Hit & Run—the Rise—and Fall?—of Ralph Nader, by Ralph de Toledano (Arlington, 160 pp., $7.95). The Raider routine applied neatly to Nader himself provides an easy and gratifying hatchet-job in the familiar Toledano style. The neo-Puritan zealot with his media-hyped image as selflessness incarnate here comes in for a withering examination; what’s left is a sorry mess. Toledano shows how the divine Ralph Nader fudges facts, discards contradictory evidence, fabricates statistics, gets his jollies by bringing low the mighty whatever their virtues, and brooks absolutely no nay-saying from his underpaid, overworked subordinates. Toledano demonstrates quickly and convincingly that even the most celebrated of the Nader Raids—the GM, Volkswagen, Du Pont studies—were shoddy in scholarship, so wildly off the mark as to be virtually worthless, and motivated less by just cause than by fanaticism. The Ribicoff Committee, for instance, absolutely eviscerated Nader’s machete job on the Corvair, the big splash report that established him as a hero to millions of gullible students and others. As usual, Toledano hits even mosquitos with an elephant gun, but, again as usual, he is a skilled researcher and the object of his antagonism evidently deserves it fully. Despite Toledano’s optimistic conclusion, Nader still rides high, but Hit & Run (if the liberals read it) should help to bring him down.
david brudnoy
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