Authors: Richard Kluger
Carried to its ultimate, this line of rationalization denied the existence of such a thing as dirty money. As James Kraft, the Whitney Museum’s assistant director of development, once phrased it, “Very few fortunes in the world were achieved through goodness.” Philip Morris’s George Weissman put it a touch more archly: “Only the gurus on top of the Himalayas are clean.” Valid up to a point, such observations served, however, to relieve beneficiaries of any need to reach moral judgments; not all riches are amassed by equal feats of ruthlessness or oppression—and some souls are actually cleaner than others even at altitudes less lofty than Tibet’s. Such a judgmental process would necessarily be fraught with difficulty and perhaps even pain, as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s vice president for development, Emily Rafferty, implied in commenting, “If we got into the middle of this [form of moral evaluation], we would question everything.” The far easier path, of course, was to question nothing, avoiding tiresome considerations of decency and mindlessly accepting all gifts as sanitized by the recipient’s need.
Although much was made of the no-strings aspect of such cultural philanthropy, there were inevitable small paybacks. When Philip Morris needed a suitable site for the awards ceremony for an essay contest it had run on the splendor of the First Amendment (and its claimed right to advertise cigarettes and anything else legal), the New York Public Library, its volumes now pleasingly dust-free, readily obliged its donor. Lincoln Center, the nation’s prime showcase for the performing arts, on whose board George Weissman was a powerhouse, let its jazz festival bear the name of the sponsor, Marlboro. The Ailey troupe protested to Surgeon General Koop that he was unjustly pillorying Philip Morris, its “enlightened [and] generous patrons,” and contended, “A nation has a cultural health as well as a physical health”—as if to imply that the latter could somehow, sometimes, justifiably be held hostage by the former.
What the eager recipients of tobacco money lost sight of—or averted their eyes from—was the real service they were performing in return. Thomas P. F. Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a willing vessel in his day for the flow of tobacco bounty, put it bluntly by charging that his own and other such eminent institutions had been “prostituting themselves” by allowing cigarette makers to trade on the cultural centers’ status as pillars of the community and to bask in the sunlight of communal approval like honorable citizens who made their living with clean hands. How could any worthy social enterprise, from soup kitchen to world-class museum, entirely escape the charge of selling its soul when it let a rogue industry purchase absolution with ill-got lucre?
The moral dilemma was forcefully stated for the antismoking movement by the Advocacy Institute’s Michael Pertschuk, who argued in his 1987 pamphlet,
Smoke Signals
, that the tobacco companies were waging a campaign for legitimacy
by masquerading as the Good Corporate Citizen when in reality they were “death and disease merchants … profiteers from human misery … drug pushers. Culture can survive without providing a cloak of legitimacy for an industry that kills … .” But when an Advocacy Institute associate of Pertschuk expressed this view to a top officer at a leading New York museum, he was told, “Oh, grow up!”
Harsh social realities, then, generally routed any serious consideration of whether tainted means should be embraced to advance worthy ends—such as, in the case of the African-American community, survival itself. Philip Morris was an early contributor to black causes and steadily expanded this program, giving to the NAACP, the Urban League, and the United Negro College Fund, sponsoring black cultural events, patronizing black-run banks and insurance companies, and advertising prominently in black media. Did the fact that a higher percentage of black Americans smoked than whites constitute an ulterior motive—racial targeting—on the company’s part? A better question was whether African-Americans battling for social justice knew or cared that their fellow blacks died at a disproportionately higher rate from smoking-related diseases—40 to 50 percent higher in the case of lung cancer—than white Americans and thus might plausibly oppose tobacco company exploitation as genocidal.
On the surface, the black community’s approach to the question was little different from the cultural community’s. Donald Hesse, vice president for development of the Urban League, told
Common Cause
magazine in March 1989 why it accepted tobacco money: “We’re really trying to do a lot with very little. … How do we keep the doors open?” His organization’s criteria for accepting contributions from a company, he said, were that “it does not ask us to endorse their product and is a legal entity.” Mafia money, at least, was out. And nothing as gauche as an implied product endorsement was purchasable (unlike Lincoln Center’s Marlboro Jazz Festival). But the black community was susceptible to exploitation in a subtler fashion, one that suggested what might lie behind Philip Morris’s otherwise estimable show of interracial concern. At a two-day 1985 conference in New York for 200 black editors and publishers, sponsored by Philip Morris, keynoter (and veteran company officer) Hugh Cullman asserted: “Today tolerance for my smoking may be under attack. Tomorrow it may be tolerance for someone else’s right to pray or choose a place to live. So the real issue isn’t smoking against nonsmoking—it’s discrimination against tolerance.”
Thus was posited a bond of victimization between all smokers and all blacks. Just how effective this sort of bonding could be was detectable in remarks delivered the year after the editors’ conference by John Holoman, president of the
Herald Dispatch
, serving the black community in Los Angeles, who denounced recent antismoking regulations as discriminatory and dreamed
up by “people with a lot of free time on their hands” who wrongly assumed black support for their cause. Kissing off the health hazards of smoking as decidedly secondary to African-American concerns about hypertension, sickle-cell anemia, teenage pregnancy, and the ravages of narcotics, Holoman charged that the real enemy was not cigarettes but the continuing American failure to correct long-standing social injustices. Besides, he said, “the strident exhortations to restrict smokers” hurt an important American industry that had been good to blacks. This same note of kinship was sounded by Harlem’s Representative Charles Rangel, who said he found no ulterior motive in the tobacco industry’s courting of blacks—an argument, he claimed, that was “only raised by health groups and white liberal groups as far as I know … .” Added another prominent African-American politician (and a heavy taker of campaign contributions from tobacco), California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, “I’m not concerned about smoking—it’s not my issue. I’m concerned about substance abuse.”
But that was precisely why—beyond the industry’s claim that blacks and smokers were equally subjected to intolerance—the cigarette companies were so strongly suspected of targeting black Americans as customers: they had too much else to worry about to ponder the possible blessings of a smoke-free society by the year 2000. As University of California sociologist Troy Duster discovered while directing an intervention trial in smoking cessation among black youngsters in the San Francisco Bay area for the National Cancer Institute, his subjects were preoccupied with “crack and the rejection and irrelevance of their labor.” Indeed, they resented efforts, however well intended, to discourage them from smoking, one of the few cheap, legal pleasures easily available to them. Trying to convince them that they were injuring themselves by persisting in their tobacco habit, Duster began to feel, was as far removed from reality as Malthus’s instruction to the teeming and overfertile poor to refrain from the procreative act.
Any suggestion that they were exploiting the miseries of the black underclass evoked cries of indignation from the cigarette companies. They insisted that they were in no way deviating from their standard marketing and philanthropic practices in dealing with the African-American sector of the population. Its ad and promotional allocation to the black community, Philip Morris said, came to 12 percent of the total, just a bit more than its proportional share of the population. A Reynolds spokesman declared it “highly offensive” to suggest that blacks were being taken advantage of by the tobacco industry and were somehow incapable of reaching the same judgment as the rest of the nation about the desirability of smoking.
It was precisely that judgment, though, that the prevalent social pathologies afflicting the black subculture could skew, as Duster and other sensitive observers understood, casting African-Americans as unwitting accomplices of
the tobacco industry’s political agenda as well as its commercial prey. A case in point was the vocal but ultimately unsuccessful effort during the mid-’Eighties by Hazel Dukes, president of the New York state conference of NAACP branches, to oppose office smoking restrictions proposed by the New York City Council. Dukes argued that the public-health measure was steeped in racial bias, because under the workstation arrangements outlined in the proposal, smoking would be forbidden in the open and shared office areas, where blacks were disproportionately numbered among the secretaries and clerks, while being permitted in closed or private offices, usually occupied by white executives. When
The New York Times
editorialized in print what others were thinking—that the tobacco industry was buying political allies by its heavy donations to the black community—-Dukes answered angrily, “Our opposition is based on a long tradition of confronting discrimination that the white mainstream and majority press often ignore.” In parroting the industry line, the NAACP spokeswoman saw no difference between discrimination based on behavior found to be antisocial and unhealthy (
e.g.
, smoking in close proximity to nonsmokers) and discrimination based on factors entirely beyond an individual’s control
(e.g.
, race, national origin, age, appearance, physical handicap). She had also missed the truly troubling point that if blacks were numerically preponderant in open office spaces where smoking was to be restricted, it was precisely the black nonsmokers among them who were being most heavily victimized by exposure to secondhand smoke.
A growing number of black leaders, though, were coming to understand their community’s vulnerability to the smoking peril and began speaking out against an easily overlooked form of victimization. One of black America’s most prominent medical practitioners, Harold Freeman, chief of surgery at Harlem Hospital and the 1988 president of the American Cancer Society, accused the tobacco companies of trying by its philanthropy and patronage to buy silence from the black community, “already suffering a disproportionate burden of disease and death,” and converting it into “a special target for a lethal product.” U.S. Representative John Conyers, Jr., of Michigan, in his thirteenth term in the House, noted the prevalence of sickness and death in black America from the products behind tobacco philanthropy: “There’s no way we can compartmentalize our lives conveniently to say, ‘Thanks so much for your promotion,’ and ignore the statistics.” The case was more vehemently stated in 1988 by Reed V. Tuckson, commissioner of public health for the District of Columbia, who labeled the tobacco industry’s philanthropic programs among blacks a “predatory strategy” with the sole goal of making money: “They go to the people of color; they go to women; they go to the poor. … There is a meanness to this greed that is unprecedented in its intensity, tenacity, and consequences. It is unjustified by any standard of humanity … .”
XI
C
HIEF
Philip Morris publicist Guy Smith was able to afford a magazine all his own—a weapon of particular utility in an age in which broadcast sound bites were inadequate to spell out detailed views on complex issues. Having its own megaphone also allowed the company to encourage its customers and reassure them that their smoking did not make them morons or malefactors.
Overcoming internal objections by company lawyers fearful the publication would say too much that could come back to haunt them in court, Smith launched
Philip Morris Magazine
late in 1985 with a free circulation of 125,000, culled largely from names of those who had bought brand-monogrammed merchandise from PM. During the next six years, it evolved into a four-color, forty-eight-page bimonthly with a claimed circulation of 13 million and became the costliest item in the corporate affairs budget. The circulation list also provided a splendid data base whenever the company needed to enlist political support against antismoking initiatives.
Smith felt that in order for the magazine to work, it had to be “more than a corporate hype sheet,” so he splashed it with lively graphics, name writers, and a cheery tone that allowed its propaganda content to be easily sugar-coated. Each issue was a studiously low-brow celebration of a wholesome, outdoorsy American lifestyle in which smoking was a natural but not overly prominent component. Amid this fluff one also came upon surveys purporting to find that 96 percent of smokers indulged for the sheer pleasure of it and that only 2 percent of restaurant-goers objected to smoking by others while they ate—figures wildly at odds with more disinterested surveys on those questions; a salute to Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger for preserving the sale of cigarettes at military commissaries, presumably as an act of patriotism; a screed by a self-proclaimed health-conscious vegetarian, asserting disbelief of any link between smoking and disease and preaching moderation in all things; and a letter from a man who said he walked six to nine miles daily without ill effects from the two packs of cigarettes and twenty cups of coffee he consumed.
Smith also moved to gain intellectual respectability for the industry by enlisting, through the Tobacco Institute and the services of its leading outside public-relations counselor, the Washington office of Ogilvy & Mather, a stable of social scientists from respectable quadrants of academia. Mostly economists of the supply-side persuasion, these scholars dealt with the smoking issue largely in terms of political and econometric theory. The informal group, which was very well rewarded for its efforts, according to one former
Ogilvy & Mather publicist who worked on the agency’s tobacco account, was headed by a former high-ranking FTC official, economist Robert D. Tollison, then director of George Mason University’s Center for the Study of Public Choice, a think tank for the dissemination of libertarian values, in particular free-market pragmatism as antidote to the misguided intrusiveness of welfare-state activism.