He was being seriously considered for a position as a staff member on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, which required a routine background check conducted by the FBI (which collects raw data on individuals but does not seek to confirm it). While waiting to hear about the job, Jacobs was told that questions had been raised about his character, honesty and trustworthiness. He subsequently learned that the source of the innuendoes was Nader. According to Jacobs' son Nick, to find out why he was denied a security clearance, Jacobs asked for and received a list of the people the FBI had interviewed and what they had said. He told the agency the accusations were untrue.

Nick says he has repeatedly asked the FBI for access to his father's FBI file, but although the agency has said the file is OK to release, he has so far not received it.

On Aug. 7, 1975, Jacobs wrote his former friend a letter expressing his distress: "I thought that we had settled after our long talk in April ... If I misunderstood you that day, it was surely the most costly misunderstanding in the 24 years I've known you. I was prepared to let you go your way in the hope that you would let me go mine and I was feeling very kindly disposed to you. That was until I learned of your statement to the FBI. The impact of that statement was as if I had been kicked in the stomach ... We must have some sort of resolution to undo the damage done by your statements. As the record now stands, it will be an impediment for the rest of my life."

It may be hard now to fathom just how credible and influential Nader was at the time. He had taken on General Motors and won, launched a new movement on behalf of consumers and recruited earnest young Raiders to work for organizations founded solely on his credibility. By 1975, Nader was regarded as an exemplar of righteousness, the ultimate advocate of the ordinary citizen. For someone of his stature to impugn the reputation of a former employee to the FBI was devastating.

According to a statement Jacobs wrote after he was dismissed, Nader told the FBI that Jacobs was fired for skimming money from the Center for the Study of Responsive Law and other irregularities. In the affidavit that Jacobs drafted in the hope of clearing his name with the FBI, he wrote: "I was the only person Mr. Nader trusted with his extensive and complicated financial dealings ... I regularly signed his name to leases, correspondence, contracts, tax returns, reports to government agencies and bank and stock brokerage accounts. Mr. Nader was aware of the fact that I regularly signed his name to these documents and would often specifically request we do so because he did not want his real signature widely known. ... The fact is that I did sign the checks which were in accord with regular practice of payment of legitimate office expenses."

In the affidavit, Jacobs indicated that the reason he decided to leave Nader's employ was his growing concern about the way Nader handled his personal and professional finances. Jacobs outlined in some detail what he characterized as questionable practices regarding taxes, bookkeeping, investments and stock transactions. He wrote, "Although Mr. Nader was earning approximately $500,000 per year in personal income, he paid little or no taxes since he deducted various expenses of his operations as 'business expenses' or he made contributions to 'charitable organizations' controlled by him." Jacobs continued, "He also engaged in what I viewed to be questionable end of year tax juggling, often pre-dating or post-dating checks to get a deduction in a particular year. He would often pad travel expenses and double-bill for travel expenses when he had two engagements in a particular out-of-town city."

The former associate also charged that Nader's nonprofit enterprises were run with very little oversight by their boards: "No independent outside audits were made of any of the Nader organizations until various states required Public Citizen statements."

Jacobs also wrote in the affidavit that Nader was "inordinately harsh in his dealings with his employees and others. Although he had amassed a reserve of over $2 million in various foundations, organizations and in his personal brokerage account, he paid extremely low wages and often refused to pay employees and others for work done."

Jacobs never filed his affidavit with the FBI, but some of the allegations it contains were confirmed by two former associates of Nader's on the Congress Project, an ambitious Nader-sponsored undertaking to investigate every single member of Congress up for reelection in 1972. Attempts to verify information about other people mentioned in the affidavit were unsuccessful because they could not be found or were unwilling to comment about events that occurred 30 years ago.

"The bottom line is, my husband knew everything," says Lenore Jacobs about her late husband. "When he died, everything died with him. Every file or notes that he had, Ralph took and would not return. There's no corroborating it because my husband's dead. It was a horrific time in our lives, not to put too fine a point on it."

Recent Stories