The Politics of Auto Safety

by Elizabeth Brenner Drew

IN MARCH, 1964, Lawrence A. Ernest of Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, wrote to his senator, Gaylord Nelson (D.), to complain about what seemed to him a lack of safety standards for automobile tires. A couple of months later, a young attorney named Ralph Nader was hired as a special consultant to a group in the Labor Department that was studying, among other things, traffic safety. During that same period, late in 1964, Abraham A. Ribicoff, a freshman Democratic senator from Connecticut, had won himself the chairmanship of a minor subcommittee and was looking for a way to make the most of it. The November election landslide foretold early enactment of most of the social-welfare legislation which had for years provided the Democrats with their major issues. And back in Detroit, the giant $25-billion-a-year auto industry nestled comfortably in its corporate cocoon, content in the knowledge that this was the pride of private enterprise, the backbone of the American economy (accounting for nearly one sixth of it), and the only major transportation industry so free of government regulation.

Yes, automobile fatalities were climbing, reaching nearly 50,000 a year, or roughly 1000 a week, and the number of people suffering automobile injuries was nearing 4 million a year. (The comparison with other means of travel: 5 passengers die for every 10 billion miles traveled by train; 13 die for every 10 billion miles traveled in buses; 14 die for every 10 billion miles flown; and 570 die for every 10 billion miles traveled by car.) The response of the industry was typified by a statement of Harry F. Barr’s, vice president for engineering at General Motors, quoted in the January 28, 1965, New York Times: “We aren’t given any credit whatever for our real concern, technically, about the problem,” said Barr. “The driver is most important, we feel. If the drivers do everything they should, there wouldn’t be accidents, would there?”

But Nelson’s constituent’s letter, Nader’s accelerating research into the safety of automobiles, Ribicoff’s forum, the Johnson Administration’s time for new issues converged in 1965. The result, little more than a year later, was a law directing the federal government to set safety standards for all automobiles sold in the United States. The new law, whatever its built-in difficulties — and there are several — is a radical departure from the government’s traditional, respectful, hands-off approach to the automobile industry, an industry which politician and businessman alike had long considered sacrosanct. How did it happen?

Politicians discovered that, beyond the merits of the issue, automobile safety was good politics.

Nobody loves an automobile company. Congressmen were deluged with what one office dubbed its “lemon letters” (“I just bought a new& emdash; and it’s a lemon”). It is a rare car owner who has not had servicing problems. Also, to talk about the importance of safe driving was to produce yawns; to mention that the car itself might be at fault was to arouse new interest. This discovery touched off a political car-safety derby, with politicians jockeying for the position out in front.

Ralph Nader, who had for years been pushing for focus on the role of the car, engaged in a one-man lobbying operation probably unprecedented in legislative history.

As the auto-safety issue developed, it had all the makings of a good news story, complete with good guys and bad guys and horror stories, and the press gave it big play. This, in turn, spurred the politicians on, and it also provided a constant monitor over attempts to weaken the legislation. The widely syndicated columnist Drew Pearson staked himself out as a sentinel against encroachments on a tough bill, and senators, representatives, Nader, and Capitol Hill staff members virtually tripped over one another leaking stories to Pearson about who was mangling the bill now.

Finally, the giant, fearsome, incredibly wealthy automobile industry — and politicians are prepared to stand in awe of industrial giants — when it reluctantly lumbered into the unfamiliar political arena turned out to be a paper hippopotamus.

ADIZZYING array of safety committees, councils, and agencies were already busy urging greater traffic. safety, but they somehow managed virtually to overlook the role of the car. Some thirty-seven private and semi-public groups — including the National Safety Council and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety — all serve on the advisory council of the strangest creature of all, the President’s Committee for Traffic Safety. The President’s committee is staffed by civil servants paid by the federal government, but its director and assistant director are hired and paid by the automobile and insurance industries. The committee has made unabashed use of the prestige of the presidential seal to spread the industry gospel: traffic safety is preserved by careful driving, good car maintenance, vehicle inspection, traffic laws, and bigger and more highways; since a good traffic-safety program is driver-oriented, traffic safety is rightfully the province of state and local governments. The interlocking directorates and mutual dependence of virtually all safety groups on the same sources of revenue — the automobile industry and commercial allies —• produced a remarkably harmonious point of view. (The Administration says it will end industry dominance of the President’s committee.)

Some sixteen government agencies have had a hand —* or finger —• in traffic safety, but most of these programs involved timid inquiries and piddling research grants (several co-sponsored by the automobile industry). Largely through the efforts of one congressman, Kenneth Roberts (D., Alabama), whose dogged efforts from 1956 until his defeat in 1964 attracted little notice, Congress had at least passed laws requiring standards for brake fluid, that all cars be equipped with seat belts, and, in what was to be the opening wedge, that all cars purchased by the federal government meet specified safety standards. The General Services Administration was to set safely standards for the 36,000-odd passenger cars it buys for the government each year — and by extension was to prod the automobile industry into more widespread application of higher safety standards. The GSA bill became law in 1964. In mid-1964 Representative Nelson had introduced a bill to require federal safety standards for tires. By early 1965, Nelson and his staff had become interested in all aspects of automobile safety, and Nelson at that point introduced a second bill to require that the GSA standards be applied to all cars.

In the meantime, Ribicoff and his energetic aide, Jerome Sonosky, had decided to lead off Ribicoff’s career as chairman of the Senate Government Operations Committee’s Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization with an inquiry into (to justify use of the subcommittee) the federal role in automobile safety. Ribicoff had, after all, established himself nationally as “Mr. Safety” by cracking down on speeders while he was governor of Connecticut (even though during that period Connecticut’s number of accidents and injuries went up, as did the injury rate per vehicle miles traveled). The national auto-safety picture had not improved since then, and Ribicoff was aware that new safety research was coming to light. In midFebruary, 1965, therefore, Ribicoff announced hearings aimed at curbing the “fantastic carnage” on the highways. The first round, of bureaucrats reciting their deeds, attracted little notice. Then, after the industry beat off enactment of a Ribicoff proposal to make part of a reduction of automobile excise taxes contingent upon installation of safety devices, Ribicoff introduced a bill to expand federal research into traffic safety and to authorize grants for vehicle inspection and driver-education programs. The top executives of the “Big Four” automobile companies — General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, and American Motors — were invited to appear before his subcommittee.

The segment of the new hearings which electrified the audience, received the most newspaper and TV coverage, and helped put the auto industry on a one-way street to federal regulation was the following exchange between Senator Robert F. Kennedy (D., New York), the latest entrant in the safety derby, and the top officials of General Motors:

Senator Kennedy: What was the profit of General Motors last year?

Mr. Roche [GM president]: I don’t think that has anything to do —

Senator Kennedy: I would like to have that answer if I may. I think I am entitled to know that figure. I think it has been published. You spent $1¼ million,

as I understand it, on this aspect of safety [research outside the company], I would like to know what the profit is.

Mr. Donner [GM board chairman]: The one aspect we are talking about is safety.

Senator Kennedy: What was the profit of General Motors last year?

Mr. Donner: I will have to ask one of my associates.

Senator Kennedy: Could you, please?

Mr. Roche: $1,700 million.

Senator Kennedy: What?

Mr. Donner: About $1 billion, I think.

Senator Kennedy: $1 billion?

Mr. Donner: $1.7 billion.

Senator Kennedy: About $1½ billion?

Mr. Donner: Yes.

Senator Kennedy: Or $1.7 billion. You made $1.7 billion last year?

Air. Donner: That is correct.

Senator Kennedy: And you spent $1 million on this?

Mr. Donner: In this particular facet we are talking about.

Senator Kennedy: Just tell me what you spent on this whole program of safety.

And then the inquiry trailed off into a rambling discussion of proving grounds and test centers.

The executives of the other auto companies, benefiting from GM’s experience, came in primed with facts and figures to display their dedication to safety research, and GM later announced that it had spent $193 million on safety in 1964, but these figures were met with widespread suspicions that the definition of “safety research” had become a very loose one. (“I saw the ‘tilt’ sign light up,” says one federal official.) At this point, in July, Ribicoff adjourned his 1965 hearings.

Senator Warren G. Magnuson (D., Washington), the powerful chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, was annoyed at Ribicoff for horning in on his committee’s territory. If there was to be a safety bill, Magnuson’s committee had the jurisdiction. In late May, in fact, with no great sense of urgency, Magnuson’s committee took up Nelson’s tire bill. When, in the face of common knowledge to the contrary, the automobile industry insisted that new car tires were the safest money could buy, the committee felt it should act. Magnuson, who had been warned by advisers that he had lost “visibility” with the voters back home, told his staff to get ready for final action a revised tire bill in 1966.

Down at the White House, President Johnson was receiving the signals from Capitol Hill. Other Presidents had talked about traffic safety, but hadn’t accomplished much. At last the time seemed ripe. In midsummer, Mr. Johnson told Joseph A. Califano, his Special Assistant in charge of the 1966 legislative program, to work up a transportation program that had in it, among other things, a traffic-safety bill. The White House signal to the Commerce Department to work up a bill was, in turn, good news to a small — very small — group of Young Turks who had been trying from within to push the department into a meaningful role in traffic safety. Their basic problem had been that the Commerce Department’s charter is to promote American business, and this is viewed as incompatible with regulating American business.

The activists had made a partial breakthrough when the department, after considerable infighting, said that it “would not object” to standby, discretionary authority to set tire-safety standards if no industry voluntarism developed. And the safety activists’ position was considerably strengthened by the publication, on November 30, of Ralph Nader’s book, Unsafe At Any Speed.

The publication was a front-page story for the New York Times, and the book shortly received widespread and largely favorable reviews. Subtitled “The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile,” it is a well-written, heavily documented criticism of the automobile industry for emphasis of style over safety, and its “engineering stagnation.” The book’s most important contributions to the growing safety controversy were to turn the gruesome yet familiar fatality and injury statistics into singular personal — and, Nader argued, unnecessary — tragedies, and to enhance public recognition of the key role played by the “second collision.” Nader did much to popularize the concept that automobile injuries and fatalities are caused less by the collision of the car with another car or object than by the resulting collision of the passengers with the car’s interior—the steering wheel, the gear shift, the chrome knobs and fixtures, and so on. Nader’s book collected material on findings that passengers could be much better protected upon impact, and insisted that no matter how many worthy precautions are taken, there will always be an intolerable number of collisions. Nader estimated that $700 of each car’s retail cost proceeded mostly from styling changes, and that most of this should be spent on safety; that some changes would not be more costly, just different. To the industry’s argument that “safety doesn’t sell,” he replied that this was a self-serving, irresponsible canard, which became a self-fulfilled prophecy.

By the time that his book came out, Nader was already deep into the growing congressional attack on auto safety, doing what he could to fan the controversy. And as an interesting, compelling character, he had begun to attract respectful attention; it was less and less tempting to dismiss him as just another kook with a fixation. Nader, a thirty-twoyear-old lawyer from Winsted, Connecticut, is the son of Lebanese immigrants, who went to Princeton and worked his way through Harvard Law School. During his life he had witnessed some terrible results of collisions, including one in which a little girl was virtually decapitated by a glove compartment door that flew open in a fifteen-mile-per-hour crash. As a law student, he began to wonder why the law concentrated almost entirely on the driver and not at all on the car, studied automotive research, and began to write articles. (In some post-law-school traveling, Nader also turned out articles on the economic problems of northeast Brazil, the ombudsman system of Scandinavia, and the future of Ethiopia; he speaks Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and Arabic.) While practicing law in Connecticut, Nader was a part-time advocate of a new approach to traffic safety, and in 1964 he gave up his law practice and moved to Washington to devote full time to his cause close to the center of power. He was a consultant to the Labor Department through the spring of 1965, and then, operating out of his rooming house, cutting his own stencils, living off his savings and his occasional speaking and writing fees, going sixteen, seventeen hours a day and sometimes all night, Nader worked solely for a strong auto-safety bill. Nader is an intense, lanky young man, with a quiet sense of humor and good instincts for timing and drama. “Ralph,” says one Capitol Hill staff man, “is a basically sound fanatic.” Beginning in early 1965, Nader was advising Ribicoff’s staff on areas to study, witnesses to call, and questions to ask. Noting Nelson’s interest in safety, he got in touch with his staff and encouraged Nelson to sponsor a bill authorizing the federal government to build its own prototype of a safe car (this found its way into the final auto-safety law). He made contact with the Young Turks in the Commerce Department and exhorted them and fed them information. And so it went, as all sides, with the strange exception of the automobile industry, prepared for the 1966 showdown.

WHEN President Johnson, in his State of the Union message, mentioned his intention to “propose a Highway Safety Act,” the final shape of the bill was still in dispute within the Administration. Califano and Charles Schultze, the director of the Budget Bureau, favored a bill ordering the Commerce Department to set federal safety standards; John Connor, the Secretary of Commerce, was for simply permitting the Secretary to set the standards after two years if the industry’s voluntary action did not suffice. Connor argued that the threat of federal standards would spur the industry to come up with more effective safety devices on its own, but if the industry knew that regulation was coming, it would sit back. Whatever the merits of this logic, the issue did not seem so important at the time; it was assumed that there would be federal standards at some point, and Connor won. The President’s bill was the strongest car-safety proposal yet before Congress, and it provided focus to the growing argument, crucial backing for federal standards, and the framework for the final product. But during the time that it was being drafted, public interest in safety regulation had grown, and the safety advocates were escalating their demands. When news of the Administration’s approach was leaked in the newspapers, Nader denounced it as a “nolaw law,” and on the day that the bill was forwarded to Capitol Hill, Ribicoff rose on the Senate floor to complain that the bill permitted too much of a time lag before safer cars reached the public and urged that there be interim standards for all cars based on the GSA standards, and that the Secretary be required to set safety standards. When Magnuson opened his Commerce Committee hearings on the Administration bill in mid-March, he announced that he would sponsor amendments requiring that GSA-based standards be applied to all cars by January 31, 1967, and that the Secretary must set additional standards one year later. On March 29, the Senate passed a stiff tire bill by a vote of 79 to 0.

It is difficult to imagine what further warnings Detroit needed in order to grasp the inevitable, yet its reaction betrayed a profound misunderstanding of the climate in Washington. It is not so unusual for a major industry to misread the mood in Congress; yet for one of this size, with such resources, with so many contacts, to misread it so completely is truly impressive. How did it happen?

“One of the serious problems in our industry,” said an official of one of the companies, “is provinciality. The auto industry is a giant, with a fantastic impact on the economy. But the sun rises in Detroit and sets in Dearborn. Besides, our laissezfaire attitude had worked so far.”

As a result, while other large industries established strong trade associations with headquarters in Washington and big names — ex-governors, ex-government officials, ex-congressmen — to preside over them and establish good Washington contacts, the Automobile Manufacturers Association remained a weak, Detroit-based organization. (The AMA is financed according to a formula based on each of the companies’ sales; there are indications that the other companies are not happy with the resultant domination of the group by GM.) GM, Ford, and Chrysler maintain Washington offices, with a staff to nurture government contracts and watch political trends, but, as an industry man put it, “In general, the Washington offices are outposts. The people who man them haven’t spent a lifetime in the corporation, and they aren’t slated for a rise in the corporation. It’s very hard for them to make themselves heard back in Detroit.”

The industry stand on the Administration bill, to be unveiled in testimony before the Magnuson committee, was drafted in Detroit by a committee of vice presidents of each of the Big Four. The essence of their position: we are doing a good job on safety, and we will do even better; leave us alone, loosen the antitrust laws so that we can get together on this, and let the states have a larger role in setting safety standards. The industry proposed a new version of the Vehicle Equipment Safety Compact, an industry-engineered arrangement whereby state officers were to get together to issue car-safety standards for states to consider. The VESC, authorized by Congress in 1958, took four years to set itself up, had no full-time staff members until early 1966, and had issued one safety standard related to cars, a standard in 1965 on tires just as a tire bill appeared imminent. By the time that the Washington representatives saw the industry proposal, it was, one put it, “pretty set in concrete.” Warnings that it would be laughed out of the hearing room produced a slight toning down of the testimony’s righteous adamancy, but no basic change. The warnings were prophetic. “I say, ‘Ha-ha,’ ” Maurine Neuberger (D., Oregon) told John Bugas, a vice president of Ford, after he had presented the testimony. Not a single committee member, including the Republicans, took up the position of the automobile industry. After public ridicule of the idea by more members of Congress, and a private Dutch-uncle session between the industry and Senator Philip A. Hart, a Michigan Democrat, Detroit executives were convinced that they had crashed into a brick wall.

But as the industry proceeded to devise new proposals, land mines exploded all about. Shortly after the President’s State of the Union address, but before the Administration bill was submitted, Ribicoff had reopened his auto-safety hearings, and Ralph Nader made his debut as a congressional witness. In early March, there appeared news stories that Nader was being followed, that detectives were going about the country asking his relatives and friends about his habits, his sex life, his politics, and his attitude toward Jews.

On March 9, just before midnight, GM issued a release saying that it had “initiated a routine investigation ... to determine whether Ralph Nader was acting on behalf of litigants or their attorneys in Corvair design cases pending against General Motors.” Nader’s book had been highly critical of the safety of the Corvair, and there had been over 100 damage suits filed against GM because of deaths and injuries from Corvair accidents.

Following GM’s announcement, Ribicoff opened a hearing on the question of whether there had been “harassment” of a witness before his subcommittee. Before a fully packed hearing room and whirring TV cameras, GM president James M. Roche apologized to Ralph Nader. Roche also said that he had known nothing of the investigation, but he held himself “fully responsible”; the senators rushed to congratulate Roche for his “forthright statement.” In questioning GM’s general counsel, however, and the head of the private detective agency which GM hired (through a go-between), the senators brought out that this “routine” inquiry had indeed gone far beyond Nader’s possible Corvair activities. Detective Vincent Gillen’s instructions to his operatives were: “Our job is to check his life, and current activities to determine ‘what makes him tick,’ such as his real interest in safety, his supporters, if any, his politics, his marital status, his friends, his women, boys, etc., drinking, dope, jobs — in fact all facets of his life. This may entail surveillance . . .”

Nader testified that he did not represent clients or act in behalf of their attorneys in the Corvair litigation; that he would freely supply information to people involved in Corvair cases, as he would to anyone who was interested; that once he had been paid $475 for help on an appellate brief in which claimants against Chevrolet had won $225,000 (“You need a manager,” remarked Robert Kennedy); and that “General Motors executives continue to be blinded by their own corporate mirror-image that ‘it’s the buck that moves the man.’ ” “I am responsible for my actions,” Nader said, “but who is responsible for those of General Motors?”

The hearings were a sensation, and did as much as anything to bring on federal safety standards. “It was that Nader thing,” said one senator whom I asked how it had all come about. “Everybody was so outraged that a great corporation was out to clobber a guy because he wrote critically about them. At that point, everybody said the hell with them.” “When they started looking in Ralph’s bedroom,” said another Hill man, “we all figured they must really be nervous. We began to believe that Nader must be right.”

In the summer of 1965, Nader had advised Ribicoff’s staff to publicize the fact that, unbeknown to the public, many new cars were sold with defects, some of them serious safety hazards. If the defects were discovered, the responsibility for recalling the cars and repairing them was left largely with the dealers, who, as Nader was to say later, “were suddenly called ‘independent businessmen.’ ” On the day that the industry testified before Magnuson’s committee, Ribicoff wired the manufacturers for a complete list of product-defect warnings issued since 1960. A few weeks later, Ribicoff announced that there had been a total of 426 recall campaigns by the Big Four, involving over 8 million cars, or almost one out of every five manufactured, mostly for brakes, suspensions, or steering systems. The industry did not have figures on how many cars out of this 8 million actually had defects, how many of the defects were safety-related, or how many defective cars were never repaired. The widespread publication of the defects list, indicating less than superb quality control and a disturbing degree of casualness about whether the customer found out, left another gaping hole in the industry’s fenders.

THEindustry outlined its new stance to the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee, but saved the details for the Senate group, which had completed its hearings. The industry now accepted the concept of federal safety-performance standards, “if the bill is amended to emphasize the importance of bringing both the states and the automotive industry into the standardmaking process and to provide appropriate guidelines and procedures.” No more argument about whether there would be federal standards; the game now was to fight it out over when and how. The new stance was the product of some excellent advice: get this issue off the front pages, bow to the inevitable of federal regulation, and light instead to make it as bearable as possible; to do otherwise is to risk a nasty showdown, a tougher bill, and stronger regulation. The advice had come from several quarters, including some Washington representatives and Lloyd Cutler, a Washington attorney who was now to quarterback the industry’s final plays. Cutler, of the Washington firm of Wilmer, Cutler, and Pickering, had been working for the industry all along on antitrust problems, and had a reputation for effectiveness in presenting industry’s viewpoints to Congress (he had represented the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association during the great drug regulation battle in 1962). In mid-April, Cutler registered as a lobbyist for the Automobile Manufacturers Association and went to work. Graying, dapper, and low-keyed, Cutler approaches this work with a lawyerlike eye for precision and detail, coupled with a patient, disarming reasonableness. “I could say, ‘No, Lloyd, we can’t accept this,’ ” said someone who worked with him on the bill, “and he would always say, ‘All right, how about this?’ And he’d come back with alternative after alternative until he’d finally hit one we could take. He’d never argue.” “It was a tougher game after Cutler got into it,” said one of the bill’s advocates.

The Senate committee’s hearings, thanks in great part to technical advice given by Nader to the committee’s staff, and questions fed by Nader to various members of the committee, had resulted in a case for federal regulation of the auto industry. The committee had become educated about the second collision. After some stumbling by the Commerce Department, the White House got in line for mandatory standards.

The committee was now ready to “mark up” (amend) the bill. The job of sorting out the various proposals and putting together a new package that the committee might approve fell to two bright staff members, Gerald Grinstein and Michael Pertschuk. Besides the Administration bill and several senators’ amendments, there were nine amendments proposed by Nader and incorporated in amendments introduced by Senator Vance Hartke (D., Indiana), and six major — and several minor — changes sought by Cutler. Nader wanted inclusion of such things as safety of nonoperating devices (safety stops on car doors, hoods, to keep them from crushing hands); publication of the technical basis for the new standards; government funding of a prototype car (to enhance the knowledge of safety engineering outside the industry); stronger enforcement powers, including investigatory ones, for the administering agency; criminal as well as civil penalties for violation of the standards (since drivers arE subjected to criminal penalties); and others. Cutler sought requirements that the cost-benefit ratio of required safety features must be considered, that they must be within existing technical capacities, that they must be appropriate to the type of the vehicle, that the time allowed for industry to comply with new standards must allow for the industry’s “lead time” for making the changes, that the VESC should play a major role in the setting of the new standards, that more burdens of proof should be on the government in any court challenge, and that there should be some protection from antitrust prosecution for joint development of new safety devices. “Some of Cutler’s amendments represented legitimate problems for the industry, and some of them were cute,” said one observer. In some cases they were both. For example, the Secretary of Commerce would not be about to order the industry to install a safety device which could not be made; yet to write into the legislation that he should not do so would burden the Secretary with the proof that a proposed device could be made, create more arguments, more delays, and more grounds for legal challenges that could postpone the setting of standards for years. When, on the other hand, the industry had a seemingly legitimate problem with the language of the bill, to concede the point was to risk a scathing by other members of Congress and Drew Pearson.

To convince as many committee members as possible of the reasonableness of their position, the industry’s Washington representatives divided up the members according to who knew which one best, which company had plant facilities in the member’s home area, and so on. The representatives, together with Cutler and his law partner, John Pickering, visited the members and talked out their proposals. Roche and Henry Ford II paid visits of state on many congressmen. Yet the industry had very thin troops. A united front by the industry, its dealers, its suppliers, and its employees would, of course, confront Congress with impressive power. But such a coalition never came off. The dealers, the suppliers, and the employees have their own problems with the companies, and the dealers’ and suppliers’ main concern with the bill was to see that their own interests were protected (who would be liable for product defects? would dealers be reimbursed for seizure of defective cars?). The dealers, because of their widespread base, are, of all these groups, the most powerful before Congress, and there is evidence that the National Automobile Dealers Association did help the industry out by itself backing an amendment or two that the industry wanted. But for the most part, the industry was on its own, with only one state’s representatives deeply interested in its problems. “That left us,” said one industry man, “with emphasizing the potential damaging economic impact of the proposals; that was our only real political muscle.”

So ingeniously did Grinstein and Pertsehuck, together with Califano, weave their way through the various amendments that they came up with a bill substantially in the form which the committee could approve unanimously, Nader could pronounce “a significant step forward,” and the industry could find not too displeasing. The committee staff had little time to produce a report on the bill. The scene was a Mack Sennett farce, with Cutler sitting in one anteroom and Nader in another, and the staff racing among the various rooms, double-checking with the protagonists to prevent last-minute blowups, well into the evening.

Toward the end, the only remaining issue was whether the industry chiefs would be subject to criminal as well as civil penalties for flouting the federal standards. So hard did the companies work to persuade the lawmakers that to vote for criminal penalties was to cast aspersions on the personal integrity of the industry leaders, and so many senators were convinced that they had already exacted their pound of flesh, that criminal penalties were defeated in the committee, and a floor move to restore them was rejected 14 to 62. The Senate then passed the bill by a vote of 76 to 0.

IF THERE was anything that annoyed the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, it was the widespread, spoken and printed, assumptions that it would “gut” the Senate bill, 1 he assumption was reasonable enough: the House group had traditionally been more sympathetic to industry’s claims than its Senate counterpart. But now it was annoyed and embarrassed by these public charges, and tired — as most House members eventually become—of being treated by the Senate as “junior partners.” Furthermore, the committee had a new chairman, Harley O. Staggers (D., West Virginia), who was much less industry-oriented than his predecessor, and the auto-safety bill provided his first day in the sun. Staggers was, moreover, stung by a rather condescending letter from Magnuson explaining the importance of a strong tire-safety bill. And so the House Committee, of all things, joined the derby and set out to “strengthen” the Senate bill.

Out of pride the committee refused to start with the Senate bill. Thus Nader and the industry began all over to press their amendments via friendly congressmen. The House Committee staff did not have authority to draw up a bill, and Staggers was not yet in firm control of his group. After six weeks, the House group came up with a bill which in some ways strengthened the Senate bill, in some ways weakened it, and in some ways just made it different.

On the House floor, the committee itself proposed amendments to meet newspaper criticism and to head off still stronger proposals. After these were accepted and — through hard work by the industry

— criminal penalties were rejected 15 to 120, the House passed a combined tireand auto-safety bill by a rare unanimous vote. The House and Senate committees ironed out the remaining differences, and the final bill was cleared by both chambers for the President’s signature.

By January 31, 1967, the Secretary of Commerce — or, when a Transportation Department has been established, the Secretary of Transportation — will order that all new cars must meet the safety standards similar to those already issued by the GSA for government-purchased cars. Most of these changes are not very dramatic: some, such as outside rearview mirrors, are items which formerly were “optionals” for the buyer; some, such as padded dashboards, seat belts, collapsible steering columns, safety glass, dual brakes, windshield washers, are features which companies already had in effect, or say they had already planned to put into effect, for all cars. Some, such as relocated knobs, head supports for front-seat passengers, padding for seat backs, rear window defoggers, and stronger fuel tanks, should be decided improvements. All of these are expected to be in the 1968 cars. By January 31, 1968, the Secretary will issue additional safety standards, which, barring delays, are to appear in the 1969 models. The new standards must be reviewed and may be revised periodically.

The real question of how effective the new law will be lies in how knowledgeable, forceful, and independent its administrators will be. The safety proponents who had a hand in drafting the bill have tried to guard against a repeat of the GSA experience, where a meager staff was virtually at the mercy of the industry for its technical information. There is reason to think twice about the industry’s claims that the GSA standards do not represent anything that the industry was not going to do anyway.

Despite the hassles over enforcement procedures and criminal penalties, it is unlikely that a company will flout the government’s orders and thereby take a chance of public disclosure that such-and-such a model does not meet federal safety standards; the damage to sales would be too great. Therefore, the struggles will come over the setting of standards. The act gives the administrators complete discretion on the extent of the new safety requirements: they could demand only a single change in windshield wipers, or they could ban convertibles and small cars. Congress provided sufficient money for the administering agency to hire a large number of experts — but there aren’t many experts to be found as yet outside the automobile companies. New York State, which contracted for a prototype safe car, turned to the aerospace industry for safety innovations for automobiles, and it is likely that the federal government will too. “And,” one observer pointed out, “Ralph Nader won’t always be sitting in the anterooms.”

While the industry, too, is still adjusting to the new day, the outcome isn’t all bad from its point of view. “Sure we would have been happier with no bill,” said one industry spokesman, “but that was impossible. And we can get some good from this. New York and California were getting into safety, and what they would have demanded probably would have been worse than what the Federal Government, after listening to all sides, will come up with. [The states are now pre-empted from demanding stronger safety standards.] In addition, this law will help us with our product liability problems, and it will restore public confidence in our products.”