Jump to full article: PR Watch, 2009-01-26
Author: Anne Landman
Intro: Several newspapers reported in late January on the death of Horace R. Kornegay, Jr., who served as the Executive Director of the Tobacco Institute from 1969 to 1986. Mr. Kornegay's passing was little noticed, but he was one of the more notable opponents of public health measures in American history.
Mr. Kornegay took over at the Institute just five years after the U.S. Public Health Service and Surgeon General's first report in 1964 positively linked smoking to a list of chronic and deadly diseases. In his speeches, Kornegay typically portrayed public health advocates -- a category that included the Surgeon General -- as a bunch of shrill, over-emotional zealots who "plied their trade with terrifying tactics" and were involved in misguided efforts to destroy the industry. . . .
On December 11, 1979, Mr. Kornegay gave a notorious speech before the Tobacco and Allied Industries Division of the American Jewish Community in which he likened attacks on the tobacco industry to the repression of Jews . . .
When society became alarmed over skyrocketing rate of lung cancer in the 1970s, Kornegay deflected attention from cigarettes by attributing the increase to improved medical diagnostic techniques.
When Eastern Airlines attempted to create separate smoking and non-smoking sections on their commercial flights in 1977, Mr. Kornegay wrote a near-hysterical letter to industry supporters to get them to oppose it . . .
Mr. Kornegay was central to the tobacco industry's decades-long battle to thwart tobacco control in the U.S., but more importantly to history, he personified the industry's combative stance in the wake of overwhelming published research implicating smoking as a cause of disease and death. It was a stance that will not be forgotten.
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