Joan Claybrook.

• Author: CONNIFF, RUTH
• Position: Consumer advocate - Interview

If Ralph Nader is the father of the modern public interest movement, Joan Claybrook is the movement's mother. As president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, Claybrook oversees research, litigation, and lobbying to promote not only consumer protection and product safety but also campaign finance reform, redress of corporate abuses, and citizens' rights.

Claybrook grew up in the 1940s in Baltimore. Her father, a lawyer and city council member, was a strong advocate for public housing, legal services for the poor, and racial integration. Claybrook's first political experience was walking around Baltimore wearing a sandwich board for her dad's campaign. Later, she remembers sitting in his council meetings and watching one of his colleagues sleep through the proceedings. He would set an alarm clock to wake himself up when it was time to go home. "I learned about the good and the bad of the legislative process very early on," she says.

Claybrook graduated from Goucher College in Baltimore in 1959 and became one of a handful of women in her generation to rise to a high-level position in the federal government. After college she worked at the Social Security Administration, preparing reports for President Kennedy's Commission on the Status of Women. In 1965, she was chosen as an American Political Science Association Congressional fellow and went to work on Capitol Hill, where she helped draft the first major piece of auto safety legislation to pass Congress.

Shortly after she arrived in Washington, D.C., Claybrook met "this extremely shy young man," Ralph Nader, who had just written Unsafe at Any Speed, the book that prompted a massive change in consumer protection laws, started the consumer-advocacy movement, and propelled General Motors to send spies after Nader in a desperate effort to discredit him. Claybrook became close friends with Nader, sharing information with him as she worked for Representative James MacKay, Democrat of Georgia, and Senator Walter Mondale, Democrat of Minnesota, to help draft the auto safety law. The new law created the National Traffic Safety Bureau, and Claybrook went to work for that agency in 1966. Somehow, she also found time to attend Georgetown Law School at night. In 1970, she went to work for Nader. She created Public Citizen's lobbying arm, Congress Watch, in 1973, to push for legislation on health, safety, and consumer protection. She left Public Citizen temporarily, from 1977 to 1981, to become the head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration under President Jimmy Carter.

Claybrook co-authored two books, Retreat From Safety: Reagan's Attack on America's Health (Pantheon, 1984) and Freedom From Harm: The Civilizing Influence of Health, Safety, and Environmental Regulations (Public Citizen, 1986). She is also a famously good cook, hosting large dinners for friends and relatives in her home near the National Cathedral in Washington. She has four nephews, whom she has taken on trips all over the world.

I spoke with Claybrook in the nineteenth-century, red brick building in Dupont Circle that Public Citizen owns. We sat in the conference room under a crystal chandelier, sipping coffee and talking about Ralph Nader, the rise of the public interest movement, and Claybrook's continuing war on corporate power, which, she says, "is the greatest threat to our democracy."

Q: When did you know you wanted to become a consumer advocate?

Joan Claybrook: I didn't think I was going to be a consumer advocate until after I met Ralph Nader. I was working for a freshman member of Congress, Jim MacKay of Atlanta, Georgia, whose seat had been created when the one-man-one-vote Supreme Court decision came down in 1962.

He had just read Ralph Nader's book, and he lived in the suburbs, where a lot of kids were killed in car crashes. So he asked me to call Ralph and get him to come down and see us. So I did. And this extremely shy young man walked in. Ralph has a shyness to him anyway, but he was really shy then. Mr. MacKay, who was very talkative and jovial, talked for about forty-five minutes and then looked at his watch and said, "Oh, my goodness! I've got to go to a meeting." So he said, "Well, tell me what you think." Ralph talked for about three minutes, and then he had to leave. I said we'd call him again. And we did, because we wanted to introduce a bill on auto safety.

Q: What happened with the bill?

Claybrook: It was a fascinating, fascinating experience. The auto industry hired an investigator to follow Ralph because they were furious about what he'd done. They looked for dirt. And Ralph discovered that they were doing this, and went to his Senator, Abe Ribicoff of Connecticut, and they blew the whistle on General Motors. They made the president of G.M. come down and apologize in a public hearing attended by 1,000 people. It was in the largest room in the Capitol, the caucus room in the Senate. It was jammed.

So I saw the development of an idea, and then the development of legislation. I learned how to draft the legislation and how to take it through the legislative process from hearings to the law. That's what I've done the rest of my life. I got enthralled by that process.

Q: I hear you've been called the Dragon Lady. What do you think of that?

Claybrook: That name is very old. That name was given to me by the auto industry back in 1966. They said that I appeared to be very reasonable and charming, but in fact I was cutting their heart out behind the scenes.

Q: Did you think it was sexist?

Claybrook: Oh, it was. But on the other hand, when your opponents give you names it's often because they're afraid of you. They think you've done a good job. So I thought it was kind of a compliment, actually. The name came out of the World War II era--the Japanese voices that were used to seduce the soldiers into thinking that the Japanese position was correct. So that's why I was the Dragon Lady.

Q: You were the siren of consumer protection?

Claybrook: [Laughs.] That's right. I think having someone call me the Dragon Lady didn't faze me at all because my family had prepared me, in a way. My father was very involved in politics. On my mother's side--her ancestor had signed the Declaration of Independence.

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