A Youthful Blast

"Do you have any ego problems?" asked Ralph Nader. "Can you interview aggressively?" If the answers satisfied Nader, the consumer crusader who has challenged such industrial giants as the auto industry and the meat packers, the applicant was accepted. He was then authorized to go forth and do unpaid battle with the powerful, the lethargic and the secretive amid Washington's vast bureaucracy. Seven young volunteers, law students and lawyers from Ivy League colleges, spent their summer examining how well the Federal Trade Commission does its job of protecting the customer. Their 185-page report, released last week, mixes verbal assassination with hard-to-fault criticism of the inadequately staffed and over-comatose agency.

Unexpected Support. "Nader's Neophytes" (TIME, Sept. 13), who were given access to the FTC's personnel and records, found the commission riddled with politics and patronage. Employees tend to be unduly compliant with the wishes of individual Congressmen, who are sometimes much less interested in protecting the consumers than in defending the companies back home. The report blamed the agency's shortcomings on its effusive, arm-waving chairman, Paul Rand Dixon, 55, a onetime aide to the late Democratic Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. It called for the chairman to "resign from the agency that he has so degraded and ossified." Among other things, it accused him of "cronyism"--of nearly 500 FTC lawyers, it says, only 40 are Republicans--and until recently of dunning employees to raise funds for the Democratic Party. To ensure staff loyalty, said the report, Dixon ignores "alcoholism, spectacular lassitude and incompetence by the most modest standards." At one point, two team members found an FTC attorney asleep with a newspaper covering his head. "They woke him up," the report said, "and he walked to his desk, where he propped his chin up with his hands. His yearly salary is $22,695." Other office workers across the U.S. may well wonder whether a catnap of this sort is really all that outrageous.

While many of the Nader group's charges were justified, the report's effectiveness was often diminished by overstatement and an intemperate tone. Suggesting an anti-business bias, the report called the dishonesty of companies "far more damaging to contemporary America than all the depredations of street crime." Though anything but objective, the report drew support last week from an unexpected source. The trade journal Advertising Age joined the Nader team in knocking the commission's foot dragging: "No community is well served," it editorialized, "if its fire department habitually reaches the scene after the last spark has been extinguished."

After a meeting last week, Dixon put his arm around the shoulders of an aide and spoke of the time when, he hoped, all the nastiness would subside. That time may be rapidly approaching. As a controversial political appointee, Democrat Dixon is in a vulnerable position with the Republicans' taking the reins.

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