Between You and Me (27 page)

The documents were quite technical, so to help us decipher them (as well as authenticate them), we hired a highly skilled analyst as an off-camera consultant. He was a chemist named Jeffrey Wigand, and until recently, he had been director of research at another tobacco firm, Brown & Williamson. After making a detailed study of the documents, Wigand told Bergman they contained solid evidence that Project Hamlet had been a success: The research scientists at Philip Morris had come up with a way to produce a fire-safe cigarette that would also be consumer-friendly. Wigand went on to say that what made him angry was the fact that Philip Morris had declined to move on to the next step and had kept its discovery under a thick veil of secrecy.

By the time “Up in Smoke” was broadcast in March 1994, Bergman had spent enough time with our consultant to know that Wigand’s anger was not confined to Philip Morris’s lack of follow-through in the quest for a fire-safe cigarette. The two of them had talked about how embittered Wigand was over what had happened to him at Brown & Williamson. When he was hired in 1989 as head of B&W’s research-and-development operation, he was encouraged to focus his scientific skills on reducing the health hazards in cigarettes.

This was at a time when executives at all the tobacco companies were insisting there was no firm evidence that smoking was a prime cause

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of cancer and other serious diseases. But according to Wigand, they were fully aware of how harmful cigarettes were.

Even though his conversations with Bergman were off the record, Wigand still had to be circumspect, because when he was fired by B&W in 1993, the terms of his severance package included a stringent confidentiality agreement. So he did not go into specifics about what he had learned during his four years there. Nevertheless, Bergman felt certain from what Wigand did say, and from his overall manner, that he had the kind of explosive information that had never before been divulged by someone who had been part of the inner workings of a major tobacco firm. The challenge for Bergman was to get Wigand to go on the record, to blow the whistle on B&W in a 60

Minutes interview with me.

That was no easy task. Wigand had been warned that if he violated his confidentiality agreement with B&W, he would be sued for breach of contract. Yet Bergman could sense that in spite of the powerful legal deterrent, Wigand wanted to spill the beans on his former employer. For one thing, he was still smoldering with resentment over the way he had been treated at B&W. For another—and this was a far stronger motive—he was outraged by the policies of deception that made it possible for B&W (as well as other tobacco companies) to produce and sell cigarettes that imperiled the health of millions of smokers. As he put it in one of his conversations with Bergman, he was struggling to resolve his “moral crisis.”

So Bergman decided to stay in touch with Wigand, to phone him fairly often and to make periodic visits to his home in Louisville. The purpose was to build a relationship based on the deep concern they shared about the harmful effects of smoking and to develop a bond of trust that would encourage Wigand to defy the confidentiality agreement and appear on 60 Minutes. Thus began a long campaign of

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earnest pep talks and hand-holding that lasted through the rest of 1994 and deep into the following year. Bergman’s patience and per-severance paid off, even though it wasn’t until the summer of 1995

that Wigand finally gave Bergman the green light to set up the interview with me.

Wigand’s on-camera indictment of his former employer proved as strong and compelling as Bergman had predicted. One of his first disclosures was the flat assertion that tobacco executives had long known nicotine was an addictive drug. That flew in the face of a memorable scene at a 1994 congressional hearing on the health hazards of smoking, at which CEOs from the nation’s seven largest tobacco firms stood in a row elbow to elbow, raised their right hands, and swore that they believed nicotine was not addictive. Among those who joined in that chorus of denial was Wigand’s former boss at B&W, Thomas Sandefur, whom Wigand accused of having “perjured himself.” I asked him to elaborate on that charge.

W I G A N D : Part of the reason I’m here is I felt that their representation, clearly—at least within Brown & Williamson’s representation—clearly misstated what they commonly knew as language within the company: that we’re in a nicotine-delivery business.

W A L L A C E : And that’s what cigarettes are for?

W I G A N D : Most certainly. It’s a delivery device for nicotine.

W A L L A C E : A delivery device for nicotine. . . . Put it in your mouth, light it up, and you’re going to get your fix.

W I G A N D : You’ll get your fix.

Wigand went on to reveal that the policy at B&W was to manip-ulate and adjust the fix by enhancing the effect of the nicotine

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through the use of chemical additives, a process known throughout the tobacco industry as “impact boosting.” What was more, when he came up with evidence that some of those additives increased the danger of serious disease, his concerns were largely dismissed. We then talked about his research project to develop a safer cigarette, and how all his efforts in that direction had been thwarted at every turn. At one point, he said, he became so frustrated that he took his complaints directly to the head man, Thomas Sandefur.

W A L L A C E : What did he say to you?

W I G A N D : “I don’t want to hear any more discussion about a safer cigarette.”

W A L L A C E : (Voice-over) And he says Thomas Sandefur went on to tell him:

W I G A N D : “We pursue a safer cigarette, it would put us at extreme exposure with every other product. I don’t want to hear about it anymore.”

W A L L A C E : All the people who were dying from cigarettes.

W I G A N D : Essentially, yes.

W A L L A C E : Cancer.

W I G A N D : Cancer.

W A L L A C E : Heart disease, things of that nature.

W I G A N D : Emphysema.

After listening to some more of Wigand’s allegations, I said to him, “In other words, what you’re charging Sandefur with, and Brown

& Williamson with, is ‘ignoring health considerations consciously.’ ”

“Most certainly,” he replied.

I could well understand why the honchos at B&W came to regard Wigand as an alien presence in their midst, and why, after he

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was fired, they were so determined to keep him clammed up. His portrait of the cynical deceptions that shaped the policies at his former company—and, by implication, at other tobacco firms—could hardly have been more scathing. It was very strong stuff. As we were about to discover, it was too strong for the collective stomach of the CBS brass.

One day in mid-September, about a month after I interviewed Wigand, I was summoned to a meeting with Ellen Kaden, the CBS

general counsel. Also present were Lowell Bergman, Don Hewitt, and Eric Ober, the president of CBS News. At the time, we still had some loose ends to tie up on the story we were building around the Wigand interview, and it was not yet scheduled for broadcast. But Kaden knew all about the interview, and that was what she wanted to talk about. “I think we have a problem,” she said, and then she used the phrase “tortious interference.” Translated from the legal jargon, that meant persuading someone to break a contract with another party. Because Wigand had a firm confidentiality agreement with B&W, she said, CBS could be “at grave risk.” My initial reaction was to assume that Kaden was merely raising a lawyerly flag of caution, a stern warning that we should be extremely careful in the way we edited the interview. Only later would I come to understand how determined the corporate management of CBS was to prevent Jeffrey Wigand from appearing on 60 Minutes.

Over the years, our program and other CBS News shows had done stories that displeased and even alarmed the so-called suits who presided over the network. That came with the territory, for there was a natural, built-in conflict between the news culture and the corporate culture. But never before, in the long history of CBS, had the top brass pushed so hard to undermine a story that hadn’t even been edited for broadcast. Even more disheartening was the fact that neither

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Ober nor Hewitt put up any serious resistance to the corporate pressure. When it came to that, I was especially sore at Hewitt, who, after all, had long been our staunch champion and protector at 60

Minutes. He and I had several spirited arguments that fall. He kept insisting that we were not “crusaders” for the commonweal (a rather odd view of a program that, under his leadership, had become renowned for its bold investigative journalism). I kept lashing back that there were important First Amendment issues at stake that he should be defending.

My distress was nothing compared to Bergman’s. He was furious at all his bosses, and I couldn’t blame him. He had pursued this tobacco scandal for the past year and a half, and he knew that bagging the Wigand interview elevated our story to a level of major consequence, on par with the best pieces ever done on 60 Minutes. Nor did Bergman believe that the tortious-interference concern had much merit. He cited the top-secret documents from Brown & Williamson that had been leaked over the past year to various media outlets. Since those documents corroborated Wigand’s main allegations, they undercut the whole point of the confidentiality agreement. Furthermore, Bergman argued, even if B&W’s clamps on Wigand were binding, it had to be an implausible stretch to extend them to him and CBS.

My own view of the legal threat was not so cavalier. Inasmuch as both sides in the tobacco war were driven by a passion for litigation, I thought we should at least consider the prospect of a lawsuit against us. At the same time, I shared Bergman’s suspicion that CBS’s objections to the Wigand interview had more to do with family and corporate considerations than with legal fears per se. For example, one of the tobacco executives who had sworn under oath that he believed nicotine was not addictive was Andrew Tisch, the CEO of Lorillard

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and the son of CBS chairman Laurence Tisch. In our interview, Wigand had labeled such testimony as perjury, and so, quite aside from the legal implications, airing that assessment on 60 Minutes would not have been good for the Tisch family’s image or financial interests. In addition (although neither Bergman nor I knew this at the time), Lorillard was in negotiations that fall to buy six brands of dis-count cigarettes from Brown & Williamson, a purchase that was announced in late November. To complicate matters still further, Larry Tisch and his top deputies were putting the final touches on a deal to sell CBS to Westinghouse for $5.4 billion. So, given all the givens, the last thing the Tisch family wanted that autumn was a tobacco-company lawsuit against CBS.

In the weeks following our September meeting with Tisch’s general counsel, Ellen Kaden, she steadily strengthened her tortious-interference argument until it became a virtual demand that the Wigand interview be killed. I suspect she did so because she and her corporate colleagues perceived weakness and acquiescence on the part of Hewitt and Ober. In early November, Hewitt came up with what I’m sure he regarded as a Solomonic solution. He decided to broadcast a sanitized version of our tobacco story without the Wigand interview.

My first impulse was to endorse that compromise, on the time-honored theory that half a loaf is better than you-know-what. But the more I thought about it, the more I came to believe that Hewitt’s decision was a terrible mistake. Among other things, it would set a dangerous precedent; I could easily imagine it becoming the foundation for a change in network policy whereby management would claim the right to cut segments from any story that incurred its displeasure.

Hewitt was clearly trying to have it both ways. He apparently thought that airing the piece without Wigand would provide a cover for his

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capitulation to the CBS brass. I remember how disgusted I was when a New York Times reporter quoted Hewitt as saying that the castrated version was “better, I think, than what we had before.”

Two days before the revised story was scheduled to air, I called Peter Lund, who, as the president and CEO of the network, ranked just under Tisch in the corporate hierarchy. I told him that the only way I could go along with the sanitized version was if I could close the program with some on-camera remarks that would be critical of the suppression that management had imposed on us. And, I said, I wanted his permission to do so. Lund’s first response was a heavy sigh; he obviously didn’t like what he was hearing. Nevertheless, he said that if I truly felt that strongly about it, then I should go ahead and have my say. I think he sensed from my icy tone that if he didn’t grant my request, I might resign in protest and raise an even bigger public howl. (As Lyndon Johnson once said about his FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, “Better to have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.”)

The truth is, I had given serious consideration to quitting on principle. The main reason I didn’t was because I was not yet ready to retire from a career that had given me so much satisfaction, and at the age of seventy-seven, I felt I was much too old to make a fresh start somewhere else. Moreover, I had a strong hunch that if we stayed the course and steeled our way through this crisis, we would find a way to broadcast the Wigand interview on 60 Minutes.