Word: naderism
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...careless driving. Psychologists agree that driving is a direct extension of the human personality, reflecting tendencies to care, compassion, aggression or even suicide. Lately, however, some polemicists have been trying to place all the blame on the machines, not on the man. Most conspicuous among these is Lawyer Ralph Nader, who gained attention at last week's congressional hearings because G.M. had set private eyes on him after he wrote a book, Unsafe at Any Speed. It is an arresting, though one-sided, lawyer's brief that accuses Detroit of just about everything except starting the Vietnamese...
...target of G.M.'s sleuthing was Ralph Nader, 32, a Harvard Law School graduate who last year authored a book called Unsafe at Any Speed, which devoted a chapter to telling about the dangers of driving a 1960-63 model of Chevrolet's Corvair. Nader charged Corvair with sloppy-and therefore presumably unsafe-engineering in its rear suspension system...
...Life. As of the time that Nader wrote his book, more than 100 lawsuits had been filed against Chevrolet for Corvair's alleged deficiencies (to date, G.M. has won two such suits, lost one, and settled one out of court). Angered by Nader's charges, some General Motors executives decided to counterattack. The corporation retained a Washington law firm, which in turn paid out $6,700 to hire Vincent Gillen, a onetime FBI agent turned private detective with headquarters in Manhattan. Gillen sent his agents a frank letter about what they were supposed to try to accomplish...
Under the pretense of making a routine "pre-employment investigation" of Nader, Gillen and agents made contact with almost 60 of his friends and relatives, dug persistently into his personal affairs. Nader's parents were Lebanese immigrants; the detectives looked for signs of antiSemitism. They questioned why a 32-year-old man with adequate means should still be unmarried. Nader charged, and Gillen denied, that two attempts had been made to put him into compromising positions with lissome girls. Nader said that one girl approached him in a drugstore, invited him for no apparent reason to come...
...Senator Too. Gillen's investigation hit a high point last month after Nader agreed to testify before a Senate subcommittee headed by Connecticut Democrat Abraham Ribicoff, which is investigating traffic safety. For a week before the hearings, G.M.'s gumshoes followed Nader all around Washington, trailed him into the Senate Office Building-from which they were evicted by guards who suspected them of being exactly what they were...