Hit & Run - The Rise and Fall? - of Ralph Nader

by Ralph De Toledano

Book Information

Category: Corvair and the Automotive Industry

Publisher: Arlington House, 1975.

Description: A review of Ralph Nader and his consumer movement.

Review / Comments: YEEEEEEEEEEEE-HAHHHHHHHHHHH!

Now THIS is the book that Assassination of the Corvair should have been!

Hit & Run is well-researched, well-presented, erudite, and compelling.  The book makes the case for the Corvair the way it should be made.  For example, the chapter that directly refutes Unsafe At Any Speed is entitled “Untrue by Any Standard”.  Just listen to the first two paragraphs:

“It is part of the Nader myth that he was made by his book Unsafe At Any Speed. This is true only by indirection.  The book would have had a small to moderate sale, impressing those who find businessmen under their beds at night.  By an irony of history, it was General Motors, the major victim of the Nader onslaught which made him.  That the publicity he received and the solicitude in which he bathed were entirely irrelevant to the book or its attack on the Corvair, the GM compact, is an additional irony.

“It took a two-and-one-half year study by Senator Abraham Ribicoff’s Executive Reorganization Subcommittee, millions of words of testimony, an exhaustive review of all the records, and a report running to three hundred and sixty-one columns of small print in the Congressional Record to demonstrate conclusively that Nader’s charges against the Corvair and his indiscriminate smear of reputable people were fraudulent and based on a selective reading of the evidence which, consciously or not, suppressed the pertinent facts.  But by this time, of course, the Corvair — a car its onetime owners still defend — had been destroyed, General Motors had been held up to scorn for ‘deliberately’ producing and ‘unsafe’ car, and Nader — halo firmly cemented to his head — had moved on to matters like the aspirin content of Alka-Seltzer.”

Yowsah.  Can we get this guy to speak at the next CORSA convention?

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