Cool Carol and the Dragon Lady

It seems hard to believe, but a Ralph Nader lieutenant now bears the chief responsibility for U.S. auto safety as head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. As if that were not enough, the consumerist who once sued the Agriculture Department over its beef grading and food-stamp rules is now Assistant Agriculture Secretary for Food and Consumer Services, overseeing the same grading of meat and food-stamp programs.

These two regulators, Joan Claybrook, 41, and Carol Foreman, 40, were among Washington's most feared and revered consumer interest lobbyists when they, along with other activists of the 1960s and 1970s, accepted sub-Cabinet positions in the Carter Administration almost two years ago. Now both are in the news: Claybrook for engineering the recall of 7.5 million Firestone "500" radial tires, and Foreman for ordering cutbacks of nitrites in bacon because they are suspected of being carcinogens.

Claybrook's appointment to NHTSA was greeted with cries of "Astounding!" and "Appalling!" from automakers in Detroit, where she was known as the "Dragon Lady." Her past days as a lower-level Government aide and then as Nader's chief lobbyist and director of his Congress Watch had shown her to be extremely zealous on auto safety. Foreman, who headed the Consumer Federation of America, provoked outcries from farm commodity producers when she became Assistant Agriculture Secretary. Each woman continues to be criticized, but now by Nader as well. He has charged that Claybrook is "a disaster" and that Foreman has "sold out" to the food industry. In interviews with TIME Washington Correspondent Eileen Shields, both women denied the roundhouse charges but add ed that they have to take more balanced views as regulators than as shake-'em-up activists.

Claybrook, a Baltimore-bred divorcee who delights in being called feisty, is proud of the record 12.9 million auto-safety recalls that her agency originated in 1977 and the 8.9 million so far this year. After long and bitter negotiations, she got Firestone to give in to the recall of 7.5 million of its "500" radial tires, which had a high level of defects. She says she expects the company to agree further this week to proceed with the recall "as expeditiously as possible," to produce an extra 400,000 replacement tires a month, and to run TV ads telling customers that a recall is under way.

Not all of her battles have ended in victory. She tried and failed to persuade her boss, Transportation Secretary Brock Adams, to make air bags mandatory in all new cars beginning in 1981 but had to settle for a 1982 to 1984 deadline. Claybrook later lost out even more embarrassingly in her attempt to tighten braking standards for tractor-trailers. She was testifying before a congressional committee on her opinion even as Adams was disagreeing with her at a press conference.

Automen do not fault Claybrook's intelligence, but they complain that her agency shoots from the hip and uses the media to publicize charges that are not retracted with the same fanfare when proved incorrect. They criticize NHTSA for yielding to pressure groups, for failing to measure costs against benefits, and for lacking enough competent staffers. Undaunted, Claybrook aims next to get the automakers to improve seat belts and to scrap their spearlike hood ornaments, which she considers dangerous.

Carol Foreman also thrives on controversy and, like Claybrook, works twelve hours a day. She is aggressive and serious, as could be expected of a woman who once lobbied for Planned Parenthood while in a visibly advanced stage of pregnancy. The mother of two children, Foreman is married to a vice president of the retail clerks union. She looks more like an editor of a fashion magazine than a tough Government regulator, and she strikes visitors as calm and relaxed. Soft, gentle music plays in her office because, she says, "it calms the wild beasts who are in here all the time."

Today Foreman manages a staff of 13,000 and a staggering budget of $9 billion, which is largely spent on nutritional and food-stamp programs. Foreman has control of drafting specifications for almost all federal food purchases, including those of the Pentagon and the Veterans Administration. She has taken steps to reduce the sugar, salt and fat content of school breakfasts and lunches; proposed a regulation that would remove Super Donuts and other fortified pastries from school breakfast programs; successfully lobbied for a law banning junk food in school vending machines; helped to persuade Congress to drop requirements that food-stamp recipients pay some cash, thereby making the stamps available to 1.5 million more people.

The Agriculture Department, Foreman argues, used to cater solely to the interests of food processors and big farmers, and her goal is to make it "the people's department" that Abraham Lincoln had envisioned. The processors and many farmers complain that she is hurting agriculture, in part because she is calling for severe restrictions on food additives and for more detailed product labeling. Nebraska Republican Congresswoman Virginia Smith, expressing a view common in the farm belt, protested: "Carol Tucker Foreman, one of agriculture's biggest enemies, is at work right now discrediting the meat industry and causing the public to lose confidence in American farm products." The meat industry has sued to block her order that nitrite levels in bacon must be sharply reduced, from 150 parts per million now to 40 parts per million next year. Still, Nader found the order too weak and roasted her for caving in to the food industry.

Foreman laughs off the criticism and is happy that she enjoys the confidence of Agriculture Secretary Bob Bergland as well as of her friend Joan Claybrook. On Foreman's 40th birthday Claybrook gave her a gift: a spiky cactus plant. It was festooned like a Christmas tree, with candy, chewing gum and junk food that Foreman had just proposed banning from sale during school lunch hours. Today only a few of the trimmings remain on the tree. The rest, reports Foreman, have been eaten by her sugar-loving staff.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.