmates walking by him en route to a big football game teasingly call him “a dirty grind.” What Princeton’s famous eating clubs are to generations of its tweedy students, the Harvey S. Firestone Library becomes to Nader.

He also learns some Russian, Chinese, and Spanish, in addition to the Arabic he occasionally speaks at home. Six years before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, he wonders whether all the dead birds on campus result from the spraying of DDT. When he carries one to the Daily Princetonian to urge that they investigate, he’s blown off. “We have some of the smartest chemists in the world here,” an upper-classman editor assures him. “If there was a problem, they’d let us know.”

While at college, he’s exposed to great thinkers, especially Alpheus Mason, the leading biographer of Louis Brandeis, and Norman Thomas (Princeton ’05). “What was your greatest achievement?” asks Ralph of the famous socialist and six-time socialist presidential candidate after a speech. Thomas replies, “Having the Democrats steal my agenda.”

His scholarship and fertile mind deeply impress one professor, who tries unsuccessfully to convince him to get a PhD rather than going to law school. “For me,” recalls Nader, “it was always the law.” In a recommendation, this faculty member describes him as “a natural leader . . . Ralph is a man of possible ‘greatness.’ I think he is going to be one of the most distinguished men in our country in years to come.”

Then Harvard Law School. “From day one I laughed at the game—to prepare corporate lawyers. If anyone fell off the bandwagon and became a lawyer for the poor, it was viewed as a random event. [For example], I took Landlord-Tenant Law, only we never got to the tenant. They made minds sharp by making them narrow.”

Bored by his courses, Nader is periodically and mysteriously gone for days on end, hitchhiking around the country and researching Indian rights, migrant workers, the status of Puerto Rico. He also starts reading about auto safety after seeing car crashes in his travels, including one where a young girl is nearly beheaded in a low-speed crash when the glove compartment pops open. He writes and publishes articles on all these topics as a writer for and the top editor of the Harvard Law Record, and his third-year paper is on the issue of auto company liability for defects that result in death and injury. His idiosyncratic approach to HLS is seen when he’s called into the dean’s office and asked about a course in which he had gotten an A on the final exam. Ralph nods his head. “But there is one problem,” says the dean. “You are not signed up for this course. Did you attend the classes?” Ralph admits that he had not. He had just thought he was enrolled in the course, so he took the exam.

In the five years after law school, Nader continues his intellectual progress, traveling to the Soviet Union, Scandinavia, and Latin/South America, writing dispatches on his portable Smith Corona (for the Christian Science Monitor, New Republic, and the Atlantic), scoring interviews with Fidel Castro in Cuba in 1959 and Salvadore Allende in Chile in 1963. He churns out two or three pieces a week. “I could go into a country and very quickly have a real grasp of the situation,” he says, reflecting his phenomenal self-confidence combined with a deep appreciation of other cultures gleaned from his anthropologist sister Laura.

More routinely, he teaches at the University of Hartford, learns everything he can about the aerodynamics of cars, and opens a local law practice (where his big problem is having to charge clients), fulfills his military commitment in reserve training doing kitchen work at Fort Dix in New Jersey in 1959 (buying a dozen pairs of army combat boots for $6 a pair that he wears into the 1980s), and lobbies his state legislature to consider a local ombudsman office like the one he studied when visiting Helsinki. He even begins research on a muckraking book on women’s rights, pre-Friedan, that he never finishes because “no one collected the kind of data I needed and my auto work took over. Amazingly, eleven states didn’t allow women on juries!”

So by the time he sets off for the nation’s capital in 1963 hoping to make an impact, Ralph Nader has already met his future—from running for president about as often as Norman Thomas to storing increasing reams of information in his own cranial search engine, much as his mother suggested.

Mr. Nader Goes to Washington

While so many young activists and professionals are drawn to Washington and to civil rights during the Kennedy years, the 29-year-old Nader hitches from Hartford to D.C. with a knapsack and a reservation at the YMCA, intent on working on what he calls “body rights.”

He gets a job consulting to an assistant secretary of labor in the Kennedy administration who also has an unusual talent for policy and language as well as a specific interest in highway safety, which he had worked on as a young assistant to New York governor Averell Harriman. Indeed, Daniel Patrick Moynihan had written one of the first magazine articles on the subject in 1959, coincidentally two weeks after Nader’s own groundbreaking piece in The Nation magazine on April 11, 1959, entitled “The Safe Car You Can’t Buy.” Moynihan considers Nader a furtive, brilliant figure who is rarely in his office yet does produce a 235-page report—Context, Condition, and Recommended Direction of Federal Activity in Highway Safety—that garners as much public attention as expected from a report with that title.

About the same time, a tiny New York publisher, Richard Grossman, is searching for someone to write a book on cars and hears about Nader from journalist James Ridgeway. They agree to a $3,000 contract for an “untitled book on auto safety.” Continuing the original research that he began as a law student, Nader has a near-finished manuscript in mid-1964 when he leaves the only copy in a cab in Washington, D.C.! He then rewrites it from scratch.

I ask Ralph decades later, “So, how’d you feel when you first realized you had left it behind?”

Sighing at the memory, he replies, “Empty.”

“Did you consider not rewriting it?”

“Never, I wouldn’t give GM the satisfaction.”

Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile comes out in November 1965. Its thesis is that the reason for most car crashes is “not the nut behind the wheel but the nut in the wheel” and “the second collision” of riders with interiors—that is, cars designed for style, not safety. With a showman’s flair, Grossman sends an invitation to all auto company executives and Detroit media to hear Ralph speak about the book and take questions from all comers. He arrives at the Sheraton Cadillac on January 6, 1966, where he performs, entertains, and disarms critics (though no top executives attend). Grossman is thrilled and surprised: “That day, I suddenly realized his genius for handling the media. He was unflappable . . . and a couple of questions ahead of the reporters the whole time.”

During these months in early 1966, while also working as an unpaid advisor to Senator Abe Ribicoff (D-CT) on projected auto safety hearings, Nader suspects that he’s being followed. Friends and allies scoff at what they consider his amusing paranoia. Then he’s approached twice by attractive women while shopping at stores near his boarding house, whose come-ons he rebuffs. When the Washington Post also gets a tip from a congressional security guard that people acting like detectives were looking for someone named Ralph Nader, articles about the snoops appear in the Post and the New Republic by two reporters who connect the dots—Morton Mintz and James Ridgeway, respectively. An outraged Ribicoff calls for a special hearing both because it’s a federal crime to harass a congressional witness and because senators don’t appreciate outsiders messing with their prerogatives.

The rest unspools like a screenplay for a Hollywood thriller. Though scheduled as the opening witness on March 20, 1966, before the Senate Select Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization, Nader—in what would become his signature uniform of dark suit, thin tie, and combat boots—arrives 40 minutes late. He then slumps quietly in the back of the packed Caucus Room of the Old Senate Office Building (the Senate’s largest chamber, where JFK announced his candidacy in 1960). It seems that he couldn’t find a timely cab on this biggest day of his professional life.

So Ribicoff first calls and puts under oath James Roche, the CEO of GM, a company then larger in gross sales at $18 billion than the GNPs of all countries other than the U.S. and U.S.S.R. With renowned lawyer Ted Sorensen counseling and sitting beside him, the executive immediately apologizes. Yes, someone in his company (who turned out to have been its general counsel) had indeed hired a detective agency to ostensibly investigate whether the subject was soliciting Corvair owners to sue GM. In fact, here is what the lead private dick had told his agents assigned to Nader: “Our job is to check out his life and current activities to determine what makes him tick . . . his politics, his marital status, his friends, his women, his boys, and so forth, his drinking, dope, jobs—in fact all facets of his life.”

Among the most offended senators is Robert Kennedy of New York, who deflates the culpable detective, a barrel-chested, blunt-talking, Clouseau-ish character named Vince Gillen. While testifying that he needed to check out rumors “in fairness to Ralph,” Kennedy interrupts in his high-pitched voice. “What the hell is ‘fairness to Ralph’? You have to keep proving he’s not queer and he’s not anti-Semitic? ‘In fairness to Ralph’? Ralph is doing all right.”

Then it’s Nader’s turn and he again proves to be a “natural”—calm, fluent, occasionally humorous, “a machine gun with facts” in one journalist’s phrase. “I am responsible for my actions, but who is responsible for those of General Motors?” he solemnly wonders, gaining everyone’s complete attention. “An individual’s capital and soul is basically his integrity. He can lose only once. A corporation can lose many times and not be affected.” Some senators then trot out the industry line that auto regulation is not the federal government’s business. Ralph vaporizes their contention. Fifty thousand people a year die in America from car crashes, he observes, and you think this should only be a matter for private businesses, not public government interested in our health and safety?

When Carl Curtis, a bumptious Republican senator from Nebraska, implies that the witness’s main goal is “to sell books,” Senator Kennedy again interrupts. “Why are you doing all of this?” he asks Ralph, trying to coax a rebuttal. If he were trying to prevent cruelty to animals, comes the response, no one would doubt him. “But because I happen to have a scale of priorities which leads me to engage in the prevention of cruelty to humans, my motives are constantly inquired into.” His shoulders hunched, his voice rising, his dark eyebrows arched in emphasis, he concludes, “Is it wrong to talk about defective cars, diseased meats, corporate cheating? Is it really distasteful that a person cares enough about issues like these to dedicate his life to changing them?”

The immediate upshot: that morning, Nader is a Cassandra warning about dangerous cars; by the next morning—after saturation of TV, radio, and print coverage—he’s a certified truth-teller, perhaps the leading real-life example of a David slaying Goliath. Unsafe becomes a best-seller and is listed by the Library of Congress as one of the 100 Books That Shaped America.

The longer-term upshot, however, is even more profound.

First, within only five months, Congress unanimously passes—by 331–0 in the House and 76–0 in the Senate—and President Johnson signs into law, at a ceremony that Ralph attends, the creation of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). According to Dr. Robert Brenner, a pioneer in the field of auto safety, “All the twenty years of research which preceded Nader’s book did not have its impact. It was one of the turning points of our civilization.” Over the next 50 years, its design standards and recalls would reduce the rate of death per mile driven by nearly 80 percent, saving over 3.5 million lives and avoiding several million serious injuries.

Second, as if planning for this one-in-a-million moment his whole life, Nader expands horizontally into other consumer and democracy issues. He begins to raise and spend money to hire what comes to be called “Nader’s Raiders.” This moniker, coined by journalist William Greider, is initially considered trivializing and mocking but is then embraced by Ralph as memorable branding—not unlike the term “muckrakers” from Teddy Roosevelt 60 years before.

“You might call it my obsession,” he tells me in 2015 about his thinking back then, as we sit in the huge, marbled conference room of the Carnegie Building on 15th Street in D.C. that is his current work home. “Others may be trapped by their earliest success to keep doing what they’re doing,” Nader says in his usual matter-of-fact tone. “I’m not interested in the Lone Ranger effect . . . The more groups I can help create, the more deeply rooted this whole process of consumer and citizen sovereignty becomes.” He repeats a favorite comment of Jean Monnet, considered the father of the European Union: “Without people, nothing is possible. Without institutions, nothing is lasting.”

So the modern consumer movement is born—not with the combined big bang of Unsafe/the Roche apology/auto safety law, but with one individual’s strategic judgment to hire, over time, thousands of Raiders to work on cars . . . and nuclear power, pipeline safety, food and drug safety, airline safety, water and air pollution, anti-trust enforcement, corporate governance and shareholder democracy, clean energy, tax reform, income and wealth inequality, advertising, campaign finance reform, pension rights, old age homes, coal mine safety, occupational hazards, health care, hospital technology, smoking, freedom of information laws, civil service, multinationals, the Educational Testing Service, sports, veterans affairs, land management, corporate welfare, the oceanic environment, biogenetics, whistle-blowing, trade policy, insurance, procurement . . .

Many Naders

With requests for paying speeches pouring in and collecting a $425,000 settlement from his invasion of privacy civil suit against GM—courtesy, in one sense, of Brandeis, whose famous 1890 Harvard Law Review article created this “right”—Nader launches a five-decade drive to empower citizens to challenge corporate abuse.

He has a very specific model to build on—the original muckrakers at the turn of the century that he learned about as a boy. The Nader-figure at that time was Frank McClure, the dynamic founder of McClure’s Magazine, something of a cross between the Government Accountability Office, a Swedish ombudsman, and an investigative journalist. In editorial board meetings surrounded by the leading writers of that era, the idea-a-minute McClure would lead discussions of various social ills and then make assignments, working closely with his writers for the months or even years it would take to complete the article or book. His philosophy: “the vitality of democracy . . . depends on popular knowledge of complex questions.” Their work product is still the gold standard, especially Ida Tarbell’s Standard Oil, Lincoln Steffens’s The Shame of the Cities, and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.

Nader, however, wants something more. The early muckrakers, he observes, “only did 20 percent of the job. They stopped at exposure. They didn’t follow through by mobilizing a concerned constituency.” So while journalists are hired—including such later stars as James Fallows, Michael Moore, David Ignatius, Jonathan Alter, and Michael Kinsley—he leans toward young multi-talented lawyers who can analyze, write, speak, and anchor institutions that endure.

He starts in 1968 by hiring five lawyers and researchers working out of a couple of rented rooms in the National Press Building on 14th Street NW in Washington, D.C. Then in 1969 and 1970, there’s a second wave of several dozen more—I’m among them—in the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) and Center for Study of Responsive Law. Our stories are similar. Most wrote letters to “Ralph Nader, Washington D.C.,” since there was no office to call or mail, and out of the thousands sent, somehow ours magically came to his attention. He’d usually interview students en route to a speech or airport . . . and then make a snap hiring decision. “He has this knack of picking bright people without ego problems,” says Joan Claybrook, an early and continuing ally who would go on to become the head of the NHTSA under President Jimmy Carter.

Harrison Wellford, for example, has a prestigious position lined up with Henry Kissinger at Harvard, but Nader turns him, saying, “I promise you two things—you’ll never be bored and will go home every night with a transcendent sense of accomplishment.” With a reelected Nixon in the White House and the Vietnam War raging, many other young professionals and students flock to this guru for wonky idealists.

The PIRG lawyers formally start on a hot day, July 1, 1970, on the sixth floor at 1025 15th Street, when a dozen sit in a semicircle of chairs in a room without other furniture. Up front and holding onto his yellow pad is the 36-year-old Nader. “What will you tell your grandchildren that you did this year?” he rhetorically asks, and then plunges in by asking the lawyers to raise their hand when they hear a subject that interests them. “It’s always better if someone agrees to an area they want than simply be ordered to take one,” he explains years later in what he refers to as “The Assignment Meeting.” Recalls one in the room: “There were areas like taxes, food and drugs, transportation, health, and safety [civil service, banking, pensions, whistle-blowing]. When it was all over we each had a field and that was that.” Each gets a desk, a phone, a pad of paper. For most, their task lasts a lifetime.

Ralph’s template on auto safety is the model, which means the preliminary task is to find or create a sympathetic network to advance her/his issue. Scour the professional and popular literature. Speak to friendly, former administrators in target agencies. Make contacts with Hill staff and congressional members who respond to “Ralph Nader urged me to call . . .” Meet journalists who understand the advantage of a two-way exchange with information junkies. That means speaking their language. According to biographer Robert Buckhorn, “Nader has perfected the art of turning his legalistic arguments into readable copy designed to hold the attention of news editors.” His tongue-in-cheeky phrasemaking—“crime in the suites,” “fatfurters,” “withering heights” for Congress—is playful and quotable. Not confused for Dylan’s eloquent lyrics but successful in their realm.

As for workplaces, there is an unspoken presumption against rivalries, excessive egotism, factual sloppiness, and long weekends. Or weekends at all, actually. When Reuben Robertson describes how he and his wife relax on vacation, Ralph responds, “And what do you do on the next day?” There is the collegiality of an all-for-one/one-for-all movement akin to the original muckrakers and suffragettes, labor organizers in the Thirties, ban-the-bomb protestors in the Fifties, civil rights organizers in the Sixties.

The most prominent of the early exposés is the Nader Report on the Federal Trade Commission in 1969. Six lawyers in their mid-20s interview and research how this original consumer agency, the brainchild of President Wilson, has declined into desuetude, patronage, and trivia. Among the Raiders are William Howard Taft IV, great-grandson of a president; Ed Cox, then going through a Weatherman-like phase before becoming President Nixon’s son-in-law; Judy Areen, a future dean at Georgetown Law School; Peter Bradford, later the chairman of both the New York and Vermont power commissions; and Robert Fellmeth, a former Goldwater supporter from Hawaii whose kinetic personality and prodigious work habits—he will also author a 3,000-page Nader study of California land use—spawn the in-house adjective “Fellmyth-ian.”

The FTC chairman, Paul Rand Dixon, is not happy with their effort, forcibly throwing one of the researchers out of his office and concluding that the final report is “an hysterical, anti-business diatribe.” But the study’s reporting and subsequent publicity provoke the American Bar Association to appoint a panel to do its own analysis, which validates the Nader report. President Nixon then appoints a new reform-minded chairman—Caspar Weinberger (that Caspar Weinberger)—who hires Taft as his legal advisor, cleans house, and revives the agency.

Fellmeth is delighted and amazed at their outsized impact. “It made headlines all over the country. Are these people crazy? We’re just a bunch of students!”

It’s heady stuff—an adoring public, admiring Congress, a president either supportive or at least not hostile. With an 80 percent favorable rating in polls and receiving some 90,000 letters a year, Nader is widely regarded as in effect playing 50 simultaneous games of chess while speeding at 70 ideas per hour. The result is stunning: beyond the Auto Safety standards, in the decade between 1965 and 1975 he either initiated or played an essential role in creating the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Consumer Product Safety Commission, Environmental Protection Agency, Amendments to the Freedom of Information Act, Amendments to the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts, and Gas Pipeline Safety law.

But a looming cloud appears in 1971 in the form of the “Powell Memo” by Lewis Powell, a Virginia corporate lawyer who represents Philip Morris and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and is named later that year to the Supreme Court by President Nixon. He lays out for clients and business lobbies how to strategically deploy donations, foundations, and the media to do what GM didn’t—discredit extremists “like Ralph Nader.”

Ralph and Me

In early 1969, as noted, Nader convinces me to switch styles and venues, from city politics to national advocacy. We first meet in person in late spring 1969, when he squeezes his tall frame into my cramped basement office of the Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review. We discuss where his project ideas may overlap with my interests. When he sees my enthusiasm for macroeconomics, the legal profession, and popular writing, he suggests two areas of concentration: the institutional power of Washington lawyers and anti-trust and regulatory law enforcement. Done. My dance card for the following decade is now largely full. We then move to a larger conference room where he woos several of my classmates to also work with him, before he walks into a large lecture hall where he further exhorts 600 in the audience.

It’s not entirely clear why Ralph and I—from different generations and places—click so well or why we come to trust each other so completely.

I’m properly awed by him, gushing to a biographer at that time, “Nader is incredibly modest. You hardly ever hear a word of self-aggrandizement from him and this is contagious. Where else could a guy my age have the impact I have . . . ?” And he in turn tells an inquiring reporter, “One of the first things that struck me was how efficient he was, how consistent in his work habits. He has very high standards of scholarship yet is very well-rounded.”

I find his brainy analyses and ironic humor hard to resist, and then there’s the personal warmth that few outsiders see. When Deni is pregnant with Jenya, Ralph will invariably begin phone conversations by announcing “Baby Watch!” and then dispense some recent information he’s come across about pre- or post-natal care. Our daily midnight calls for ten years provide the greatest public education of my professional life. In these talks, it’s as if we’re just two peers shooting the breeze. Which we’re not. But it’s part of his common touch—he seems to treat everyone, from waitresses to presidents, the same . . . like we’re all customers at the Highland Arms.

In turn, he seems to appreciate my New York brand of kibitzing about everything and our mutual teasing. He calls me “the Mark of Excellence” using GM’s slogan in a way that was never intended; I call him “the Nader of the Lost Mark” when I’m away. My addiction to hot dogs provokes him to conclude that “you’re probably 90 percent rat feces and rodent hair by now”; I shoot back with something about his limited sartorial choices, lack of cultural awareness (“quick, who’s Linda Ronstadt?”), and a sweet tooth tracing back to his youthful diet of cookies. (Alas, there aren’t many other vices to taunt since he stopped smoking in ’61.)

We laugh about our absurd encounters with the famous. During a meeting with Rev. Jesse Jackson in about 1975, for example, an aide suddenly jumps up and silently begins combing his Afro with a big pic, as Jackson doesn’t miss a beat. Ralph shoots me an almost imperceptible glance that unmistakably says, “You’ll never have to do that to me.” We attend the wedding reception of Ed Cox and Tricia Nixon at the White House when, separately on a receiving line with the father of the bride, President Nixon actually utters the same malapropism to each of us: “So, you’re a Raider’s Nader!” Comparing notes later, we each realize that we each said to ourselves, “Thank you, Nixon Richard!”

Beyond chemistry is synergy—he has big ideas and I try to implement them. Let’s do the first citizen critique ever of federal anti-trust law enforcement. Okey dokey—500 interviews and 1,200 pages later, I become the go-to expert on a subject that until then was monopolized by the anti-trust bar and corporate executives.

“So, what’s he like?” I’m commonly asked, the assumption being that at night he rips off his mask of virtue to reveal some reptilian alien beneath. But I got nothin’ because he’s the embodiment of the cliché “what you is see is what you get.” He’s uniformly regarded by a dozen former Raiders whom I talk to for this book as persistent, consistent, indefatigable, austere, stubborn, sleepless, focused, unflappable, insatiable, honest, blunt, never defensive, never vain, funny, considerate, relentless—and with a photographic memory. Ralph’s so comfortable in his own skin that he wears it all the time—and sounds exactly the same in late-night phone conversations as in public speeches. “He has a unity of personality seldom found,” writes biographer Charles McCarry, “except in children or historical figures.”

I also come to see two additional aspects away from public view—he despises violence and shuns coercion. He invariably edits warlike metaphors out of my writing and 70 years later recounts with unusual disgust how he hated bullies in middle school: “sometimes I would intervene, to my disadvantage.” Nor can I really recall any instances when he spends the coin of coercion that’s the currency of political insiders from Lyndon Johnson to Andrew Cuomo—“if you don’t do X, I’ll do Z to you.” Instead of leverage, he’s all logic and data, like a real-life Mr. Spock marshaling the best arguments to prevail. When some local officials in Winsted complain that he’s big-footing them on a project in the town, he replies, “Nobody’s telling anyone what to do. If you don’t have millions of dollars and employ hundreds of people, the only way you can tell people what to do is democratically.”

In other words, he’s a terrible opponent but, except for the pay and hours, a great boss and teacher.

There’s no “Theory of Everything” that controls our work in the Seventies.

But like dots in a pointillist painting that become a discernible shape, a philosophy of government and business emerges out of the hundreds of books, columns, reports, testimonies, and speeches—it’s called “consumerism” by others. It combines private sector investment and efficiency with public government insistence on disclosure, fairness, and competition. Lengthy articles by Ralph in 1968 in the New York Review of Books and by me in the Yale Law Review lay out our thinking.

The conceptually clean dichotomy between private and public sectors—privately owned businesses in one sphere, democratically elected government in another—has broken down now that huge corporations and billionaires are trying to buy public government in hostile takeover bids. According to scholar Andrew Hacker in 1973, “As matters now stand, government . . . is a subsidiary branch of the corporate community.”

There’s no marketplace in nature. Free-market fundamentalists may pretend that the business form is divine but conveniently ignore how “laissez isn’t always fair” due to consumer ignorance, business fraud, monopolies. That’s when lawmakers reflecting a democratic consensus can change the rules: first, by government prohibition (like child labor and racial discrimination in hiring); second, by government regulation establishing floors of behavior (this much pollution but not more); or third, by government-mandated disclosure (nutritional labels, tar and nicotine content on cigarette packages).

All regulation, we argue in our writings and testimony, can be divided into two parts. There can be bad “cartel regulation” and good “health/safety regulation.” As the deregulation movement of the 1970s showed, if market competition can work, it should be allowed to work—hence the abolition of rate-setting that decade by the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) and Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB). But when markets are afflicted by hidden hazards that individual consumers can’t discern or avoid—think of industrial pollution, dangerous cars, cribs that kill—then health-safety standards are essential. Voluntary virtue can’t cut it in a profit-driven economy. And it’s far smarter to locate guardrails at the top of a cliff than ambulances below.

I’m pretty confident that even the most rabid anti-regulation Republicans who talk endlessly about “freedom” do not want their children flying through shattered glass no matter how much they adore the regulatory philosophy of Milton Friedman. Nor is it obvious how seniors or the poor were more “free” when they couldn’t afford health insurance before Medicare and Medicaid. Sometimes the “freedom to choose” is a libertarian euphemism for the “freedom to lose” life and limb.

The job of the consumer movement then is this: to make corporations more accountable, either based on H. L. Mencken’s view that “conscience is the sense that someone may be looking” or based on democratically enacted rules that establish minimally accepted market behavior. Private contracts are of course essential to a modern economy. But so is the social contract to protect people from the “externalities” of production like pollution and injury. Frederick Hayek calls that serfdom, but we instead embrace this practical blend of Capitalism with Democracy since each needs the other to survive.

From when I leave Harvard Law School in 1970 to when I leave Ralph in 1980, I juggle some offbeat assignments but concentrate in the four areas that follow: regulating business, monitoring Congress, reforming the legal profession, and enacting a federal Consumer Protection Agency. Two out-of-portfolio assignments this decade, however, provide exhilarating diversions: Ralph hosting Saturday Night Live and flirting with a presidential campaign.

SNL & POTUS. I call Lorne Michaels in 1977 to suggest the counter-programming of having Ralph as a host. “He’s really funny when he’s not testifying,” I say, defensively explaining how a scold can do comedy. Lorne, the show’s founder and still its guiding force 40 years later, responds, “He has to be to devote his life to getting rid of dangerous hood ornaments on cars.”

I spend a week in mid-January 1977 working out of 30 Rock, meeting talent and sitting in the writers’ meetings to help steer Ralph through something outside his ken. It’s exciting though sobering for a person who regards himself as culturally literate, if not funny, to be respectfully but consistently turned down when I suggest ideas that are standard laugh lines for Ralph and me in speeches. (One that gets through the process teases energy companies trying to own the sun; it bombs.) But I get to meet folks who later support my own candidacies—Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, Al Franken, and, in what is his first SNL show ever, a new comedian named Bill Murray.

Late in the week Ralph arrives, learns his lines and paces, and is friendly to all though treated like some deity by the performers (though of course that’s how we regard them). Two sketches stand out.

In the opening, a manic Ralph comes off the elevator, according to the director’s notes, “wearing a flashy, fringed, rhinestone-encrusted cowboy outfit and a white ten gallon hat on his head, [saying] ‘call me Ralphie!’” An excited Laraine Newman says, “I’m a big admirer of yours, I really am. I just can’t help myself, I’ve gotta hug you.” An air bag hidden in his shirt is then supposed to inflate to keep her at bay . . . which works perfectly during rehearsal earlier in the evening but merely emits a loud hiss during the live show. Ralph pauses a fraction of a second, knowing full well that 10 million viewers are scratching their heads, says “Whoops!” and then, displaying a show-must-go-on panache, shouts the familiar opening into the camera—“live from new york, it’s saturday night!”

In a later sketch, Ralph is living with two inflatable party dolls—who he affectionately calls Pam and Rita—in order to test their durability for a consumer exposé, “Party Dolls: Turn-on or Rip-off?” “You have no idea how exhausting these tests are. I have to dress and undress them every day, brush their little teeth, paint their little nails,” he tells Garrett Morris, adding that “Rita is beginning to leak.” Morris responds, “You mean you have to pump her up, huh?” Ralph: “Not today. I have a yeast infection.” (Twelve years later at a twentieth-anniversary celebration of the Raiders, Ralph admits, “No, I did not then know what a yeast infection was.”)

Walking on a street the next week in Washington, a young guy approaches, saying, “I know who you are . . . you’re the comedian, right?” Ralph loves it.

Running for president, however, is not a joke to some admirers. Pleas that he run for Tom Dodd’s Connecticut seat in 1970, after Dodd’s censure by the Senate, are ignored, Ralph understanding that he’s both essential to all his start-ups and more influential than any freshman senator. In 1972 columnists Mike Royko and Nicholas von Hoffman, author Gore Vidal, and something called the New Party repeatedly push for a presidential run—and get no response. But the public seems intrigued. When Royko includes a mail-in questionnaire in a column to his Chicago Daily News readers, the results are startling: 1,614 for Nader, 148 for Ed Muskie, 42 for Ted Kennedy, 41 for George McGovern, and 11 for Hubert Humphrey.

Then, after vice presidential nominee Tom Eagleton in 1972 quits the Democratic ticket because of his history of undisclosed electroshock treatments, nominee George McGovern calls Ralph to ask if he’d consider replacing Eagleton on the ticket. Ralph politely demurs right away, saying, “I’m an advocate for justice and that doesn’t mix with the needs of politics.”*

In 1976, the attorney general of Massachusetts, who has the statutory authority, decides to put Nadar’s name on the Democratic primary ballot, adding that he’ll only take it off if the candidate swears not to run. Ralph, however, thinks it a big-brother-ish, undemocratic imposition to require a citizen to affirmatively say he’s not running when he’s given no indication of doing so. For a few weeks there’s a stalemate and nothing happens—and then the campaigns of Senator Fred Harris, Representative Morris Udall, and Governor Jimmy Carter start calling me to say, Hey, he’s not going to run, right? When I dutifully convey all this to Ralph, he shrugs, largely amused by the situation, yet, in my view, curious how the public conversation plays out. Polls appear showing that he’s competitive with the existing candidates. Finally, however, with principle but not law on his side, it’s Ralph who has to blink.

When he gives me his notarized letter of declination to the state’s AG to bring to the post office, a diabolical thought crosses my mind en route—what if I “sewer-service” the envelope (i.e., when official papers are thrown away though claimed to have been served)? Then he’d appear on the Massachusetts ballot and then there’d be a national draft movement and . . . my reverie ends and I mail it off. And that was that, presidentially. I thought.

September 11, 1973. Ralph and I meet at 9 a.m. at the Eastern Shuttle counter at the third-worldish National Airport in D.C. to fly up to New York City for our testimony to the United Nations about multinational corporations. He buys our tickets with cash ($25 a person!) because he refuses to carry a credit card. I’m in a corduroy suit and coiffed with a frizzy “Hebrew-National” while Ralph’s in the same dark suit and skinny tie that he apparently wore in utero. And he’s clomping around in a pair of those army combat boots he took with him after leaving Fort Dix in 1959.

On the flight, Ralph barely looks up from his accordion folder of newspapers, magazines, and transcripts that is his third arm, reflecting a mania for reading he developed in boyhood. We grab a cab and get to the UN only a half hour before our remarks to a panel of the General Assembly in the Great Hall.

After, we head right back out to LaGuardia. But heading north on the FDR Drive, we hear on the radio that Chilean president Salvadore Allende has been killed in a right-wing coup. Ralph bolts upright in his seat, upset, eyes narrowing, having interviewed the elected socialist five years before. He’s largely quiet on the flight back but, as we begin our descent to National Airport, abruptly says, “You know, Mark, that’s among the reasons I’ll never run for office. Look what they just did to Allende.”

It’s a pledge he keeps for a couple of decades, despite devotees who implore him to invest his huge popularity into a symbolic or even serious candidacy for president. But then, dismayed by how big-money interests continued to have a de facto veto over progressive legislation from the Seventies to Nineties, he does an about-face and runs for president four times, including his eventful candidacy in the Bush-Gore contest of 2000. He of course survives intact, his reputation less so.

Business Regulation. While there are Nader’s Raiders working on specific market impacts—pensions, pollution, food safety, dangerous workplaces—Ralph in 1970 is concerned that no one group is working on the very structure of corporate capitalism. What’s the corporate governance within firms that produces bad decisions and allows managers to avoid accountability? What’s the competitive relationship between firms in the marketplace? What’s the role of government regulation over corporations when markets fail? His view: shareholder democracy, “free markets,” and government regulation are either weak or fictitious restraints on big businesses. He tasks me with starting the Corporate Accountability Research Group to expose and strengthen this underperforming “closed enterprise system.”

In effect, he wants to launch another anti-trust movement. The first, during the Robber Baron era of interlocking directorates and the railroad monopoly, stretched from 1890 through 1914 and produced the Sherman Antitrust Act, prosecutions of Standard Oil, and creation of the Federal Trade Commission. Crusading Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver, who had gained fame leading sensational congressional hearings against organized crime in the early 1950s, later attempts to do the same in hearings against “administered prices” by “private socialism.” But the Mob being more exciting than Monopoly—and with growing acceptance of an economy dominated by big business and big labor (Galbraith’s “countervailing powers”)—his drive for new legislation dies with him in 1963.

As the populist heir of TR and Kefauver, Ralph has a three-part plan. First, an investigation of anti-trust law enforcement—don’t we want more competition and fewer shared monopolies? Second, a proposal for a system of federal, not state, chartering of corporations—shouldn’t national companies have national charters? Last, an approach to health/safety regulation that highlights the often-ignored benefit side of the cost-benefit equation.

I enjoy the challenge of long odds more than most, but the opposing lineup seems unusually forbidding. Undergirding the status quo are companies worth trillions spending billions on campaign gifts and fleets of lawyers, lobbyists, economists, and scientists—all held together by the consensus philosophy of laissez-faire capitalism. And while citizens can understand racial prejudice or a polluted river, it’s hard to get many aroused over “market shares” and “oligopolies.” In describing why anti-monopoly activism is “the faded passion of American reform,” Richard Hofstadter in 1963 concludes that it was a “complex, difficult and boring” subject. That helps explain why there’s a priesthood of insider anti-trust lawyers and corporate executives on one side and unorganized, unsophisticated consumers on the other.

So where to start? If you’re going to break into the Bellagio of capitalism, you need real talent. I recruit two of the smartest people I have ever known, both law school classmates—Bruce Wasserstein, whom we met in chapter 1, and Beverly C. Moore Jr., who will become the leading class action analyst in the country. I later add Joel Seligman, who in the 1990s would write the definitive 11-volume history of the SEC before becoming president of the University of Rochester. Filling out our starting five is an amazing find: 69-year-old Irene Till, who had been the chief economist under Kefauver and co-wrote his book on monopoly power, In a Few Hands.

I spend 16 hours a day burrowing into the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission Bureau of Competition, since these two agencies divide up enforcement of the Sherman Act and the Federal Trade Commission Act. Our team initially reads everything written about competition theory and antitrust enforcement but then engages in the best way to decipher the process—interview current and former staff at these agencies as well as those who monitor it in Congress. As described by Ralph’s Pulitzer Prize–winning childhood friend, David Halberstam: “If there were one thing I could teach a young journalist working on a major story, it’s what I would call the sequence of interviews . . . how each interview sets up the next interview. You don’t go on the very first day to the central person because you won’t be prepared and he will be prepared.”

With Bruce, Beverly, and me digging in and Ralph reviewing and commenting on every page, the four of us release our 1,148-page document—The Closed Enterprise System—at a Washington press conference on Saturday, June 5, 1971. Ralph is in good form—understated in tone but cutting in content: “This is a report on crime in the suites and its human, political and economic costs to Americans. It is finally a study of corporate radicalism so deeply insinuated into the politico-economic fabric of the society to be considered any longer a mere deviation from the norm.”

I then tick off a few case studies showing when these agencies shy away from challenging big mergers; why consent decrees that settle cases are kept secret; how “shared monopolies” dominate two-thirds of American manufacturing so they can jack up prices and worsen inequality; and how political influence undermines white-collar law enforcement—the leading examples being the Nixon White House and Johnson attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach.

Am I shocked and thrilled when the New York Times the next day publishes a long, front-page article with the headline and sub-head, “Nader Asserts Monopolies Mulct the Public of Billions . . . Report Charges Political Power Aids Giants in Blocking Antitrust Suits”? Yes. I. Am.

There is a big reaction. Senators Hart, Metzenbaum, and Magnuson embrace the report and schedule hearings. AG Katzenbach says, “No third year law student at Harvard is going to tell me how to run anti-trust enforcement.” (Which begs the question whether he is distressed by our analysis or our law school.) Conservative scholars in reviews, however, are critical: Yale Law School professor Arthur Leff calls it “unconvincing” in the New York Times Book Review; Chicago Law professor and conservative luminary Richard Posner writes, “It is a highly tendentious work—scholarship it is not.”

But our preliminary goal is achieved—we’re taken seriously as the first public critique of anti-trust enforcement and earn a seat at a table that previously had only heard a monologue on monopolies. When two years later Jack Anderson runs scandalized columns about how ITT strong-armed the White House and Department of Justice (DoJ) to allow the ITT–Hartford Fire merger—which we had covered in our study—the public and congressional reaction renews interest in our work. Throughout the decade, Ralph and I produce a stream of articles, books, speeches, and bills in an effort to convince the public and public officials to embrace real market competition, not oligopolies.

The results are mixed.

On the one hand, we write a bill with Senator John Tunney (D-CA)—the first pro–anti-trust legislation to become law in 25 years. It requires that consent decrees must be made public and that criminal penalties be raised from misdemeanors to felonies punishable by up to $1 million (for firms). Later, we get the Senate to enact the Hart-Scott-Rodino bill requiring that companies give the FTC advance notice of large mergers to allow for a legal challenge pre-consummation. We convince Attorney General Edward Levi to create a specialized unit to investigate white-collar crime and to publicly release correspondence between companies and the DoJ. And Ralph and I begin the practice of briefing new assistant attorneys general in charge of anti-trust about our views—and they, knowing of our reach into their staff and the media, seem attentive.

But while there is a continuing public conversation about the value of large anti-oligopoly cases, they’re never filed. The very well-regarded Senator Phil Hart (D-MI), chair of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, holds hearings, but there’s little appetite among politicians to bite the hand that funds them. Washington names a Senate Office Building after Hart but not a law.

Dented but unbowed, we continue our work on the structure of the marketplace but also add the structure of the corporation itself.

Ever since states gave companies charters to conduct business as “creatures of the state,” no one questions the requirement of public charters to do business with the public. But who issues them? In a largely agrarian economy, it made some sense that local firms were chartered by states where they only did business. But 1789 businesses resemble 1970s businesses only to those who think that a minnow is no different than a shark since they both swim. States don’t print money or conscript armies since these are obviously national functions. So why do states by the twentieth century continue to charter national if not multi-national corporations?

When I’m in law school, I don’t question why corporate law seems to be all about Delaware law. When Ralph is in law school the prior decade, however, he figures out the back-scratching system that leads over half the Fortune 500 to incorporate there—i.e., Delaware gets one-fourth of its state revenues from chartering fees while the companies get state law and courts that defer to management prerogatives. It’s a law-for-sale, race-to-the-bottom that enables Delaware to become the Reno, Nevada, of corporate law. Or as Ralph would often joke, “General Motors could buy Delaware . . . if DuPont were willing to sell it.”

In the mid-1970s, he assigns me and Joel Seligman, aided by Irene Till, to try to expose and change a system that works well for big business and Delaware, but not so much for other stakeholders of corporations—millions of employees, shareholders, communities, and consumers.

As with our anti-trust work, we read everything we can on the corporate form, which is largely formalistic, rarely empirical. We then interview legal experts and scholars about ways to make sure that these “private governments” are more accountable to those they employ and affect. We discover that the federal chartering of companies was discussed twice by Jefferson at the Constitutional Convention, though never voted on. Presidents Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson also considered it during the Populist Era but opted instead for antitrust as the preferred mechanism of accountability.

We release our 433-page report—Constitutionalizing the Corporation: The Case for the Federal Chartering of Federal Corporations—at a packed press conference on January 24, 1976, in D.C. We highlight workable alternatives to unaccountable corporate power: the top 700 corporations required to have a majority of board members “independent” of management domination; an Employee Bill of Rights with whistle-blower protections; Community Impact Statements before plants move; additional disclosure requirements (political gifts, minority hiring data, toxins in the workplace); more shareholder rights to close the gap between ownership and control. And we continue pressing our analysis from our anti-trust work about how oligopoly entrenches oligarchy and worsens income inequality when concentrated private sector power—to cite the much-used word 40 years later—“rigs” both the economy and politics.

Coverage is extensive, hearings are held. We publish Taming the Giant Corporation later that year, and my study The Corporate Lobbies, on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, the next. Under the auspices of Senator Howard Metzenbaum (D-OH), I meet monthly for six months with a small group of national leaders—including Irving Shapiro, head of both DuPont and the Business Roundtable, and Bill Winpisinger, head of the Machinists Union—to see if there’s any common ground we could all agree on. (Answer: no.) We organize a large labor-environmental-consumer coalition of 25 organizations—including the AFL-CIO—and prominent experts like John Kenneth Galbraith, Michael Harrington, and Barry Commoner that lobbies Congress and conducts a “Big Business Day” in 1980 in 110 cities modeled on Earth Day, though far smaller.

Again, some specific ideas are enacted, like a pre-notification for plant closings and pay-for-performance data per firm. But we do not cut the Gordian knot strangling our system of corporate governance. Business exploits the very phrase “federal chartering” to imply that we are seeking “a federal takeover of American business.” (Of course, either way corporations stay privately owned.) But as with anti-oligopoly bills earlier and a Consumer Protection Agency later, the powerful corporate-legal-congressional complex prevails to keep the profitable status quo intact.

First-year law students still sit in corporate law classes based largely on Delaware judicial decisions . . . and, like me, no doubt wonder why.

Our efforts to protect federal health and safety regulation, however, go better for a simple reason—the burden for change here is on corporate interests, not on consumer advocates. Business’s “war on regulation” is a one-trick pony that focuses on exaggerated cost data provided by the affected industries and on rhetorical attacks on “big government.” And the more outlandish and abstract the attacks, the better. So there is talk about supposed $200 toilet seats required by OSHA but not the 1 in 11 workers in the private economy with a job-related injury or illness in 1976. Talk about jobs lost but not jobs produced in the environmental controls and non–fossil fuel energy sectors. And don’t bother to debate high miscarriage rates and birth defects around the contaminated town of Love Canal or families incinerated by low-speed rear-end collisions because of ruptured gas tanks.

Although business lobbies just assert that any new rule will bankrupt them—like putting air bags in cars or taking fluorocarbons out of spray cans—once these reforms are implemented, they’re either easily absorbed into the cost of production or provoke innovation that meets standards. This intellectual fraud finds its apotheosis in St. Louis economist Murray Weidenbaum, who is lavishly quoted and amply financed by big business groups when he merely lists dubious estimates of the costs of regulation. A nice round $200 billion is his favorite number in the Seventies.

Rebutting such ideological arithmetic proves easy. We and other advocates (a) highlight reduced cancer rates and a sharp decline in crib deaths, among many other savings, to expose the hollow rhetorical war against the federal bureaucracy and (b) aggregate the best available benefits studies in 1979 that far exceed Weidenbaum’s cost estimates.

Armed with examples and data, we proselytize for smart regulation in numerous publications and professional forums. I edit a volume in 1972 called The Monopoly Makers that explains our critical distinction between cartel regulation where “regulatory capture” leads to excessive rates and health/safety regulation that reduces the “externalities” of production that markets don’t. Then, using the existing Freedom of Information law, I sue Secretary of Commerce Philip Klutznick to disclose those American companies secretly complying with the Arab States’ boycott of Israel. Prevailing in Green v. Klutznick, I release the names of 1,400 chagrined companies that put their profits over America’s ally.

I spend considerable time with two talents on Senator Ted Kennedy’s staff who would go on to illustrious careers—Stephen Breyer and David Boies—collaborating to end Civil Aeronautics Board and Interstate Commerce Commission rate regulation. Working with economist Gar Alperovitz, we create COIN—Consumer Inflation in the Necessities—a consumer/labor alliance arguing that inflation is the result not only of monetary policy but also of specific sectoral problems. We meet with President Carter, who agrees to push this framework.

And I periodically debate regulation in Bar forums and before corporate audiences. A couple of times I face a charming but largely fact-free Washington lawyer by the name of Antonin Scalia. Another time I go up against Irving Kristol—the so-called “godfather of neo-conservatism”—at a J. C. Penney forum, with very good results according to the corporate host afterward. (“Jeez, you clobbered him.”)

Lawyer Reform. Before there was Nader, there was Shaw, opining that “all professions are conspiracies against the laity.”

Ralph’s skepticism about the performance of the legal profession to advance the public interest begins in law school, which he regards as a factory “engineering law students into corporate thinking, legal minutiae and wooden logic . . . impervious to what Oliver Wendell Holmes once called the ‘felt necessities of our times.’” Coaxed by him a dozen years later, I draft a survey that the law school agrees to send to all recruiting law firms before they’re allowed to interview students, which I enter into a primitive spreadsheet so students know what firms to see and what to ask. It’s still there two decades later.

About every year in the 1970s, the two of us would go together to Cambridge, and, usually to a full house, we’d be a tag team on “Law Firms and Law Schools: The Ethical Imperative.” Here’s one Nader biographer, Hays Gorey, writing about it:

His wild mane of wavy brown hair swinging from side to side, Green took the podium first, shaking his head and describing in moving terms the challenge and satisfactions of public interest law . . . Why couldn’t more of them follow him into public interest law? Working up to an angry climax, Green pinpointed the perfectly obvious reason: money. “But there are other currencies, you know . . .”

Nader [is] freshly and somewhat ridiculously barbered, yet the different styles and modes of dress and hair did not conceal from anyone the essential oneness of their purposes and views. The same fire burned in both men . . . He asked the students why it should not concern them that “most Americans are shut out of the legal system—priced, delayed, politicized, mystified out of it.” [At the end], the law students rose out of their chairs and Austin hall throbbed with prolonged cheers and applause.

But his earlier MO of pulling a few resumes out of a pile and then interviewing someone en route to somewhere has now run its course. I annually also visit laws schools to recruit talent for Ralph’s growing network, numbingly interviewing 20 applicants a day in half-hour intervals for five straight days at five law schools—usually Harvard, Yale, NYU, Columbia, and George Washington or Georgetown.

I then weed the 100 down to 20, who are interviewed back in D.C. by Ralph, me, and a few others. Often, among more substantive inquiries, Ralph asks, “Do you smoke pot?” I watch top students writhe under the pressure of either lying to Ralph Nader or losing the job of their dreams. After he does this a few times, I pull him aside and say, “Ralph, you just can’t ask this anymore. Almost everyone smokes at some point and it’s not morally disqualifying.” He looks at me in mock horror and says, smirking, “Oh no, not you too, Mark!” His modern imitation of Cotton Mather mercifully ceases.

Beyond recruiting, Ralph is eager to write a book on the influence of Washington lawyers and law firms. The idea starts when he’s in one Senate anteroom and Lloyd Cutler, the auto industry’s lawyer, is in another as drafts of the 1966 auto safety report ping-pong between them. Though the process produces a largely strong bill, Ralph is nettled when Cutler successfully defeats the imposition of criminal penalties for knowingly manufacturing dangerous cars in Senate and House floor votes. This experience contributes to Ralph’s testimony three years later before Senator Ribicoff’s subcommittee about how Washington lawyers operate: “The gentlemen who run these operations are eminent specialists in cutting down consumer programs in their incipiency or undermining them if they mature. They are masters of ex parte contact, the private deal and tradeoff, the softening of the bureaucrat’s will . . . I think you can learn more about the consumer movement and its problems by asking them just how they go about doing it on the other side.”

When Ribicoff does invite several to testify, all politely refuse, with Cutler chiding Nader for not believing in the adversarial system of justice. That does it. He asks me to spend my maiden summer of 1969 investigating Cutler as well as Covington & Burling, the largest corporate firm in the nation’s capital. “Since they’re powerful institutions in D.C.,” he explains, “they shouldn’t hide behind client confidentiality but should account for their impact on public policy.”

I research Cutler and Covington intermittently along with my work on The Closed Enterprise System and federal chartering. But a couple of problems emerge: though I ship all my research in boxes to a hotel room where Ralph intends to write the book, he’s now the Nader of 1973, not 1963, and the obligations of fame and numerous public interest groups don’t permit him the time to do it. Finally, pressured by his own guilt and by me, he gives me a green light to start writing. Unfortunately, however, a book on the same subject by a skilled Washington journalist, Joseph C. Goulden, beats us to the market in 1972. The Superlawyers is a big best-seller.

I plow ahead and in 1975 publish The Other Government: The Unseen Power of Washington Lawyers. Based on 300 interviews and exhaustive research, it argues that these “power lawyers” lack “a sense of consequence” about their anti-social impact. The book shows how they usually get their way in closed meetings with no adversary counsel anywhere and based on politics plus lobbyists. These lawyers ignore the part of the Code of Professional Responsibility requiring counsel to be “officers of the court,” and they fail to even understand, in Brandeis’s ideal, how to be “lawyers for the situation.”

While reviews are positive, especially John Kenneth Galbraith’s in the New York Times Book Review, when the ranking partner at Covington, H. Thomas Austern, is asked about Nader and the book, his only comment is “Fuck him.”

Ralph and I produce a compendium volume and conference, Verdicts on Lawyers, with essays that chronicle how lawyers have tilted the scales of justice and priced themselves out of the market for nearly all Americans. The volume complains about “legal featherbedding,” price-fixing, the lack of inexpensive alternatives to justice, and inadequate pro bono hours at law firms. We explain that lawyers remind us of “meat manufacturers in 1906 and auto manufacturers in 1966 . . . who believe they are capable of self-regulation.” I tell James Fallows, who at the time is President Carter’s speechwriter, that “90 percent of lawyers represent just 10 percent of the people” and, in a new experience for me, hear a president use this line in a speech urging parallel reforms. (Alas, I probably got the numbers wrong—looking back, it should have been 90 percent and 1 percent.) Eventually we turn over our analysis and materials to a newly created Equal Justice Foundation, which has continued this work to this day.

I also work with Nader’s top litigator, Alan Morrison, on how best to break up this professional guild. As head of Ralph’s Public Citizen Litigation Group, Alan brings lawsuits against bar associations’ “minimum fee schedules” and bans on advertising—which together stunt competition and raise prices—that result in two Supreme Court decisions in the mid-Seventies striking down both. (Amazingly, bar associations of lawyers lose before the country’s top judicial panel of lawyers by votes of 8–0 and 8–1!) All of our Naderian efforts combined produce probably the biggest change in the profession in decades.

Another legal collaboration involves President Nixon’s infamous firing of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox in October 1973 in what came to be called the Saturday Night Massacre. That night Ralph calls several of us urgently saying, “We have to do something.” We convene early the next morning at the Litigation Group to brainstorm how to best respond. Ralph cares deeply about this event, in part because in 1972, before Watergate became a synonym for scandal, he called the Nixon administration “the most corrupt in history” due to excessive surveillance, extralegal policies, tolerance of financial corruption, and its undemocratic “fascism of the mind.” For which he was chided as exaggerating.

After several go-rounds, it’s decided that Ralph and a few members of Congress (including Representative Bella Abzug) will sue the president for violating the special prosecutor law forbidding his removal except for “extraordinary improprieties on his part.” Six months later, Morrison persuades federal district court judge Gerhard Gessell to declare Cox’s firing illegal. But by then the case is moot, since Cox is back at Harvard and a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, is continuing the probe. Yet Nader v. Bork has the effect of letting Nixon know that Jaworski must now be considered truly independent of the White House. There are no more legal massacres, if you don’t count Nixon’s massacre of himself.

What I remember most from this period is how, leaving the Corporate Accountability Research Group (CARG) every night about 1:30 a.m., I’d motorcycle by the Mayflower Hotel on Connecticut Avenue to scoop up that morning’s Washington Post to read Woodward and Bernstein on “Nixon’s Richard.” In my then-Manichean world of black-and-white hats and in the context of Nixon’s villainy, it’s probably the most emotionally satisfying few months in a life of fighting the Right.

The Congress Project. “Nader’s Biggest Raid,” in the estimation of Time magazine, emerges in 1971 out of several intersecting thoughts in Ralph’s mind. Though very successful on Capitol Hill in the late Sixties, he worries about the tightening grip that big donations have on elections and laws. Lamenting the lack of civic education, he wonders out loud whether a student army studying Congress could do for citizenship “what the Arthur Murray Dance Studio does for aspiring dancers.”

On November 2, 1971, at the National Press Club, Ralph announces “probably the most comprehensive and detailed study of Congress since its establishment.” It’s an audacious effort to enlist 1,000 volunteers and 50 full-time Raiders to research and write profiles of 484 congressional members either running for reelection in 1972 or holding Senate seats, plus book-length reports on six major committees. While the product will be nonpartisan and informational, it will also no doubt be controversial, so Ralph pledges to finance it with only his lecture fees and not foundation funds. He accelerates his lecturing, hitting a high of eight one day in Oregon, with only one rule: he refuses to be driven in Volkswagens because “they’re portable funeral parlors.”

On June 19, 1972, Ralph holds an orientation session at a George Washington University college dorm to excite his “army.” According to author Justin Martin, “The atmosphere was electric . . . Nader began by comparing the project to the Wright Brothers’ first flight. ‘Many of you are too smart for the courses you’re going through but let me assure you, you’ll be really sweating, literally and figuratively.’ Nader warns against pot smoking. It’s illegal and if anyone gets busted it would reflect poorly on the Project . . . [And there was] an extremely tight deadline. ‘If it’s not met, there’s no tomorrow.’”

Running it are two of his most trusted aides, Joan Claybrook and Bob Fellmeth. True to form, Bob drafts a 633-question survey that takes an average of ten hours for a congressperson to answer. An effort of this magnitude generates a significant pushback: from members who resent the time imposition, from liberal members who assume Nader would merely be on their side with no questions asked, and from the profilers themselves who think that nine profiles averaging 30 pages each to be a bit much. After they balk at the volume and deadline, Ralph slightly relents and reduces the workload to only eight profiles with an additional week tacked on.

Then Oscar Dystel, the head of Bantam Books and the acknowledged godfather of paperback books in America, gives Ralph a big idea—publish a soft-cover book based on all the research that could “make Congress readable.” In June he conscripts me, Fallows, and environmentalist David Zwick to write it in under two months. Who Runs Congress? proves to be about the most intense professional experience of my life. We three drop everything else and spend day and night at CARG’s underground office at 18th and M Street splitting up the research and writing.

I watch how Fallows, who in my opinion goes on to be the premier journalist of his generation at the Atlantic, knocks out first drafts that are publishable as is, rendering editors largely extraneous. My research excavates two quotes that become benchmarks for future discussions of Congress: first, Will Rogers saying, “We have the best Congress money can buy”; second, Boies Penrose, a turn-of-the-last-century, 300-pound Pennsylvania Republican senator with refreshing candor, telling his donors, “I believe in a division of labor. You send us to Congress; we pass laws under which you make money . . . and out of your profits you further contribute to our campaign funds to send us back again to pass more laws to enable you to make more money.”

Everything miraculously comes out in October. The profiles are extensively used in campaigns by incumbents, challengers, or both. Hays Gorey writes, “It may still be one of Nader’s most significant and enduring contributions to revitalizing the United States system [of governance.]” Who Runs Congress? proves to be controversial, popular, and influential. Congressman Gerald Ford is upset that “it calls some Members criminals.” Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield lauds it as “having a good deal of meat and validity.” David Bollier, a historian of the consumer movement, concludes:

Much of The Congress Project’s impact stemmed from the success of “Who Runs Congress?” The book was a brisk, tough-minded, witty overview of Congress, drawing upon Congress Project research and other materials, both original and derivative. [It] took off like a rocket . . . and was #1 on the New York Times best-seller list for the month of November, 1972. Eventually going through four different editions and print runs of more than one million copies, it remains the best-selling book ever written on the Congress.

While it is difficult to measure the impact of any single book, there is no question that “Who Runs Congress?” helped change the climate of public opinion toward Congress and Congress’s own perception of itself. The book was widely read among the incoming batch of legislators in 1974, the famous class of “Watergate Babies” that included 47 freshmen Democrats.

Given Ralph’s penchant for creating enduring organizations, perhaps the greatest impact of the project and book is that they led to the establishment of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch to permanently monitor Capitol Hill. Claybrook is its first executive director from 1973 to 1977, and I’m the second from 1977 to 1980. Those years running the most influential consumer lobby in Washington shape me for years to come and ignite my own ambition to try to answer the book title’s question with “Why not me?”

Present at the Stillbirth of the Consumer Protection Agency. While Congress Watch’s eight staff hardly even the odds against several thousand business lobbyists, the disparity in federal agencies is geometrically worse.

James Madison’s theories in Federalist # 10 about competing factions balancing each other out read like naïve fiction two centuries later. According to all 14 members of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee in 1977: “[At] agency after agency, participation by the regulated industry predominates—often overwhelmingly . . . For more than half of the proceedings, there is no consumer participation whatsoever. In those proceedings where participation by public groups does take place, typically it is a small fraction of the participation by the regulated industry.” This is insider democracy, as citizens inquiring about process or policy are often rebuffed by the query “Who ya with?”

To fix this flaw, Senators Hubert Humphrey and Estes Kefauver in 1959 introduce a bill to create a Department of Consumer Affairs that would unite all consumer functions under one roof and provide counsel to speak up for voiceless consumers. It goes nowhere. By the late 1960s, Nader and Rep. Benjamin Rosenthal (D-NY) team up to develop a proposal for a Consumer Protection Agency (CPA) that wouldn’t combine all functions in one place—where Ralph fears it could be more easily stymied by concentrated business power—but would provide countervailing advocates before existing health, safety, and environmental agencies. He calls the bill “the most important piece of consumer legislation ever to come before Congress.” Five times between 1970 and 1976 it passes either the Senate or House but never both because of the fortuities of scheduling, bickering over individual provisions, and Republican opposition.

Then, at the start of the 95th Congress in 1977, it’s strongly supported by the newly sworn-in President Carter; Speaker Tip O’Neill; 150 labor, senior, and citizen groups; and a 2-to-1 majority in public polls. Ralph assigns me to run the campaign to secure final enactment. Given the lineup and merits, we’re optimistic.

Beneath this broad public support, however, there’s a troubling undercurrent—we keep hearing generalized complaints about “big government” and “not more government” and “not another OSHA.” We explain that the CPA can’t regulate anything, but as an office with an annual budget of $15 million will only provide consumer advocates to argue positions before existing regulatory agencies. Reasoned arguments, however, are not the fuel of lobbying—money and grassroots pressure are. So we develop two counter-strategies.

First, we create Congress Watch Locals in 83 swing congressional districts because local pressure beats pleading off the House floor any day. But we now confront the first all-out organized business opposition since the Powell Memo laid out its how-to manual in 1971. The Business Roundtable in 1977 hires Leon Jaworski to lead the lobbying against the bill. The Wall Street Journal runs a front-page piece with the headline “Business Lobby Gains More Power as It Rides Antigovernment Tide.” Speaker O’Neill says that he has “never seen such extensive lobbying” in his quarter century in Congress.

Second, to counter the cliché of “more big government,” I organize the Nickel Campaign to get at least 500 local residents in each of these 83 districts to send in actual nickels to wavering members to symbolically and puckishly explain that this “big new government bureaucracy” will cost citizens only about five cents each. Many members are annoyed since they don’t know what to do with this shower of 40,000+ nickels. One actually complains, “It’s a form of bribery,” which forces me to explain that “if they can be bought for a nickel, they’re aiming too low.” Allies worry that such a move risks turning off moderates who resent such public mockery. To which Admiral Hyman Rickover replies, “They never complain when business tries to buy them, only when someone stands up for the people.” (Eventually, the 83 members split 42 to 41 on the final vote.)

I work daily for months with the Speaker’s office and the White House, especially Esther Peterson, the beloved 71-year-old consumer advisor to President Kennedy and now Carter. She’s constantly rattled by Ralph’s public comments and attacks—once telling him that “I shouldn’t spend my energy picking up the pieces with the people you’ve offended”—though we consider that as one of the only ways to lean on wavering members. In any event, according to biographer Charles McCarry, “Ralph doesn’t think politics is the art of the possible but a system of imperatives.”

O’Neill, Nader, and our team are increasingly worried about Democrats overanxious about corporate money in Washington and small businesses in the district. One backs off, saying that he just “can’t explain 500 times back home why this isn’t just more big government.” Another tells Ralph outright, “I’m worried that the Chamber [of Commerce] will run a candidate against me in the primary.”

Shortly before the culminating vote in February, there’s a triple whammy: Representative Tom Foley jumps ship after watching a fellow Democrat lose in a nearby district to a far-right Republican, which in turn enables Democrats such as Patricia Schroder, Leon Panetta,† and others to follow suit. Then, in a move that astonishes both the pro- and anti-CPA sides, the Washington Post, which had editorially supported a consumer agency for years, switches to oppose it the day before the final vote; it writes gibberish about how it’s no longer needed since Carter had appointed many consumer advocates to his agencies. (Brandeis is on the bench so no need for defense counsel?) Then President Carter, who for months had been promising to hit the phones, calls the first 6 out of a list of 24 members that we provide, gets none saying yes, and stops calling.

The bill fails 227 to 189 on February 8. When I reach Ralph, who is traveling in Nevada, with the news, the line goes silent for a few seconds. “This is the world’s greatest country,” he says more in regret than anger, “but it’s being run by a bunch of pinheads.”

This is a big, historic loss.‡ Looking back, February 1978 starts a long comparative shift in consumer power and corporate power in Washington, D.C. The forces that pull down the CPA are seen in the passage of the Prop 13 property tax referendum in California that year, in the defeat of the Labor Law Reform bill also that year, and, of course, in Reagan’s 1980 victory. Conservative arguments against big government—except when it comes to corporate welfare, defense spending, gay rights, reproductive choice, imposition of the death penalty—still reverberate in 2016.

Within a month of CPA’s demise, I get an unexpected call from Peterson saying that she’d like to retire and intends to urge President Carter to choose me as her successor. “Are you interested?” While I usually like to prepare and think ahead, in this case I’m mute with indecision. “Um, um, well, thanks . . . and, um.” “Mark, can you think about it and at least come in for an interview with Eizenstat?” President Carter’s top advisor gatekeeper, Stuart Eizenstat, is a smart, smooth, fair-minded guy. He emphasizes Carter’s consumer bona fides, which I’m pretty familiar with after the CPA battle.

Now, I’m not immune to the prestige of a White House appointment that at the least provides a clinching answer to my parents’ question: “So, when are you going to get a real job?” But the job might only be for a year, that year being when Carter is running for reelection and trying to not appear anti-business in order to raise campaign funds from elite donors. Given the likely clash between Carter’s needs and my Naderian inclinations, it’s pretty clear which would prevail. I inform a disappointed Peterson and explain to the Washington Star that I declined because my current work “was important and rewarding and because they deserve someone more loyal than I can be to their important energy program.”

The Carter offer, however, does stir something in me. The mix of writing, lecturing, lawyering, and lobbying is nearly the exact job description I would have designed for myself in law school, but might there be something of even more satisfaction and sway? Then, like anyone who works on and around Congress, the idea starts growing—why not in Congress? Can I meld advocacy skills and political office to expand my impact? Can someone do both?

A year later I leave the security of what I know for a high-risk bid for a U.S. House seat in a New York City already bursting with talent. Ralph is surprised, not shocked, yet supportive. While he’s never before endorsed a candidate, he agrees to make an exception under our new rule: if someone works for Ralph ten years or more, thereby forfeiting significant income and a Rolodex of rich business friends, he may try to even the playing field.

There’s subsequently one moment when he inquires if I’d return. At 11 p.m. the night I lose my 1980 general election, he calls to offer political condolences and then raises the prospect of me returning as the head of Public Citizen during what’s likely to be the coming crisis of the Reagan presidency. But I choose to remain and keep my family in New York and see where it leads. Like the Carter decision, I’ve come to a fork in the road and taken it, which of course changes my life. So in 1969 I ditch Lindsay in New York for Nader in Washington . . . and in 1980 stay in New York, nearly ending up in Lindsay’s job two decades later.

1981–2016: Nader on the Road and on the Phone

The nightly phone calls end when I leave, replaced by monthly ones that feel like two college roommates catching up years later. Ralph’s always curious to know what I’m learning and how I’m faring in Gotham politics while I cherish the opportunities to pick his brain. Deni says she can always tell when he’s on the line because my voice shifts to a warmer, more substantive, and deferential register—once a young aide, apparently always one.

The Eighties, however, prove very challenging for Ralph. At a personal level, his adored older brother Shafeek dies around the time that Ralph contracts Bell’s palsy in 1986, which makes his eye and face droop to the point that he wears sunglasses to hide the distortion. Yet he travels to 48 states that fall to stop the insurance industry from restricting tort liability and quips to audiences wondering about his appearance, “Well, you can’t accuse me of speaking out of both sides of my mouth.” Politically, the Powell Memo ripens into a corporate counteroffensive that finds its man in GE’s Ronald Reagan. President Reagan’s anti-consumer, anti-government progeny don’t so much reverse consumer and environmental laws—they’re too popular for that—but instead his administration largely stops enforcing them. Since “government is the problem,” the fortieth head of the American government tells us in his first inaugural address, he appoints people like James Watt to Interior and Anne Gorsuch to the EPA, who obligingly fail at their jobs. The joke in right-wing circles is that the administration’s credo is “Don’t just do something, stand there!”

At the same time, Congress wearies of someone they see as an annoying Old Testament prophet. It was said that the people of Greece turned against Aristedes because he was always called “Aristedes the Just.” In Henrik Ibsen’s play An Enemy of the People, the “enemy” people got mad at was not so much the company that polluted its water supply but the town scold who kept insisting that something be done about it.

The media too, as almost always happens, has moved on—other stories, other players, other issues. News implies new . . . which Nader isn’t. And he knows it. “My approach is not in fashion,” he says dispassionately mid-decade, “but a non-adversarial approach means abdication.” He adds that “The Post and Times don’t pay attention, and therefore the networks don’t pick us up. You’ve got to come at them with a national outcry.”

So he switches gears.

Over the next three-plus decades, he seeks new spheres of influence that don’t require permission slips from powerful interests. He organizes locally, pressures Washington from outside Washington, runs for president, travels to Cuba to confer with Castro, writes more of his own books, creates an American Museum of Tort Law in Winsted, and erupts with a steady lava of letters to power brokers.

Local grassroots organizing and politicking means even more out-of-town lectures and better-targeted issue campaigns. Nader organizer Don Ross, backed up by Ralph when necessary, travels the country for much of the decade starting local PIRGs based on student fees. If tuition automatically includes football equipment, why not lawyers the students hire to work for them? (Twenty-six PIRGs still exist.)

One campaign that works is Prop 103 in California in 1988. When the insurance industry proposes to jack up rates by double digits, a former Raider, Harvey Rosenfield, creates a new organization, Voter Revolt! He invites Ralph to campaign for a referendum that would instead roll back rates by 20 percent and create an elected state insurance commissioner to monitor the industry. Though outspent $70 million to $3 million, 103 prevails 51 percent to 49 percent almost entirely because of Ralph’s saturation-proselytizing around the state. Over time, several billion dollars shift from companies to consumers.

“The competing proposals were very complicated,” reports one glum insurance industry lobbyist afterward, “but people figure that if Nader was for 103, it couldn’t be bad.” Bill Schneider, a well-known CNN and LA Times commentator, provides a political interpretation: “There were a lot of stories that he was old hat in the 1980s. But he resurrected his image at a stroke by winning Proposition 103. The victory came as a big shock to people in Washington who didn’t realize he continued to have that clout. But he managed, rather incredibly, to maintain this image of saintliness, that he is [sic] uncorruptible.”

A similar sentiment is heard from Speaker Jim Wright a year later when Nader leads a nationwide effort that successfully defeats a 50 percent congressional pay raise: “Where did this guy come from? I thought he had his day.” A victory that reduces congressional pay, however, does not endear him to an already resentful Congress. But afterward, one political wag—theatrically getting down on her knees on Connecticut Avenue—told Claybrook, “They may not like you, but they respect you.”

Perhaps the biggest success in this post-1980 era results from his original advocacy, when the Supreme Court rules 9–0 against Reagan’s attempt to block NHTSA’s air-bag rule, allowing the agency to require them by 1989. If there’s one perfect example of “big government” intervening in an imperfect marketplace to save lives, this is probably it.

Not all of his ideas, however, catch on. He advocates with little result the “Audience Network,” where consumers would band together to buy and run low-frequency TV stations. He proposes “Citizen Utility Boards” (or CUBs), where ratepayers would agree to pay a few bucks a month to finance their own lawyers to challenge utilities in rate-making bodies and court; only Illinois and a handful of other states adopt it. Another tactic is charming but fanciful. “I wanted four-person strike forces to parachute in to company towns—including a lawyer, organizer, PR person, and a sage saying ‘you can’t do that’”—as in actually parachuting in to get attention. This Hindenburg, however, never gets off the ground. What happened? I inquire. “My problem is that I’m bolder than the people working under me. I’m not gonna be reined in but I can’t do things like that without these people.”

Speaking of not being reined in, there are of course his four presidential campaigns.

After years of suing Nixon, being disillusioned by Carter, disgusted by Reagan, shunned by Congress and the national media, disappointed later by Clinton and Gore—who refuse to ever meet with him, even on auto safety—Nader begins considering a symbolic presidential run to elevate ignored issues. His usual formulation was that he’d run for elective office only if “there was an invasion from Mars.” So what changed? “There was an invasion from Wall Street . . . and the model of expose and reform wasn’t working because of a kept Congress. Something had to change.”

Enjoying his experience campaigning all over California for Prop 103, in 1992 he allows his name to stay in the New Hampshire primary ballot, campaigns for three weeks largely in favor of legally allowing “NOTA” in future races—establishing a “none of the above” line—and receives 6,311 votes. In 1996, the Green Party gets him on 21 state ballots. He pushes a long agenda of pro-democracy and pro-consumer reforms but seeks no contributions, runs no ads, and spends under $5,000 of his own money. And gets 684,871 votes.

Against the near-unanimous advice of his closest friends and allies, he chooses an all-out run in 2000, campaigning in 50 states and getting on the ballots of nearly all of them. Some former Nader’s Raiders organize a petition to publicly denounce his candidacy, but I’d rather stab myself in the eye than him the back—and refuse to join. But as the ranking elected Democrat then in NYC, I endorse Vice President Al Gore, explaining to my mentor, “If you campaign for Greatest Advocate of the Century, you have my vote. But if the question is who can actually keep the Republicans from continuing to control the Executive Branch, then I’m with Gore.”§

His race has some low points, like never being able to get into the debates. And when he says that Bush and Gore are equally bad (using a too-glib “Bore vs. Gush” formulation), he means that they and both parties are too indebted to big money, not that they are identical on social or foreign policy. But the nuance is lost and damage done among angry Democrats. There are some high notes as well: he raises an unexpected $8 million and pioneers what are called “super-rallies” where thousands pay up to $25 to hear him speak; they culminate in nearly 20,000 at Madison Square Garden (including my admiring son Jonah) who collectively roar when he opens with “Welcome to the politics of joy and justice!” (After one long speech, he pesters an aide, “Did I mention that Pentagon point and my idea on health care?” Aide: “What are you worrying about? They loved it!” Ralph: “You don’t understand at all. You never know what thought or line will connect to someone and change their thinking or their life.”)

Ralph starts at 6 percent in national polls, aims for at least 5 percent of the vote in order to qualify for matching funds in any future presidential campaign, but ends up with 2.7 percent. Worse, of course, Bush wins Florida after a recount by 537 votes while Ralph gets 96,915 there. He becomes even more of a pariah to ranking Democrats. Todd Gitlin says, “I think [his candidacy] borders on the wicked.” James Carville adds, “No one in the history of the world is on a bigger ego trip than Ralph Nader . . . I am going to shun him and any good Democrat should.” Notes Senator Joe Biden, “Ralph Nader is not going to be welcome anywhere near the corridors. He cost us the election. God save me the purists.”

He is now faced with the worst of all possible worlds—most Republicans loathe him because he’s regarded as an anti-business liberal; many Democrats loathe him for electing Bush.

Asked about his blame for Bush in December 2015, he replies: “Apparently I was unusually influential since I made Gore lose his home state of Tennessee, got Florida to design its butterfly ballot, convinced Gov. Jeb Bush to strike thousands of eligible minority names from voter rolls, stopped the recount short of the whole state, and persuaded the Supreme Court to make Bush president.” He also contends that unless the Democratic Party fears progressives, it will always take them for granted and give them lip service. In 2007, Lawrence O’Donnell agrees: “If you want to pull the major party that is closest to the way you’re thinking, you must—you must—show them that you’re capable of not voting for them.”

When asked directly if, knowing what he knows now, he regrets running in 2000, he answers, “If I could do it over, I’d have run all out in 1992 when the field didn’t have a strong favorite. Look at how well even Paul Tsongas did.” Well, did you ever visualize yourself as president and what you’d do? “I did visualize what I’d do in terms of a program, which is to devolve power to people, especially at the state and local level. Unless you do that, you can’t get anything done in Washington.”

For all the exceptional events of 1966 that catapulted him to national prominence, November 2000 sees the nightmare of Bush winning the closest presidential election ever due to an even less plausible combination of events that made the numerical loser the winner. If Gore had lawfully won, Ralph’s candidacy presumably wouldn’t have been held against him ever since and might have even helped resurrect him as the national progressive leader holding President Gore’s feet to the fire.

But “if” and “might” are not arguments—they’re unprovable counterfactuals,¶ maybe someday an Amazon alternate-history series. Especially after 9/11 and the calamity of Iraq, most Democrats automatically accept that Nader is responsible for Bush-Cheney. Period. Making matters worse, Nader again runs in 2004 and 2008. I make my opinion known in a December 2, 2003, handwritten note: “Ralph, I have only two words why I believe it would hurt our values and our country if you run in ’04—‘President Bush.’” I help arrange a meeting between him and nominee John Kerry, whose campaign I’m co-running in New York State. Ralph urges him “to draw sharper distinctions with Bush, like on the very popular minimum wage increase,” but, in Ralph’s later view, “he instead blurred himself. If he had done it, he’d have likely carried Ohio and the White House.” Nader ends up making no discernible difference, garnering less than 1 percent.

My frustration over his choices and my personal quandary of being part-politician/part-Raider, however, leads me to say something foolish and out of character. During the 2004 Republican Convention at Madison Square Garden in July, I happen to see him crossing the street at 34th and 8th. We shout hello, embrace, and I hear myself say out loud, “Ralph, why are you doing this again? You’re risking my children’s lives by possibly helping Bush win reelection.” He looks startled and dismayed, having heard such comments from many adversaries but not often from a protégé. I don’t think I’ve ever regretted saying anything more.

But those saying he ran because of some personal “ego trip” are completely misreading him and looking at an unconventional person through a conventional lens. Taking the long view beyond 2000, his goal was always, like Norman Thomas, to advance a progressive agenda in the hope of its eventual enactment, which is different than getting his picture in the New York Times. I’ve known a lot of prominent people who get the shakes if they’re not getting frequent media validation but none who are as personally modest (if publicly grandiose) as him. Or as he says privately, “I don’t like to toot my own horn.”

After these presidential detours, he returns to more familiar ground—traveling, conferencing, lecturing, writing.

In 2002 he goes to Cuba for 15 hours of conversations with Fidel Castro.

According to his “Sleepless in Havana” strategy, Castro invites Nader and his seven-person group to his offices for three dinners from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. with plenty of fruit, berries, nuts, and wine in between. Oregon lawyer Gregory Kafoury recalls their wide-ranging conversations about history, economics, politics, culture, and whether Cuba can steer a path between capitalism and communism. “It was as if each had spent a lifetime looking to meet someone as grand and brilliant—and found him.” Nader also pitches his specific plan for the United States and Cuba to exchange what each has in abundance—U.S. technology and Cuban doctors, respectively. Castro agrees but the Bush administration nixes it.

Also on the trip, the American advocate meets with a group of some 40 Cuban intellectuals for a wide-ranging conversation about the two countries, with the Cuban group led by Ricardo Alarcon, something of the Revolution’s Hamilton and Franklin, having fought with Fidel and then performed for decades as a resident intellectual, author, economic czar, legislator, diplomat. Nader opens with a question: “Can any society withstand the pressure of corporate, commercial capitalism?” After three hours of conversation, Alarcon says for his group that he believes they can because “we are a society of resistance.” Then on the final day of the trip, El Presidente attends a lecture that Ralph gives at the University of Havana. Nader aide John Richard asks Castro what he thinks of the talk. Castro replies, “And they say that I give long speeches!” For another example, I ask Ralph in 2000 about the length of his acceptance speech that day at the Green Party nominating convention. “Only an hour and a half,” he says, self-mockingly.

He continues to visit cabinet secretaries on a variety of issues, call public interest groups with his ideas of what they should be doing, and bang out a column a week, In the Public Interest, for what is by now a total of over 2,000. He also spends more time in his Winsted family home writing books very different from each other and from those he supervised a decade before.

He publishes five in five years between 2011 and 2015. One is a lyrical, almost poetical paean about the family values of the Naders from Connecticut—The Seventeen Traditions. Then there’s a mammoth work of what he calls “political fiction” and “utopian realism” called Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us. It’s an extended parable with real named billionaires who decide to pool their wealth to change America. He no doubt hopes that the book is predictive but realistically thinks that “these people don’t believe in anything they haven’t thought of themselves.”

Ralph’s especially pleased at his deep dive into original sources to research the history of conservative thought in his 2013 book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State. But he’s displeased three weeks later when he tells me that the Times won’t even be reviewing it.

He now appears so infrequently on national TV, including the cable shows, that when he’s on MSNBC’s Hardball in October 2014, the irrepressibly exuberant host, Chris Matthews (himself a former Nader’s Raider), can’t stop remarking, “Wow, Ralph Nader, It’s really you. You’re really here!” channeling Twain’s famous observation about reports of one’s premature death. Given hosts’ and bookers’ reluctance to reach out to him, he instead tries to reach out directly to citizens via social media, writing a separate column for the Huffington Post, tweeting daily, hosting a weekly radio podcast.

Our freewheeling monthly talks in recent years provide an updated answer to that long-asked question, “What makes him tick?” For I hear someone now in his early 80s who sounds almost exactly like he did in his 30s.

• Infuriating Ralph are “defeatist Democrats,” as he calls them. In a phone conversation in March of 2010, he’s angry and prescient: “Look at how Democrats and the media got rolled in 2002 by Republicans always pushing for more war—like Hearst’s papers and TR before the Spanish-American War . . . We now have the best House chairs in a long time—Waxman, Miller, Markey, Conyers—yet things are worse than ever because they don’t take on the Republicans for the vicious politicians they are. Why not at least list the 100 proposals they’re against that the majority of people are for? Self-defeatism is unseemly when 30 million people can’t afford to put food on the table . . . Their problem is so deep that only psychiatric language can describe it. We have to save the Democratic Party from the Democratic Party.”
• When I tell him that I saw Al Franken burst out crying at his own U.S. Senate fund-raiser as he talked about the plight of Native Americans on reservations in Minnesota, Ralph is impressed. “That’s very good. It shows a level of empathy few have in his position.”
• After the Citizens United decision in January 2010, we speculate about its potential impact. “It won’t last,” he says confidently. “The public will never put up with such an obvious system of political corruption. It’ll eventually be reversed.”
• During the 2012 presidential campaign, he’s itching for Obama to “stand for something beyond being against Bain Capital. He needs a more compelling message to help Democrats in Congress, more of a clash of philosophies. Otherwise, iceberg ahead for Democrats.”
• In recent years, he’s disappointed by how progressive allies “don’t even read each other’s books—we don’t work together or help each other out like the right wing does.” Accordingly, he has a hobby of secretly buying their remaindered books at auction to distribute to libraries and audiences and tweets about their good works to get the word around. He functions as a conveyor belt of progressive intel. About once a month, I still get an envelope with a clip or book from him with a handwritten note or hand-typed letter on his Underwood (replacing his Smith Corona) explaining why I should pay attention to the enclosure. I’m not the only one on his version of e-mail. (He’s not online and doesn’t have a smart phone.) In 2014 he lauds my earlier book, Losing Our Democracy, which he has just re-read. How many people do you know re-read books?
• He’s dismayed and impressed by the modern GOP. “They aim high. Gingrich toppled Wright and Foley but there’s an intensity gap between the Right and Left.” He sees the Republican Party “as about the most radical party in American history. They don’t want a modern economy but want to go back to Andrew Mellon. They want to return to prehistory, like the Taliban. OK, they don’t want to cut off hands but look at what Bork and Bolton want to go back to.”
• We repeatedly disagree about Hillary Clinton, whom he thinks is a “militarist” and “corporatist” while I see her as more a Wellesley boomer than a Wall Street pawn who’s also a brilliant center-left politician who will do no more opportunistic things than FDR and JFK to win. Wouldn’t he vote for her against any Republican? “Well, you don’t have to be morally complicit though.”
• Once I ask him to be introspective about his phenomenal drive. Incredibly, he challenges my premise and then follows with an uncharacteristic, wandering, revealing self-analysis:

I don’t see myself as driven. You’re more driven than I am [sic]. I’ve accomplished less than 1 percent of what I should have. If I were driven, I would have spent the time to get more billionaires to fund our expansion earlier. But really rich people were so demanding for a quid pro quo or their own little hobbyhorse that it turned me off. I said, “Do I really want to get into this quagmire?” As you know, Mark, something happens between pleader and giver. After a while, it affects you. If I went through that trap door and became too subservient, I’d lose my credibility with the public. That’s why I was so fanatical about not living high on the hog—you have to set an example.

“I’m struck by your combination of personal humility along with outsized public ambitions,” I tell him in a final interview for this book. “Isn’t that unusual?”

“Not at all, they go together. If I got all wound up in my own ego then I’d burn out. In order to get big things done, you’ve got to put ego aside and focus on working with whoever you have to. What I really try to do is elevate people. I just visited with Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx and explained that he should imagine that drivers are hanging by a thread from his window and only he can save them—and there’s no better time than now when his boss isn’t running for reelection and there’s all this attention to the scandals of GM and VW. He and his people liked that. Basically, my approach traces back to something that constitutional law professor Paul Freund once said in class. It seemed to go over the head of the students but I’ve never forgotten it: ‘What makes us brothers and sisters is the infinite power of the universe.’”

An hour later, I realize when I’ve heard a version of this lesson about ego and result before. It was in the fall of 2001 when Senator Hillary Clinton reached me in my car between campaign events to offer advice for my general election for mayor. To paraphrase from memory since I took no notes: “Mark, you’ll now obviously be attracting a lot of attention and criticism. You really have to put all that aside, not let it get to you, bother you. Instead, just concentrate on what you need to do that day or week to become mayor.”

Ralph and Hillary are different in many obvious ways. Yet they also both possess a very large bandwidth, wonky earnestness, progressive values at least domestically, implacable public self-confidence, the resolve of a fighter, appear undauntable and unsinkable, are both loved and loathed, and focus on mission over ego. If only they could have an easy meal together about policy. But given their current roles as Mr. Outside and Ms. Inside and Ralph’s instinctive skepticism of powerful politicians, that doesn’t seem likely anytime soon.

• Finally, he lists various new organizations he wants to launch after the fiftieth anniversary of Unsafe in November 2015, including one called The Secretariat composed of a couple hundred former military leaders to speak up on defense cuts and war/peace. “With $200 million, they could have stopped the Iraqi invasion. There are now hundreds of them out of uniform with strong views but no vehicle to express them,” he asserts. “OK,” I respond, “but do you really think you can pull such a group together?” Ralph pauses: “You never know unless you try.”

In other words, there’s no quit in this guy, no acknowledgment, privately or publicly, of any lion-in-winter phase, or any sign that ostracism has dampened his optimism. His pace and imagination appear undiminished. This national icon seems to get as excited about lower-order efforts—a letter to the editor, a debate on C-SPAN—as he did when writing law after law in the late 1960s, enjoying a river of lecture invitations, or packing the Garden. “When I see something wrong,” he says, like a progressive Peter Pan refusing to grow up, “I feel like I’m 19 again.” Speeches in the Sixties and 2016 contain the same signature line: “The only aging is the erosion of ideals.”

An American Original: The Ledger of a Life

Although Nader says his legacy or critics don’t concern him—“What will they do, pull seat belts and airbags out of cars?”—two questions interest me as a friend and author: how could one person do so much, and what’s his place in history?

As for his impact, there are three essential truths.

First, events have largely vindicated his principles. Big corporations have been abusing consumers and citizens—because of purchased politicians and sympathetic corporate judges—throwing off the desired balance between Democracy and Capitalism. His overarching goal of a system of regulated capitalism is one that is vital and widely popular.

Second, he has an unusual combination of skills that have enabled him for decades to recruit adherents, win public support, and be unaffected by odds or obstacles. Of course, he’s a joyful workaholic with unusual stamina. He notes with uncharacteristic pride that he has an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records of having had the most political campaign stops (in different communities) in one day when he engaged in 21 from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m. in Massachusetts in 2000, ending in the revolutionary war town of Sheffield. When Harrison Wellford asks him in March 2015 after a reunion dinner of Raiders what he’s doing later that night, Ralph says, “Going home to edit. I love staying up all night reading a report.” His stamina and resilience owe to a rare mental architecture that shakes off a defeat like a great pitcher who’s just thrown a home run ball. “I don’t get all clutched or nervous if things go wrong,” he tells one journalist. “I have an inner consistency that carries me through.”

When a group of original Nader’s Raiders reminisce about his traits, I ask them if he ever raised his voice or yelled at any of them. None could remember an instance except one time, when Congress Watch failed by one vote in the House to enact an auto safety provision. He was crestfallen, fell silent for a moment, then said to Claybrook, “Well, don’t ever do that again!” When I later ask Ralph if he recalls ever yelling at staff for some costly blunder, he says, “Never. Since any such conversation would not be between two people with an equal relationship that would make me a bully, which would make me sick.” Despite his prominence, he doesn’t so much dictate top-down to subordinates like a standard senator, governor, or CEO but rather embodies the ethic of Albert Schweitzer: “Leadership is example.”

Third, for all his decades of tedious consistency, Ralph is also a bundle of seeming contradictions. He combines personal humility with public hubris and is both of Winsted and the world, grounded in small-town virtues along with obvious intellectual and political sophistication. He’s alternately an accountant and philosopher, fretting small details while advancing big visions. (Alan Morrison once told Ralph he could never be president “because you won’t be able to sign 3 million checks a day.”)

He’s an American radical—as in challenging orthodoxy and getting to the root of problems—who works within the system to change it.

It is rare that one person can make a decisive historical difference, although arguments can be made, most obviously, for Lenin, Hitler, Churchill, Gandhi. Usually, movements make leaders far more often than leaders make movements. It seems likely that the civil rights, women’s, environmental, and gay rights movements in the Sixties would have grown and prevailed eventually because of real grievances even without the inspiration of a King, Steinem, Carson, and Milk, all of whom amplified and organized the voices of dissent. But no Nader, probably no consumer/corporate accountability movement, or at least nothing remotely resembling the groups and laws that sprung from his initiatives.

His failures have been large: the 2000 presidential race, no Consumer Protection Agency, and corporations more politically powerful than ever because of influential adversaries from Lewis Powell to John Roberts to the Koch brothers. It’s hard, however, to think of many private citizens in American history with more public influence on more issues over a longer time than Nader.**

Of course there are individuals with monumental impact in a particular area—no one can match Dr. King for the greatest influence on our greatest social movement. But in terms of range, who? And in terms of his longevity, who? Nader’s breakout moment came exactly 50 years ago. Yet he hasn’t gone away and isn’t likely to anytime soon—his parents lived to be 100.

While there’s still resentment among liberals over 2000 and some of his rhetorical excesses—against Obama and the Clintons, for example—there’s also a consensus about his historic role. Former vice president Walter Mondale said he thinks Nader is “a man without parallel in American history.” Liberal essayist Michael Kinsley, who once worked for him, argues, “No living American is responsible for more concrete improvement in society. Ralph is living proof that there isn’t much difference between a fanatic and a saint. I’ll bet you Mother Teresa is impossible to deal with too.” His four biographers—Gorey, Buckhorn, McCarry, and Martin—regard him, in Ribicoff’s phrase, as “an American original.”

People had high-jumped for millennia, but when Dick Fosbury in the 1960s started jumping head-first rather than the traditional feet-first scissor-kick, “the Fosbury Flop” took the event to, well, new heights. Other originals, paradigm-shapers in their different fields: Hearst, Brandeis, Ford, Lloyd Wright, Houdini, Robinson, Elvis, Brando, Kerouac, Dylan, Salinger, King, Friedan, Baldwin, Ali. We know it when we see it in the arts, sciences, sports, business—that combination, as James Lipton said of Brando, “of talent and technique” that creates something very different.

Nader is very different. There were public advocates before him, of course. But like Fosbury, he dives head-first into high bars. I’m reminded of what tennis great Ille Nastase said of his rival Bjorn Borg in the late 1970s: “We’re playing tennis, he’s playing something else.”

In 2015 I mischievously ask a well-known author on a book tour for his opinion of who, not counting public officials, has had a comparable or greater impact on public affairs over time on such a broad range of problems as Citizen Nader. After no hesitation or self-consciousness, Ralph responds, “Benjamin Franklin. Look what he did, from creating the postal service and volunteer fire departments to starting public libraries and of course his Almanac. Then there are his scientific inventions—did you know that he was a member of the Royal Academy of Science in England?”

Nader’s Tort Museum

A Tort Museum? In Winsted, Connecticut (population now 7,563)?

Even allies became cynics when Nader first mentions the idea in 1998 after he visits plaintiff’s lawyer William Trine in Boulder, Colorado, to look at files in a major litigation Trine had won. “What do trial lawyers do with key exhibits in such cases when they’re over?” Ralph asks. “Well, they either store them in boxes somewhere or throw them out.” Light bulb! He then begins raising money toward his dream of a Tort Museum to advance understanding of what is, in the phrase of historian Eric Foner, “a weapon of the weak.”

“Tort” is French for “wrong.” From the Common Law through the Seventh Amendment’s right to trial by jury, tort law is a system to ensure that victims of wrongful acts or products get compensation. But Nader watches with growing alarm over 30 years as this mechanism of corporate and personal accountability is undermined by a successful corporate campaign to re-translate tort law into “frivolous lawsuits” and the work of “greedy trial lawyers.”

That’s why on a perfect fall day in September 2015, Deni and I drive two hours north to Winsted, down Main Street by Jessie’s Barber Shop and ABC Pizza, to the former Winsted Bank Building that Nader bought in 2012 for $525,000 to house the American Museum of Tort Law. It’s actually the first museum in the world on any aspect of law. At its opening, we join some 500 guests to listen to an illustrious panel of lawyers and public figures and to Patti Smith perform “People Have the Power.” Nader welcomes everyone, including a group of Chinese students in Chinese. (The Princeton Sinologist urges them to “go back to your country and start a system of civil justice there.”) Then, in his usual subdued tone, he explains his mission for the museum:

Tort law protects our freedom and safety. It’s a system of civil justice and direct democracy with checks and balances—a jury of your peers and the right to appeal. Can’t get better than that . . . Tort law broke open how the tobacco industry takes 400,000 lives a year, how asbestos has killed so many in this corporate cover-up—and product defects in automobiles, pharmaceuticals, hospitals. All of these cases generated a message to the owners, the people who control these companies, that it’s cheaper to be safe than unsafe and inflict terrible injuries on innocent people whether they’re customers, workers or just people living in a community. That’s what this museum is all about.

A slavery museum recently opened in Louisiana on a plantation, organized by a trial lawyer whose distant relative had owned the place. In a sense, slavery was the ultimate tort.

Entering the 6,000-square-foot museum, visitors walk past a large quote from Judge Learned Hand: “Thou shalt not ration justice.” Then they see an eye-catching, mint-condition red Corvair, with its (in)famous rear-end engine that made it the centerpiece of Unsafe at Any Speed, as well as the lathe that established strict liability for manufacturers making dangerous products. A short film on the history of product liability, narrated by Phil Donahue, is complemented by colorful illustrations of major moments in tort law, from the thirteenth century through Nader’s successful lawsuit against GM for invasion of privacy. Plans are now under way to build a model courtroom, conduct mock trials on the Internet, take exhibits on the road, and make the museum not merely a destination location but an “educational enterprise” so the law of wrongful injury can stay strong and adapt to new situations (what happens when driverless cars get involved in accidents?).

As for why Winsted, he says, “Why not Winsted? Why should all these things go into the big cities? It was here that workers in manufacturing mills over decades were injured or killed.” As for whether it will help beat back the anti–civil justice assault of big business, sitting in the audience I am brought back to another David-Goliath battle 50 years earlier when people were understandably skeptical about his long-odds crusade for an auto safety law and his attack on General Motors. Now its Corvair is a museum piece—in Nader’s museum.

Notes

* At a 1989 event honoring Ralph, McGovern offers this jesting toast: “I wished we’d gone that route. What a ticket McGovern-Nader would have been! And after my presidency, Ralph would have served another eight. Well, what about 1992?” At least I assume he was jesting.

† I’m furious with my Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties book reviewer Panetta. I call my friend folk singer Harry Chapin, who had promised to do a fund-raising concert for Panetta, and convince him to withdraw. Hanging up the phone, I say to my assistant Dan Becker, “Not usual for a public interest lobbyist to have economic leverage over a member and use it. Better enjoy this because it may not happen again.” Don’t think that it did.

‡ In 1976, Congress Watch came within one vote of breaking the business lobby–supported CPA filibuster, which required 67 Senate votes. One unanticipated, huge side benefit of the five failed cloture votes was the decision of a frustrated Majority leader Robert Byrd to amend the filibuster rules and require only 60 votes to stop a filibuster. The bill’s death therefore gave life to this key Senate reform, which is still the standard.

§ Privately, like many of his friends, I suggest that he adopt the “Ivins Plan,” named for writer Molly Ivins, to urge people vote for Gore in swing states but Ralph in very Red and Blue states. He declines since he’s trying to maximize his vote to reach the 5 percent threshold that generates another round of public funds. Later, critics will claim that he intentionally went into swing states, like Florida, to try to defeat Gore. But independent scholars who have studied his schedule of appearances confirm that he was out to get votes, not defeat Gore.

¶ Another interesting hypothetical—based on Bernie Sanders’s later successes as a Democrat—is what would have happened if he hadn’t promised his father that he’d never join either of the two major parties and had run as a Democrat in either 2000 or 1992. That’s now, however, merely an intriguing chimera.

** It would require a full-length, current biography to chronicle the breadth of his impact: he helped enact a score of major laws, such as the Auto Safety Acts, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, Consumer Product Safety Commission, Freedom of Information Amendments, Clean Water Act, Consumer Credit Disclosure law, Consumer Co-Op Bank, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, Mine Health and Safety Act, Whistleblower Protection Act, Wholesome Meat Act.

He created some 100 separate organizations on particular issues (Pension Rights Center) or in the states (PIRGs); sponsored 125 books and wrote a dozen. Thousands of young advocates have worked either directly for him or in satellite organizations over 50 years, including numerous leaders in public service, journalism, academe, business, and politics, such as: Joan Claybrook, Sidney Wolfe, Alan Morrison, Harrison Wellford, Clarence Ditlow, Gene Karpinski, Peter Bradford, Michael Waldman, Miles Rapoport; Michael Moore, James Fallows, E. J. Dionne, Michael Kinsley, David Ignatius, Chuck Todd, Chris Matthews, Amy Goodman; Robert Fellmeth, Judy Areen, Joel Seligman; Bruce Wasserstein; Ed Cox, Donna Edwards, and Barack Obama (NYPIRG).