Fear that both labor and capital might withdraw their representatives from the supervisory panels doomed hopes of keeping inflation below 3 percent. “If the President doesn’t want our membership on the Pay Board on our terms, he knows what he can do,” Meany told delegates to an AFL-CIO convention in Miami Beach. Nixon boldly flew to the convention hall to reply: “I know exactly what I can do. And I am going to do it.” Nevertheless, the board capitulated to Meany in the last week of Phase One, announcing full recognition of deferred wage increases and establishment of 5.5 percent as the annual norm for new raises. Even that line wasn’t held; in its first decision under Phase Two the board granted a 15 percent pay boost for coal miners. The price commission was no more effective. It began by approving 7 percent increases in the cost of tinplate manufactured by two steel companies. Within three weeks one-third of the country’s 1,500 largest corporations had applied for endorsement of price hikes, and acceptances surpassed rejections by a ratio of 20 to 1.
In December the stock market plunged again. The board continued its conciliatory treatment of labor, but three months later Meany and two other top union leaders pulled out anyway, accusing the majority of bias. The next day Leonard Woodcock of the UAW also quit. That left only one labor member: Frank E. Fitzsimmons, the Teamsters president. Since Nixon’s Christmas Week pardon of Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamsters had been in the President’s pocket. That clemency had been universally attributed to politics, but few blamed Nixon. Though his standing in the polls had improved somewhat since the lows of summer, it was generally believed that if he was going to be reelected he would need all the help he could get.
Portrait of an American
RALPH NADER
In the Connecticut manufacturing city of Winsted his Lebanese immigrant father was the local populist, a familiar American type. Customers at Nadra Nader’s Highland Sweet Shop, a restaurant and bakery, complained that the proprietor never let them eat in peace. Nadra was always lecturing them about the wrongs, the inequities, the injustices of the system. Like many immigrants, he was a more ardent Democrat than the natives. He went on about the crimes of the Interests and was forever threatening to sue them. In time nearly everyone there tuned him out, with one exception: his youngest son Ralph.
In 1938, at the age of four, Ralph Nader was a tiny spectator when lawyers harangued juries in the local courthouse. At fourteen he became a daily reader of the Congressional Record. He won a scholarship to Princeton, where he refused to wear white bucks or other symbols of sartorial conformity and staged a protest against the spraying of campus trees with DDT. He was locked so often in the university library after hours that he was given a key. Characteristically he responded by denouncing the administration for callous disregard of other students’ legal rights. In 1955 he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, graduated magna cum laude, and admitted to Harvard Law School, which he described as a “high-priced tool factory” turning out servants of power.
His reputation as a puritan grew. He foreswore the reading of novels; they were a waste of time. So were movies; he would limit himself to two a year. He scorned plays, tobacco, alcohol, girls, and parties. At Harvard he also quit driving automobiles, but here his motive was different. He had become interested in auto injury cases, and after some research in car technology at nearby MIT he wrote an article for the Harvard Law Record entitled “American Cars: Designed for Death.”
The problem continued to bother him. Throughout his career he was to be concerned with the protection of the human body—from unsafe natural gas pipelines, food additives, tainted meat, pollution, mining health hazards, herbicides, unwholesome poultry, inadequate nursing homes, and radiation emission from color TVs—but the auto threat was basic. He opened a private law practice in Hartford (which rapidly became a source of free legal advice for the poor) and continued to urge stronger car safety regulations on local governments. Early in 1964 he took his campaign to Washington, where Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan hired him as a fifty-dollar-a-day consultant to the Labor Department.
Working with Connecticut’s Senator Abraham Ribicoff, Nader turned out a two-hundred-page brief calling for auto safety legislation with teeth. A General Motors engineer became the first of his many secret contacts in industry by pointing out the Chevrolet Corvair’s tendency to flip over. In November 1965 Nader’s first book, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile, called the Corvair “one of the nastiest-handling cars ever built” and charged that the industry had taken “four years of the model and 1,124,076 Corvairs before they decided to do something.”
Unsafe at Any Speed, which sold 450,000 copies in cloth and paper, brought its author before a Ribicoff committee on February 10, 1966, as an expert witness on hazardous autos. Three weeks later Nader became a national figure when he accused General Motors of harassing him with private detectives, abusive telephone calls, and women who tried to entice him into compromising situations. A GM operative admitted under oath that he had been instructed by his superiors “to get something somewhere on this guy… get him out of their hair… shut him up.” Nader filed suit for 26 million dollars and collected $280,000. Like his book royalties, the money went to the cause; when the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act was passed that summer the Washington Post declared that “Most of the credit for making possible this important legislation belongs to one man—Ralph Nader… a one-man lobby for the public prevailed over the nation’s most powerful industry.”
Nader set himself up as a watchdog of the National Traffic Safety Agency and then went after the meat packers; the result was the Wholesome Meat Act of 1967. He broadened his attack on exploiters of the consumer to include the Food and Drug Administration, Union Carbide smokestacks, think tanks, unsafe trucks, pulp and paper mills, property taxes, bureaucrats, consumer credit, banks, and supermarkets. One observer said, “Ralph is not a consumer champion. He is just plain against consumption.”
Unlike the muckrakers of the Lincoln Steffens era, Nader acquired a conservative constituency. At a time of anarchy and disorder he believed in working within the system. He was a linear thinker, an advocate of law and industrial order. Stockbrokers contributed to his causes. Miss Porter’s School sent him volunteer workers. He was acquiring lieutenants now—“Nader’s Raiders,” a reporter dubbed them—and they were mostly white upper-middle-class graduates of the best schools, with names like Pullman cars: Lowell Dodge, William Harrison Wellford, Reuben B. Robertson III, and William Howard Taft IV. One of them, Edward F. Cox, became a son-in-law of President Nixon.
He installed them in cubbyhole offices in the National Press Building furnished with secondhand desks, chairs bought at rummage sales, apple crate files, and shelves made from planks and bricks. He worked them a hundred hours a week and paid them poverty-level salaries. Royalties from the books they turned out went into his campaigns. They didn’t complain; he himself was earning $200,000 a year and spending $5,000.
He lived in an $80-a-month furnished room near Dupont Circle, paid $97 a month office rent, and had no secretary. People gave him briefcases; he turned them into files and traveled instead with his papers in a sheaf of manila envelopes. His black shoes were scuffed, the laces broken and knotted. He wore a gray rumpled suit, frayed white shirts, and narrow ties which had been out of style for years. Standing six feet four inches, with wavy black hair and a youthful face, he was compared by Newsweek to a “Jimmy Stewart hero in a Frank Capra movie.” His only unusual expense was his telephone bill. It was enormous. He was paying for calls from all his volunteer spies in industry.
Most of his income came from lecture fees. Each week he received fifty invitations to speak; he accepted 150 a year, charging as much as $2,000. He became known as the most long-winded speaker since Walter Reuther, rarely relinquishing the lectern before an hour and forty-five minutes. There was never any flourish at the end. He would simply stop talking and pivot away. College audiences gave him wild ovations, but he never
turned back to acknowledge them. If asked to autograph a book he would curtly reply, “No.” A friend said, “Ralph is so afraid of being turned into a movie star, of having his private life romanticized, that he has renounced his own private life.”
He was an impossible customer. To a waitress he would say when ordering, “Is the ham sliced for each sandwich? Is that genuine or processed cheese? Do you eat sugar? You do? Let me tell you something—it’s absolutely useless, no food value.” To an airline stewardess he said, “The only thing you should be proud to serve on this whole plane is the little bag of nuts. And you should take the salt off the nuts.” When Allegheny Airlines had the temerity to bump him from a flight on which he had a confirmed reservation, he filed suit and was awarded $50,000 in punitive damages, half for him and half for the consumer group he had been unable to address because of the missed flight.
Asked by Robert F. Kennedy why he was “doing all this,” he answered, “If I were engaged in activities for the prevention of cruelty to animals, nobody would ask me that question.” His ultimate goal, he said, was “nothing less than the qualitative reform of the industrial revolution,” and he refused to be lured from it by any bait. Nicholas von Hoffman and Gore Vidal proposed him for the Presidency. He said, “I’m not interested in public office. The biggest job in this country is citizen action. Politics follows that.”
Yet for all his evangelism, his devotion to the public good, and his monastic life, Nader’s impact on society was questionable. At times he seemed to know it. “We always fail,” he said once. “The whole thing is limiting the degree of failure.” His audiences appeared to regard him as a performer. They applauded him, but it was as though they were applauding an act. Few of them felt compelled to get involved, to follow his example or even his advice. They went right on driving big Detroit cars, eating processed foods, coating themselves with expensive cosmetics and smoking poisonous cigarettes.
In a pensive moment he reflected that “A couple of thousand years ago in Athens, a man could get up in the morning, wander around the city, and inquire into matters affecting his well-being and that of his fellow citizens. No one asked him ‘Who are you with?’” Americans of the 1970s did not inquire about him; they knew. Yet they themselves remained uncommitted. The painful fact—excruciating for him—was that however loud their cheers for Ralph Nader, however often they said that they were for him, in this Augustan age of materialism they were not really with him.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Pride Goeth
THE AGE OF PUBLICITY, as Louis Kronenberger called it, may be said to have begun in the 1920s with flagpole sitting and the ordeal of Floyd Collins, an unlucky youth whose entrapment and eventual death in a Kentucky cave-in was page one news for two weeks in 1925. Ballyhoo became increasingly conspicuous after World War II with the emergence of such exhibitionists as those who took their marriage vows on carnival carrousels, spent their honeymoons in department store windows, bore children under floodlights, and hired halls to celebrate their divorces. “The trouble with us in America,” Kronenberger wrote in 1954, “isn’t that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.” He suggested that next to Marx and Freud, the ideologue with the greatest impact on U.S. lives was Phineas Taylor Barnum.
As American influence spread abroad, so did the Barnum spirit. Among the bizarre stunts overseas which put their perpetrators on front pages in 1972 was a telephoned threat to blow up the luxury liner Queen Elizabeth 2 and the defacing of Michelangelo’s Pietà in St. Peter’s Basilica by an Australian geologist with a twelve-pound hammer, a perverted sense of theater, and the conviction that he was the son of God. They were outrageous, but at least they weren’t homicidal, which was more than could be said for many foreign self-promoters. That year was memorable for what might be called the hoopla of death. Murders committed abroad for their publicity value included those of three NATO electronics experts executed by Turkish leftists, twenty-six travelers in Tel Aviv’s Lod Airport by a squad of Japanese terrorists, eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics by Palestinian Arabs of the Black September ring, and 469 Ulster Catholics and Protestants by Ulster Protestants and Catholics. In addition, Japan’s Yasunari Kawabata, the 1968 Nobel Prize winner in literature, took his own life. He thereby followed the example of Yukio Mishima, a young colleague who had protested western influence in his homeland by committing ritualistic hara-kiri in the good old way, eviscerating himself and submitting to decapitation by his best friend.
Americans had no reason to feel smug about this lengthening roll of dishonor overseas. It was Lee Harvey Oswald of Dallas who had first demonstrated to his countrymen in the 1960s that attention must be paid to a daring murderer, and his example had been followed in the United States by, among others, Sirhan Sirhan, of Los Angeles, Charles Whitman of the Austin bell tower, and Robert Benjamin Smith, who had committed mayhem in the Mesa, Arizona, beauty school. In 1972 they were joined by others with similar motivation. Mobster “Crazy Joe” Gallo was gunned down in New York’s Little Italy. His sister told reporters, “He changed his image, that’s why this happened.” When George Jackson’s two Soledad colleagues were acquitted in the death of a prison guard, Angela Davis managed to transform it into a public relations triumph; “It’s beautiful,” she said. The end of Life magazine on December 29, closing a big publicity artery, was treated by some politicians as a death in the family. The name of four-star Air Force General John D. Lavelle began appearing on reference books after he had been reprimanded and reduced in rank for unauthorized bombing raids in North Vietnam; his name had been in the papers. Most memorable was Arthur Herman Bremer, who gunned down George Wallace in a Laurel, Maryland, shopping center on the eve of the presidential primary there. On the way to jail Bremer asked officers, “How much do you think I’ll get for my memoirs?”
While these malefactions were drearily familiar, some Americans did break new publicity ground that year. Two police cases deserve special recognition because, unlike the Soledad, Gallo, and Wallace incidents, they displayed remarkable imaginative powers on the part of criminals or accusers. The first was the skyjacking of a Southern Airways DC9 jet by pirates who lifted extortion from the realm of the ordinary by threatening to crash the plane into the nuclear research plant at Oak Ridge unless their demands were met. Though the airliner’s tires were shot out by FBI agents, the skyjackers collected two million dollars at the Chattanooga airport and landed in Havana, where, like so many of their predecessors, they were dismayed to find themselves under Cuban arrest and their loot confiscated. The other episode followed a charge by J. Edgar Hoover that peace workers were plotting to kidnap Henry Kissinger and blow up steam pipes beneath Washington, D.C., which carried heat to all federal buildings in the capital. Indicted for conspiracy, six Catholics and a Moslem were tried. The government lost the case, and nine months afterward two of the defendants, Father Philip Berrigan and Sister Elizabeth McAlister, startled their associates at, respectively, the Society of St. Joseph and the Sacred Heart of Mary community, by getting married.
That was thought strange by practitioners of traditional religion, but an even zanier approach to piety was that of the “Jesus people,” also known as the “Jesus freaks” or the “street Christians.” In reality they represented the latest stage in the youth movement, which had evolved from the beats to the hippies and was searching for a new kick. “Jesus, am I ever high on Jesus!” was one of their rallying cries. Three years earlier Theodore Roszak had declared in The Making of a Counter Culture that the movement had clearly defined spiritual aspects. He meant Zen and even odder sects; Christianity was then considered hopelessly square and establishmentarian. Now, however, the cats were wearing crucifixes and Christ T-shirts—“You Have a Lot to Live,” read one, echoing a Pepsi-Cola jingle, “And Jesus Has a Lot to Give.” They established communes called God’s Love, Zion’s Inn, and Soul Inn, attended Jesus rock concerts and Christian nightclubs, and made some parents yearn for the day
s when kids got stoned on old-fashioned marijuana.
As the colleges continued to be almost serene in 1972, peace militants talked about a public relations failure, but administrators of state universities were relieved; taxpayers had been rejecting school bond issues by lopsided votes. President Nixon’s press office claimed that he had “scored points” with his constituents by a colorful turn of phrase; he had said he planned to spend more time at Camp David because “I find that up here on top of a mountain, it is easier for me to get on top of the job.” On November 14 the New York Stock Exchange achieved a breakthrough in good publicity when the Dow Jones industrial average closed at 1006.16, above 1,000 for the first time in history. (It was, though no one knew it then, a good time to sell.) The public image of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis shone more brightly, and that of one of her tormentors more dully, after a federal judge in New York ruled that a freelance photographer named Ronald E. Galella had “relentlessly invaded” Mrs. Onassis’s privacy. In the future, the court ruled, Galella would be required to stay 50 yards from her, 75 yards from her children, and 100 yards from the family’s homes and schools.
These varied events in the Age of Publicity, while noteworthy, were, however, rendered pallid by the accomplishments of two giants of the age. Both were American, both were passionately devoted to advertisements of themselves, and both achieved international recognition in 1972. One was an outlaw, the other merely ill-tempered.
Robert James Fischer, the irascible one, played chess. It is not recorded that he ever did anything else except insult his opponents, fail to make scheduled appearances, alienate his supporters, display greed, break his word, deliver ultimatums, throw temper tantrums, disappear at crucial moments, and become, after a classic tournament with Russia’s Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, Iceland, the winner of the world chess championship. His countrymen agreed that it couldn’t happen to a worse competitor. He stalked off angrily counting a record $156,000 in prize money.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 189
