Chapter 4

By Frank Tursi, Susan E. White and Steve McQuilkin
JOURNAL REPORTERS
© Winston-Salem Journal

Smokers across the country poured their first cups of coffee on the morning of Jan. 4, 1954, and took the first satisfying drags on their day's first cigarette. They paged through their morning newspapers on the slow Monday after a long holiday weekend. President Eisenhower was threatening to cut spending to balance the budget, and the State Department was considering sending arms to Iraq and Pakistan. A Tibetan priest reported meditating with the 8-foot-tall Abominable Snowman on a Himalayan peak. The critter couldn't talk, but was pretty friendly, the priest noted. Turning the pages, the smokers came across a full-page ad. It was addressed to them.

The R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. was once the largest cigarette company in the United States with a powerhouse of best-selling brands: Winston, Salem and Camel. But times changed, and as the case against smoking became more pronounced in the 1960s, RJR failed to adapt to the marketplace. Its rivals would eventually rush past it, and RJR's efforts to catch up would have a profound impact on the company and the cigarette industry.

"A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers,'' the banner headline read. Signed by the presidents of five of the country's six largest tobacco companies -- Liggett & Myers was the holdout -- the ad was the industry's first collective response to the news a month earlier that mice painted with the residue of cigarette smoke had developed skin cancer. The tobacco presidents wanted to reassure their customers that such experiments were not conclusive and that many ''eminent'' doctors and scientists questioned their validity.

The executives reminded smokers that science was still searching for the many causes of cancer and that no one had proven that cigarettes were among them. Though they didn't think that their products were harming anyone, the presidents made a pledge to their customers: ''We accept an interest in people's health as a basic responsibility, paramount to every other consideration in our business.''

They promised to cooperate ''closely'' with doctors and government agencies assigned the task of safeguarding public health and to spend their companies' money on research into ''all phases of tobacco use and health.'' The presidents also announced that they were forming a committee to direct industry research. It would be headed by a scientist of ''unimpeachable integrity and national repute'' and advised by an independent board of scientists and doctors.

''This statement is being issued because we believe the people are entitled to know where we stand on this matter and what we intend to do about it,'' the presidents concluded.

Forty years later, the newspaper ad would become a contentious piece of evidence in the legal battle over tobacco. The lawyers suing the tobacco companies would portray the ad as nothing more than a public-relations ploy, an advertising gimmick aimed at beguiling smokers into thinking that cigarettes were safe. They would argue that it marked the beginning of a devious strategy to cover up the dangers of smoking.

While they would tend to downplay the ad's significance, attorneys defending the companies would maintain that the presidents may have been naive in thinking that any problems with cigarettes could be quickly solved, but that they meant what they said and fulfilled the promises they made. The ad carried no such weighty baggage on that morning in 1954. To the smokers who read it, the presidents' message was simple, concise and clear: Trust us. In the Ozzie-and-Harriet America before Watergate and exploding Pintos, smokers had no reason not to. They took another drag and turned the page, comforted by the knowledge that these important men, who headed big, powerful companies, would get to the bottom of all this.

Thrown for a Loop

Eward A. Darr, the president of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., hinted that the tobacco executives might not have been looking for honest answers, as their ad implied, but that something other than people's health was their ''paramount'' concern. Quoted in the same edition of the Winston-Salem Journal in which the ad appeared, Darr didn't say anything about conducting independent research to protect the health of smokers. The companies formed the research committee, he said, as a ''concerted effort on the part of the tobacco industry to combat a bit of propaganda, which we believe to be erroneous, unfair and unjust.''

He was, of course, talking about Dr. Ernst Wynder's mouse experiments along with the epidemiological studies linking smoking and cancer that had received such widespread play in newspapers and popular magazines since 1950. ''We want the American public to know what the real story is,'' Darr said.

Combatting the negative publicity is also what Timothy V. Hartnett, the president of Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., had in mind on Dec. 14, 1953, when he sent a memo to his counterparts at the other tobacco companies. The news stories and magazine articles had taken their toll.

Domestic cigarette consumption was down about 2 percent, the first non-wartime decrease since the Great Depression in 1932. It would fall an additional 5 percent in 1954. Cigarette salesmen reported that retailers were becoming uneasy. So were investors. Since the mouse study hit the popular press at the end of November, RJR's preferred stock was down more than $4 a share, from a high of $103 a month earlier. Stocks in other tobacco companies had suffered similarly.

Clearly, something had to be done, Hartnett told his fellow presidents, ''to get the industry out of this hole.'' The first thing the companies should do, he suggested, was to hire the best public-relations experts because ''none has ever been handed so real and yet so delicate a multimillion-dollar problem.''

In response to the memo, Darr and the presidents of the five other large tobacco companies gathered the next day in the elegant Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue in New York for the start of an unprecedented two-day meeting. The U.S. Supreme Court, in busting Buck Duke's old tobacco trust in 1911, prevented the companies from working in concert. Criminal convictions for price fixing in 1939 reinforced that ban. Except for the occasional dinner honoring one of their own, the tobacco presidents had avoided even being in the same room together. They must have thought that circumstances were dire enough to risk a government antitrust action.

''At the moment, these men feel thrown for a loop,'' Edward DeHart would write nine days after the meeting. He was an account executive with Hill & Knowlton, one of the largest and most respected public-relations firms in the country. The tobacco presidents had taken Hartnett's advice and hired the agency, whose representatives also attended the meeting.

''They've competed for years -- not in price, not in any real difference of quality -- but just in ability to conjure up more hypnotic claims and brighter assurances for what their own brand might do for a smoker, compared to another brand,'' DeHart continued in a memo to other agency executives. ''And now, suddenly, they feel all out of bounds because the old claims became unimportant overnight; they are suddenly challenged to produce just one, simple fact.''

Journalist Walter Winchell, who also sensed a sea change, got it about right when he told his radio audience a few weeks before the meeting: ''The burden of proof has shifted. It is no longer up to the scientists to prove that cigarettes cause lung cancer. It is the duty of all concerned to prove that they do not.''

Evidence wasn't exactly what the tobacco barons were seeking. They didn't invite Wynder or any other outside researchers, statisticians or doctors to give presentations. Regardless of what they later said about the health of smokers being uppermost in their minds, the presidents didn't talk about restricting advertising, modifying their products or recommending that customers get routine chest X-rays.

On the contrary, they were ''strongly convinced'' that there was no sound scientific evidence to prove that cigarettes hurt anyone, according to minutes of the meeting. What they had on their hands was simply a public-relations problem. And who better than a tobacco man, who had cut his teeth on enticing ads that persuaded people to use a product they didn't need, to solve such a problem?

''They feel that they should sponsor a public-relations campaign which is positive in nature and is entirely pro-cigarettes . . .,'' the meeting's minutes say. ''They are also emphatic in saying that the entire activity is a long-term, continuing program since they feel that the problem is one of promoting cigarettes and protecting them from these and other attacks that may be expected in the future. . . .''

The Plan: Stop Panic

Because they feared antitrust violations, the presidents favored an informal committee rather than a trade group or association. The committee would be charged with handling the public-relations campaign, and Hill & Knowlton would run the committee.

''We have one essential job -- which can be simply said: Stop public panic,'' DeHart wrote to others in the agency. ''There is only one problem -- confidence, and how to establish it; public assurance, and how to create it. . . . And, most important, how to free millions of Americans from the guilty fear that is going to arise deep in their biological depths -- regardless of any pooh-poohing logic -- every time they light a cigarette.''

It would be a delicate task that must be handled with tact, DeHart noted. ''It is important that the industry do nothing to appear in the light of being callous to considerations of health or of belittling medical research which goes against cigarettes,'' he wrote.

For that reason, John Hill, one of the agency's founders, had strongly suggested at the Plaza Hotel meeting that, to have any credibility with the public, the industry must finance research into smoking and cancer. The tobacco presidents, though, were less than enthusiastic.

Their companies already conducted a great deal of in-house research and sponsored additional work at universities and hospitals, they said. The problem, as they saw it, was getting the results of this favorable research into the hands of the public. Hill, though, was emphatic, and the presidents later reluctantly agreed with him. To reflect this new emphasis, they decided to name their new group the Tobacco Industry Research Committee.

In the recommendations they sent to the tobacco presidents in late December 1953, the Hill & Knowlton executives outlined the basic strategy that the industry would follow for the next 40 years: Develop a credo that the health of the customer comes first; convince smokers that any harmful compounds in cigarette smoke would be removed; insist that more research was needed to pinpoint the causes of lung cancer; and agree among themselves not to seek a competitive advantage by promoting the supposed health benefits of their products.

To do all that, though, the presidents first had to convince the public that they were good guys. Detailing their honorable intentions in an ad that would run in newspapers across the country seemed like a logical beginning. The tobacco presidents were willing to go only so far, however. In the original ad copy, Hill & Knowlton included the promise: ''We will never produce and market a product shown to be the cause of any serious human ailment . . . (we) will undertake to keep the public informed of such facts as may be developed relating to cigarette smoking and health and other pertinent matters.'' The presidents deleted the sentence.

Such details, later uncovered by lawyers suing the tobacco companies, have fueled a courtroom debate about the presidents' motives. The Hill & Knowlton memos and the minutes of the Plaza Hotel meeting clearly show that the tobacco barons wanted to defend their products against what they perceived to be unwarranted attacks and to preserve their companies' profits. The avowed purpose of protecting smokers seems merely to be the cover they used to achieve their goals.

Industry lawyers now carefully dissect the words in what has become known as ''The Frank Statement'' ad and nit-pick the details in order to put their clients in the most favorable light. The people who now run the tobacco companies, the lawyers note, weren't around in 1954. To them, the ad and the motives of the men who signed it are part of an ancient history that is hard to decipher. Who knows what those guys were thinking?

Murray Senkus, though, worked for Ed Darr in 1954 as RJR's director of chemical research. He said he has no reason to think that his boss or the other tobacco executives were lying at the time or were trying to cover up evidence that cigarettes were harmful.

''In retrospect, I can say that they were openly facing the issue objectively,'' he said. ''The thing that most people forget is that there was a tremendous amount of research outside of the industry completely, trying to get to the bottom of the problem. In my dealing with the officials, they openly stated it has not been proven. They said it all the time.''

The men who attended the meeting in the Plaza Hotel knew little about biology, medicine or other sciences. They had come up in an industry that sold an agricultural product, noted Edwin Jacob, a New York lawyer who had long represented the tobacco industry. ''Given this lack of sophistication, many industry officials in 1953 felt that claims about smoking and lung cancer could be disposed of summarily by opening some laboratories and proving in very short order that the claims being made were wrong,'' Jacob wrote in a 1978 memo. ''In the minds of most company officials there was just no substance to the claim that smoking cigarettes caused lung cancer.''

A man can't be faulted for his beliefs, said Paul Crist, a partner with Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue. The Cleveland firm currently supplies RJR's main trial lawyers. Crist noted that the company executives at the time said they didn't think their product caused cancer, which is what the National Cancer Institute also said. ''I don't know how one can conclude that somebody's belief on issues like that are true or false,'' Crist said.

Characterizing the promises made in the ad as a pledge also is a mistake, he said, because that implies some contractual obligation.

All in all, tobacco's critics make too much of the ad, Crist said, by trying to paint it as the blueprint of a massive, 40-year coverup. ''I don't believe that very many people saw that (ad),'' he said. ''And I believe the people who saw it, it had no impact on them, given the vast amount of information coming out of the laboratories then by Dr. Wynder and others at the time.''

The ad appeared in 448 newspapers in 258 cities and cost the companies $244,304. Within two weeks of its appearance, Hill & Knowlton received more than 1,000 telegrams and letters.

Taking the Offense

People writing those letters sent them to the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, 5400 Empire State Building, New York, N.Y. That was the only address that appeared in the ad. Hill & Knowlton's name appeared nowhere, yet the agency received all the mail because, in reality, the PR folks and not the independent scientists touted in the ad ran the committee. Its office was one floor below Hill & Knowlton's in the Empire State Building, and W.T. Hoyt, an agency account executive, was the committee's executive secretary. Thirty-five other agency staff members worked full or part time for the committee, which during its first year spent $477,955, or more than half its budget, paying Hill & Knowlton.

''The purpose (of the committee) was to evaluate the publicity, adverse publicity, that was being generated and to formulate some positive response to it,'' Irwin W. Tucker, who attended the Plaza Hotel meeting as Brown & Williamson's research director, admitted more than 40 years later. (Tucker footnote; deposition on purpose of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee.)

That's not what the presidents implied in their ad or what the committee's mission statement said. Its public purpose was ''to aid and assist research into tobacco use and health, and particularly into the alleged relationship between the use of tobacco and lung cancer, and to make available to the public factual information on this subject.''

Tobacco executives would repeat that message for the next 40 years, telling the public and members of Congress that the committee -- later known as the Council for Tobacco Research -- was spending millions of dollars trying to honestly determine smoking's health effects. The research committee would become an integral piece of the industry's defense. In the assessment of Bill Shinn of Shook, Hardy & Bacon, a law firm in Kansas City, Mo., that has long represented tobacco companies, the committee became the industry's ''shield.''

That mission was aptly described in October 1954 by Dr. Clarence Cook Little, the first chairman of the committee's board of scientific advisers. He told the other members of the board that their job was ''to build a foundation of research sufficiently strong to arrest continuing or future attacks on tobacco.''

In ''Pete'' Little, the tobacco barons had what seemed like a real catch. A Harvard graduate, he had been the youngest president of the University of Maine and had headed the University of Michigan. He had even been a bona fide cancer fighter, heading for a time the American Society for the Control of Cancer, later known as the American Cancer Society, and had developed a nationwide campaign to teach doctors how to detect the early signs of cancer.

In the spring of 1954, Little, 66, was back in Maine raising mice that researchers used in genetic experiments and laying plans to direct the tobacco industry's scientific committee.

Though he had said publicly 10 years earlier that smoking was responsible for the rising rate of lung cancer, Little announced that spring there was no proof that such a relationship existed. ''If smoke in the lungs was a sure-fire cause of cancer, we'd all have had it long ago,'' he said. ''I doubt very much you get tar out of the end of a cigarette.''

He was just the kind of guy Hiram Hanmer was looking for. Hanmer, who had replaced Hartnett as president of Brown & Williamson, was on the search committee that interviewed candidates for scientific director. ''We have, therefore, come to the conclusion that we must be satisfied with someone with a reputation for integrity, of reasonable confidence, and, above all, one who is safe for the industry,'' Hanmer wrote in a memo that spring.

Tucker, who was also on the search committee, said that the committee was looking for people with an ''open mind,'' but any applicant who thought that the studies linking smoking and lung cancer had some validity was disqualified.

Little was chosen from three or four candidates whom Hoyt suggested to the search committee. He became the industry's primary spokesman, delivering dozens of speeches and written statements airing the industry's position on smoking and health and attacking the mounting body of scientific work that tended to link smoking and disease.

Little, for instance, appeared on Edward R. Murrow's See It Now television show on June 7, 1955. Murrow asked him whether any cancer-causing agents had been found in cigarettes. ''No,'' Little replied. ''None whatever, either in cigarettes or in any product of smoking, as such.''

His answer was disingenuous at best. During a meeting of his scientific advisers almost a year earlier, Little reported on a research project that the committee had paid for that found benzopyrene, a potent carcinogen, in the smoke from cigarette paper. The scientific advisers urged that the researcher be ''held in check.''

Dorothea Cohen, who wrote research summaries for the committee's annual reports for 24 years until her retirement in 1989, had this assessment of what she did for a living: ''The CTR is just a lobbying thing. We were lobbying for cigarettes.''

Most reporters in the 1950s saw the research committee for what it was, but, in the interest of fairness and balance, they began incorporating its views in their news stories. For example, Dr. Evarts A. Graham, who conducted the first mouse-painting study with Wynder, reported in February 1956 that cigarette tar painted on the backs of different types of mice and on rabbits' ears again induced cancer. This time the industry was ready for him. A statement released by the research committee noted that ''doctors and scientists have often stressed the many pitfalls present in all attempts to apply flatly to humans any findings resulting from animal experiments.'' To a scientist, the response was worthless, but it was enough to cast doubt in the minds of smokers.

By the spring of 1955, the strategy recommended by Hill & Knowlton was largely successful. ''The first big scare continues on the wane,'' the agency reported. ''The research program of the (committee) has won wide acceptance in the scientific world as a sincere, valuable and scientific effort. . . . Positive stories are on the ascendancy.''

More important, sales were again climbing, up 3.6 percent from the slump of 1954.

Ed DeHart, though, realized early on that the tobacco presidents were flirting with disaster if they continued to rely on smoke and mirrors. ''For the public, an issue touching on the deepest of human fears and instincts is involved -- the issue of uncontrollable disease and death,'' he wrote in that December memo. ''Hence, cigarette companies might not readily be forgiven if their approach to this problem stemmed only from eagerness to protect their earnings and if they twisted the research of medical science . . . into a device to save stockholders.''

For years, the industry had twisted research into ''sales propaganda with few repercussions,'' DeHart continued.

''Doing so now would be a grave mistake. The stakes are too large; the penalties for losing could be too great.''