"Who Ya With?"

By Hays Gorey

CITIZEN NADER by CHARLES McCARRY 335 pages. Saturday Review Press.

$7.95.

"I cannot decide," Charles McCarry lamented in mid-manuscript, "whether Ralph Nader is Jesus Christ or the Manchurian Candidate." The pity is that McCarry and others fail to sense that Nader is--and need be--neither.

In this literate, first full-length biography, McCarry dutifully confronts the standard assortment of Nader paradoxes. How explain a man who earns $200,000 a year, but lives on $5,000? Who assails even his former allies if they fall short of his exacting and peevish standards? Who refuses to drive a car, cheer the Redskins, make the cocktail parties, settle in suburbia, come to dinner, or allow visitors into his boardinghouse? But McCarry never comes close to defining his subject, in part because he never understands the consuming and monastic role--as Public Citizen--that Nader has assigned himself.

Nader was abruptly transformed into a national celebrity quite by mischance. After Unsafe at Any Speed, G.M. foolishly set detectives on the trail of its obscure critic. When a Senate subcommittee aired this Goliath v. David melodrama, Nader became a hero of just about everybody who feels oppressed by a formless, corporate "they."

Nader has busily progressed from attacking defective autos (millions of which have been recalled as a direct result of his activities) to denouncing the filth in meat-packing plants, which was still sickeningly pervasive 60 years after Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Nader's list of targets expands steadily: harmful food additives, explosion-prone natural-gas pipelines, radiation emissions from color television sets, unwholesome poultry, polluted water and air, bureaucratic sloth, corporate oligopoly, laborunion corruption, Union Carbide, the Du Fonts of Delaware, California land use, the Bureau of Reclamation. Next, Nader plans to zero in on the lassitude of the Congress of the United States.

Nader is not beyond reproach by any means. A 1970 attack by his Raiders (task forces of college students) on the integrity of Senator Edmund S. Muskie because an air-pollution bill fell short of their idealistic standards, was puerile and misdirected. A subsequent study of New York's First National City Bank exhibited remarkable naivete about economic and financial complexities. Nader's often unbridled hyperbole is cause for legitimate rebuke. He once described the hot dog as the most dangerous unguided missile in the U.S.

In criticizing Nader, though, Mc-Carry complains that Nader criticized the National Traffic Safety Agency after helping establish it--and therefore being bound, McCarry presumes, never to attack it. After his disillusion with Nader's overzealousness, McCarry incongruously follows with a recitation of Nader's underzealousness in supporting the late Joseph A. Yablonski's ill-fated attempt to win control of the corrupt United Mine Workers.

"Conspiracy." Nowhere does McCarry really analyze the old-fashioned but to him somehow revolutionary concept of a Public Citizen as one exclusively devoted not to profit, fame or political power, but to what he takes to be the public good. McCarry, a journalist who served as Henry Cabot Lodge's speechwriter in 1960, is appalled that a corporation, like an individual, should be accused of "negligent homicide." It shocks him that Nader would describe Government officials too complacent to deal effectively with highway safety as part of a "conspiracy." He regards as practically un-American Nader's proposal that industrial polluters and price fixers should receive criminal penalties.

McCarry is good at presenting the early life of a rare child who flowered into a rare man. At age four, Ralph Nader spent his spare time listening, enchanted, to lawyers arguing cases in the Winsted, Conn., courthouse. At 14, he was addicted to daily reading of the Congressional Record, for most adult readers an adequate substitute for chloroform. As an undergraduate at Princeton, Nader was locked into the library so often after hours and on weekends that he was finally given a key of his own. His father, a Lebanese immigrant, ran a restaurant that "was no place to go and eat in peace." As a onetime customer, still rattled by the recollection, remarks, "Mr. Nader would always try to heat everybody up about wrongs and iniquities . . . Mr. Nader would never let anything alone."

But as the youth grows into independent manhood, McCarry, almost like a baffled parent, begins urging that Nader be more worldly and conventional. In near exasperation, he writes: "Nothing can reconcile Nader to the time lag between the expression of his outrage and the obliteration of its cause. He is never satisfied . . ."

When other critics question Nader's authority to investigate corporation ex ecutives or public officeholders, he wea rily responds: "A couple of thousand years ago in Athens, a man could get up in the morning, wander around the city and inquire into matters affecting his well-being and that of his fellow cit izens. No one asked him: 'Who ya with?' " One suspects that Charles McCarry would have. . Hays Gorey

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