1970. Ralph Nader's Crusade for Corporate Responsibility

Nader's Environmental Campaign

"Ralph Nader standing on on an overpass above Interstate 495, a beltway circling Washington, DC, in 1967" (source)

Bill Downs

ABC Washington

May 20, 1970

A New York businessman once told me that when the history of American industry is written it will be recorded that the biggest single mistake ever made by corporate engagement was when General Motors hired a private detective to tail Ralph Nader. More on this in just one moment...

It was back in 1966 when General Motors hired a private eye to case Ralph Nader. That was when Nader was attacking GM's Corvair automobile as a menace on the highways. When the full story of the world's largest corporation's attempt to quash Nader's one-man safety crusade was revealed in Senate hearings, it made the young reformer an American folk hero almost overnight.

Nader did not only rock Detroit's automakers; corporate boards of all other US industries shudder at the mention of his name. For like The Shadow, only Nader knows where he'll strike next.

That is except for this Friday in Detroit when the General Motors corporation holds its annual stockholders meeting.

It seems that over the past couple of years, like many Americans, Ralph Nader generated an interest in ecology—including air pollution. Next to the automobile, which is responsible for some sixty percent of atmospheric poisoning, the manufacturing and power industries are the major polluters.

And being the biggest and richest of all, Nader figured GM, which he already is fighting, would be the ripest target in yet another crusade for corporate responsibility. A group of young Washington lawyers agreed and set up Campaign GM to gather proxies from universities, pension funds, churches, and anywhere else to put pressure on General Motors management.

It is not an effort to bring down the corporation, which they could not do anyway, but to make the giant industry responsive to public demands for safer and cleaner transportation, antipollution manufacturing processes, and to change the direction of US industry generally from strictly a dollar profit machine toward more social goals of improving the quality of life in America.

Nader's Raiders, who already are assembling in Detroit for Friday's stockholder meeting, do not know how many proxies will support them. But they already are claiming victory. The US public is watching, and more importantly General Motors and the auto industry are beginning to listen.

This is Bill Downs in Washington for American Information Reports with another look at man's environment.

1949. Partial Blockade Slows Traffic to Berlin

Traffic Snafu at German Border Crossings

Barbed wire and a watchtower mark the border to the Soviet occupation zone, with a sign that reads "Beyond this point is the Russian zone—Hinter diesem punkt beginnt die Russische zone" (source)

Bill Downs

CBS Berlin

June 30, 1949

Another Berlin traffic snafu this morning has truck traffic from the west snarled in what amounts to a partial blockade of the autobahn connecting this city with the west.

Some eighty trucks, most of them carrying food into the Western sectors of Berlin, have been stopped by the Russians at the autobahn checkpoint just outside the city. The Soviet authorities claim that the truckers do not have the proper documents to proceed into Berlin and dispose of their goods.

The series of stoppages started yesterday when six trucks were halted by the Russians. This action was protested by American officials. But last night and today the truck traffic continues to be stopped. In some cases the food in the trucks has been confiscated in the Soviet sector.

Western authorities are not sure whether this is just another Soviet failure to coordinate its orders to sector guards or whether this is a deliberate Russian policy to further disrupt traffic into the city. The paradoxical thing is that the trucks are allowed through the Russian checkpoint at Helmstedt in the British zone and only are stopped when they reach Berlin.

American officials say that the trucks are halted only after search. Some of the vehicles are allowed through. Others have been escorted around the Western sectors to the Soviet sector in Berlin.

In other words, it appears we have another partial blockade on our hands.

Although the elevated strike ended three days ago, no trains have moved into the city as yet. Soviet authorities promise that rail traffic will get going tomorrow.

Today the anti-Communist union that went back to work on order of the Western military governors is charging that the Russian-controlled rail management already has broken its promise that no reprisals would be taken against the strikers. The independent union charges that 380 strikers were either dismissed when they tried to return to their jobs or told that the only railroad work for them is in the Soviet zone.

American authorities this morning said that no action would be taken on the matter until the union presented formal protests and evidence that the rail directorate has violated its agreement.

This is Bill Downs in Berlin. Now back to CBS in New York.

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Bill Downs

CBS Berlin

July 1, 1949

Well, it has taken a year and one week to do it, but this morning everything is running in Berlin—the elevated, rail freight traffic, barges, and trucks.

And although it is cold and rainy here today, the airlift planes continue to roar ahead as visibility gets better at the three airports which were the end of Berlin's lifeline during the late and unlamented blockade.

Eleven empty trains left Berlin for the west last night, and this morning two fully loaded trains have arrived in the American sector. Over the weekend the unloading will continue, after which railroad traffic will be back to normal by Monday. The Russians explained that yesterday's temporary stoppage of autobahn traffic on the outskirts of Berlin was all a misunderstanding due to new customs employees. The elevated railroad that was struck for more than a month started up at about four o'clock this morning. There have been no incidents involving the former strikers.

Tonight American military trains to Frankfurt and Hamburg will again go on schedule.

It seems strange to say it after all these months of tension, but as of this moment no particular crisis exists in Berlin.

The West Berlin city government is meeting today in an attempt to straighten out its financial affairs. The Russian blockade, which brought about the political split of Berlin, left the anti-Communist part of the city facing a 211 million mark deficit.

Gerhart Eisler, Communism's most famous fugitive, is back in the news today. He is turning up in the Soviet sector of Berlin as "Professor Gerhart Eisler of Leipzig." His new public position is chairman of the committee to free Max Reimann. Reimann is the West German Communist leader from the Ruhr serving a three month British sentence for holding unauthorized political meetings.

Professor Eisler is holding a news conference this afternoon to which American correspondents have been cordially invited.

Thus the fugitive Communist spy appears to be emerging as Moscow's number one mouthpiece in Germany. No one expects him to say anything new.

This is Bill Downs in Berlin. Now back to CBS in New York.

1948. Signs of Economic Difficulty Reported in the Soviet Zone

East Berlin Struggles with Counter-Blockade

Members of the Kasenierte Volkspolizei, predecessor to the National People's Army of the German Democratic Republic, march in a May Day parade at Marx-Engels-Platz in East Berlin, May 1, 1953 (source)

Bill Downs

CBS Berlin

December 18, 1948

A small announcement by the British military government this morning demonstrates better than anything else the status of the Berlin crisis, now and in the weeks to come.

The British announce that next week "Operation Union" will be resumed. "Operation Union" is the project wherein the families of British soldiers are allowed to join them on occupation duty.

No families were allowed into Berlin after the blockade began last June. Announcement that Operation Union will get underway again is another one of those bits of evidence that the Western powers expect Berlin to remain a crisis for a long time to come.

Persistent reports of increased economic difficulties in the Soviet zone of Germany are confirmed in part this morning by accusations that German railroad officials in the Eastern part of Germany have fallen down on the job.

These charges are printed in the leading editorial of the Tägliche Rundschau, official Red Army publication in Berlin and main propaganda organ of the Communist Party. The editorial praises the workers in transportation for coal and crop deliveries and then lists a series of complaints—a lack of tank cars caused curtailment of the chemical industry; failure to move lime halted production there because there was no place to store it. The warehouses of the glass industry are so full that the percentage of breakage is high.

This shows lack of organization, the newspaper charges, adding the hint that managers leave their desks for a while and see how things have been changed since 1945.

American economic authorities say this is further proof of the effectiveness of the counter-blockade. Spare parts and repair depots for the entire German railway system are concentrated in the British zone in the Ruhr.

The American, British, and French military governors have referred to the disputed sections of the occupation statute to their respective governments for settlement. The French object to American and British proposals concerning costs of the occupation to be paid by the Germans and about legal relations with a future German government.

This probably will delay completion of the provisional constitution now in the making by the West German parliamentary council in Bonn.

This is Bill Downs in Berlin. Now back to CBS in New York.

1970. Bill Downs Recalls Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Atomic Bombings

A view of the atomic cloud over Nagasaki from 15 kilometers away in Koyagi-Jima, August 9, 1945 (Photo by Hiromichi Matsuda - source)

Bill Downs

ABC Washington

August 6, 1970

It's hard to remember back a quarter of a century the way things were over Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the first and last atomic bombs ever dropped in anger, possibly because the mind doesn't want to remember.

We flew in low over Nagasaki harbor a few days after the bomb was dropped, and from a distance the city looked normal—but no movement, as if everyone had slept late on Sunday morning. There was a prisoner-of-war stockade, marked with a red cross, isolated on a harbor peninsula, and we circled to drop some cases of cigarettes to the waving British and American POWs below.

Then we headed up the Nagasaki valley to discover that the dark landmass which, through the haze looked like a city, had been a city, all right—but the mist were plumes of smoke that still rose from the embers. It was all embers.

You could measure the bomb's blast by looking at the side of the mountains where there was a precise burn-line; the trees green above the atomic bomb's fire blast, charred matchsticks below. Incongruously the thought popped into my mind that Nagasaki looked like an unemptied ashtray after an all-night poker game.

The same for Hiroshima, only the city had been on a level river estuary and had been larger and more modern than Nagasaki. What had been the city's few reinforced concrete skyscrapers—a half dozen floors high, I think—stood above the flattened ruins like vandalized tombstones, which in a sense they were.

I had come to the Pacific War after reporting the war in Europe. I had flown on bombing missions and tramped through the ruins of a hundred Belgian, French, and German cities.

But those European ruins had been piles of brick and iron and stone. It stuck me in Japan that the atom doesn't even leave any decent rubble after it explodes.

Should we have dropped those two A-bombs twenty-five years ago, I don't know. But I shudder to think what might have happened the past twenty years when not only American generals, but Russian, French, British, and Chinese generals had those nuclear baubles to play with, not knowing for sure what they could do to anyone's Hiroshima or a Nagasaki.

That's World of Commentary. I'm Bill Downs in Washington for the American Entertainment Radio Network, a service of ABC News.