Jump to full article: Maine Today, 2009-06-29
Author: Donald Kaul
Intro: It's been 45 years since I quit smoking cigarettes, two weeks before the surgeon general's report on smoking came out.
I thought you should be smart enough to figure out that cigarettes were bad for you without the government telling you After all, they didn't call them "coffin nails" for nothing.
I'd been quitting smoking for almost as long as I'd been smoking, about 12 years. . . .
My environment didn't help. I worked in a newsroom, where pretty much everyone smoked. . . .
That was the thing about cigarettes, they were cool. And if you wanted to be cool, too -- and who didn't? -- you had to smoke them. Edward R. Murrow, the coolest of postwar TV journalists, held his cigarette like a scepter while interviewing the rich and famous, his head wreathed in smoke.
James Dean, the coolest of young actors not named Brando, appeared in "Rebel Without A Cause" with a filtered cigarette lightly clenched in his front teeth. Until then we hadn't realized that filtered cigarettes could be cool. (Such was the power of movies in the good old days.)
But, always, we knew it was bad for us. We could feel it. We just didn't know how bad. The surgeon general's report told us. Very bad. . . .
The report, initiated under President John Kennedy, was easily the greatest public health initiative of my time. And now we have another step on the way to sanity, and it promises to be the next great public health measure. . . .
I'll admit that even today it looks kind of cool when you see people smoking in, for example, a French movie (smoking has all but disappeared from American movies). Seeing someone in a hospital bed, tubes attached, gasping into an oxygen mask? Not so cool.
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