>First Class

226   an attorney named H. C. “Jack” Roemer: H.C. “Jack” Roemer to William W. Shinn, Shook, Hardy & Bacon; September 13, 1978, RJ Reynolds Records. Bates No 503648881. Right from the start, not quite on the up and up. “The fact that he [Dr. Frederick Seitz] is assisting us has not been publicly announced,” Roemer wrote. “So I do not wish to emphasize that fact.”

Roemer would occasionally flip open the calendar and handle the Dr. Seitz schedule personally: as in H.C. Roemer to Paul Lacy, Professor and Chairman, Department of Pathology, Washington University School of Medicine, January 11, 1979. Bates No. 50368352. “Dr. Seitz will be communicating with you about a visit.” The cc went to the above-named William W. Shinn, of Shook, Hardy. (William is father of the David W. Shinn who once visited Junior Farris—finding the animal smell quite intense—at the Oklahoma stockyards.)

Seitz discusses working with Roemer on 1, Frederick Seitz; Roemer HC, “Presentation to International Advisory Committee—R.J. Reynolds Industries, by Frederick Seitz,” May 9, 1979. Bates No 504480541-504480562.

 

226   destination settings: “Mildred C. Roemer,” Davie County Enterprise Record, August 3, 2000; “Mildred C. Roemer,” Winston-Salem Journal, July 28, 2000. Dan Zegart, Civil Warriors: The Legal Siege on the Tobacco Industry, Delacorte Press 2000, 292. Zegart describes the Harvard-educated Roemer as a “well-read, sophisticated man, son of an executive of International Telephone and Telegraph. Fine featured with coal-black hair and graceful manners.” Roemer’s J.D. was Columbia Law.

 

226   he’d become general counsel: R.J. Reynolds Industries, Annual Report, 1980. “Business Milestones,” Winston-Salem Journal, June 8, 2019; Dan Zegart, Civil Warriors: The Legal Siege on the Tobacco Industry, Delacorte Press, 2000, 299.

 

226   had dirt floors: Dan Zegart, Civil Warriors: The Legal Siege on the Tobacco Industry, Delacorte Press 2000, 288. For dirt floors as a motive, see 294.

 

226   internship at Harvard: Zegart, Civil Warriors, 288.

 

227   “tobacco research has had”: Gary Huber to Earle Clements, Tobacco Institute, October 4, 1971. Bates No. TIMN0112370-0112371. It is very clear what Huber is offering: the Harvard name, that impressive vehicle, with tobacco hands on the steering wheel. “It is my hope that you people will give me the opportunity to meet with those in the tobacco industry who can give us guidance in developing such a program . . . ”

Gary Huber was so anxious that, when he didn’t receive quick word, he wrote again, resending the initial letter. “I have been without a secretary for six weeks, and there have been a few pieces of correspondence lost,” the doctor explained. “We now have hired a good girl and this sould not happen again.” Sic on both: The typo (“sould”) and that terrible 1971 “good girl.”

Gary Huber to Earle Clements, Tobacco Institute, October 15, 1971. Bates No. TITX0011745.

 

227   “Being as native to Kentucky”: Earle C. Clements to Gary Huber, Tobacco Institute, November 17, 1971. Bates: TITX0011743-0011744.

Huber was an able self-marketer. In a later letter, the doctor points out, “As I mentioned to you before, there has been, to my surprise, considerable reservation on the part of a few about studying tobacco. This has not in any way, however, dampened my personal interest in pursuing this problem.” One of those nobody-but-me-will-do-it self-aggrandizements that is also an if-not-me-nobody threat.

 

227   senator and governor: Tobacco Institute, “Former Senator Earle Clements Named Tobacco Institute President,” February 23, 1966. Bates No. TI18002027. “We are delighted to have him accept his new association with our industry.”

 

227      chapel: Gary Huber to Horace Kornegay, Tobacco Institute Records, November 22, 1971. Bates No. TIMN0112369. (Kornegay had replaced Earle Clements.)

I wonder if he was being entirely truthful about the new office assistant. In this letter Huber expresses hopes about his “personal salaray.” You don’t often read business correspondence with more indifferent spelling.

Huber puts it to the Tobacco Institute square. “I am somewhat amazed,” he writes, “how our conventional funding establishments begin with the premise that tobacco is bad.”

 

227      “anti-smoking zealots.”: Gary Huber to A. H. Galloway, CEO, Reynolds Tobacco, July 7, 1972. Bates No 01189636-9643. Eight months in, and Gary Huber was corresponding with the executive office. One thing that makes corruption enticing: the short cut to glamour. When they need you, you’re assigned a special elevator. The buttons are “L” and “PH.”

Huber promises the Camel cigarette chief “a program here will reflect both the desires of our scientists and the needs of the tobacco industry.” The particular need was evident.

 

227      Unmistakable: Robert Proctor, Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition, University of California Press 2012. Chapter 23, “Penetrating the Universities,” 425.

 

Huber had always been willing to play ball with the companies, pleasing them with his willingness to defend the “constitutional hypothesis” and the possibility of a “safe” cigarette. . . . The Harvard project made the industry look good and so was handsomely endowed, absorbing $7 million over an eight-year period.

 

It’s useful to consider Proctor’s overall assessment; for a day player like Huber, and absolutely for principals like Frederick Seitz and (the now approaching) S. Fred Singer. “Collaboration with the tobacco industry is one of the most deadly abuses of scholarly integrity in modern history.” Proctor, Golden Holocaust, 458.

 

227      studied and rebounded his way: Dan Zegart, Civil Warriors, 292-294. Personal and social inducements: “Huber tried hard to please, perhaps too hard,” Zegart observes. “Huber walked through the atrium with its gilded Corinthian columns and up the staircase to the ballroom on the second floor, where he found [Jack] Roemer. Huber didn’t mind being wined and dined, not after growing up on a dirt floor in Spokane.”

 

227      “Harvard!”: Zegart, Civil Warriors, 292.

 

228      “the academic catch of a lifetime”: Civil Warriors, pps 290-91.

Robert Proctor, Golden Holocaust, 425, as above, puts the investment at $7 million over eight years. The Dallas Morning News has it as $7.5 million. Lee Hancock, Mark Curriden, “Ex-tobacco insider says lawyers were in control,” The Dallas Morning News, December 21, 1997.

 

228      “But you get used to being flown”: Doug Levy, “Struggling to Clear the Air on Tobacco,” USA Today, October 12, 1994.

 

228      Introductions to senators: Zegart, Civil Warriors, 293. Here’s how that was done. There’s the value of a Harvard degree. And, for the executive set, of a Harvard staff, Harvard zip code, Harvard phone exchange. “It was heady stuff for a boy from Spokane. Soon, Huber found himself being flown to Washington to be trotted out at a posh restaurant where someone from the Tobacco Institute would introduce him to Senator Henry Jackson or Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan or Nixon cabinet member Melvin Laird as Tobacco Institute photographers fired away, capturing Huber, a giant in a tweed jacket and metal-rimmed glasses, bending slightly to shake hands with the celebrity of the moment. Mr. Secretary, this is Dr. Gary Huber. He’s running our research program at Harvard.”

 

228      “cultivating the Gary Hubers of the world”: Zegart, Civil Warriors, 293.

 

228      “one of the best friends”: Civil Warriors, 303.

 

228      Dave Hardy: A thoroughly, nearly theatrically disillusioned Gary Huber, two decades later, would tell PBS Frontline, “My keeper was David R. Hardy. . . The big guy.”

PBS Frontline, “Inside the Tobacco Deal,” May 12, 1998.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/settlement/interviews/huber.html

Accessed 6-22-22.

 

228      first product liability suit in 1962: Stakes in the case were high; as the coal people said of their 1990s climate situation, “a game-ending kind of issue.”

This is from “The Hardy Boys and the Case of the Controversial Clientele,” Corporate Report, November 1981, Joel Laner.

“[Dave] Hardy was the man on whom Philip Morris put its chips. At the time of the trial, when public concern about the possibility that cigarettes caused cancer was beginning to grow, the stakes in the case were enormous. ‘If the tobacco companies lost the case or any of the others brought against them. it would have put ’em out of business,’ stressed former Shook, Hardy attorney Harry Morris. ‘The damages would have been billions and billions of dollars, not to say what would have happened to sales. A precedent established, anyone with lung cancer would file suit.’”

 

228      voice box: “Cigarette Concern Wins Cancer Case,” The New York Times, July 11, 1962. “John T. Ross, former officer of the Better Business Bureau [had] lost his voice box and other organs of his throat in an operation for the removal of a cancer.”

 

228      unable to shower: Hill & Knowlton, “Special Report, Kansas City Lawsuit: Ross vs. Philip Morris, Inc.,” June 19, 1962.

 

228      confidently socialize: John T. Ross, Plaintiff vs. Philip Morris Company, LTD., Defendant, Case No. 9494, Morning Session, Tuesday, June 19, 1962. Plaintiff Ross told the court he had been swayed by a 1943 Philip Morris ad: “You Are Safer Smoking Philip Morris. Finer Pleasure Plus Real Protection.” (204.)

Nine years later he lost his larynx. Along with it, he explained, was a loss of human participation. “It changed my whole personality. . . . I have no social life as such today.” (256–257.)

 

John T. Ross, Plaintiff vs. Philip Morris Company, Ltd., Defendant, Case No. 9494, Afternoon Session, Monday, June 18, 1962, 106. The attorney for the plaintiff’s opening statement: “The evidence will be that because he has a hole in his throat deep down here, he doesn’t even dare go out on the water. He can’t even get into a boat, because if the boat were upset, he would drown or suffocate. He can’t fish.

“The evidence will be that the man can’t even take a shower. And that when he takes a tub, he must be extremely careful.”

Dave Hardy’s opening statement stressed weightiness. He turned to the jury box. “Your duty here is most important,” he said. “And your determination of this case could destroy an entire industry.”

If you’re visualizing the movies’ idea of a diabolically effective lawyer, you have properly cast Dave Hardy. His nickname was 14-hour-a-day Dave. He’s said to have had a magical ability with the jury: this charisma, I think, is the slightly worn, facially-evident confidence of having done all the work. Prior to tobacco, Hardy set state records for jury awards. All this is in the Corporate Report 1981 piece cited below.

Hollywood would cast Joseph Gordon Levitt or John Krasinski. Then, during the slightly overlong run time, you would watch them lose their soul.

Joel Laner, “The Hardy Boys and the Case of Controversial Clientele,” Corporate Report, November 1981.

 

228      his expert witness: Hill & Knowlton, “Special Report, Kansas City Lawsuit: Ross vs. Philip Morris, Inc.,” June 25, 1962.

 

228      a story of freak legal luck: The Shook, Hardy evolution is such a great nasty story it has sparked lots of great nasty journalism: If Mad Men hadn’t already covered this area of the calendar, the firm would make a wonderful series: the history of our country through one streaky porthole. (John Hill’s public relations story could serve a similarly smeared function.)

Shook, Hardy securing the national tobacco business was such a wild fluke that a Philip Morris associate counsel told the magazine Corporate Report (Joel Laner, “The Hardy Boys and the Case of Controversial Clientele,” November 1981), “Yes, it’s unusual for a firm in Kansas City to represent a company like ours, headquartered in Manhattan.”

Magazine journalists have the freedom to be colorful: “The odds on a Kansas City law firm defending the tobacco industry are not much better than those on a lame horse in the Derby or on a Beverly Hills law firm representing a grain elevator operator in Atchison, KS.”

Other “Controversial Clientele”: In pro bono hours, Shook, Hardy did things like defend the Ku Klux Klan.

 

228      taking a chance on local talent: Judy Z. Ellet, Ingram’s: Kansas City Business Magazine, March 2002, “Kansas City’s Legal Journey.” A little-did-they-know: “All Philip Morris needed was a Missouri lawyer to appear in a Missouri court just for this one case.”

 

228      “morally degraded”: Brian M. Lowe, Emerging Moral Vocabularies: The Creation and Establishment of New Forms of Moral and Ethical Meanings, Lexington Books, 2006, 176.

 

228      “disemboweled”: Dan Zegart, Civil Warriors, 44.

 

228      “a man who is most frequently”: John T. Ross, Plaintiff vs. Philip Morris Company, Ltd., Defendant, Case No. 9494, Afternoon Session, Monday, June 25, 1962. Here’s Hardy again working his magic. (597-598.) “Because we have here a man who is most frequently described as a zealot, an evangelist, and that sort of thing, for the fact that cigarette smoking causes cancer.” For us, the phrasing is difficult to fathom. Like being a zealot for the connection between water vapor and rain.

 

228      in less than an hour: Mark Hansen, American Bar Association Journal, “Shook, Hardy Smokes ‘Em,” October 1, 2008. “The jury deliberated less than an hour before returning a verdict for the defense.”

 

229      Philip Morris was dazzled: The word used by David Margolick in his Times piece: “David R. Hardy, the wily country-style lawyer who dazzled Philip Morris with his handling of the Ross case in 1962.” Margolick, “Tobacco Its Middle Name, Law Firm Thrives, For Now,” The New York Times, November 20, 1992.

From the article in Corporate Report: “To this day, members of the firm marvel at how much the direction and success of the firm derive from the totally unforeseen fact that Mr. Ross filed his suit [against Philip Morris] in Kansas City. Anywhere else and some other attorney, some other firm, would have had the chance the tobacco companies.

“ ‘Of course, the break was there, and it was a hell of an opportunity,’ stressed Robert Northrip, who is slated to head the tobacco litigation department soon. ‘But don’t forget that opportunities come to people all over the country, and many are not seized.’ ” Laner, Corporate Report, November 1981.

 

229      devised their hard-shell strategy: Allan Brandt makes this more global. The Cigarette Century, Chapter 10, “Nicotine is the Product”: “David Hardy, a partner at Shook, Hardy & Bacon, the Kansas City law firm that fashioned the industry’s principal defense strategies.”

As Gene Borio writes, in his celebrated Tobacco Timeline, Shook, Hardy & Bacon would “[go] on to become virtually synonymous with tobacco litigation.” Eugene Borio, The Tobacco Timeline, “Twentieth Century: The Rise of the Cigarette.” 
https://academic.udayton.edu/health/syllabi/tobacco/history2.htm

Accessed 6-22-22.

David Margolick’s Shook, Hardy piece in the Times is just entertaining reading. (Margolick, “Tobacco Its Middle Name, Law Firm Thrives, For Now,” The New York Times, November 20, 1992. The middle name is, of course, Dave Hardy.)

“In early November, eight years after she died of lung cancer, Rose Cipollone joined John Ross, Mildred Peters, Peter Ierardi and a number of others on a lengthy list of losers in lawsuits against tobacco companies. They or their survivors took the cigarette companies to court, only to be vanquished once they got there by the law firm of Shook, Hardy & Bacon. No major industry and no law firm anywhere are so inextricably linked.”

Among other color details: during the peak tobacco years, “even nonsmoking Shook, Hardy lawyers carried cigarette packs in their shirt pockets or briefcases for client solidarity. . . A former associate recalled how, when a lawyer at the firm brandished an anti-smoking strip from ‘Doonesbury,’ his superiors ‘looked at him like he’d brought out a dead animal.’”

Margolick shares what must have been an au courant nineties joke. “The firm to which people invariably compare Shook, Hardy & Bacon is not some real-world operation at all,” the journalist writes. “But Bendini, Lambert & Locke, the fictitious Memphis law office in John Grisham’s best-selling thriller, The Firm.”

And now, the second half of the “never paid a dime”—“The industry has yet to pay out a dime in damages, settlements or court costs . . .”—sentence from the Marlboro chapter. “. . . and much of the credit goes to Shook, Hardy.”

 

229      Hardy took an interest: Zegart, Civil Warriors, 293; “Dave Hardy and Huber were often together.” Huber told PBS Frontline, “He had an enormous ego and took great satisfaction in being a leader, explaining how things worked.” Frontline, “Inside the Tobacco Deal,” May 12, 1998. Hancock, Curriden, Dallas Morning News, “Lawyers Were in Control”: “His main attorney contact became the late David Hardy Sr.”

 

229      He personally oversaw: For example, David R. Hardy to Thomas F. Ahrensfield Esq. et al, “Re: Harvard Project,” December 19, 1972.  Bates No. 01189571-01189572. “Dr. Gary Huber has requested the following work to be done in the laboratory of one of the companies . . . One other item that Dr. Huber has requested is for access to the same glass blower used by Lollilard . . . ”

 

229      Kansas City Royals baseball games: Zegart, Civil Warriors, 293. “Hardy would try to psyche out the opposing batters as they warmed up. His technique was a long, steady stare. ‘They go to the plate a little shaken up,’ he claimed. He gave Huber a Royals program, which he signed, ‘Dave Hardy, Official Scorekeeper.’ Huber framed it and hung it on the wall of his office in Boston.” Ah: Gary Huber, always the blushing handmaid.

Zegart expresses this coolly. Huber, dazzled by powerful. “His [Huber’s] response was to become a sycophant.”

 

229      exclusive clubs: Zegart, Civil Warriors, 293.

 

229      “That’s the witness stand”: Zegart, Civil Warriors, 294.

The coolest part of the world shown by Dave Hardy to Huber? Huber got put into a sportscar (you have to imagine it’s a sportscar) and zipped out of town, shown the James Bond installation where Shook, Hardy & Bacon stores its most sensitive records. This was “located in natural limestone caves that ran deep into hills beyond the Kansas City limits. Outside the mouth of the cave was a guardhouse, and an armed man came out and opened the gate. The car drove right into the little mountain through an entrance wide enough to accommodate an eighteen-wheeler. Inside, among cold stone walls darkened by truck exhaust, sat thousands of boxes.” Civil Warriors, 293-4.

 

229      after heart attack number four: Civil Warriors, 295.

 

229      an unburdening: Civil Warriors, 295. Hardy “talked about his life, his career, the work he had done for the tobacco companies, which he believed was his monumental achievement. Huber had somehow become Hardy’s deathbed confessor.”

 

229      When Huber married: Civil Warriors, 302.

 

229      emphysema: “Huber’s star was sinking fast,” Zegart writes in Civil Warriors, 298. In Golden Holocaust, Robert Proctor notes an equally troubling (to tobacco) aspect of the Harvard research. “The industry seems to have been caught off guard in 1978 when Huber announced, on the basis of human experiments, that low-tar cigarettes probably were no safer and might even be extra dangerous insofar as smokers ‘consistently held the smoke from the low tar cigarettes in their lungs a longer time in an apparent effort to extract more satisfaction from them.’ This was clear evidence that ‘low tar’ didn’t necessarily mean ‘safer’—and a deep challenge to the industry’s principal business strategy of health reassurance.” Proctor, Golden Holocaust, 425-6.

Zegart writes that the brilliant chief of Philip Morris Research and Development, Helmut Wakeham, understood with the emphysema study that the jig was up. “I think the longer we are in bed with him,” Wakeham counseled Philip Morris, “the sorrier we will be that we ever jumped in.” Wakeham blamed the lawyers. They had gotten “us into this mess, now let them get us out with minimum damage. Better to bite the bullet now and amputate than to get gangrene later.” Civil Warriors, 298.

 

229      The cigarette attorneys flew: Civil Warriors, 299-300. It must have been unnerving. “Notably missing was Jack Roemer, who as general counsel for Reynolds, then the number one cigarette company, had been the Project’s strongest booster since Hardy died . . . ‘This is Jack’s project,’ said Holtzman. ‘I don’t understand why Jack isn’t here.’ ”

Zegart explains later, “Roemer retired a few years after the Harvard fiasco, and never explained why he hadn’t shown up that day in Boston. Huber always assumed Roemer took the blame for the Harvard Project running off the reservation.” 302.

 

229      the end of the Harvard Project: Civil Warriors, 300. Golden Holocaust, 426. Lee Hancock, Mark Curriden, Dallas Morning News, “The Lawyers Were in Control”: “For 25 years, Dr. Gary Huber, lung doctor and longtime academic researcher, was one of tobacco’s most reliable allies. . . Industry lawyers told Huber in 1980, his final year at Harvard, that his research was ‘getting too close to some things,’ according to his statement in the Texas case.”

Dan Margolis, “Slow Burn Smolders In Court—KC-Based Shook Is Mentioned In A Federal Judge’s Blistering Ruling,” The Kansas City Star, October 24, 2006. “In 1980, the industry cut off funding to Harvard scientist Gary Huber after Shook attorney Lee Stanford and other industry lawyers determined that he was ‘getting too close to some things,’ according to [Judge Gladys] Kessler’s opinion.”

 

230      he was messily gone: Lexington Herald, April 8, 1981. “Gary Huber Temporarily Removed As Director of U.K. Tobacco Institute.” Right there on the front page.

There was also “State Weighing Evidence Against U.K.’s Huber,” John Woestendiek, Lexington Herald, April 8, 1981. Apparently, among larger charges, Huber was dipping into a discretionary fund to recreate some physical aspects of the Harvard experience: “Sources say Huber has used the fund to pay for the difference between coach and first class airfare.”

Zegart is curtly funny here. “Down in Lexington, things began to go wrong in a rather spectacular way . . . Within a year [of moving to Lexington,] he was fired from the Tobacco and Health Research Institute.” 300.

 

230      your only customer: This is Zegart, 302: “Those who knew him best said Huber was never the same after Kentucky. He seemed to have lost his air of authority and confidence.” 

 

230      disputing reports by government scientists: Austin-American Statesman, “Study’s tobacco funding hidden by school,” November 16, 1997. “The University of Texas Health Center at Tyler helped shield from public view the research done by Dr. Gary Huber on tobacco’s health risks as well as the $1.68 million sent by tobacco industry lawyers that paid for the work from 1985 to 1996 . . . According to documents provided under Texas open records laws, for more than half the period from 1985 to 1996, money was routed through an outside account bearing a Greek code name to keep it off hospital books and make it difficult for an outsider to find.” Diabolical.

Similarly, in nineteen-fifties England, to foil journalists and plaintiffs, in internal British-American Tobacco correspondence, cancer—crippling, body-breaking—was referred to as something gentle and warm: Zephyr. (As in, “A deep dichotomy is developing between the Zephyr rates for urban and deeply rural populations.” C.D. Ellis, Re: Visit of Sir Charles Ellis, October 23, 1955. Bates No. 101696099-6100. Ellis was Scientific Adviser to British-American Tobacco. See also Brandt, Cigarette Century, 158; Proctor, Golden Holocaust, 689.)

Shook, Hardy projects crewed on by Huber are in Lee Hancock, Mark Curriden, “Ex-tobacco Insider Says Lawyers Were In Control,” The Dallas Morning News, December 21, 1997.

Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, Trust Us, We’re Experts, Putnam, 2001. 236.

 

230      Huber still did work: Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, Trust Us, We’re Experts, Putnam, 2001, on page 237 have a long, terrifying passage about how work by a denial scientist like Huber got used. Huber could write a dubious report for a dubious, non-impressive outlet like Consumers’ Research, then see it quoted into the mainstream by non-dubious organs like Forbes, and then—well, here’s the frightening passage.

The purpose of the secrecy, of course, was to preserve a veneer of third-party independence so that Huber could appear credible when he spoke out publicly in defense of cigarettes. By the late 1980s, he had become one of the most vocal and visible scientific critics of studies probing the hazards of environmental tobacco smoke.

“In 1991 Huber authored an article that picked away at EPA’s epidemiology for Consumers’ Research magazine, a Consumer Reports lookalike that is partially funded by the tobacco industry. The scientific studies linking secondhand smoke to cancer, he wrote, were ‘shoddy and poorly conceived.’ His article was repeatedly quoted by the tobacco industry’s network of columnists and by opinion magazines opposed to government regulation of smoking.

“Michael Fumento (a graduate of the partly tobacco-funded National Journalism Center) wrote a piece for Investor’s Business Daily that quoted Huber and several other tobacco-friendly researchers, calling them ‘scientists and policy analysts who say they couldn’t care less about tobacco company profits’ but ‘say the data the EPA cites do not bear out its conclusions.’

“Huber’s arguments were also cited by Jacob Sullum, editor of the libertarian magazine Reason (which receives funding from Philip Morris), in an article that was then picked up by Forbes Media Critic magazine. Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds liked the Sullum piece so much that in May 1994 the R.J. Reynolds company bought reprint rights to an editorial he had written for the Wall Street Journal. A few months later, Philip Morris paid Sullum $5,000 for the right to reprint one of his articles as a five-day series of full-page ads in newspapers throughout the country, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, Boston Globe, and Baltimore Sun. The ads appeared under the headline, ‘If We Said It, You Might Not Believe It.’

“The result, noted Consumer Reports magazine (no relation to Consumers’ Research), was that ‘Huber’s argument has undoubtedly now been seen by millions more people than ever read the original EPA report, let alone any of the hundreds of scientific articles on the subject in medical journals.’ ”

 

230      a black and gold Harvard chair: Civil Warriors, 287.

 

230      “What happened to you?” she asked: Civil Warriors, 303.

 

230      Penance, obviously: Civil Warriors, 302-303.

 

230      His daughter warned him: NBC Nightly News, “In Depth With NBC’s Bob Kur,” March 4, 1998. Kur does indeed introduce it as the fallen-man story, the Narrative of the Seduced Potential Hero. Of Huber: “He was young, idealistic, ambitious.”

 

230      tobacco-outed by Business Week: Linda Himelstein and Richard A. Melcher, Business Week, “Did Big Tobacco’s Barrister Set Up A Smokescreen?”, September 4, 1994.

 

230      “blow the lid right off this thing”: Civil Warriors, 286.

The lawyers promised reporters Huber would be, essentially, smokers’ smoking gun.

“ ‘No other whistle-blower comes close to having as much inside knowledge about the conduct of this entire industry, how it operated and how it conspired with its lawyers to deceive, as does Gary Huber,’ says Ron Motley, a lawyer in the Texas case who helped persuade Huber to switch sides.”

Lee Hancock, Mark Curriden, “Ex-tobacco Insider Says Lawyers Were In Control,” The Dallas Morning News, December 21, 1997.

 

230      whether their flight would be first class: Zegart, Civil Warriors, 305.

 

230      They showed Gary Huber: Proctor, Golden Holocaust, 436.

 

231      “What we did was artifact”: Zegart, Civil Warriors, 306.

 

231      “the public relations value”: Alexander Holtzman (Philip Morris Associate General Counsel), Letter to Mr. Maxwell From Mr. Holtzman, April 23, 1973. Bates No 3990069490-3990069491.

 

231      “It was a magnitude of shock”: PBS Frontline, “Inside the Tobacco Deal,” May 12, 1998.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/settlement/interviews/huber.html

Accessed 6-22-22.

 

231      “Keep the faith, hold the line”: Saundra Torry, “The Case of Texas Versus Big Tobacco Speeds Toward Trial or Settlement,” Washington Post, January 9, 1998.

 

231      “Don’t be seduced”: Civil Warriors, 304.

 

231      “We helped them get away with it”: NBC Nightly News, “Philip Morris CEO Continues Testimony in Minnesota Trial,” March 4, 1998.

 

231      “I’ve been used”: Lee Hancock, Mark Curriden, “Ex-tobacco insider says lawyers were in control,” The Dallas Morning News, December 21, 1997.

 

231      “Do not trust them”: PBS Frontline, Inside the Tobacco Deal, 1998.

 

231      It wasn’t that Gary Huber got elevated: There seems to be a narcissism in the incoming and the outgoing: it takes narcissism to sell to the denier industries; your needs are paramount. And then a different, frustrated narcissism—revenge narcissism—to turn your coat.

Huber was clearly, touchingly convinced he would solve the tobacco problem in the legal sense. His testimony “will kill them,” he promised the Dallas Morning News reporters in 1998. “It will kill them dead.”

The Dallas Morning News, “Ex-tobacco insider says lawyers were in control.”

In Golden Holocaust, Stanford’s Robert Proctor makes this a morality play. “Attorneys suing the industry showed him documents demonstrating his role in this scheme, and he agreed to testify against his former benefactors in court, exposing their duplicitous manipulation of science.” 426.