Thank You for Smoking

Nick replied that he had jumped in front of every TV camera in sight in order to emphasize the industry's concern for responsible advertising, health, and underage smoking, but that he doubted that his face would be prominently featured, if at all, in the newscasts. Face time for tobacco smokesmen was a disappearing electronic commodity, more dismal handwriting on the wall. Not so long ago, TV producers would routinely send a camera crew over to the Academy to get an official industry rebuttal, only a five- or ten-second bite casting the usual aspersions on the integrity of the medical research that showed that American cigarette companies were doing the work of four Hiroshima bombs a year. But recently there had been fewer and fewer of these dutiful little opposing-viewpoint cabooses. More likely, the reporter would just close with "Needless to say, the tobacco industry disputes the NIH's report and claims that there is no— and I quote—'scientific evidence that heavy smoking by pregnant mothers is harmful to unborn fetuses.' "

"Did you bring the Kraut along with you?" BR asked, his eyes going back to his MMWR, a slightly distracting habit — in truth, a maddeningly rude but managerially effective habit — that he had acquired at Stanford Biz. Keeps underlings on their toes. By "Kraut" he meant G — for Graf — Erhardt von Gruppen-Mundt, the Academy's "scientist-in-residence." Erhardt had a degree in Forensic Pathology from the University of Steingarten, perhaps not Germany's leading academic center, but it made him sound smart. JJ had brought him onboard back in the seventies and had built a "research facility" around him out in Reston, Virginia, called the Institute for Lifestyle Health, consisting mostly of thousands of pampered white rats who never developed F344 tumors no matter how much tar they were painted with. The mainstream media hadn't taken Erhardt seriously in years. Mainly he testified in the endless tobacco liability trials, trying to confuse juries with erudite, Kissingerian-accented, epidemiological juju about selection bias and multivariable regressions. The decision to have him appear in court during the Luminotti trial wearing his white lab coat had not been well received by the judge.

"Yes," Nick said. "NHK — Japanese TV — did an interview with him. He was very good on secondhand smoke. He's really got that down cold. He'll get face time in Tokyo. I'm certain."

"That won't do us a whole lot of good in Peoria."

"Well. " So Erhardt was next. Twenty years of devoted service to science and auf Wiedersehen, you're history, Fritz.

"I think we ought to get ourselves a black scientist," BR said. "They'd have to cover a black scientist, wouldn't they?"

"That's got heavy backfire potential."

"Ilike it."

Well, in that case.

"Sit down, Nick." Nick sat, craving a cigarette, and yet here, in the office of the man in charge of the entire tobacco lobby, there were no ashtrays. "We need to talk."

"Okay," Nick said. Joey could always go to public school.

BR sighed. "Let's do a three-sixty. This guy" — he hooked a thumb in the direction of the White House, a few blocks away—"is calling for a four-buck-a-pack excise tax, his wife is calling for free nicotine patches for anyone who wants them, the SG is pushing through an outright advertising ban, Bob Smoot tells me we're going to lose the Heffeman case, and lose it big, which is going to mean hundreds, maybe thousands more liability cases a year, the EPA's slapped us with a Class A carcinogen classification, Pete Larue tells me NIH has some horror story about to come out about smoking and blindness, for Chrissake, Lou Willis tells me he's having problems with the Ag Committee with next year's crop insurance appropriations. There is zero good news on our horizon."

"Fun, ain't it, tobacco," Nick said companionably.

"I like a challenge as much as the next guy. More than the next guy, if you want the honest truth."

Yes, BR, I want the honest truth.

"Which is what I told the Captain when he begged me to take this on." BR stood up, perhaps to remind Nick that he was taller than him, and looked out his window onto K Street. "He gave me carte blanche, you know. Said, 'Do what you have to do, whatever it takes, just turn it around.' "

BR was being elliptical this morning.

"How much are we paying you, Nick?"

"One-oh-five," Nick said. He added, "Before tax."

"Uh-huh," BR said, "well, you tell me. Are we getting our money's worth?"

It made for a nice fantasy: Nick coming over BR's desk with his World War I trench knife. Unfortunately, it was followed by a quick-fade to a different fantasy, Nick trying to get a second mortgage on the house.

"I don't know, BR. You tell me. Are you getting your money's worth?"

"Let's be professional about this. I'm not packing a heavy agenda. I'm putting it to you straight, guy-to-guy: how are we doing out there? I get this sense of. defeatism from your shop. All I see is white flags."