Ashes to Ashes (55 page)

Joseph Cullman, the Philip Morris chairman, understood that the news from Washington represented “a setback for the industry,” as he would later acknowledge. “It was the first really professionally competent group report—it had to be recognized and taken seriously. We had expected a more evenhanded report,” as the company had been advised, he said, by people on. or connected with the advisory committee. “We thought it would be rather noncommittal, not as specific … and fairer from our viewpoint. We took it as a very serious adverse development.”

Consideration was given to protesting in public that the Surgeon General’s panel had not based its findings on a fair model
(i.e.
, smokers of filter cigarettes), but such a step was deemed “ill advised,” Cullman recounted, because it both conceded too much to the health charges and lacked enough credibility to blunt the report’s main thrust. Despite the company’s suspicions about much of the medical evidence, it was “ready to devote large sums,” as Cullman put it, to determine if cigarettes were truly a health menace and, if so, what should be removed from the product to make it safe. “But unfortunately … we didn’t know what was or wasn’t a hazard, and no one’s ever proven what the problem really is. … All we did know is that we could lower the tar and nicotine yields.”

George Weissman, then Cullman’s executive vice president for overseas operations, was less inclined to concede an inch to the Surgeon General’s panel. “I read the whole report—we all read it—and marked it up,” he recalled, but found nothing in it to suggest that Philip Morris ought to mend its ways. “Until then we’d always had the philosophy—and we still have it so far as I’m
concerned—that there is no clinical evidence, no smoking gun, that it was impossible for one item to cause so many diseases and that more research has to be done. … We didn’t say we were innocent—or that we were guilty. … Being prudent men, though, we did everything in our power to ensure the quality and safety of our product. If there was a problem with the tar and nicotine, we kept reducing the yields.”

But among those committed to the industry position, some were able privately to separate their personal from their professional reaction to the landmark report from Washington. “As someone who had to be confronted by this document for the rest of my career,” said one Philip Morris insider, “the Surgeon General’s report was a remarkably fine … effort to deal conscientiously with some of the objections we had raised.” He found the report well organized and intellectually substantive and was particularly struck by how the advisory committee had “devised those criteria for attributing causation [to a statistical association]—it was very clear—it lent force and authority to what might have been a readily attackable conclusion. They made it very hard to challenge.” What made the essence of the indictment so unsettling, they acknowledged among themselves, was that “we had no countervailing data to present, only methodological objections. There was no silver bullet the industry could fire back—nothing to show, then or now … .”

None of the Philip Morris executives was more concerned with the implications of the government-sponsored report than Helmut Wakeham, vice president for research and development since 1962. In his corner office in the McComas Research Center at Philip Morris’s Richmond complex, its two paneled walls covered with abstract art, the other two composed entirely of windows that commanded a view of the Virginia countryside, Wakeham pondered how to respond to a request from the company brass to suggest appropriate policy in the wake of the Surgeon General’s report. His integrity as a professional scientist as well as a corporate loyalist was being tried.

Wakeham’s formidable personality and confident manner made him controversial within the company. Cultivated, imaginative—even visionary on occasion—and not wanting in ego, he could not mask a no-nonsense manner that went straight to the point and an intolerant streak that could cut a slower-witted subordinate with a remark like “You may not do much, but what you do doesn’t make sense.” Said one of Wakeham’s longtime ranking lieutenants, “You had a love-hate relationship with him, but you couldn’t help respecting his intellect.”

Ruminating on the smoking and disease link asserted in the report from Washington, Wakeham took heart from the way the Surgeon General and his advisors had fudged the issue of the efficacy of filter cigarettes. In his memo of assessment to Philip Morris officials in New York, Wakeham called the report a “perfunctory treatment of a major industry effort to meet objections to its
product.” Since the central implication of the Surgeon General’s report was plain—
i.e.
, the health risks of smoking stemmed from the constituents in tobacco smoke—it followed that, as he would put it in private correspondence years later, “those risks would be decreased if the constituents were removed or reduced.” But Philip Morris’s effort to create such a modified product “does not mean that we in research and development or the company as a whole accepted the Surgeon General’s committee’s interpretations or criticisms as scientifically valid, or that we believed it had been established that cigarette smoking produces lung cancer and similar diseases in human beings.”

But such an unwillingness to concede the case against smoking was not reflected in Wakeham’s remarkable February 18, 1964, memorandum to his corporate superiors. In it he wrote, “Positive programs to cure ills cited in this [Surgeon General’s advisory committee] report, whether real or alleged, are recommended, as little basis for disputing the findings at this time has appeared.” He noted that the report had been widely taken “rather as a verdict against cigarette smoking” and was thus likely to promote “a shift in the onus of proof from the accusers to the tobacco industry.” His latter-day disclaimer aside, Wakeham’s true regard for the report to the Surgeon General may be inferred from his remark in the February 1964 memo: “The professional approach of the advisory committee furthermore may serve to force future arguments to a more scientific basis.” As his first recommendation to top management, then, Wakeham urged the view that “greater benefit will accrue from accepting the report’s findings on face value and proceeding to the cure of ills, real and alleged as they may be, than from engaging in disputation and refutation of these claims.”

As head of R&D, Wakeham now asked for increased corporate support for “[development by year end of a superior filter cigarette with acceptable taste having high gas phase absorption and very low TPM [total particulate matter, the residual post-combustion solids generally referred to as ‘tar’]” as well as expanded knowledge within the PM Research Center “through intelligence effort in epidemiology, bioassay, lung cancer research,” and other areas. Wakeham added, “The hoped-for result of these efforts will be cigarettes with distinguishing new product properties which are biologically approved on all major health questions,” and would therefore provide “a substantive basis for vigorous health advertising by publication of articles in the technical literature. … ” He understood, in short, though others in his company and the industry would continually claim otherwise, that a truly innovative and possibly less hazardous cigarette could be advertised as such under standing FTC regulations if a manufacturer with the skills to create one also had the courage to face liability claims that its older brands were, by definition, more hazardous to the smoker.

That Wakeham may have been a self-deluding dreamer rather than the hardheaded
scientist his colleagues preferred to picture is one possible inference to be drawn from the concluding hortatory remarks of his 1964 memo: “The industry must come forward with evidence to show that its products, present and prospective, are not harmful. Medical research must be done for this purpose. … The industry should abandon its past reticence with respect to medical research. Indeed, failure to do so could give rise to negligence charges” against the manufacturers. He even urged the company to undertake its own prospective study of the health effects of filter cigarettes on smokers.

But such proposals and thinking, however enlightened from the scientific standpoint, produced instant teeth-gnashing by Paul Smith, Philip Morris’s ultraprotective general counsel. “I’d hear from Smith every day,” Wakeham said. “His department recognized the legal hazard and felt that the activities of R&D would or could weaken their case and did everything they could to discourage [our] effort. We had our share of confrontations.” But Philip Morris’s top scientist clung to the Baconian precept that knowledge is power and that the cigarette industry’s health problem could not be met without understanding it better. “The legal department’s view of it,” Wakeham recounted, “was that you couldn’t be criticized for not knowing something.” And strictly from the perspective of corporate safety, the lawyers had the better argument, for what if the company had undertaken a long-term study of the mortality rates of filter-cigarette smokers and found no reduced peril? Wasn’t it better never to know than to find out and have to choose between suppressing the data or disclosing it at the high risk of financial suicide? Lawyerly prudence argued for letting others draw the reasonable inference that lowered tar and nicotine yields reduced the health hazard. That train of strategy only deepened Wake-ham’s dilemma. How could his department ever satisfactorily demonstrate to the FTC that it had developed a truly less hazardous product if to do so required his scientists to prove a negative—
i.e.
, no biological activity resulting from the experimental brands? “You can’t prove the absolute safety of anything,” he remarked. “How can you say what is a ‘safe’ cigarette?”

Although company officers worried that an ambitious R&D program might cost their enterprise its very existence, Wakeham’s budget kept growing—indeed, his annual requests were never cut, he claimed. But the company leadership was ever wary of him. Recalled one twenty-year Philip Morris veteran who supervised overall operations at Richmond including research and development, “Wake [Wakeham’s intramural nickname] always wanted to make a contribution [on the smoking and health issue], but the company executives didn’t want him to. … The industry always felt that the research into the health question needed to be done by third parties … and was prepared to support that research effort generously.” If adverse conclusions emerged, “it was more the government’s responsibility to reach a conclusion on the subject”—meaning the continued legality of a lethal product. “The industry couldn’t act
any differently from the way it did.” Indeed, what profit-seeking entity would place the public interest ahead of its own self-aggrandizement and voluntarily put itself out of business?

Just how nervous Wakeham’s idealized goals made the ledger-watchers at corporate headquarters may be surmised from the appraisal of the R&D head by one veteran financial officer, Shepard Pollack, who in time rose to the presidency of Philip Morris’s domestic tobacco business. “I never trusted him,” said Pollack, finding in Wakeham “a certain intellectual stiffness” and in his department a set of “priorities that were unmugged by reality.” Pollack, no by-the-book bean counter but a wily Harvard graduate who had apprenticed in Ford Motor’s financial department during the company’s “Whiz Kid” days, doubted that Philip Morris or any of its competitors could ever market a “medically acceptable” or “biologically approved” cigarette—as Wakeham had called for—“without exposing ourselves to totally bankrupting liability claims. … R&D didn’t understand that.” None of Wakeham’s superiors worked harder to achieve the ends he championed than Clifford Goldsmith, the engineer who emerged as the company’s mainstay on the manufacturing side in this period. But while Goldsmith held Wakeham in high regard as a scientist, “We didn’t necessarily agree with his memos”—or at least with how the goal of a modified cigarette could be presented for public or even internal consumption. “We had to be extremely careful not to mislead the public,” Goldsmith recounted. “We don’t have the knowledge of the [health] effects of low-tar cigarettes.”

But Wakeham loyalists took a different view from that of those who disparaged him. Said one, a chemist with a background in cancer research before coming to Philip Morris for a twenty-seven-year career in which he worked closely with Wakeham: “There was a conflict in the company between science and the law that’s never been resolved.” In his February 1964 memo, his longtime subordinate added, Wakeham “was addressing the issue purely as a scientist—lawyers look at the problem in a different way, and so we go through this ritual dance—what’s ‘proven’ and what isn’t, what’s causal and what’s just an association—and the lawyers’ answer is, ‘Let’s stonewall.’ … If Helmut Wakeham had run things, I think there would have been some admissions. But he was outflanked by the lawyers, led by Paul Smith, who some people felt walked on water. The lawyers were saying, in effect, ‘My God, you can’t make that admission’ without risking liability actions against the company. So there was no cohesive plan—when critics of the industry speak of a ‘conspiracy,’ they give the companies far too much credit. … None of us at that time was sure what we could do, what we should or shouldn’t do—or say. If there had been a way to detect cause and effect through biological testing, as there was in administering vinyl chloride to test animals [to determine its carcinogenicity], that would have clarified things. There were some who thought there
might really be a ‘magic bullet’ cause—a single substance in the smoke—as the fractionating [chemical analysis by spectrometry] went on and on. There was much groping, looking at catalysts [for cleaner burning tobacco], additives to the filtration, devices like the Strichman filter [a Columbia University-sponsored invention], which gave you a hernia to draw on So these memos by Wakeham reflect a pretty smart scientist-businessman’s point of view. And he stood his ground.”

Just how narrow a territory the scientists commanded within the Philip Morris corporate realm could be divined from top-management statements in the months soon after Wakeham sent his memo to New York. In remarks at the annual meeting in April 1964, President Cullman said the company’s scientists and outside experts who studied the report to the Surgeon General felt that its prime conclusion causally linking lung cancer to smoking was unjustified—not at all what Wakeham’s memo had stated. And it was indeed regrettable, Cullman added, that the SGAC study was made without due regard for smokers of filter cigarettes, which then made up 60 percent of the overall market and 85 percent of Philip Morris sales. The company’s 1964 annual report assured its stockholders (and the public) that the government document “was studied with great care by your management,” which found that “it contained no specific recommendations … which could be usefully employed by our scientists, and no significant reports have been issued subsequently to clarify the question of tobacco and health”—as if to imply that the SGAC had only fogged the issue.