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

4. The Search for Common Ground Begins

36 4 The Search for Common Ground Begins By late fall 1996, the Scruggs-Moore settlement initiative was dead, or at least stunned. But Matt Myers knew that the economic and political winds blowing toward settlement were still strong. The industry was still under pressure from Wall Street to get rid of the nettlesome cases—and its pariah status. In August 1996, just as the Scruggs-Moore deal was falling apart, a jury in Florida awarded Grady Carter, a lone lung cancer victim, $750,000 in damages, only the second time in history that a tobacco injury case had reached a jury. The award was against the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation, but the reverberations were industrywide. Philip Morris’s stock lost $12 billion in value in less than an hour. The industry’s new leaders, led by R. J. Reynolds’s Goldstone, had signaled openness to settlement, if not yet willingness to make fundamental concessions. The White House, led by Bruce Lindsay, harbored the seductive vision of a negotiated settlement, brokered by the president and celebrated by all sides. And Moore and Scruggs were increasingly fearful of losing the Mississippi case, which had now been set for trial in the summer of 1997. Though Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and other Republican congressional leaders detested David Kessler, the FDA, and the regulation that crimped their business constituency, they were anxious to shed the growing taint of Republican indenture to the tobacco lobby— and to its campaign contributions. In 1996 Lott’s predecessor, Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, had refused to support FDA regulation of tobacco. He parroted the industry line that tobacco was no worse than any other consumer product. “We know it’s [tobacco] not good for kids, but a lot of things aren’t good. Some would say milk’s not good.” This Republican unease was measurably heightened by Bill Novelli’s decision to allocate a significant portion of the National Center for Leading toward Settlement 37 Tobacco-Free Kids’s $5 million annual budget to a series of aggressive advocacy ads in the papers Congress reads: the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Capitol Hill’s “local” newspapers, Roll Call and The Hill. The ads attacked Big Tobacco’s massive campaign contributions to members of Congress. Though the ads were scrupulously nonpartisan, since tobacco money was flowing disproportionately to Republicans, the impact was partisan. Lott and other Republican leaders began to view a Moore settlement initiative, supported or at least not opposed by the industry, as a painless way to foreclose the Democrats ’ opportunity to exploit Republican ties to Big Tobacco in the next congressional elections. The leadership of the tobacco control movement had shown itself capable of uniting behind an ever expanding, all-encompassing shopping list of tobacco control policies, from broad, unfettered FDA authority over tobacco to full civil and criminal accountability for all the industry’s past, ongoing, and future wrongs. The leadership had also united without stress in opposition to the Scruggs-Moore settlement, because it fell far short on virtually every item on that list. However, the leadership had not yet had to respond to any serious proposal that met some of the public health advocates’ most important objectives but fell short of the ideal. Yet new, improved settlement proposals were sure to emerge. Matt, for one, knew that “Hell, no!” would not remain a sufficient answer. Priorities would have to be set; hard choices would have to be made. The new Congress, still in firm Republican hands, would convene in January 1997, and a newly reelected and emboldened President Clinton would be looking for legislative achievements—and willing to compromise . Matt and Bill Novelli began to think through, for themselves initially, just what their top priorities would be—and what concessions to the industry might be tolerable in order to achieve their public health priorities. The discussions Matt had pursued informally the summer before with both national and local tobacco control advocates, while he was organizing their common opposition to the Scruggs-Moore settlement proposals, convinced him that few others in the movement were yet thinking hard—or prepared to think hard—about potential trade-offs. We were a public health community—really a bunch of individuals—who never had to cope with hard, hard choices and competing values. We had 38 Smoke in Their Eyes all been able to operate at the level of broad rhetoric, because...