• Smoking Out the Tobacco Industry
  • The Weed That Kills

• Wrestling with Satan
  • Heretics: Intimate Enemies

SMOKING OUT THE TOBACCO INDUSTRY
Author Richard Kluger '52 Explores the History and Politics of the Weed
BY VAN WALLACH '80

Richard Kluger '56 and the tobacco industry took a wild rollercoaster ride this spring, although Kluger probably enjoyed it more than the cigarette marketers. With serendipitous timing, Kluger's new book, Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris (Alfred A. Knopf), hit the shelves just as a furious round of legal and political warfare erupted between antismoking forces and the corporations plugging the Marlboro Man, Joe Camel, and other tarnished icons.
In May, Philip Morris Companies, the nation's largest cigarette maker, tangled with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration over the best way to limit cigarette sales to children. A few weeks later, a federal judge in New Orleans struck down proposals for a national class-action suit against the tobacco industry, even as several states pursued their own suits. Cigarettes were again in the news when presidential candidate Bob Dole expressed his view that they are not always addictive. Ashes to Ashes and its author landed in the thick of all this. The book garnered national attention, including a lead review in The New York Times's Sunday book-review section. In a Times op-ed piece Kluger criticized Philip Morris's proposals for restricting tobacco sales to kids, and in a cover story for its Sunday magazine he weighed in with suggestions for resolving the government-industry standoff.
Although it's too early to assess Ashes to Ashes's impact on this great social debate, said Kluger during a recent interview in his home near Princeton, "My hope is that it will be read by people serious about doing something about smoking, and that it will stay around for a while."
An encyclopedic tale of science, marketing, psychology, and politics, Ashes to Ashes fills 767 pages and took Kluger seven years to research and write-twice as long as he expected. It tells the story of tobacco from pre-Columbian times to President Clinton's moves against smoking last year. Ashes to Ashes concludes with an eight-point program to cut the Gordian knot of the nation's tobacco problems. Kluger recommends that Congress grant the tobacco industry "a blanket (and retroactive) exemption" from all personal injury-claims by smokers; as a quid pro quo, the industry would have to accept higher taxes on its products, FDA oversight of manufacturing and marketing, severe advertising and marketing restrictions, an end to price supports, and intensified efforts to educate consumers about the health effects of tobacco.
Neither side received the book uncritically. Lawyers pursuing cases against tobacco companies were dismayed by Kluger's call for a blanket exemption, while in a letter to Kluger, an attorney for Philip Morris charged him with harboring a long-standing bias against the industry.
"These proposals are not utopian and would be considered in a rational world," says Kluger. "But it's an irrational product, with an industry in a protective bunker. If they don't come to the bargaining table and Clinton wins in November, there will be a major government effort to finally regulate the product."
Ashes to Ashes brims with sharply drawn portraits of industry leaders, minute-by-minute accounts of bureaucratic and boardroom battles, and detailed explanations of the accumulated scientific case against smoking. Kluger labels his approach "discursive," noting, "The trick was to lay out next to each other what was going on here and then there. I had to show, in the Watergate terminology, what did they know and when did they know it, and what did they do about it-and what did the rest of us know and do." He calls smoking our "most pressing public-health problem in terms of the lives it takes," and in the book he refers to the industry's "Alice in Wonderland" counterattacks on scientific studies documenting tobacco's impact on health. A series of Surgeon General's reports starting in 1979, he writes, "effectively put an end to the scientific 'controversy,' which lingered in the public's mind only because the cigarette makers had the money, power, and brass to claim that there still was one."
Whatever the outcome of the tobacco wars, Ashes to Ashes has heightened its author's standing as a leading social historian. R. Z. Sheppard, a reviewer for Time who worked with Kluger at the New York Herald Tribune before it closed in 1966, compares him in tenacity and thoroughness to Robert Caro '57, the prize-winning biographer of Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses, noting, "He's got staying power and ability. No one's going to have to do the subject again after Dick takes care of it." Robert Gottlieb, a former editor of The New Yorker, agrees. "Kluger's an obsessively hard worker," he says. "Every stone is turned. No hour, day, or year spent on the job is too much. He happens to be a good writer, which is a blessing. However, all the good writing in the world doesn't in itself account for the kind of book he's chosen to write, that amasses so much material intelligently and judiciously that the reader must be convinced that what he is reading is accurate, fair, and truthful."
As the head of Simon & Schuster in the 1960s, Gottlieb had hired Kluger to be its executive editor, and later, at Knopf, he edited Kluger's first two nonfiction books: Simple Justice, published in 1976, about Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court case outlawing school segregation; and The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune, published in 1986. An author since 1964, Kluger has written 11 books in all. In addition to his three weighty nonfiction works he has published eight novels, two of which-Good News (1982) and Royal Poinciana (1987)-were coauthored with his wife, Phyllis. Members of the Tribe (1977), a historical novel based on the lynching of a Georgia Jew in 1913, is his best seller, moving 125,000 copies in all editions. The runner-up in sales is Simple Justice, which has sold 75,000 copies and, like The Paper, remains in print.
While the books vary in topic, some themes stand out. Litigation-which Kluger finds "fascinating" because of its inherent drama and hyperbole-links Ashes to Ashes, Simple Justice, Members of the Tribe, and Star Witness (1979), a novel about women lawyers. Historical themes also color his choice of topics: Members of the Tribe is set in the early 20th-century South, while The Sheriff of Nottingham (1992) reaches back to 13th-century England. One of his contemporary novels-National Anthem (1969)-takes a comic turn, leading off with a biting description of the narrator's 10th reunion at a school that appears remarkably like Princeton.

Kluger, who grew up in New York City and wrote for the student paper at the Horace Mann School, spent four years on the staff of The Daily Princetonian, his last as its chairman. One of his proudest possessions from college days-a framed letter from Albert Einstein in reply to a note from Kluger-hangs in his office. As a sophomore reporter during the McCarthy era, he had written the physicist asking his opinion about scholars who took the Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions about their political past. (Einstein replied: "As long as a person has not violated the 'social contract' nobody has a right to inquire about his or her convictions.") An English major, Kluger wrote his senior thesis on another prolific author, novelist Thomas Wolfe.
After college he worked on the staffs of the Newark Star-Ledger, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, the New York Post, and the New York Herald Tribune. He was the Tribune's literary editor at the paper's demise and parlayed that experience into executive positions in book publishing at Simon & Schuster and later Atheneum, where he served as editor-in-chief.
In 1973, after landing a contract with Knopf for Simple Justice, Kluger left publishing to devote full-time to writing books. He viewed his years in journalism as a warm-up for serious nonfiction. "The difference between journalism and social history," he says, is that in the latter, "you have the time and space to take a longer look. I had years to gather the materials-most journalists lack that. I also had the journalistic training to do things academics are loath to do, like interview living sources." Published three years later, Simple Justice remains for Kluger his "most emotionally gratifying work" because of the importance of its subject. "It was my way to make a contribution to social justice in this country," he says.
Over the next decade, Kluger wrote The Paper and several novels. Then in 1987 he signed a contract with Knopf for a book about smoking, tentatively titled The Weed. Kluger settled in for what he planned would be a three-and-a-half year project.
Compared to his earlier books, Ashes to Ashes presented its author with exceptional research challenges. Simple Justice and The Paper had dealt with discrete time frames (the case was decided, the Herald Tribune closed), and Kluger had enjoyed full access to the Tribune's files (retained by its former owners) and those of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. By contrast, the smoking story was open-ended, and Kluger had no central, cooperative source of documentation.
"I like the challenge of a new subject," he says. "This one was particularly difficult because I had no access inside the industry. I knew nothing about the subject, other than puffing away myself." Kluger, who enjoys an occcasional cigar, smoked cigarettes for 15 years (like the President, he claims not to have inhaled) but quit in 1973 out of concern that smoke exacerbated a vision problem. Phyllis Kluger, who did much of the medical research for Ashes to Ashes and to whom the book is dedicated, didn't stop smoking until 1995. Kluger says her struggle to quit helped him to understand the addictive nature of tobacco. As he told The Princeton Packet, "A cigarette is really unique because it's both a sedative and a stimulant. There isn't any other product quite like that."
Early in his research Kluger got what he calls "a huge break": in February 1988, the case of Cipollone v. Liggett Group, Philip Morris, and Loews went to trial in U.S. District Court in Newark, New Jersey. It involved a liability suit by the family of Rose Cipollone, a longtime smoker who had died of lung cancer four years before. The Cipollone case brought hundreds of industry documents onto the public record for the first time. (The trial ended with the jury's awarding no damages to the plaintiff's estate because, as Kluger writes, "her own behavior was preponderantly at fault.") Kluger got another break when Philip Morris responded more positively than he had dared hope to his request for interviews. The firm's chairman, Hamish Maxwell, sent Kluger's letter to counsel Murray Bring. A former clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, Bring had read Simple Justice, and he recommended that Philip Morris cooperate with Kluger.
"They wanted to know my slant," Kluger recalls. "I said it was a straightforward book on an embattled industry and I wanted to know their slant. They said they were cooperating because they wanted me to present their views, whether I agreed with them or not." He wound up interviewing 60 Philip Morris executives, usually with a company attorney present. Of the company's top brass, he says, "Their capacity to deny what they know is diabolical, certainly hypocritical. They are attractive in that they are clever people and cordial when they want to be."
Supported by a healthy advance on the book and royalties from his novels still in print, Kluger tackled the writing in his methodical style. Each day at 7:30 a.m., he sat down at his trusty SCM electric typewriter and wrote until noon (only after completing Ashes to Ashes did he get a computer). The afternoon was typically spent preparing materials needed for the next day's writing.
The disciplined writing life is a lonely one. Kluger keeps on an even keel with lots of walking and swimming, as well as more TV viewing "than you think an educated person would do." He and Phyllis, who have two grown sons, also take annual theater jaunts to London.
With Ashes to Ashes behind him, Kluger is already well along on the research for his next project: a novel about Princeton in the 1950s, with the Honor Code as a main theme. He's scouring old issues of The Daily Princetonian and The Tiger and plans to interview classmates. Kluger, who just celebrated his 40th reunion, says the idea for a Princeton novel has been with him since his undergraduate days, when he began keeping notes for it. "I'm daunted by the project," he says, "because most college books are done by young writers when the joy and poignancy of the experience is fresh. The longer you wait, the harder it is to recall it, and you romanticize much of it as you get older."
And what will the perspective of four decades bring to his subject?
"That," says Kluger, "is what I'm wrestling with now."

Writer Van Wallach '80, a nonsmoker and a frequent contributor to PAW, lives in Westport, Connecticut.

From Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris, by Richard Kluger '56 (© 1996, Alfred A. Knopf; reprinted by permission).