William Haddon, Crusader for Auto, Highway Safety, Dies of Kidney Failure

Dr. William Haddon Jr., lifetime crusader for safer automobiles and first director of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, died Monday of kidney failure. He was 58.

A physician with degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health, Haddon had been president since 1969 of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

Supported Air Bags

Supported by the insurance industry, the institute has pressed for decades for the mandatory installation of air bags in new automobiles--a fight still under way--and for other safety devices for highway travel.

In a 1977 interview, he called the auto industry’s resistance to air bags a scandal comparable to Watergate.

“If a mother turns to look at her baby and she goes off the road and hits a pole that shouldn’t have been there, that turns a mishap into a fatal event,” he said. “I think that’s too high a penalty for being human.”

Set Safety Standards

Haddon built the NHTSA from scratch after his appointment in 1966 by President Lyndon B. Johnson. He set the first federal safety standards for motor vehicles and set standards for state and local laws on drunken driving and requirements that motorcyclists wear helmets.

In accepting an award from the American Public Health Assn., he once said he had long believed that “the understanding and prevention of disease and injury should be the first strategy of medicine and that treatment, no matter how necessary, is not the logical first line of attack.”

Haddon is survived by his wife, Gene Billo Haddon, and three sons, Jonathan William, Charles and Robert.