Smoke in Their Eyes: Lessons in Movement Leadership from the Tobacco Wars

Foreword

ix Foreword David Cohen Sound and sober contemporary political history by historians and journalists is not rare, but lively and evenhanded storytelling of political struggles by those who have lived them is. And historical analyses of landmark political challenges that actually yield practical lessons for those who might face such challenges in the future are even less common . You are about to read a book by my colleague and friend of nearly forty years, Mike Pertschuk, that captures the essence of a landmark event in the history of American civic movements. For three decades leading up to the spring of 1997, the tobacco industry had fiercely resisted all serious efforts to enact regulatory and other public health policies appropriate to the vast human damage cigarettes were proven to cause. Suddenly, that spring, the companies offered concessions of a breadth and magnitude that no tobacco control advocate had ever considered remotely possible. As a result, Congress came within a hair’s breadth of enacting comprehensive tobacco control legislation that would have transformed the tobacco industry from an unregulated, unrestrained marketer of the world’s best-selling addictive lethal product into a tightly regulated marketer of a controlled substance. But it did not happen . Why not? No one could have been better prepared and situated to find the answer than Mike Pertschuk, no one better able to extract the broad lessons for the leadership of civic movements. He brings converging sets of skills and experience to this story. Mike came to Washington in 1962 to work as a legislative assistant to a strong consumer advocate, Senator Maureen Neuberger of Oregon. He was soon energetically working with her to press President Kennedy x Smoke in Their Eyes to form a national commission—as the British had done—to provide an authoritative judgment on the proven health risks of smoking. At the time I met Mike, I was lobbying for Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), supporting Senator Neuberger’s consumer protection advocacy. Neuberger’s efforts provided at least part of the pressure that led President Kennedy to authorize the convening of the first Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health, which declared in 1964 that smoking was a proven cause of lung cancer and other disease . On Senator Neuberger’s behalf, Mike then worked with allies within the Federal Trade Commission to prod the commission to issue its landmark rule forcing cigarette manufacturers to carry strong and explicit warning labels on their packages and in all their advertising. He soon moved to the Senate Commerce Committee to staff a new Consumer Protection Subcommittee under the leadership of Chairman Warren G. Magnuson of Oregon. There, he formed a strong alliance with emerging consumer advocates Ralph Nader and Joan Claybrook and staffed a succession of consumer protection laws that have stood the test of time, from automobile safety legislation to the flame proofing of children’s sleepwear. Mike Pertschuk’s reputation as a thorn in the side of the tobacco industry followed him to Senator Magnuson’s Commerce Committee. In his first year on the committee, he was barred from working on tobacco matters—tainted by his being labeled “biased” against tobacco by the tobacco-state Democrats on the committee. In 1965, by the time he was allowed to staff Congress’s first cigarette label warning bill, he found himself stymied by the pervasive power and presence of the industry . He laments that he ended up facilitating an industry-crafted bill that greatly weakened the label warnings that the FTC would have required , and that barred the FTC and any other federal or state authority from strengthening the warnings or mandating them in advertising. What happened is the bane of the powerful special interests, a positive unintended consequence. Mike Pertschuk learned from the lessons the tobacco interests taught him: verify and squeeze but never trust. By 1969, he had become staff director of the Commerce Committee . Having won the full confidence of Senator Magnuson and other senators, including Republicans, he was better able to challenge Big Tobacco’s political power. Under the skilled leadership of Chairman Magnuson, he developed the 1969 legislation banning the broadcast advertising of cigarettes. In Ashes to Ashes, his Pulitzer Prize–winning history of the tobacco Foreword xi wars prior to the events of this book, historian Richard Kluger well captures the qualities that made Mike an effective, as well as dedicated , inside consumer advocate within the Senate...