Philippe Boucher's Rendez-vous with . . . Mike Pertschuk
Rendez-vous with . . . Mike Pertschuk
Author of "Smoke in Their Eyes, Lessons in Movement Leadership from the Tobacco Wars"
Co-director of the Advocacy Institute
Washington DC, USA
By Philippe Boucher
Rendez-vous 120
Tuesday, December 4 2001
PB : Thank you Mike for accepting our rendez-vous.
May I ask you to introduce yourself ?
Mike Pertschuk : Starting in 1962, following the publication in Great Britain of the Royal college of Physicians report indicting tobacco in death and disease - the first such national study, I had been an active advocate for tobacco control and other public health and consumer protection regulation, first, as counsel to the consumer protection-minded Democratic leadership of the Senate Commerce Committee, then, as a Democratic Commissioner and Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission.
Then, in 1984, when I left the Commission, and together with David Cohen, former President of Common Cause, formed The Advocacy Institute, I became less a front line combatant, more a chronicler of the tobacco control and other citizen movements, seeking to gain and pass on to newly emerging movement leaders the insights and lessons of effective citizen advocacy and movement leadership that could be drawn from past successes - and failures.
After leaving the front lines, I first set out to study and write about the leadership of a handful of recent citizen group issue campaigns that seemed to have achieved unlikely success in the face of intrepid resistance from a popular Reagan Administration closely bonded with formidable corporate interests.
The book that emerged from these studies, "Giant Killers" (W.W. Norton, New York, 1986), was my first effort to probe and celebrate the essence of what my colleague David Cohen has come to call "issue leadership." Among the "Giant Killers" studies was the lobbying campaign which led to enactment of the 1984 Cigarette Labeling Bill, the first tobacco control law enacted by Congress that the tobacco lobby had not either written or supported in its own strategic interest. This successful effort was led by Matt Myers, then Executive Director of the Coalition on Smoking Or Health, whose earlier work on the FTC's investigation of tobacco industry advertising and public relations deceptions had laid the groundwork for the modest victory in achieving stronger labeling requirements.
Q1 Why did you decide to write "Smoke in Their Eyes?"
MP: In one sense, this book is simply a continuation of the story telling and analyses in "Giant Killers" and my other writings on movement leadership roles and strategies in issue campaigns - applied to a remarkably rich tableaux of leaders writ large upon a national canvas. But that is only part of my reason for writing this book.
Many years ago, a tobacco lobbyists gnashed his teeth and growled at me for what he considered some outrageous public statement on the risks of smoking and the evil deeds of the tobacco companies. "You know," he sputtered, " when you're on the side of the angels, it's easy to stretch the truth."
He was wrong in that case - as tobacco's paid liars almost always have been - we were just dramatizing the truth. But his jibe stuck with me over the years.
For the truth also is that because we do see ourselves as "on the side of the angels," we don't always look hard, self-critically, at our own words, our own actions, our strategies, our tactics, our own underlying motivations - even, sometimes, our shadings of the truth.
And, 15 years ago, as part of a new organization dedicated to helping emerging tobacco control and other public health and social justice leaders learn from those who had gone before, it soon became clear that it was as important to learn from our failures, as from our triumphs.
And then, after so many years in public life, a decent pension, with few ambitions unrealized, and loving grandchildren, the thought occurred to me, to paraphrase the famous question, "if not you, who? And, if not now when?"
So this critical work has been going on now for several years. But surely nothing I have said or written is destined to make more people I genuinely admire, and sometimes love, more angry than the new book, "Smoke in Their Eyes; Lessons in Movement Leadership from the Tobacco Wars"
More specifically, my narrative of the actions and words of key tobacco control leaders in responding to the settlement negotiations, the settlement agreement reached between the state Attorneys General and the tobacco companies in June, 1997, and the Congressional aftermath leading to the death of the McCain bill, which embodied a strengthened version of that settlement.
The initial impetus to write this book came not from the dispassionate conclusion that it could be a lodestone of insightful leadership lessons, but from a deeply felt need to examine and to set the record straight on the leadership roles of Matt Myers, Dr. Koop, and others. For, as these events unfolded, they generated anger and hostility within the movement, among friends and colleagues who had fought in relative harmony against the common enemy of Big Tobacco until the moment, in April 1997, that news of secret settlement talks leaked to The Wall Street Journal. And from that moment on, those who supported the settlement, especially Matt Myers, who initially was the sole public heath advocate at the bargaining table, were subjected to bitter and unrestrained personal abuse.
This portrait did not fit what I had observed of Matt Myers over almost two decades. It did not fit what I knew of the events leading up to the settlement and their aftermath- though, observing from the sidelines, I had to admit that there was much that I did not know. I felt that fairness - to Matt and to the other tobacco control leaders as well - required a careful reconstruction of these events and the decisions that shaped them.
I have tried to do just that. But the larger goal of this book, as it has evolved, is to plumb the depths of this story for the rich and provocative lessons in movement leadership roles, strategies, and styles which it readily yields: how a movement propelled forward to a moment of historic opportunity by an extraordinary cadre of passionate, resourceful, and gifted leaders fell victim, in part, to their conflicting visions of the Good. Especially I focused on the last section of the book: the lessons I believe can help the tobacco control movement avoid the errors of the past.
Q2. How did you proceed?
MP: Beginning in the summer of 1997, only a few months after the June 20, 1997 settlement agreement was announced, and continuing for the next two years, I engaged a wonderful young research assistant, Joel Papo, to document the progress of events, collecting and organizing not only all published materials on that settlement and its aftermath, but also the "ephemera" of history, especially the e-mail list-serv exchanges and pronouncements.
I also began to interview as many of those in the tobacco control movement who had taken an active leadership role in opposing or supporting the settlement and the resultant McCain bill as I could manage in the time I could spare from me main work at the Advocacy Institute - 38 interviews in all. These were transcribed, and I drew from them extensive quotes for the book, which I submitted to them for their approval as faithful to their words. Where I also drew quotes from e-mail messages, I obtained the permission of the authors for those that were not clearly intended to be broadcast widely.
Because, as I make very clear in the Introduction to the book, I had and have my own views on the settlement, I made a special effort to record and to represent in their own words the views of those I didn't agree with. For those who opposed the settlement, this included, for example, Drs. Kessler and Koop; Congressman Waxman, Doug Blanke, Julia Carol, Fran Dumelle, Michelle Bloch, and Rob Weissman. Stan Glantz refused to be interviewed, but, as any reader will acknowledge, his strong views are amply represented in his own words throughout the pages of the book.
I also asked critics of the settlement who also did not share my views to review early drafts of the book for fairness, anong them, Dick Daynard, Phil Wilbur, and my son Mark Pertschuk (President of Americans for Non-smokers Rights). I made changes responsive to each of their concerns, but, of course, there were and are issues on which we remained in disagreement and none of them bears any responsibility for what remains in the book.
Perhaps most difficult in any writing of this kind was the need to limit the numbers of voices, events, players on whom I could focus. One potential publisher dismissed an early outline of the book as "a quagmire" which would have produced 1000 indigestible pages. Instead, I focused on a relatively small group of leaders whom I believe represented the views of the major disputing factions.
Q3. Can you summarize what the main provisions of the McCain bill were?
MP: Much of the hope for a major federal role to curtail tobacco use and to rein in the tobacco companies was prompted by the Food and Drug Administration's 1996 legal assertion that FDA possessed, under existing law, the authority to regulate tobacco products and the landmark rules Kessler issued curtailing tobacco advertising, marketing, and sales to children. Despite the confident predictions of tobacco control advocates, the Supreme Court, on March 21, 2000, held that FDA had been wrong in asserting authority to regulate tobacco products. Congress, the Court declared, had made clear its intent that FDA not have such authority, and only a deliberative act of Congress could now grant such power to FDA. With the Supreme Court's decision, David Kessler's brilliant work to empower FDA was nullified, leaving a gaping hole which the November, 1998 multi-state settlement did not fill. For example, it did nothing to reduce illegal sales to kids, and did far less than the FDA rules to curtail marketing to kids.
The McCain bill would not only have affirmed FDA's full powers to regulate every aspect of cigarette manufacture and marketing, it would have done so with a politically legitimatising Congressional mandate. It is reasonable to assume that, by now, FDA would already have in place a nationwide and consistent effort to reduce marketing and sales to kids - enforced by regulatory teeth lacking in the multi-state agreement. The FDA rules had already started to prove effective before the Supreme Court halted them. FDA would also by now have convened independent expert panels to lay the groundwork for scientifically sound regulations to reduce the addictive power of tobacco products and reduce the harm caused by them. FDA would have had the power to mandate safety testing, to force the tobacco companies to disclose anything in their research which might have a bearing on the health impact of their products, to force the tobacco industry to change their products, and then to control what they said about those products so their marketing no longer seduced old or new smokers.
Under McCain Law authority, FDA would be well on the road to mandating new, far more bold and chilling, health warnings - more vivid and visible - with the residual power to revise them as FDA came to learn what warnings were truly effective - in contrast to today's 15 year old tired warnings, which require an unlikely new act of Congress to change a syllable. Further, the FDA would also have had $225 million each year of guaranteed funding from tobacco company payments to develop and enforce their regulatory schemes, funding that would not be dependent on the Congressional appropriations process.
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The McCain bill also contained a battery of yet unrealized, major new policy and funding initiatives:
Also included were provisions skillfully introduced into the bill through the educational efforts of a cadre of advocates for minority communities, led by Jeanette Noltenius and Charyn Sutton. Noltenius, leading LCAT (the Latin-America Council on Alcohol and Tobacco) and Sutton of the National Association of African-Americans for Positive Imagery or NAAAPI, despaired of serious attention from either the ENACT or SAVE LIVES coalitions, and set out to educate and energize a powerful - and unique -coalition of all the Congressional minority caucuses to demand McCain bill provisions which met the unique needs of their communities.The companies would be facing the looming threat of up to $4 billion a year penalties against them for their failures to reduce teenage smoking by the stringent percentage goals set. By now, we would have seen a $1.10 per pack price increase which would have resulted from the McCain bill's mandated payment of $506 billion over 25 years, rather than the multi-state agreements payments of only $206 billion, or a per pack rise of $.45 A non-profit organization, similar to the American Legacy Foundation but with a board made up entirely of public health advocates, would have had $500 million a year to spend on counter-advertising without Legacy's constraints against directly attacking tobacco companies practices. And this campaign would have continued indefinitely - rather than for the five years funded for the Legacy Foundation. Comprehensive tobacco control programs, independent of local politics, would have been established and federally funded in every state. Unlike funds from the MSA, these programs would not have been subject to the political whims of every governor and state legislature looking for non-tax dollars for pet projects that have nothing to due with tobacco or public health. These programs would also be providing at least $680 million a year to fund cessation programs and nicotine replacement drugs for those addicted to tobacco. Every state and community - whether in Kentucky or Montana - would be bound by nationwide minimum standards to protect people from secondhand smoke in all workplaces. The tobacco industry's law suit against the Environmental Protection Agency challenging EPA's landmark classification of ETS as a "Class A carcinogen" would have been terminated
With the help of Commerce Committee member, Ron Wyden, who supported and worked closely with McCain in developing the final bill, Noltenius and Sutton made certain that language was added to virtually every provision of the bill to assure that all public health programs funded by the bill included programs specifically designed to meet the needs of minority communities. For it has been these communities which have notoriously been targeted by the most aggressive tobacco industry marketing and the cynical "philanthropy" which had become a lifeline for many important minority community institutions and events. Such funding continues to buy community credibility and the silence of community leaders who otherwise have every reason to be up in arms about the companies target marketing of the most vulnerable among them.
Q4. You refer several times to the skillful use by Stan Glantz of the listserves. How do you explain the inability/unwillingness of the CTFK to use the electronic tools to press their points? Is the situation different now?
MP: There were several factors at work that led CFTFK to hold back. First, was simply the exhausting need to fight within the intense negotiations against the hard bargaining of companies phalanx of lawyers, the urge to make public health concessions by the weaker attorney generals and the greediest of the trial lawyers - leaving little time for the essential work of communicating with those working in the field away from Washington. Another factor was the danger of communicating widely damaging inside knowledge such as the fear of the experienced trial lawyers working for the attorney generals that the legal foundation for their cases was extremely weak, or that the secret polling and focus group research that convinced most of attorney generals that prospective juries would be hostile to the huge damages awards they were seeking. This information would have helped to explain why CFTFK believed a settlement was necessary, but would have provided vital, damaging intelligence to the tobacco companies. Finally, there was a sense that the attacks on Matt and CFTFK had become so personal and vicious that no serious dialogue was possible. So CFTFK shrank back from engaging in the broad movement dialogue led by settlement opponents.
The situation is greatly different now. CFTFK and those who opposed it during the events of the settlement are now closely allied on many fronts, from staunchly opposing Philip Morris' efforts to enact a flawed FDA bill, to all-out media campaigns against the companies' fraudulent efforts to portray themselves as reformed. I believe they have well learned the fundamental lesson that to keep a movement together there is no substitute for constant communications, fully anticipating and airing any potential future developments, and developing a broad consensus - in advance - of the movement's "bottom line" in any negotiations. It is also my impression that CFTFK has built a much stronger base of relationships and trust with advocates in the field through their support of state campaigns, and that the "feed-back loop" from their field organizers who are in daily contact with state advocates is constantly flowing. I foresee no circumstance in which anything like the conflicts and miscommunications of 1997 and 1998 could occur again.
Q5. What do you see as the principle lessons we can all learn from what you view as failures of leadership, both among those who supported the McCain bill - even with its liability "cap" provisions- and those who opposed the bill so long as any liability relief was provided the companies?
MP: In Chapter 36 of the book, "Thirteen Ways to Lead a Movement Backward", I spell out thirteen generic lessons I believe can be drawn from the events chronicled that might help guide the movement in the future. Of course, one would need to read the chapter to get a full accounting of what I mean by them, but their headings will give a pretty good sense of them. They are:
1. Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Or Talk! Talk! Talk! Talk!
2. Take no risks.
3. Keep doing what you have been doing no matter how the world is changing.
4. Lose track of your fundamental goals.
5. Never set priorities.
6. Let your strategic thinking be captive to mind-numbing metaphors.
7. Beguile yourself with the illusions of an endless summer of momentum.
8. Resolve good faith strategic differences with your allies by plugging your ears and shouting them down
9. Neglect to convince your grass roots followers that your vision of victory is not their nightmare of defeat.
10. Be united even in folly.
11. Follow your followers over the cliff.
12. Never learn from looking back.
13. Let your outsize ego be your guide.
I have no doubt that almost everyone involved in at least some aspect of the settlement battles will bristle at least some of these lessons, softened, I hasten to add, from the earlier, intemperate title: "Fourteen Ways to lead a movement over a Cliff."
Now many of these lessons fall into the category of things we know, but never learn. And for most of them it is true that they are far easier to name, than to practice.
Nothing in policy advocacy, for example, is harder than to know when to to fight, and when to negotiate. Most great social movement leaders, from India's Ghandi and Ireland's Michael Collins to Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela pursued a long-term strategy which can be encapsulated as "Fight! Fight! Talk. Talk"
With courage and persistence, they would fight oppressors for decades, sometimes violently, sometimes non-violently. And then, when they sensed that the time was right, they sat down across a table and made peace.
Nothing could be harder. In his autobiography, Mandela confesses that he deliberately kept his negotiations with the Apartheid regime secret because he feared that his comrades in arms were not yet ready for negotiating with the hated forces of Apartheid.
It is never easy for warriors to transform themselves into peacemakers, to shift from the comfort of combating a securely demonized enemy, to the moral ambiguity involved in acknowledging an enemy simultaneously as a bargaining partner.
So many of our best public health warriors are never able to move beyond "Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!"
But there is another - and equal - failure of movement leadership, which Stan Glantz has identified persuasively in his history of the California Tobacco Wars: that is, the tendency of too many public health advocates to fail to recognize that they are indeed in mortal conflict with an implacable and unscrupulous adversary. As a result, they either fail to fight aggressively at all, or prematurely accept the meager gains of strategy which is all "Talk. Talk. Talk. Talk."
None of this is easy. As one of my beloved law professors used to say, "This is the law - except when it isn't."
I won't try here to discuss all the remaining lessons. But I'd be less than candid if I didn't confess that lately I've been searching for insights into how at least the broadest of these lessons might strike a chord among our far more salient concerns in the wake of September 11 and our subsequent actions against the Taliban.
Then I chanced across these words from the previously unpublished Notes on Prejudice from Isaiah Berlin to a friend in 1981, published in the New York Review of Books for October 18, 2001.
Few things have done more harm than the belief on the part of individuals or groups that he or she or they are in the sole possession of the truthŠand that those who differ with them are not merely mistaken, but wicked or mad: and need restraining or suppressing. It is a terrible and dangerous arrogance to believe that you alone are right: have a magical eye which sees the truth: & that others cannot be right if they disagree.Of course, The Review published this now because it sheds light on the essence of the terrorist mentality - and equally of those among us who look to the Arab world and Islam and see only evil.
But it is also the main thrust of my book. Though I try to make the case that the advocates for the settlement - and the McCain bill that emerged from the settlement - were largely right, and their opponents largely wrong, that conclusion is surely debatable.
What seems to me far less debatable is my more general argument that movement leaders who are consumed not only with righteousness but also with the conviction that those who disagree with them "are wicked or mad" are cancerous to a movement or a society. From Lionel Trilling, I quote the warning that "the highest idealism may corrupt" and that "the moral passions are even more willful and imperious and impatient than the self-seeking passions.'
These insights are more urgent after September 11th than before.
So I hope and pray that the growth of the new civility among us that sprouted in the unlikely soil of New York and spread in the aftermath of September 11th will persist, and will even herald a long-awaited civic revival; that all of us engaged in good and noble work will make greater space for honest disagreement among us. And that the end result will be the finding of common ground and common cause, in our daily work, and in our work for the survival of the world's civilizations.
PB: Thank you Mike for taking the time to be with us today.
P.S: Smoke in their eyes is published by Vanderbilt University Press.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=082651393X/tobaccobbsA/
Rendez-vous is supported by a contract from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
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