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

20. “When to Walk Away”

142 20 “When to Walk Away” As the negotiations moved into their final hours, Julia Carol offered Matt unsolicited advice by e-mail: If I were Tokyo Rose and could sing to you as you went about your business , I’d be singing the Kenny Rogers song about the gambler: “You gotta know when to hold ‘um . . . know when to walk away . . . and know when to run.” And Matt replied: I like your counsel—even as I feel like I am going up in flames—at least with you it is because you have been fighting the good fight and have thought the issues through. With too many others, it is because they like to grandstand, but not do the hard work. Don’t be surprised if I end up on your side of the battle when all is said and done, but it will be because the key AGs failed to hold firm on important issues. I hope they don’t give me a reason to oppose what they are doing because, if done right, I do believe the talks have the potential to move us along further and faster than the alternatives. Only time will tell. Carol’s wasn’t the only friendly voice urging Matt to walk away from the negotiations. The two staff members who were his lobbying team at the Center, Anne Ford and Michael Kirshenbaum, became increasingly insistent that it was in the public interest—and his own interest —to walk. Anne Ford was Matt’s right hand in lobbying the Senate. She had worked for five years on the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee for the ranking Democrat, Tom Harkin of Iowa, before joining Matt at the Center. She could be a passionate advocate but had little patience with those critical of any compromise with the industry : “I came from the Hill. I don’t understand pure. I had no sym- The Settlement 143 pathy with those who said, in effect, ‘I’m going to be pure as the driven snow no matter what public health we can get out of it.’ And I would provoke heated arguments with them.” So Anne had not questioned Matt’s participation in the negotiations until Mike Moore, Dick Scruggs, and their colleagues began to edge toward agreeing to limit the industry’s liability for future wrongdoing: I have a vivid memory that we were going beyond what had seemed acceptable earlier. And my sense was we were getting caught up in the rush to the end. I began saying to Matt, “I don’t understand why we don’t take a step back and think about where we are, take an assessment, walk away from it.” His response was, “Fine, Anne, I’ll walk away. We lose whatever voice we have. I might be able to actually stop some bad stuff from happening. This is going to happen regardless of whether I’m there or not there.” Anne was not persuaded: “I said, ‘Let them continue, but they won’t have you there.’ ” Michael Kirshenbaum was a young, able, politically populist idealist —in other words, highly skeptical of the political process, distrustful of the president and Congress, appalled at the thought that the “system ” would force the choice of trading off the industry’s full liability for its misdeeds in exchange for essential public health policies. “Right or wrong, it was horrible; it truly is a horrible thing. And it shouldn’t be that way.” But he nevertheless supported Matt’s decision to participate in the negotiations: I accepted that he saw this as a strategic opportunity where there had been no hope for any type of national tobacco policy before. If I had believed that Matt got involved in all this for other motives than what he thought was the best way to advance tobacco control policy and make public health gains, then I would have been disillusioned with him personally. And I wasn’t. Ford, Kirshenbaum, and the Center’s veteran tobacco control consultant , John Bloom, all argued that the liability negotiations already were infuriating the movement. They felt that the provisions, which seemed to undermine the full authority of FDA, would be a lightning rod for David Kessler and the other tobacco control advocates who were already inclined to oppose the settlement. Michael argued that the Center should distance itself from the settlement: 144 Smoke in Their Eyes We tried...