Authors: Richard Kluger
The integrity of such rebuttals can be inferred from an advisory memo written in July 1959 by the TIRC’s publicity consultants, Hill & Knowlton, to Reynolds Tobacco’s new chief executive, Bowman Gray, Jr., serving as chairman of the industry’s lately formed Tobacco Institute, the heart of its future lobbying and public-relations activities. The H&K memorandum underscored the industry’s need for intensified measures “to cope with attacks based on ‘scare’ charges” and to reaffirm “through all means possible the position that the role of tobacco in health and particularly lung cancer is not proved and that evidence mounts to dispute the broad charges made against tobacco. … The health of the nation is constantly improving, along with increased use of tobacco. The ‘scare’ campaign … has developed nothing new since the statistical studies … .”
This sort of jabberwocky, doubtless soothing to the publicists’ clients but as detached from reality as Alice in Wonderland, also characterized the industry’s response a few months later to Surgeon General Burney’s long, careful statement firmly implicating smoking in lung cancer causation. Attributed to Clarence Little and likely prepared in Hill & Knowlton’s offices a few floors below his, the rebuttal argued that experimental animals exposed to tobacco smoke had not contracted lung cancer (but had, it failed to note, undergone many serious and likely precancerous cell changes); that human lung tissue in
heavy smokers was often normal (even as, it might have been noted with about equal relevance, many who were exposed to tuberculosis did not contract the often deadly disease); and that there was recent evidence that air pollution might be a bigger menace to the lungs than smoking—a statement as false as the Hill & Knowlton suggestion that there was mounting evidence to discredit the broad charge against smoking.
This ceaseless, groundless, and distorting combativeness reached its full flowering in the 1960 TIRC report by Little’s Scientific Advisory Board. Headed “Causation Theory of Smoking Unproved,” the text contended that “[t]he continued failure of evidence which is qualitatively different or of increased significance to appear leaves the causation theory of smoking in lung cancer, heart disease and other ailments without clinical and experimental proof. … The result is that the tobacco theory is rapidly losing much of the unique importance claimed by its adherents at its original announcement.” What “tobacco theory”? What “adherents”? What “original announcement”? Here was nothing less than wholesale dismissal of a decade of findings by many separate and independent investigators of good standing, often smokers themselves, examining a major health issue in a variety of ways—not the keening of a cabal of pointy-headed prohibitionists. Little’s statement went on: “[T]he one hard fact that we must face up to is that there is so much more to find out … . It is [as] important to know … why the overwhelming majority of heavy cigarette smokers do not develop lung cancer as it is to know why the comparatively small percentage of smokers do.” Little might as logically have called for a study on why most motorists who speed do not die as a result while many who do not speed are still killed in auto accidents.
To give the cigarette makers a pulpit from which to sound a more positive note instead of simply naysaying after each new critical scientific report, they opened the Tobacco Institute (TI) in Washington in 1958 and funded it in proportion to each company’s share of the market the year before. In addition to the producers and distributors, the TI proclaimed itself a united front also representing 600,000 tobacco-growing families, some 30,000 factory workers, and multitudes in the retailing end of the tobacco trade. The TI catechism stressed the contribution of tobacco to the national economy and the preservation of the endangered American farm, the inconclusiveness and inconsistencies in the antismoking findings, and the rights of individual smokers to disregard killjoy public-health investigators. Like any trade organization, the institute lobbied Capitol Hill, managed even with a rudimentary staff in those early years to keep a lid on the federal cigarette tax (eight cents a pack since 1951), and helped prevent tobacco products from being explicitly included in the 1960 federal Hazardous Substances Labeling Act.
As a defensive strategy, the Tobacco Institute reassured its customer base by minimizing the alleged hazards of smoking and mocking those who reported
them. Its quarterly (later monthly) broadside,
Tobacco & Health Research
, distributed free to some 200,000 doctors and others in the medical community, hewed closely to the TIRC line in casting doubt on any and all antismoking revelations and publicizing studies that linked everything but smoking to cancer. The TI’s first president, James Richards, a former U.S. representative from South Carolina, set the tone for sensitivity to the health issue with remarks like “There have always been a few people who are fanatically prejudiced against tobacco. Not liking it themselves, they are opposed to its use by others.” Richards was succeeded in 1960 by a suaver industry spokesman, native North Carolinian George V. Allen, a former ranking State Department official and lately retired director of the U.S. Information Agency. Allen ratcheted the propaganda machine up to a new level of paranoiac shrillness, declaring soon after his installation: “We must learn to distinguish the real facts of tobacco from unjustified emotional campaigns, based on the ‘health scare’—a technique that was not successful one hundred or three hundred years ago and, we are confident, will not be successful today.”
If their hired mouthpieces were intemperate in operating their disinformation agencies, the industry’s own executives were even more confrontational. Howard Cullman, head of the Cullman Brothers cigar leaf business and the more polished and political brother of Joseph Cullman, Jr., whom he succeeded on the Philip Morris board upon Joe Junior’s death in 1955, denounced “recurrent attacks of do-gooders … announcing what they think should be our way of life… .” When Cullman’s nephew, Joe Third, took over as Philip Morris chief in 1958, he was quick to comment, “The health scare is receding—the worst is over,” as if describing the swelling from a pesky but decidedly minor irritant. Liggett & Myers was guilty of, at the very least, grievous hypocrisy in its 1957 annual report, in which it quoted remarks made by a Yale Medical School pathologist that since nothing in cigarette smoke was carcinogenic, there was nothing for a filter to remove—a proposition that Liggett-paid scientists at the Arthur Little laboratories had discarded two years earlier, after replicating the Wynder skin-painting experiment and in other smoke analysis research. And when
Time
magazine featured recently elected Reynolds chairman Bowman Gray, Jr., on its April 21, 1960, cover, he was quoted as saying of the cancer charges: “I just don’t believe it. People are hearing the same old story, and the record is getting scratched.”
VIII
IF
only by virtue of becoming chief executive of the new sales leader in the cigarette business, RJR’s Bowman Gray, Jr., was regarded by 1960 as the tobacco industry’s leading statesman. His claim to the title was further
strengthened by the Reynolds tradition of dynastic rule; Gray’s father and namesake had once presided over the company, as had his uncle, James. Yet most people at Reynolds felt that freckled “Red” Gray had won the top post less on his pedigree than on merit.
He had begun working for the company in the factory as a schoolboy during summer breaks and after college had lived out of a suitcase for six Depression years as a crack RJR salesman. Installed at Reynolds’s Winston-Salem headquarters, he displayed a sponge-like mind for absorbing facts and figures and strongly championed the field sales force, helping hone its calculatedly down-home counterside manner. For all his detectably patrician attitude, Gray insisted that his phone line be open at all hours for a direct call from any member of the Reynolds 2,000-man sales force with a problem in the field. As befit one who was on record in his disdain for the health charges against the industry, he smoked four packs of Winston a day, but he could not ignore the spinal disease that was atrophying his muscles and would force him into a wheelchair during much of his tenure running the nation’s top tobacco company.
At the bottom end of the industry, another change occurred in the executive suite in the late ’Fifties that was to have a far more profound effect on the cigarette business. Parker McComas had reinvigorated slumping Philip Morris by buying Benson & Hedges, launching the reinvented Marlboro as a filter brand in its strikingly designed box, and bringing along a new crop of junior executives. The most prominent and visible of these was the new executive vice president, Joseph Cullman III, the senior marketing man. Conscious that he was something of a privileged character who had not exactly struggled to the top at Benson & Hedges before his family sold it to Philip Morris, Cullman did not take his position for granted. No one had promised him a rosepetaled path to the top, and so, in his early forties now, he seemed to be all over the place, trying to learn about every aspect of the company operations even if he put some noses out of joint in the process. There was the day, for example, when Cullman in shirtsleeves breezed into an office temporarily occupied by John Vance Hewitt, the deeply formal senior partner of the law firm handling Philip Morris’s business, Conboy, Hewitt, O’Brien & Boardman. Hewitt and an associate were busy questioning a PM sales executive on an FTC-related pricing matter when Cullman appeared, wanting to know what was going on, and when apprised, indicated that the salesman should not be tied up for too long and that perhaps a junior man would serve as well—as if the interview were not a serious matter. “Joe gave you the sense of a scrappy little guy who didn’t hesitate to toss his weight around,” one Philip Morris veteran recalled of Cullman. But he was usually upbeat and disarming, forever questioning and listening closely to the answers he got, mixing widely and well, yet maintaining a measured manner and authoritative presence that would make him the inevitable choice to succeed stately Parker McComas.
The company, meanwhile, had been greatly buoyed by the Marlboro launch. A 1955 ad in New York’s
Daily Mirror
offering a free pack of the new brand to anyone who showed up at the company’s 100 Park Avenue headquarters that day drew 15,000 takers, and the excitement generated elsewhere was such that production could not catch up with demand for nearly a year. The flip-top box was proving so appealing that the company repackaged all its brands in that style and, while it was at it, retired the old Philip Morris brown package for a spiffy new red-white-and-gold one. But the change seemed only to accelerate the flagship brand’s rate of decline, which, when added to the high start-up costs for Marlboro, kept company profits anemic. Advertising dollars were not stinted, though, in establishing the presence in the tobacco firmament of that two-fisted worthy, The Marlboro Man. Sometimes portrayed as a wistful wrangler, sometimes as a professional athlete or a naval officer or just a guy in a trenchcoat, he was always an older, rugged-looking fellow who knew the ropes and sported as testimony to his adventurous past a tattoo on the back of his hand in the shape of a winged shield. These stigmata, a writer for
The New Yorker
suggested in a jocular 1958 appreciation of this fanciful persona, made the Marlboro Man, for all his swagger, seem “encrusted with anxieties.” By 1957, its third year on the market, Marlboro was the No. 8 best-selling cigarette and had surpassed the Philip Morris brand as the company’s bellwether and main hope for advancement.
Philip Morris’s profit pinch was exacerbated in the mid-’Fifties by what came to be known within the company as The Dixie Dilemma. Ordered in 1955 to desegregate its public schools, the surly and largely white-supremacist culture of the South was snappish toward any perceived Yankee intrusions. At the likely instigation of one or more of its competitors, Philip Morris was painted throughout the old Confederacy as a warm friend of black America because it had made a modest charitable contribution to the Urban League, it employed one Negro as a minor sales executive, and its main manufacturing facilities in Virginia were somewhat more integrated than those of the other tobacco companies, most with factories in North Carolina. The result was a boycott of Philip Morris brands. Recalled Paul Jeblee, the company’s division manager in Georgia, Alabama, and Florida in this period, “I encountered a very discouraging scene. There were towns where you couldn’t park your car if it had Philip Morris stickers on it … places where you couldn’t even get your fuel tank filled.” Jeblee retained vivid memories of a day in Hayneville, Alabama, when he and the company’s sales representative visited twenty-three stores, “of which twenty-two had no Philip Morris brands when I arrived, and twenty-two had none when I left, the exception being a store with a single dusty carton of Philip Morris high on an out-of-the-way shelf. So I thanked the man for supporting Philip Morris, and he said, ‘Hell, I’m not supporting Philip
Morris, but I’m damned if those other sons-of-bitches in town are going to tell me what I can and can’t sell.’”
Philip Morris’s comparative weakness in the domestic market allowed President McComas to take a chance that none of his more prosperous rivals was interested in pursuing. American cigarettes had gained worldwide acclaim in the wake of World War II but were hard and expensive to come by abroad. Reynolds and Liggett & Myers, somewhat provincial if not actively xenophobic in outlook, had scant interest in the foreign market. American Tobacco had ceded international selling rights to its brands to British-American Tobacco under the old trust arrangement dating back to the beginning of the century, while Brown & Williamson was a BAT subsidiary and thus strictly limited to the U.S. market. And Lorillard was pumping all its money into salvaging Kent. That left the door open to McComas, a former international banker, to give Philip Morris a crucial headstart overseas.
The start, in 1955, was inauspicious enough and largely experimental, with little capital available to subsidize foreign operations for long. The first two efforts were a small manufacturing unit in Australia, from which Philip Morris hoped eventually to supply all of the sterling market in Asia, using native leaf and local brands, and a joint venture in oil-rich Venezuela with a local manufacturer who would turn out domestic brands with local leaf and distribute Philip Morris’s imported brands. Comparable ventures were soon set up in Canada and the Philippines, but McComas’s keenest interest was in Europe, where tariff walls and currency exchange problems made exporting a dubious strategy. The only sensible arrangement was to license foreign nationals to make Philip Morris brands, an even trickier business in terms of taste and quality control. To avoid giving away too many trade secrets, the company shipped in preblended U.S. tobacco, starting small with a solid but not dominant Swiss firm, Fabriques de Tabac Réunies (FTR), which began making Marlboros in the lakeside city of Neuchâtel in the late ’Fifties. It became the catalyst that would one day make Philip Morris Europe’s largest cigarette purveyor.