Set for Safety

With 200 Congressmen, auto exectives and Administration officials on hand at the White House, President Johnson last week signed into law two auto-safety bills. Also present: Ralph Nader (Unsafe at Any Speed). One bill offers federal financial incentives to the states to develop more effective traffic-safety programs. The other requires the Secretary of Commerce to promulgate, by next Jan. 31, safety standards that will become mandatory for automakers in their 1968 models. It also sets up, within the Commerce Department, a new National Traffic Safety Agency.

To head the safety agency, the President nominated Dr. William Haddon Jr., 40, a career man with the New York State department of health, most recently as director of its chronic-diseases division. For years, Haddon has been interested in auto safety, and he has written several books on the subject. One of them, Accident Research: Methods and Approaches (1964), won a National Safety Council award. Though he has often been critical of Detroit's safety standards, Haddon has nonetheless earned a reputation among automakers of being a fair-minded and reasonable man.

A reasonable man is just what Detroit needs. Long after Nader's book focused national attention on auto safety,* the industry held out against federal legislation, insisted that it could and would impose new and more adequate safety standards upon itself. Only after finding that they were fighting a losing battle did the automakers come around. They now say that they support the legislation that the President signed last week--as long as the Government is willing to be "reasonable" in the standards it sets up.

Sweet Talk & Skill. Even before the measures became law, the auto industry named a representative to talk sweet reasonability to Government officials. Appointed president of the Automobile Manufacturers' Association, at a salary of about $100,000 a year, was Thomas C. Mann, former U.S. Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs. With headquarters in Washington, Mann will work closely with Haddon, serve as the industry's spokesman while the new safety rules are being formulated. The State Department's longtime top expert on Latin America (TIME cover, Jan. 31, 1964), Mann retired last June, has since spent most of his time writing a book about the U.S.'s Latin American policy. He has never before had any association with the auto industry. But the industry has high hopes for him as a skilled diplomat, a man who knows his way around Washington and, not least, a good friend of Fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson.

* Nader's chief target had been G.M.'s Corvair, whose 1960-63 models' rear wheels had a tendency to "tuck under," supposedly causing rolls and skids. Last week in Los Angeles, G.M. for the first time lost a damage suit involving Corvair design; a jury awarded $66,000 in damages to two passengers in a Corvair that in 1960 skidded into a roadside culvert and overturned. Corvair's record in suits of this type is now 1 lost, 3 won, 17 dismissed or settled out of court, and 133 pending.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.