Joan Claybrook
Appearances
Throughline
Ralph Nader, Consumer Crusader (Throwback)
He's six feet four and lanky. But when he sits down… He kind of goes into this mode where you think he's not so tall. He's very shy. Unless you ask him something, he's not going to interrupt you or start the conversation. And Mr. Mackey was a very talkative southerner. And so he talked for about 45 minutes. Just a straight monologue.
Throughline
Ralph Nader, Consumer Crusader (Throwback)
And then he looked at his watch and he said, oh, my goodness, I have to go to a meeting in 15 minutes. Mr. Nader, what should we do?
Throughline
Ralph Nader, Consumer Crusader (Throwback)
And so then he left and I suddenly realized I only had the rooming house phone number. So I ran down the hall and I said, Mr. Nader, is there a better phone number to reach you? And he said, no. So I knew I was going to be calling him at midnight a lot.
Throughline
Ralph Nader, Consumer Crusader (Throwback)
I would be shopping. And he was area of the cookie counter, and he loved sweets. And this woman approached him and said, would he like to come up to her apartment?
Throughline
Ralph Nader, Consumer Crusader (Throwback)
There were just, you know, endless attempts to kind of document that he was, you know, a bad person or he was taking money from somebody to do this.
Throughline
Ralph Nader, Consumer Crusader (Throwback)
And so Senator Rivercroft decided to have a public hearing.
Throughline
Ralph Nader, Consumer Crusader (Throwback)
And he commanded the president of General Motors, whose name was Roach. I love the name, Roach. He told Mr. Roach to come and testify.
Throughline
Ralph Nader, Consumer Crusader (Throwback)
Ralph became suddenly this national figure. Unlike a lot of people who would just be happy to sell some more books, Ralph wanted this law passed. So he then lobbied. And that's what I did every day in Washington, D.C. It was hard for him to lobby because he is shy. He had to push himself to go do that.
Throughline
Ralph Nader, Consumer Crusader (Throwback)
He just called all the time. I mean, he'd love to use the telephone. So he was checking with me all the time. What's going on? Who's doing this? What's happening?
Throughline
Ralph Nader, Consumer Crusader (Throwback)
I was his inside voice, you know, and so I would tell him what was going on. So that's how he kept up with the auto safety stuff, because now he was on to other tracks.
Throughline
Ralph Nader, Consumer Crusader (Throwback)
It was hot. I mean, Ralph would call each one of these staff people every other day, and then he would ask them to write memos on what they'd found, and he would sort of guide them on what to investigate.
Throughline
Ralph Nader, Consumer Crusader (Throwback)
Oh, definitely. I was one of the Raiders. These government agencies weren't doing their job. And we wanted them to do their job. If they had authority to do things and weren't paying any attention to it, which was the case in many cases, we were there to badger them and to push them.
Throughline
Ralph Nader, Consumer Crusader (Throwback)
He blasted me for having betrayed my own personal standards. And so I didn't talk to Ralph for quite some time after that.
Throughline
Ralph Nader, Consumer Crusader (Throwback)
He made it acceptable to criticize big companies.
Throughline
Ralph Nader, Consumer Crusader (Throwback)
I think it's imbued politics in that way that people absolutely do see themselves as consumers.
Throughline
Ralph Nader, Consumer Crusader (Throwback)
My name is Joan Claybrook, C-L-A-Y-B-R-O-O-K.
Throughline
Ralph Nader, Consumer Crusader (Throwback)
He said he wanted me to work on auto safety, which totally dumbfounded me because I didn't know anything about it at all. He gave me Ralph Nader's book, Unsafe at Any Speed, which had just come out a month before.
Throughline
Ralph Nader, Consumer Crusader (Throwback)
My boss had a Corvair, and she had a car crash. Shortly after I got to Washington, she was very badly injured.
Throughline
Ralph Nader, Consumer Crusader (Throwback)
That was easier said than done because no one knew where he lived.
Throughline
Ralph Nader, Consumer Crusader (Throwback)
And I called him, you know, like 20 times in the next week. never answered the phone. And finally, in total anger, one evening at midnight, I called him, and he answered the phone.