Abstract

They called it `Zephyr.'

The article focuses on the books "The Cigarette Papers," by Stanton A. Glantz and John Slade and "Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris," by Richard Kluger. One is fittingly titled "The Cigarette Papers," because it does for the tobacco war have done what the Pentagon papers did for the Vietnam War. It confirms what every admirer of private enterprise should have surmised: that the tobacco manufacturers always, but always knew more about their product than their critics did. In "Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris," Kluger holds that if the tobacco executives were morally reprehensible, it was less for peddling a product commonly understood to be dangerous than for lying to reassure the clientele.