Ashes to Ashes (96 page)

The decision helped doom Millhiser’s chances to succeed Cullman. The final choice was “a close call,” as Cullman remembered it. “The board felt George was more open to diversification than Ross, who was a strong tobacco man and … dedicated to our staying mainly in that business.” But the succession also played out as it did partly because the very strength of intellect that had propelled Millhiser into serious contention with Weissman caused concern among Philip Morris insiders. “The speed with which his mind flew from topic to topic could be off-putting,” one high-ranking colleague recalled of Millhiser. “It was hard to get Ross to focus.” Said another top company officer, “For all his brightness and love of words, he was not a very good communicator. … He didn’t straight out identify a problem but approached it more anecdotally, as if the listener ought to intuit what needed to be done.”

Weissman had never had a problem focusing or communicating. Son of an
immigrant milliner, a poor boy who had attended City College by day and worked nights at Orbach’s department store, he had charmed rather than shoved his way to the top of the business world. If possessed of a less original mind than Millhiser, Weissman at fifty-nine was the polished, consummate company loyalist, willing to undertake any assignment good-naturedly. His lanky build and craggy looks had once got him tagged by a financial writer as “a corporate Gary Cooper;” his weather-lined face gave him the appearance, fittingly, of the quintessential Marlboro Man. He lighted his cigarette with the flair of an actor and always managed to show the Marlboro pack while in the act.

Millhiser was given Weissman’s former title of vice chairman but without the added designation of chief operating officer (COO), indicating that his standing in the power structure would be more ceremonial than real. Goldsmith, named president of the corporation, Millhiser’s prior slot, was more the de facto COO and chief keeper of the tobacco flame. Socialite Hugh Cullman, whose success running Philip Morris International stemmed in large measure from his remarkably strong lieutenants, was thought unsuited to the trench warfare involved in running the company’s day-to-day U.S. cigarette business. Instead, Hugh was named chairman of the nonexistent board of PM-USA and chief executive officer of the domestic unit, but the presidency and chief operating job went to Goldsmith’s acolyte, Shepard Pollack, a crack finance man. Jack Landry was passed over, largely for fear that his drinking had burned him out; he was given company-wide oversight of marketing, a vague assignment that removed him from the front lines but kept him on call as a counselor to the company’s golden boy and, many assumed, future CEO, James Morgan, who took over as marketing chief of PM-USA. Jim Bowling became Weissman’s key executive assistant, the ultimate staff man, but without line power. The presidency of Philip Morris International went to the savvy, soft-spoken Cambridge man, Hamish Maxwell. As Cullman’s successor, Weissman was supposed to keep this veteran lineup in place and driving toward the top in tobacco and beer—and while he was at it (and since he had campaigned for it), turn the problematic Seven-Up purchase into a silk purse.

Joe Cullman stepped aside as the Christmas holidays arrived, yet he never really left the premises. He traveled a lot and played more but was invited to keep his office, with the trophy elephant tusks in place, and he did. George Weissman had the keys to the cash register and all the trappings of power, but Cullman’s shadow hovered nearby, and his substance remained highly visible on the board of directors. Had he been a brilliant merchandiser and astute manipulator of diversely gifted subordinates—or a monstrous merchant of death, stubbornly denying and defying the scientific evidence against smoking cigarettes, and minting profits all the while? Or was he both?

A fourth-generation tobacco man, Cullman had come of age when the medical
case against smoking was based more on folklore and anecdote than persuasive documentation. How many businessmen this side of heaven would have willingly received the emerging verdict of science, bowed to it gracefully, and shuttered the shop that stood accused of poisoning so many of its customers? Such a concession was unthinkable to men who had risen to the top of the tobacco trade in the belief that they were servicing a clientele that by and large understood the product was not therapeutic for their internal systems, whatever calming or stimulating effects it worked on their psyches. The simple truth was that the cigarette makers were getting richer and richer as the scientific findings against them piled higher and higher, and before anyone fully grasped the situation, the choice seemed to have narrowed to abject confession and surrender to the health advocates or steadfast denial and rationalization. Cullman took the latter course and did so with somewhat less truculence than his opposite numbers at other cigarette companies. “Nobody could really identify what was in there [the cigarette smoke] that shouldn’t be there,” he would remark ten years into his retirement. His company nevertheless—and without ever conceding the reason—did partially respond to its critics by modifying the toxicity of its often lethal product. To use Cullman’s retrospective words, “[W]e brought the numbers down … and we’ve done many things to come up with a cigarette that’s more acceptable. … I never had a crumb of conscience.”

Could he have felt anything else and kept functioning as the peerless tobacco purveyor of his generation? Actually, out of humanitarian concern he might have said nothing in derogation of the studied and disinterested judgment of medical science—namely, that he was selling a potentially deadly product. But businessmen are combatants, not healers, and when they press against or exceed the bounds of decency in their quest for gain, unhesitant to profit from the folly of others, should the exploited clientele and victimized society expect the perpetrators to restrain themselves out of some sudden divine visitation of conscience? Or must human nature be forcibly corrected when it goes awry?

If no one was garlanding Cullman as a paragon of compassion for his fellow man, the executives he left in place upon his retirement were even less inclined to concede culpability. The 1978 Philip Morris annual report, issued a few months after Cullman stepped down and the first to bear Weissman’s signature as CEO, stated the official company position on smoking and health this way: “No conclusive medical or clinical proof has been discovered;” the antismoking charges still relied on statistical associations that did not establish cause; and “independent statisticians and biometricians have questioned the validity of the statistics in a number of these studies.” On his retirement six years later, Weissman would go a good deal further than Cullman had ever ventured in both self-justification and reassurance of the public. “I’ve always felt science
was on our side,” he told the
Tobacco & Candy Journal
, “ … and that we had more regard for the scientific truth as it existed … .”

Ross Millhiser, tobacco lover par excellence, would recount, in retirement, his experience at a World War II prison camp where he saw fellow captives of war trade badly needed food for the two or three cigarettes each was given among his daily rations and drew a lifelong lesson about the sustenance men extracted from their smokes: “I never lost faith in the business—you can’t keep people frightened forever.” In his sardonic manner, he expressed confidence that “the desire to die in good health will wane” and registered disdain for the American cultural norm “to live your life strictly to prolong it, eating only what’s good for you and undertaking all of life’s other activities that way. … Smoking is a contribution to living. You can say that I’m uninformed, obdurate, or blind, but I can’t see where it’s going to cause me to have cancer.” The war in Vietnam, he was convinced, had “frustrated us as a society,” causing the American people to feel “we aren’t doing anything right anymore … and it’s easy to take it all out on cigarettes.”

This mentality, easily dismissed by outsiders as bunker paranoia, was still more forcefully voiced by Clifford Goldsmith. “We have been unfairly pilloried,” he would say five years after retiring from Philip Morris, “and I’m sad because I know we’re honorable people.” He conceded that tobacco executives had a vested interest that made their views on smoking and health appear biased—“and we probably are, but I never had a moment’s concern … . I felt we were performing a real service—that ours was a product helping the public through the rigors of living.” From ancient times, human beings have ingested substances besides food to gain pleasure or achieve serenity—he cited opium, coca leaf-chewing, and crack as examples far worse than tobacco smoke—and added, “We have fulfilled a need, and it’s very naive to assume that nonsmokers don’t fulfill that need in other and more destructive ways,” including self-consuming stress and a whole range of antisocial acts of aggression.

Far from apologizing, then, for the alleged devastation its product caused, Philip Morris, under a new chairman, a practiced hand at public relations, set out to convince the American public that it was animated by genuine social consciousness. Its philanthropic contributions under Weissman grew more numerous and visible, and special efforts were made to help minorities and their organizations (without mention of the fact that blacks and Latinos smoked in a somewhat heavier proportion than white Americans). In its gifts to both social causes and the arts, such as PM’s sponsorship in 1979 of a touring show of a century of ceramics in the U.S., the company seemed guided by two criteria: urgent need on the part of the recipients, whose appreciation and complicity in PM’s profit-seeking activities were thereby assured, and high visibility in the community.

Weissman’s strong interest in the arts, stemming from exposure in his boyhood
to opera records played on his family’s phonograph, was a reflection as well of his attitude toward business. In time, he would speak of a “triple helix,” an interweaving of interests whereby the arts needed the financial support of business, business needed the arts to improve the quality of its life, and the community at large needed both. “Our business activities must make social sense,” he wrote in the 1979 annual report, “and our social activities must make business sense.” And above all, “A Philip Morris unit must be an exemplary corporate citizen wherever it operates.”

A few weeks before PM’s annual report was issued in the spring of 1980, R&D vice president Robert Seligman exhibited his exemplary citizenship in a letter to Alexander Spears, his counterpart at Lorillard. He wrote that, as directed by Weissman’s right-hand man, Jim Bowling, he was sending on “our recommendations for industry research which we prepared last year … . I have added a list of three subjects which I feel should be avoided.” These were: “1. Developing new tests for carcinogenicity, 2. Attempt to relate human disease to smoking, 3. Conduct experiments which require large doses of carcinogen to show additive effect of smoking.”

The Calling of Philip Morris

AS THE
1980 election year opened, FTC Chairman Michael Pertschuk, chief proponent of the staffs painstaking probe of cigarette advertising, found himself under mounting pressure to rein in the agency’s four-year-old rule-making power to correct industrywide abuses. No one doubted the ebullient Pertschuk’s sincerity or devotion to the public interest, but he was being painted now as a radical interventionist and enemy of American business. Sentiment was growing in Congress, stirred up by tobacco-state legislators like Kentucky’s Senator Wendell Ford, to clip the FTC’s wings before it turned into a ferocious bird of prey. Indeed, before Congress adjourned that year, those wings had been pinioned: the supposedly independent commission’s power to issue sweeping rulings against practices violative of the public interest in any given industry was made subject to veto by either house of Congress. Pertschuk was plainly trying to breast a rising national tide against federal regulation of business, and he knew if a Republican became President, the FTC’s options to move against the tobacco industry would be sharply curtailed.

Sensing urgency as the presidential nominating conventions loomed, the FTC chairman sent a memo to his staff on the need to accelerate the drafting of their report on the investigation into cigarette ads, noting that “too much time has passed (to which I’ve been a prime contributor). We must move to a decision before time slips out of our hands.” To spur progress on the report, the agency in September brought in Matthew L. Myers, a product of the ’Sixties protest generation whose idealism had been tempered by years on the road as a
troubleshooting litigator for the American Civil Liberties Union. Myers’s mental toughness was put to the test at once as he encountered a staff of bright, young, dedicated people like himself who, as he recalled, “were surrounded by mounds of data, roomfuls of it, and didn’t know what to do with it all.”

Within two months, a draft report was hammered out. But then the Reagan landslide came in what Myers remembered as “a brutal blow” to his staff, greatly circumscribing the range of regulatory options the FTC might propose, no matter how convincing the staff report. Working seven-day weeks to fine-tune the report if possible before Reagan’s political appointees were rooting out activism at the agency, Myers and his colleagues excised rhetorical flourishes and flat declarations of abuse by the cigarette companies—punches had to be pulled. To achieve any impact at all, Pertschuk and Myers wanted the five commissioners to adopt the report unanimously so that it might better withstand the scrutiny of the Reagan deregulators. Myers at, once ran into “a huge damper,” as he put it, in the person of that old, cigar-puffing warhorse, Paul Rand Dixon, nearing the end of his second decade on the commission and, still scarred by the rebuke he had suffered from Congress for his 1964 initiative against the cigarette companies, “unwilling to do anything on tobacco.” Dixon even wanted to keep the staff report to Congress secret. Commissioner Robert Pitofsky, a superior lawyer and stickler for precision in wording and airtight factuality, insisted the report be above reproach, and so the editing process proved anything but expeditious. The Reaganites arrived, Pertschuk was moved to the back bench, his place as FTC chairman taken temporarily by Daniel Clanton, a moderate Republican, and the text had to endure a painful combing by incoming senior staffers animated by a pro-business ideology. By that spring, the FTC’s activist engines were running in reverse. In May, as the staff report on cigarettes was finally released, even Pertschuk had joined in a unanimous vote to end the FTC’s proposed regulation of the nonprescriptive drug industry.