Authors: Richard Kluger
V
BY
the close of the ’Seventies, the tobacco industry was at the apex of its power and had never been more profitable. In both the social and political arenas the cigarette makers were triumphant largely because they faced no organized national opposition, only weak and scattered voices of protest. A 1978 report by a national commission on tobacco and health policy called the anti-smoking effort “minimal and symbolic” and noted that “in relation to the size and scope of the problem,” only “a very small amount” of the $230 million raised annually by the three largest health voluntaries had gone to combat smoking. That same year, America’s largest medical group, the AMA, had issued its report on tobacco and health, and it proved to be little more than glossy window dressing and a flagrant dereliction of the organization’s professional responsibility. Few state laws had been enacted that materially curbed smoking in public beyond extreme cases like lighting up in elevators and on public transportation.
In Congress, nobody with power spoke out forcefully against smoking. Washington’s two most skilled consumer advocates, Michael Pertschuk, chairing the FTC, and the unaffiliated, unquenchable Ralph Nader, had too many other battles to pursue. So well entrenched politically was the industry that the senior senator from the leading tobacco state—Jesse Helms—had little trouble extracting a pledge from his party’s 1980 presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan, that if he was elected, his administration would countenance no antismoking crusade like Califano’s. Nor was there a peep from any federal administrative figure after the decade’s two most outspoken foes of smoking, Califano and Jesse Steinfeld, had been hounded out of office.
The only part of the federal government deeply involved in the health aspects of smoking was the National Cancer Institute, which had spent most of the 1970s and tens of millions of taxpayer dollars doing the industry’s work for it by trying to develop a cigarette that could be endorsed—and was, by its director of smoking research—as a tolerable risk. Meanwhile, the ingredients of this documented hazard were less regulated than any other hazardous product.
When John Pinney, director of the Office on Smoking and Health, sought an agreement from the industry to disclose the additives in cigarettes and to introduce no others until the effects on consumers could be determined, he got nowhere. “The real outrage is that nobody lays a glove on this product,” Pinney commented several years after leaving office. Best of all from the industry’s standpoint, the public appeared little concerned about tobacco’s dominion. The 1978 Roper poll taken for the Tobacco Institute found worry about cigarette use to be near the bottom of the list of the nation’s social concerns, even though nine out of ten Americans believed smoking to be hazardous to the smoker’s health and a majority believed it to be probably hazardous to bystanders.
Headquarters of the cigarette companies’ united front was the Tobacco Institute, whose president since 1970, Horace Kornegay, was surrounded by some of the best lawyers, lobbyists, publicists, and scientific consultants money could buy. Their chief mission was to treat the soaring mountain of scientific evidence against their product as a mirage or a molehill and to reassure the public that eminent authorities contested the health charges, as if there were equal validity to each “side” of the ongoing cigarette “controversy”. Senator Edward Kennedy, hardly its friend, remarked of the Tobacco Institute in 1979, “Dollar for dollar they’re probably the most effective lobby on Capitol Hill.” Added Nader’s associate, Sidney Wolfe of the Health Research Group, “They have completely paralyzed Washington in terms of any significant ability to regulate cigarettes.”
As if gearing up for incessant and intensified battle, the TI nearly doubled its staff to seventy operatives in 1978, opened satellite offices in California, Pennsylvania, Texas, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, and broadened its activities to include four full-time speakers who barnstormed the country addressing any business, fraternal, or civic group that would have them, and publication of a shelf load of rebuttal documents. Prominent among this attack literature was the bimonthly
Tobacco Observer
, which typically characterized its antismoking foes as “intolerant prohibitionists” composing “a joyless tribe … who want to manage everyone else’s lives, perhaps because they have been incapable of managing their own.” The newsletter was filled with apologetics like the article “Women and Cancer” in the February 1980 issue by a University of Texas professor emeritus, arguing that the rise in lung cancer among women was largely attributable to industrial pollutants and other occupational exposures now that there were more and more women in the workplace. In the TPs 1979 brochure “About Tobacco Smoke,” carbon monoxide was dismissed as a common gas, and the amount of it contributed by cigarette smoke to the global air supply “is reported to be negligible”—thus omitting mention of its possibly critical role in polluting the bloodstream of inhaling smokers. For sheer artifice, this sort of deceptive propaganda won the admiration of the
American Cancer Society’s vice president for public information, Irving Rimer, who found it handsomely produced and crisply written—“One expects an industry with their resources to go first-class,” he remarked. But Rimer earnestly regretted the lack of candor in the TPs literature: “They might have confronted the evidence and said they were concerned about it and were going to do everything they could to reduce the carcinogenic contents … [and] remove any defects from the product that made it deleterious to the public health.”
One of the TI’s most effective operatives was William F. Dwyer, whose curly-headed good looks and pleasing voice gave him the demeanor of innocence and sincerity as he traveled the land from 1974 to 1979 reciting the gospels according to St. Nicotine. A 1950s Princeton dropout who had gone into politics as an aide to the Republican congressman from his conservative home district in Rochester, New York, Dwyer loved public speaking and was good at it, so in time he went to work for several federal agencies whose programs he would beguilingly explain and defend before business groups and the general citizenry. When Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, Dwyer decided he had had enough of politics and answered a blind ad for an industry group seeking a spokesman on a controversial subject. Himself a smoker, Dwyer was pleased by the prospect of traveling first-class for TI in an expense-account lifestyle to plump for tobacco. He underwent intensive indoctrination with industry scientists, technicians, lawyers, and publicists, who drove home two lessons to him: (1) “Nobody likes us,” and (2) that almost certainly included smokers.
When he first went on the road, Dwyer was accompanied by members of Shook, Hardy & Bacon, a Kansas City law firm that specialized in defending tobacco companies against liability claims, and when he slipped by saying “there is no evidence” that smoking caused disease, he was corrected to say “there is no proof” of a causal link. The lawyers, Dwyer recalled, coached him to admit nothing and condition all his remarks, “so we cabined everything—the whole thing was a disclaimer” and never a thinly veiled pitch in behalf of the virtues of smoking or a claim of harmlessness. Typically a TI publicist would telephone a local Rotary Club program director to advise that an assistant to the institute’s president—Dwyer had been given the exalted title to enhance his promotability—would be in his community on a given date not to push smoking but only to ask for a fair hearing on the industry’s side of the health charges. “We were promoting the free market system,” Dwyer recounted, “where people can decide for themselves whether or not to consume a particular product.”
Before long, Dwyer had his patter down cold. “Smoking has been valued and vilified by popes and potentates—we accept that,” his opening ran, but the industry could not accept the notion that its fully legal product ought to be
foreclosed from the marketplace. “There are things the public hasn’t heard,” Dwyer would assert, because the industry’s story had not been properly disseminated. “It was an appeal for fair play,” he said. His notion of fair play, as expressed in talks to small groups and then much more widely amplified in press interviews and radio and television appearances scheduled around his prepared speech in any given community, included charges like:
a widespread antitobacco industry is out to harass sixty million Americans who smoke and to prohibit the manufacture and use of tobacco products. … Outrageous and medically unsubstantiated assertions made by well-financed and highly organized groups opposed to smoking are disputed by many men and women of science.
What “widespread antitobacco industry” was that? Who was trying to prohibit the manufacture of tobacco products? Which “outrageous and medically unsubstantiated assertions” were those? And what were the names of the “many men and women of science” who disputed the health charges against smoking and were also innocent of taking the tobacco industry’s pay?
Dwyer’s knack for phrasemaking grew with time, as in his urging his listeners to be wary of “the shower-adjusters” among them—busybodies who would, “if we let them, try to take over our lives and adjust the temperatures in our showers next if they don’t like the way we’re living.” His jousts with the media turned more and more one-sided, as he came to understand better how to manipulate them. Broadcast interviewers, he found, were rarely “real journalists” when compared to print reporters, who tended to be more prepared and persistent in their interrogations. Few of his questioners or opponents on a debate platform were as professionally equipped as Dwyer, and in time most antismoking organizations would not let their representatives appear on the same platform with the TI’s glib pitchman. One prominent exception was the irrepressible John Banzhaf, every bit a match for the industry spokesmen; Dwyer found the ASH founder to be “a zealot” and their encounters devoid of all graciousness, possibly because for Banzhaf the encounter was more than a rhetorical contest.
By contrast, Dwyer savored the engagement: “I liked being in a battle—it was like a political contest—a head game … . I enjoyed the intellectual stimulation and the challenge of it.” He suffered no guilt pangs, he said, for his work in behalf of what many took to be a rogue industry, and would point in justification to the government-mandated warning on every cigarette pack that each consumer was free to heed or not. “I really believed that these people had been told.”
VI
BUT
“these people” were continuously told a lot of other things as well. The Tobacco Institute started running a series of double-page advertisements in February 1979—a month after the big Surgeon General’s report was issued—in the nation’s three mass newsweeklies and
Parade
, the Sunday supplement, which showed the industry’s mind-manipulators at their most adroit. The thrust of the ads was that smoking was not a grave health issue but merely one of several equally acceptable social options, none of which required intervention by government into the lives of a sensible and civil people.
Headlined “Freedom of Choice is the best choice,” the first ad took the form of separate messages to smokers and nonsmokers. The former were offered commiseration: “If you’ve ridden any planes [lately], you’ve found yourself banished to the back of them, last to be served, last to leave,” so it was only natural for them to feel they were being made into “social outcasts”. But the whole notion of separating smokers from nonsmokers was much ado about very little, the ad went on to imply; in communities where nonsmoking diners were entitled to smoke-free accommodations, restaurant owners were finding scant demand for the segregated seating. “The point is that most nonsmokers think smokers are O.K.,” the TI ad reassured the latter—as if it were the smokers as human beings rather than their smoking that were the object of disapproval.
In fact, government regulations did not require smoking sections to be in the rear of aircraft cabins or that smokers be the last to get service or to deplane. In fact, smoke-free sections in restaurants were growing in popularity as the public began to grasp the possible implications of the toxic content of environmental tobacco smoke (ETS), though its magnitude of deadliness remained uncalculated. And in fact, most nonsmokers did not think smoking was “O.K.;” according to a large survey by the U.S. Public Health Service in 1975, 77 percent of those nonsmokers questioned found it annoying to be near a smoker in the act. None of this deterred the authors of the Tobacco Institute ads, which went on to trivialize smoking as “a small ritual,” part of the “personal style” of those who practiced it, and whether “you prefer carrot juice or bottled water, beach buggies or foreign cars, tobacco smoking or chewing gum” hardly mattered. What did was how awful life would be “if we allowed a tiny handful of intolerant anti-smokers, and a small number of discourteous smokers, to break up the enjoyable harmony we find in each other’s personal choice.”
Smoking, though, was not a “small ritual”—harmlessness was implied by the diminutive—nor a charming personality trait but a compulsive, often debilitating
habit that most smokers told pollsters they would gladly break if they could. Neither could sly representations reduce to “a tiny handful of intolerant anti-smokers” the increasing majority of the population that favored segregating smokers who indulged themselves in public, even if politicians were not yet ready to enact such restrictions. But when the tables were turned and the tobacco industry itself was done in by the dubious tactics of its enemies, it let out a loud bellow—or, as in the seduction of Philip Morris by an ardent anti-smoking advocate with access to a mass audience, went to great lengths to silence the tormentor.
Peter Taylor, a leading investigative reporter on British television, approached Philip Morris after he had made two 1975 documentaries, one entitled “Licensed to Kill” about the British tobacco industry and a second about a man dying of lung cancer, for ITV’s popular “This Week,” Britain’s approximate counterpart to America’s top-rated “60 Minutes”. For yet another show on the perils of smoking, Taylor wanted to feature Philip Morris, which was of course aware of the antismoking pitch of the prior shows but said it was told their seeming one-sidedness was due to the failure of the British cigarette manufacturers to avail themselves of the proffered opportunity to appear and give their side of the story. Philip Morris was badly in need of a major plug in the British market, and since it was about to introduce Marlboro Lights there, the company had a keen incentive to grasp the hand Taylor was extending to it.