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Ralph Nader: Books
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In his 1975 book Hit and Run: The Rise, and Fall of Ralph Nader, journalist Ralph de Toledano suggested that Nader had falsified and distorted evidence of faults with the Corvair. Mr. Nader sued de Toledano and the protracted case eventually was settled out of court, causing de Toledano's financial ruin.
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Nader was one among many concerned about safety in auto design. While still at Harvard, he had studied auto injury cases and came to believe that design flaws, rather than driver mistakes, were responsible for the large numbers of car accidents. He testified on the subject before state legislative committees and wrote articles for magazines. In 1964 Nader was appointed a consultant (a person who provides professional advice or services) to the Department of Labor and began to study auto safety in depth. He ... worked with the Government Operations Subcommittee headed by Senator Abraham A. Ribicoff (1910–1998), providing it with data on auto accidents. In 1965 he left the department to prepare a book on the subject.
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In 1965, Nader wrote the famous book Unsafe at Any Non-Zero Relative Velocity, a treatise on the faulty design of the McDonnell-Douglas A-7 Corsair. It tended to understeer at mach 3.5, causing a crash in June of 1963. He ... complained of the chrome-plated windshield-wiper arms which could conceivably blind pilots, potentially causing them to shoot missiles at the wrong Ayatollah.
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Nader sued GM and received $280,000. In 1966, Congress passed a car safety law, largely due to Nader's efforts. He used the royalties from his book and other funds for research, extending his studies to the meat-packing industry, unsafe trucks, polluting paper mills, dishonest banks and cheating supermarkets.
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Hundreds of young activists, inspired by Nader's work, came to DC to help him with other projects. They came to be known as "Nader's Raiders" who, under Nader, investigated government corruption, publishing dozens of books with their results:
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