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109 13 Brown and Williamson versus Walter Jacobson The mailman comes to Channel 2 twice a day, not carrying a bag over his shoulder, but pushing a two-by-four-foot canvas container on wheels through the delivery entrance on Erie Street. He checks in at the security desk, rolls his cargo up to a wall of cubbyholes outside the newsroom, and sorts the envelopes by name. Twenty-five or thirty of them go into “Jacobson,” a doublesize slot, where they pile up until I or my assistants—doing the legwork I did for Jack Mabley at the Daily News—spread them in a space between us, to be opened by whichever of us can stay off the telephone long enough to read. Not much of the mail has ideas we haven’t thought of, or interesting angles to ongoing stories in the news, or details of a person or family being stomped on by Washington, Springfield, or city hall. But every now and then there comes what we wait for. For example: In the fall of 1981, in a hand-addressed envelope postmarked Lexington, Kentucky, comes a letter to me, scrawled and unsigned. “I’ve heard of your commentaries about the tobacco industry,” it says. “I’d like to help you do more. I know of a confidential report on cigarette advertising in the files of the Federal Trade Commission that reveals tactics by the industry to addict children to tobacco.” The letter describes what it says is specific information the FTC has about the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corporation, which sells Viceroy cigarettes. If I can confirm the existence of a federal report like that, I’ll have a mighty good story—maybe not Watergate, but good enough for me. And not too problematic. I won’t have to confirm that Brown and Williamson is trying to sell cigarettes to children, just that there’s an FTC report accusing it of it. My assistant, Michael Radutzky (who will go on to be a senior producer at CBS’s 60 Minutes), tracks down the report, which says that Brown and Williamson has asked one of its agencies for advice on how to market Viceroy 110 B R O W N A N D W I L L I A M S O N V E R S U S WA LT E R J A C O B S O N to young people. It also says that Brown and Williamson has accepted the advice, “adopted many of the ideas” the agency recommends, and “translated the advice on how to attract young ‘starters’ into an advertising campaign.” Here are some of those ad agency ideas: “For the young smoker, a cigarette falls into the same category as wine, beer, shaving, or wearing a bra . . . a declaration of independence . . . striving for self-identity. Therefore, an attempt should be made to present the cigarette as an illicit pleasure . . . a basic symbol of the growing-up maturity process.” I include those words from the FTC report in a commentary about the tobacco industry peddling cigarettes to children. At the end I say, “That’s the strategy of the cigarette slicksters, the cigarette business, which is insisting in public, they’re not selling cigarettes to children. They’re not slicksters, they’re liars.” A television commentator telling a million people watching Channel 2 News in Chicago that Viceroy executives “are not slicksters, they’re liars.” That’s it! Enough is enough! The tobacco industry isn’t going to take it anymore. It will fight back. Brown and Williamson will sue for libel, demanding $17 million from me and CBS. I’ve imagined the scenario a thousand times—a meeting in a wood-paneled, marble-floored, liquor-cabineted corporate conference room; two or three tobacco big shots, salt-and-pepper hair, gray suits, white shirts, rep ties, and (fake) gold cufflinks. A Scotch in a hand of each. None of them is smoking (they reserve the death sentence for the children they’re aiming to addict). “That little fucker in Chicago,” I imagine one saying to another. “Let’s nail him.” Which is precisely what they do. They hire Martin London, one of the toughest, smartest, most aggressive corporate lawyers in the country, onetime counsel to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and to Spiro Agnew, vice president of the United States under Richard Nixon, who resigned when convicted of federal tax evasion. Channel 2 hires Don Reuben, equally tough and smart, one of the most aggressive...

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