THE intense, dark-haired man visiting the office of Walter B. Wriston, chairman of the First National City Bank of New York, crisply announced that he was interested in looking into several of the bank's activities. Consumer credit, for example. The visitor suggested that "Citibank's" credit standards might be so restrictive that many black applicants are automatically ineligible for loans. On the other hand, he added, the standards might well be too loose, thereby encouraging people to go dangerously into debt. Wriston, who is rarely without a sense of humor, piped up wryly: "Do I have a third choice?" The visitor did not smile back. He was Ralph Nader.
That was how Wriston, head of the nation's second largest bank, learned a year ago that he was about to join a growing list of corporate and public executives in a bracing experience: being "Naderized" by the nation's leading consumer activist. Nader arranged the visit to declare that Citibank had been chosen as the target of one of his encyclopedic studies. He wanted Wriston to open up to 16 young Raiders, mostly first-year law-school students, who would conduct the probe. Citibank's chief agreed to cooperate. To colleagues who worried about the project, Wriston cheerfully remarked: "We're getting a free management survey."
The first part of a two-part study was published last week, and TIME Correspondent John Tompkins interviewed Citibank officials about their experience with Nader's Raiders. Tompkins' report:
The prudent bankers naturally felt that they had to put some limits on the extent of their help, and in setting those limits they may have developed a kind of counterguerrilla guide for "raided" businessmen. Shortly after Nader's visit, Wriston told his officers that the investigators should be given the same information as stockholders and newsmen. In particular, he warned them against saying anything that would help the bank's competitors or violate a customer's privacy. Bank attorneys noted that the latter precaution was a legal necessity.
Some matters were painstakingly negotiated. Nader Lieutenant David Leinsdorf, a 28-year-old former antitrust-trial assistant in the Justice Department, originally asked to interview no fewer than 750 Citibank officials and employees; the list was finally arbitrated to 53. Each interview was taped and conducted in the presence of a senior bank officer, an attorney and a public relations man—a team that usually outnumbered the two or three student interviewers.
Term-Paper Material. After being questioned by the students for one to three hours each, the bankers were nearly unanimous in giving them high marks for intelligence and zeal. But most doubted that anyone in the Nader group knew enough about banking to make valid judgments on the more complex issues. Says Thomas C. Theobald, a senior vice president: "It was like two college students looking for term-paper material." He was surprised that the interviewers overlooked several obviously controversial topics, including Citibank-managed investments in South Africa and in companies that are polluters.