In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

89 12 Progress Matt returned to the Center for Tobacco-Free Kids office late Friday (April 4), after the close of that second day of negotiations. He reported to Center president Bill Novelli on both the day’s events and his conviction that the industry was prepared to make major concessions on all of the key public health issues. Bill, as he would remain throughout, was fully supportive of the Center’s participation in the talks through Matt. Bill recalls: Matt came in and he said, “Hey, you’re not going to believe this!” And he laid out how he had been contacted, and he said, “What do you think we should do?” Of course, my first reaction was why would we want to sit down and talk to these bastards? This is never going to work. Negotiation with these guys in reaching some accord, some détente, this won’t work. We have to destroy these people. Well, here came the opportunity to actually negotiate, and so I had to kind of unscrew my head a little bit in order to accept it. We had all programmed ourselves to fight the enemy, and you have to change your mindset in order to go from fighting to negotiating. The more Matt and I talked about it, the more I thought to myself: (A) it can’t hurt to listen; (B) we owe it to public health; and (C) I was egotistical enough to think well, who better than us? And so I said, “Okay, let’s do it; but let’s not do it alone, let’s figure out how to keep our allies abreast of this thing. We’re not the Lone Ranger; we’re not freelance people here. The deal was that we had to do this in full confidentiality. We said, “We’ll abide by that but we can’t really abide by full confidentiality. We have got to keep a few people abreast. After all we have a board; we are accountable, we’re not just a couple of guys out here on an island.” So we determined that we would keep some people informed, and we chose four or five people who were not only reasonable counselors, but people who really had to know these things. We chose John Seffrin [CEO of the American Cancer Society], and we chose Dudley Hafner [CEO of 90 Smoke in Their Eyes the American Heart Association], and we chose Lonnie Bristow [immediate past president of the American Medical Association], and we chose the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Richard Hyman. Bill and Matt quickly set about convening the group by conference call. Matt reported, and the response was uniformly enthusiastic. The Cancer Society’s John Seffrin recalls: “Matt did a marvelous job with his infamous yellow legal pad, going through exactly how far the talks had gotten, what was still on the table, what was off the table. And I immediately recognized that there were opportunities here to get things that we wouldn’t get in the rest of my life any other way.” The Heart Association’s Hafner confirms the enthusiastic reactions of the group: “We were very positive. This was something very, very significant and we owed it to the public to see it through. And we said right up front, Matt emphasized it, and we all emphasized it, that if this didn’t work, if it didn’t play out the way the tobacco execs were letting on, we could always walk away. We owed it to the public to find out.” But Matt’s decision to join the negotiations—the only designated public health representative—was challenged by another confidant whom he briefed on developments, Nancy Kaufman, vice president of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a veteran public health advocate and shrewd strategist. Kaufman recalls her reaction: I have to say I was excited about this happening. It seemed quite historic. But, I was also scared because I know how good and clever the industry is, and how they hire the best help they can buy. I felt, here was a kind of David and Goliath challenge, and I was a little bit scared about what might happen, too. I didn’t like the fact that Matt would be in there by himself. I told him it would be a huge mistake. I realized that there were either tremendous strides to make in these negotiations or tremendous failures, and I didn’t think...

Share