Authors: Richard Kluger
Persons who have smoked cigarettes for many years sometimes express the opinion that the harm has already been done and that they might as well continue to smoke since it will do them no more harm. The evidence is completely contrary to that point of view.
III
AS
the medical case against smoking accumulated, the American tobacco industry seemed to grow fiercer in its declarations of defiance.
After dismissing the Royal College of Physicians report, for example, the Tobacco Industry Research Committee took a harsher whack at the British doctors’ effort by asserting in its 1962 annual report, “The unquestioning, unreserved endorsement, as conclusive, of each such repetitive report, which contains no new or original data but amounts to a statement of opinion, is a disservice to scientific research.” Not only did the industry’s spokesmen ignore the highly suggestive, if not altogether incriminating, findings on cell change in smokers’ lungs by Oscar Auerbach, but they also conceded nothing as a result of studies funded by the TIRC itself. Its 1962 report, for example, was virtually silent on the extended findings of the Leuchtenbergers with regard to cell alterations in the bronchi of mice exposed to whole smoke—further corroboration of Auerbach’s observed changes in human smokers’ epithelial tissue. Another TIRC-backed study, dealing with 139 lung cancer deaths out of 915 autopsies, noted that all of those so stricken had been smokers. The emerging awareness of smoking as a prime promoter of heart disease was underscored in a report by industry-funded investigator Alvan Kersh-baum, who, extrapolating from animal studies on the effects of nicotine, noted: “An eventual, delayed increase in serum levels of cholesterol and other lipoprotein lipids … is a conceivable result in humans after smoking … . If, as many investigators believe, a disturbance of lipid metabolism is a factor in the development of atherosclerosis, the effect of cigarette smoking on lipid metabolism should be given attention in considering the pathogenesis of this disorder.”
Instead of giving ground in the health debate or falling silent in the face of such findings, the tobacco industry snatched at any study, however dubious, that minimized the pathogenic impact of smoking. The Tobacco Institute’s now monthly newsletter,
Research Reports on Tobacco and Health
, typically carried articles with headlines like “Human Virus Induces Animal Lung Cancers” and “Study Questions Accuracy of Death Certificates” and reprints of pro-industry articles like “Heavy Smokers with Low Mortality.” Amid this steady drumbeat of denial and disinformation, there was no cruder instance of reassurance to the industry’s customers than the one in a letter of rebuttal by the TIRC’s new president, W. T. Hoyt, in the February 1963 issue of
The New Englander
, in which he wrote: “Our scientific advisers tell us that the causes of lung cancer are still not known and that, as a matter of fact, recent research has tended to point up many new possible causes … .”
Despite propagating such indefensible humbug, the cigarette makers’ operations from 1960 onward were increasingly attuned to the health issue, which could no longer be dismissed as a mere “scare”. Ever more concerned with the possible legal liability to which their percepably hazardous product might expose them in court suits, tobacco executives grew dependent on lawyers in framing their every public move and in the sort of research they undertook privately.
In his unpublished corporate history of Philip Morris, Jerome E. Brooks, son of the prominent Harvard social historian Van Wyck Brooks, reported that during the 1962–65 period “no move of a public nature was or could be made without the special approval of legal advisors, a control which was to become more restrictive” as a result of the liability suits beginning to plague the industry at that time.
The growing realization that they would all sink if they did not swim together, regardless of which company was bearing the brunt of litigation at the moment, led to the adoption of a siege mentality among the cigarette makers. They leagued their efforts through four jointly wielded instruments: the industry’s executive committee, composed of the chief executive officers of the leading companies; the “Secret Six,” composed of the general counsel of each company; a parallel but more venturesome ad hoc committee of younger lawyers from outside firms that were of counsel to the industry members; and the industry’s chief publicists as well as those at Hill & Knowlton assigned to the tobacco account. Collectively these four groups exercised control over the industry’s statements on the health charges against smoking as issued by the Tobacco Institute and TIRC.
Yoked strictly by expediency, the tobacco executives and their costly hirelings were not exactly in love with one another. American Tobacco’s lawyers, for example, were viewed by others in the tobacco camp as tradition-bound and “tight-assed,” querulous within industry councils, die-hard on the health issue, and the last to reach for the dinner check. Liggett’s contingent from a white-shoe New York firm were rated as more gifted socially than as legal strategists. Reynolds’s legal corps, headed by wary, Harvard-trained house counsel Henry Ramm and manned mostly by operatives from the crack Wall Street firm of Davis, Polk, Sutherland & Wardwell, was considered competent if less than brilliant. Lorillard’s officers and lawyers were the most suspiciously viewed of any in the industry because the marketing of their lead brand, Kent, had been most dependent upon exploiting the health issue, studiously downplayed by its larger competitors.
Probably the ablest and most enlightened of the legal representatives was the team assembled by Philip Morris, which as a result wielded power within the industry’s councils disproportionate to the company’s modest market share. Their passionately protective general counsel, Paul Smith, moved regularly and with the full joy of combat between New York, Washington, foreign parts, and even Winston-Salem, where he might suddenly show up for a
téte-á-téte
with RJR’s boss, Bowman Gray, Jr., whom Smith much admired as a true gentleman. Smith had able reinforcements from the Conboy, Hewitt firm, of which he had formerly been a member, and, to deal with regulatory and legislative matters, the Washington firm of Arnold & Porter, a powerhouse in Democratic political circles with a high-profile New Deal pedigree. The firm’s
top strategist and behind-the-scenes wire-puller, Abe Fortas, would shortly gain immortality in American jurisprudential annals with his pro bono 1963 victory in
Gideon
v.
Wainwright
, expanding indigents’ right to counsel. The embattled tobacco industry, while hardly paupers, also felt the need for illustrious representation in the law courts as well as the court of public opinion, and Arnold & Porter’s liberal lawyers were hardly in a position philosophically to turn down the cigarette makers now being accused of purveying death to multitudes. “People here felt intensely about the importance of the right to counsel,” recalled Arnold & Porter partner Abe Krash, who was on the Philip Morris account from the start. “ … [I]t’s not necessary that our views be congruent with our clients’.”
As public-relations counselors, Hill & Knowlton exercised a dual role. On the one hand, it cautioned the industry against excessive displays of truculence or just plain putting its foot in its mouth, as in the case of a proposed statement to the effect that 97 percent of smokers never contracted lung cancer. Aside from being inaccurate, the claim was tantamount to conceding that at least several million current customers would get the disease. When, on the other hand, H&K proposed measures that the industry might take to demonstrate sensitivity to rising criticism, such as voluntarily adopting an advertising code, urging customers to smoke in moderation, and putting warnings of a health hazard on each cigarette pack, the suggestions were coolly received. To urge moderation on cigarette users, the companies’ lawyers argued, implied that there was a safe level of smoking and, logically, an area beyond it that was excessive when in fact there was no known standard that could be applied generally, so why open Pandora’s box? The idea of voluntarily placing a warning label on the pack seemed to have the double virtue of easing public pressure on the industry and helping fend off future liability suits, since forewarned smokers could thereafter be said to have assumed the risk of their decision to begin or continue smoking—a valid legal defense. But the industry lawyers worried that such warnings were an admission that might invite lawsuits as well as deflect them. One who strongly pushed the warning labels as an enlightened preemptive measure by the industry was Hill & Knowlton account executive Edward DeHart. DeHart’s persistent advocacy of conceding at least a sliver of ground in the health controversy almost cost him his job. He was confronted in a hallway one day by RJR’s Henry Ramm, then serving as unofficial chairman of the Secret Six, who said to the public-relations man, referring to placement of health warnings on cigarette packs, “I want you to stop talking about it.” The industry, DeHart recalled, “was in no mood those days to do anything it didn’t absolutely have to do.”
IV
ONE
day early in his tenure as president of Philip Morris, Joseph Cullman was bustling through the corporate offices on Park Avenue when he passed the desk of a new star recruit and noticed that Helmut Wakeham was neither smoking nor in possession of an ashtray.
Smoking was not exactly obligatory for industry employees, but ranking officials who harbored career ambitions were well advised to make at least a pretense of smoking or risk the suspicion that they were not totally loyal to the product. In the case of Wakeham, momentarily apprenticing to PM operations vice president Robert Roper but hired as a physical chemist with a doctorate from Berkeley to work in research and product development, there were extenuating circumstances. As the son of a German mother and a father who was a native Nebraskan adhering to and actively teaching the tenets of the Seventh-Day Adventist church, Wakeham had grown up with the belief that smoking was a desecration of the temple that was the human body. While not unduly freighted by such dogma, the urbane and well-traveled Wakeham deferred to parental wishes during a career that included research in the oil, tire, and textile industries, and so arrived at Philip Morris as a lifelong abstainer from tobacco.
“I see you’re not a smoker,” Cullman remarked to him in a nonconfrontational way as he stopped at Wakeham’s desk. “Well, maybe you can be more objective that way,” he added and moved on.
It was a quick, shrewd read, of the sort Cullman was skilled at. Helmut Wakeham, his full head of blond hair going gray now in his early forties, saw himself above all as a man of science and cultivation. Blessed with a probing mind able to dissect technical subjects like the intricacies of cigarette filtration, he was equally at home discussing a play by Schiller, music from Bach to Debussy, or the politics of the Indian subcontinent, where he had worked for several years as a consultant to the International Cooperation Administration and the indigenous textile industry. He did not see himself as a tobacco chemist any more than he had seen himself as a textile chemist earlier. “I am simply applying scientific facts and methodology to tobacco problems,” he told a reporter for the Richmond
Times-Dispatch
soon after being transferred to the Philip Morris research center across the James River from the company’s main manufacturing facilities. Candid, precise in his speech, skilled at translating technical concepts into laymen’s words, Wakeham was tapped in 1960, two years after his arrival at the company, to be director of research and development. It was not long before he found himself occasionally at swordspoint with Philip Morris’s testy house counsel. “Paul Smith had been made company czar
of the smoking and health question,” Wakeham recalled, “and, being a very ambitious man, saw it as the key to his gaining and holding power. He continuously raised the specter of the tobacco companies’ losing a lawsuit” that might prove ruinous, “but I didn’t altogether buy that view.”
Deferential though he was to his resident legal counselor, Cullman mandated an openness of expression among his chief subordinates which was the hallmark of his management; he did not favor yes-men or lockstep thinking. Wakeham was thus free to speak his mind and did so without excessive concern about his prospects for corporate advancement; his prime ambition seemed to revolve around the growth of his department, which within five years of his taking charge numbered 500 scientists and technicians. One of Wakeham’s principal forums for self-expression was a monthly seminar he conducted for the company brass on technical aspects of the business, often touching upon the health area. Attendance was high, if not mandatory, and was usually boosted by Cullman’s presence, though he would typically arrive a few minutes after the appointed starting time, scan the crowded room that had respectfully waited for him, and ask Wakeham with an impatience more detectable now as his power and duties grew, “How long is this going to take?” Wakeham would answer, “About forty-five minutes—if you don’t ask me a lot of questions.” But Cullman was a champion questioner, and Wakeham’s seminars often ran twice the allotted time.
One of the new research director’s early initiatives was to enlist Archer Martin, who had won the Nobel Prize for developing gas chromatography, to help train Philip Morris scientists in the new techniques for tracking down the thousands of constituent compounds released by burning cigarettes. Wakeham thought it elementary that “only by knowing the chemistry of tobacco and smoke could we ever hope to control the composition of our ultimate product.”
With the aid of the latest equipment, Wakeham was able to report to the PM research and development committee, in a memorandum dated November 15, 1961, that his lab people had confirmed at least trace amounts of forty-two compounds in cigarette smoke identified as carcinogens. “Present evidence suggests,” he added, “that smoking has a stronger
tumor-promoting
than
tumor-initiating
effect … ” (underscoring in original text). Other portions of this memo also revealed high familiarity with health considerations and acknowledgment that the company could and should take measures to modify its product in response. Wakeham spelled out a three-part “Research and Development Program Leading to a
Medically Acceptable
Cigarette,” which long afterward he would explain referred to a product that the health community would concede to pose minimal risk to users. “I was a little bit naive,” he commented more than thirty years later, “in thinking that our critics would really like us to find a more acceptable product. I was forced to come to the conclusion after many years that they weren’t really interested in such a thing”—that
health investigators and antismoking advocates, in short, wanted the cigarette to disappear, not to be fixed.