Author Bio

Michael Pertschuk has had a long and distinguished career in public health advocacy: as consumer counsel and ultimately chief counsel to the U. S. Senate Committee on Commerce, from 1965 to 1976; as chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, from 1977 to 1984; and as co-founder and co-director of the Advocacy Institute. His previous books include Revolt against Regulation, Giant Killers, and, with Wendy Schaetzel, The People Rising.

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Main Description

The classic American struggle between the public interest and corporate interests is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in the decades-long struggle between the tobacco industry and advocates for public health. The failure of the "global settlement" legislation is now viewed by many public health experts as an historic missed opportunity, and in this extraordinary book, Smoke in Their Eyes, Michael Pertschuk brilliantly describes the forces brought to bear.

A lifelong public health leader and tobacco control advocate, Pertschuk provides uncommon insight into the movement and its opposition. Questions that reveal themselves here can be applied to public advocacy as a whole: how can movement leaders gauge and best employ popular support? Who has legitimacy to speak on behalf of a particular public cause? And perhaps most crucially, how is it possible for those whose cause is a moral one to strike political compromise? With a narrative as compelling as the issues it raises, Smoke in Their Eyes will be of great interest to everyone from students of public advocacy and political science to general readers.

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Reviews

Certainly the best-written piece of nonfiction in its genre I have ever read. Pertschuk has a gift for taking what could be just another 'Washington insider' story and transforming it into the true overarching moral/political/human drama it actually is--and all of it infused with a sense of tremendous social consequences for each one of us, which it also is.
--Brock Evans, Executive Director, The Endangered Species Coalition

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Nobody has a broader or clearer understanding of the worldwide antitobacco movement than Michael Pertschuk. His inside analysis of how its brightest hour suddenly turned into its darkest moment is an urgent object lesson, teaching that even those firmly on the side of the angels can be consumed by righteousness and self-importance. In this case, the good guys let themselves be blinded to the hard realities of the political process always lurking in the shadows. The U.S. public health community's failure to seriously blunt the perils of smoking--the nations most destructive drug--when it had the tobacco industry reeling is a national tragedy that needed to be chronicled.
--Richard Kluger, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ashes to Ashes

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Table of Contents

Foreword ix
Introduction 1
Part I. Leading toward Settlement
1 Thinking the Unthinkable 13
2 Why Matt Myers? 21
3 Sinking the Unthinkable 28
4 The Search for Common Ground Begins 36
5 Why Stan Glantz and Julia Carol? 40
6 "Everyone" Agreed! 49
7 The Real Leadership? 53
8 A Suspect Consensus 59
9 Guess Who's Coming to Dinner 64
10 Day One: Four Meetings, Two Directions 70
11 One Stays, One Stays Out 78
Part II. The Settlement
12 Progress 89
13 Betrayed? 94
14 Slings and Arrows 103
15 With Friends Like These . . . 110
16 The Line Hardens 113
17 A Divorce in the Family 119
18 The Nicotine Fix 123
19 "I Say It's Immunity, and I Say the Hell with It" 131
20 "When to Walk Away" 142
viii Smoke in Their Eyes
21 The Two Ks to the Rescue 146
22 The Deal Is Struck--and Stricken 153
Part III. The Rise and Fall of the McCain Bill
23 The Struggle for Clinton's Nod 161
24 Unity under Clinton's Umbrella? 173
25 Things Fall Apart--the Cent

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