Authors: Richard Kluger
His understanding of the uses and limits of advertising was also exemplary. Philip Morris advertising proved effective in the ’Sixties largely because it did not say more than it had to—a prudent as well as artful policy in view of the possible liability exposure from any too explicit claims or promises. As James Morgan, an earnest articulator of the company’s marketing creed, put it, “Philip Morris advertising was especially good at getting the consumer to finish the sentence. It says, This is what I am, you can understand it and decide for yourself how and why I’m relevant to you.’ What does ‘Marlboro Country’ mean literally? Not much—but it lays out a proposition and lets the consumer absorb the message … .”
Once the advertising “pull” for Marlboro, Benson & Hedges 100s, and Virginia Slims began to generate sizable cash flow, Cullman turned to the one area he and his marketing staff had neglected—the “push” by the company’s undersized, underpaid, and undertrained sales force. “New York headquarters didn’t quite understand the interplay between the customer and the sales representative,” said Paul Jeblee, a Carolina country boy with a handlebar mustache and no college education who struggled up through the company sales ranks, partly by learning to bone up on every conceivable piece of data that Joe Cullman might quiz him about. Cullman proved receptive to a laundry list of reforms on the sales side which Jeblee was instrumental in urging, starting in the late ’Sixties as stores all over now regularly ran out of Philip Morris stock, though the fixtures that Reynolds provided free to most supermarkets remained loaded with RJR brands, which commanded twice the shelf space of any competitor’s products. For a time it had been left to store managers to assign the shelf space to the non-Reynolds brands, presumably on the basis of sales movement, but when other companies began to pay for preferential placement, Philip Morris, the most reluctant to pay, was hit hardest. “RJR had the hardware,” recalled Tom Littleton of his travails as a Philip Morris salesman, “so we were literally down on our knees to service the bottom shelves. To look at my pants, you’d have thought I spent my life in church.”
The Reynolds lock on fixturing was costing Philip Morris sales. A Marlboro smoker unable to find his brand on, say, the fourth shelf down might well grab a carton of Winston from the shelf at shoulder level rather than go down the block or drive five miles for his favorite smoke. By 1969, Philip Morris began to pay for preferred space on the supermarket racks—sixty dollars a year, typically, which did not amount to much per store but, when multiplied nationally, represented a considerable cash outlay. Even where “plan-o-grams” had been contracted for, allotting PM brands fixed footage on the second or third
shelves, salesmen had to defend the space fiercely, so great was the pressure from competitors in an era of proliferating brands and line extensions. “You could never depend on the store managers or distributors to service the accounts—you had to mind the stores yourself,” recalled Richard Schoenkopf, a middle manager in sales and merchandising with PM for a dozen years.
Jeblee’s efforts to upgrade the sales program went well beyond boosting manpower and pay. A new sales manual was created and more sophisticated selling and servicing techniques were taught, as the big retail chains took over an ever larger share of the tobacco market from the little mom-and-pop stores. Malls were beginning to dominate, especially in California and the booming South and Southwest, and a new breed of salesman and sales manager was required to handle big orders and negotiate hard for adequate display on inelastic shelves. Newcomers who showed high managerial promise were put on the fast track to advancement. Jeblee pushed the company into high-speed market analysis with newfangled computers so that every wholesaler and retail outlet could be instantaneously rated on its performance with PM brands and management could know, as never before, what was selling where.
All of this purposeful motion set the company aglow. At its 1969 national sales meeting in Tierra Verde, Florida, the vice president for sales, Max Berkowitz, told his assembled troops: “The present climate at Philip Morris is … dynamic—growing—changing—shifting—innovating—you can supply your own words to describe a company whose sales have tripled in less than ten years [A]t no time in my thirty-two years with the company has the flavor of success—the sight of the top—been so close. At no other time … has the thought occurred to me that American [Tobacco] and Reynolds could be caught—and yet now it has to be obvious to all of you—we could be No. 2 before long.”
VI
DURING
the four years between the passage of the federal cigarette labeling law and its expiration date, June 30, 1969, the tobacco industry had three courses open to it. It could lie low, bide its time, and hope that the storm over the health charges against smoking would subside with the’ appearance of the warning on each pack. Or it could move quietly behind the scenes to head off still more serious government regulation by negotiating an orderly and gradual retreat. Or it could continue to deny the legitimacy of the health issue and act provocatively in defense of its highly lucrative domain.
Shaken by the 1964 indictment from the Surgeon General’s office and stigmatized by the congressionally imposed warning label, however mild, the cigarette makers watched and waited a bit, saw the rising line on their sales
graphs stutter only briefly, and chose intransigence as their response to medical science’s declared war against them. Their unstated reason was the belief that any substantive concession—for example, that lowered tar and nicotine contents made a cigarette less hazardous—would doom them to expulsion from the legitimate marketplace. Thus, their anointed spokesman on the health issue, Clarence C. Little, scientific director of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, by then renamed the Council for Tobacco Research (CTR), was, at the age of eighty, sounding like a badly broken record in asserting the same things in 1969 that he had fifteen years earlier about the hazards of cigarettes: (1) “there is no demonstrated causal relationship between smoking and any disease”—in direct contradiction of the conclusions of the Surgeon General’s panel; (2) many factors were “significantly associated with cancer”—but none, he omitted, was so manifestly linked to cancer of the lung as smoking; (3) an individual’s genetic makeup largely determined his or her susceptibility to cancer—a strong argument, actually, against smoking at all, since those susceptible had little way of knowing until it was too late; (4) although a few investigators claimed the inhalation of tobacco smoke might be followed by “certain changes in the tissue of lung surface,” there was “definite disagreement among pathologists as to the significance of such changes”—a disagreement found preponderantly among those in the industry’s hire; and (5) “the whole field of smoking and health requires a great deal more research and information before a proper evaluation can be made.”
Earle Clements, the wise old pol who now headed the Tobacco Institute, may never have been a total captive of the industry that paid him, but he dealt with the health charges in a fashion complementary to Little’s. He told the Illinois Association of Tobacco Distributors in 1967, for example, that through the $20 million in grants distributed over the past thirteen years by the CTR and the American Medical Association, “every facet of the charges against smoking is being evaluated, studied, and researched. … If there is something harmful, I am confident that scientists can remedy it.” Meanwhile, he added by way of rallying the troops, “We can protect our industry by vigorously and accurately presenting the facts.” But it was the facts that the tobacco industry was shying away from, if not actively trying to hide. At about the time Clements was defending the industry’s efforts before the Illinois distributors, PM research director Helmut Wakeham was writing to the TI president to complain of the Council for Tobacco Research program, saying that “much of the grant work has little or no relevance to smoking and health, in my opinion” and adding, “[W]e should be prepared to admit the possibility of some risk … and to counsel moderation [in tobacco use].”
But there were few scientists in the industry as enlightened and willing to speak up as Wakeham, whose views, at any rate, went largely unheeded. The principal reason for this, to judge by internal industry documents during the
mid and late 1960s, was that the joint research program, particularly the one administered by the CTR, was being used as much to protect the tobacco manufacturers as to advance any allegedly disinterested search for the scientific truth about smoking. Rather than being operated at arm’s length from the industry’s scrutiny, as tobacco spokesmen liked to boast, the CTR program and its associate scientific director, Robert Hockett, were directly linked to the “ad hoc committee” of younger company lawyers on global lookout for friendly or pliable scientists willing to testify for the industry and/or undertake studies that might cast doubt on the health charges against smoking. Such “special projects,” as these helpful investigations were euphemistically tagged, would generally be offered first to the CTR’s Scientific Advisory Board for funding, but if that panel declined them, they would be approved by the ad hoc committee and funded through a “Central File,” as the high-priority kitty was termed in a January 3, 1966, memo by Addison Yeaman, vice president and general counsel of Brown & Williamson, to his fellow members of the “Secret Six,” the industry’s top in-house lawyers. Once funded, these projects were assigned to the supervision of New York attorney Edwin Jacob, who was not directly employed by any of the cigarette makers and so enjoyed the protection of confidentiality in his dealings with these scientist “clients”. As Roy Morse, a former research director at R. J. Reynolds, disclosed long after, “As soon as Mr. Jacob funded [a scientific study], it was a privileged relationship, and couldn’t come into court … So they could do projects that they could bury if they chose.”
Examples of such undertakings were a small grant to a radiologist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa to investigate “population pockets” with a high incidence of lung cancer and low consumption of cigarettes and a $5,000 grant to Yale Medical School biostatistician Alvan Feinstein, who had investigated what he said was a selection bias in hospital diagnoses of cancer patients who smoked. Feinstein now solicited money to pursue a “multi-variable analysis” of disease, contending in his grant application to Jacob, “If cigarette smoking is as harmful as has been alleged, it should not only ‘cause’ these diseases but should also make their manifestations and outcome worse” in smokers, but his preliminary findings did not show that. Feinstein’s effort appealed to Jacob, who in endorsing it for ad hoc committee approval wrote that if the Yale investigator’s early finding of no correlation between smoking and the clinical course of lung and laryngeal cancer was borne out, “it would be of assistance in disputing the assertions of aggregation and acceleration of cancer by smoking made in certain of the [product liability] law suits.” That these “special projects” were conceived largely as lawyers’ tools to defend the industry was further testified to by Yeaman’s January 1966 memo in which he spelled out the priorities for such grants. “Category A” was “projects essentially of ‘adversary value,’” the B category covered those “having a generally defensive character,” and C, the lowest priority, referred to “basic research.”
One “Category A” project referred to in this document was to be handled directly by the CTR, with “Dr. Hockett to submit preliminary plan for implementation.” So much for claims of hands-off research.
This prejudicial selectivity in dealing with the medical case against smoking to bolster the industry’s legal defense and public-relations efforts was a part of the companies’ studied campaign of denial and deflection, if not outright deceit. Carl Thompson, the executive in charge of the Tobacco Institute account for public-relations consultants Hill & Knowlton, sent a memo on October 18, 1968, to the institute’s new P.R. head, William Kloepfer, on how best to angle the contents of
Tobacco & Health Research
, the industry propaganda sheet masquerading as a legitimate newsletter and distributed massively to doctors and scientists around the country: “The most important type of story is that which casts doubt on the cause and effect theory of disease and smoking … .” Eye-grabbing headlines were the key, Thompson counseled, and “should strongly call out the point—Controversy! Contradiction! Other factors! Unknowns … .”
Hill & Knowlton’s counseling was too benign for a number of die-hard tobacco industry executives—H&K, in fact, would shortly resign the account after fifteen years partly because the cigarette makers’ stonewalling attitude embarrassed the firm with other clients—and some of its public-relations business went to the new Tiderock Corporation, run by Rosser Reeves, the legendary apostle of hard-sell advertising when he headed the Ted Bates agency. One of Tiderock’s early inspirations was to plant an article by freelancer Stanley Frank in the January 1968 issue of
True
magazine (circulation: 2 million copies), ridiculing the smoking-health link, and then call attention to the issue with a big newspaper ad campaign. The month afterward, some 600,000 reprints of the article were distributed with a note attached signed by “The Editors” and saying, “As a leader in your profession and community, you will be interested in reading this story;” nowhere was there any indication that the reprints were paid for by tobacco money. Frank’s article, nothing more than a rehash of the industry line
(e.g.
, “Statistics alone link cigarettes with lung cancer”), was then made yet more simplistic, given a pseudonymous byline, retitled “Cigarette Cancer Link Is Bunk,” and run in a March issue of the
National Enquirer
, the nation’s foremost scandal sheet, thus exposing another million or more readers to the disinformation campaign fueled by the tobacco companies.
Not only was the industry unapologetic about the health hazard it was selling to the public, but in launching 100 mm. brands with higher tar and nicotine yields than anything then on the market, it blithely compounded the medical peril. And when reputable parties like the FTC, Consumers Union, and the Roswell Park cancer institute called the public’s attention to the heightened yields, the industry claimed that inadequate test samples and undependable measuring techniques had been used and invoked the straw man of science’s
continuing failure to prove that “any particular ingredient as found in cigarette smoke actually causes any human disease.” This last contention had become the industry’s favorite—and most transparent—ruse, for although no single ingredient among the several thousand compounds detectable in tobacco smoke may have been the culprit in and of itself, the combination of some of them or the entire accumulation almost surely was implicated in disease formation.