Thing On My Chest
Written and Narrated by Roger Netzer
Connecticut
Thing On My Chest — An Invective (with footnotes)
In memoriam Judy Stevens
The library, which we used to call the library,
is called Tisch Hall now.
The name change honors benefaction
that Jonathan Tisch’s family poured
onto the Connecticut prep school
where Jon and I were schoolmates
back in the 1970s.
The Tisch dynastic brand can be seen
round New York, too: hospital wing here,
university library there. And on book covers:
Jon, in addition to running
the family conglomerate, writes bestsellers:
The Power of WE: Success Through Partnering
and Citizen YOU: Doing Your Part to Save the World.
He was a nice boy back when I knew him.
Well brought-up, friendly, and unpretentious.
Not spoiled. His pleasing homeliness
(he has since matured to near handsome)
was offset by a clownish grin he dispensed generously.
Impossible not to like.
So what if his folks owned Lorillard,
America’s third largest tobacco company?
The Lorillard jingles were great.
The one for Newport (my big sister’s smoke,
and the company’s top-selling brand) went
♫ Keep your pleasure fresh keep smoking Newport
filter cigarettes, Newport filter cigarettes! ♫
My sister took up Newports at fourteen,
consistent with Lorillard’s strategic recognition
that ‘the base of our business
is the high school student.’ (1)
In the decades before they bought Lorillard,
Jon’s dad Preston and uncle Laurence
had made a fortune in the less lethal enterprises
of hotel and theatre chains.
By 1968, the time had come to diversify.
Controversy about the health risk of cigarettes
had depressed Lorillard’s share price,
so the Tisches were able to buy it for a song,
way less than what the enormous annual revenues justified. (2)
The gamble paid off big-time.
Not without cost to the family, though.
Forty years and ten billion
in profits later, it turned out
the whole Tisch family had felt ‘discomfort’
owning a tobacco company.
But why? After all, the Tisches ‘believed
nicotine was not addictive.’
That’s what cousin Andy swore in 1994
when, as Lorillard’s chairman and chief executive –
the torch having passed
to a younger generation of Tisches –
it fell to Andrew to testify, under oath,
to the Congress of the United States. (4)
Besides, addictive or not, smoking was not fatal.
Asked by Congressman Henry Waxman (D. California)
whether cigarettes caused cancer, Andrew swore,
‘I do not believe that.’ (5)
(Do you believe, reader,
that Andrew did not believe that?)
Congressman Waxman, who served in Congress
for half-a-century, pressed his question.
‘Do you understand how isolated you are
from the scientific community in your belief?’
‘I do, sir,’ Andrew replied. (6)
Still, that was a little too much heat.
The Tisches began to sell off their interest
in tobacco. Slowly, over more than a decade.
They did not want to tank the share price
by dumping the company’s stock in one fell swoop.
That way, the Tisch four-decade swim
in the ever-gushing revenue stream
could continue.
My family passed milestones, too.
In 1966 a heart attack killed my dad,
who enjoyed smoking Kents (Lorillard again!),
♫ Kent with the micronite filter. ♫
I gave up Marlboro (Philip Morris, now Altria)
in 1987. My sister Judy shook her Newport habit
in 2004 by dying of lung cancer.
No Tisch was dumb enough to smoke,
so they never witnessed the grave
unpretty effects up close.
But they faced challenges of their own.
Every year, they had to read and adopt
the annual corporate business plans.
These business plans addressed an economic conundrum
peculiar to the tobacco industry:
Habitual use of the product
caused many consumers to leave the customer base
prematurely and permanently.
So every year the Tisches —
advised, naturally, by top scientists
and marketing consultants –
would implement a strategies
solving the perennial problem:
Where would the company find new customers
to replace the former customers?
Lorillard found emerging markets
to fill the gaps. The dead suckers’ children
— well, all children — were a fertile demographic
to cultivate and farm. And there were generations
still unborn to be harvested when the time came.
Market elasticity, it’s called.
By facing these uncomfortable realities, the
Tisches surmounted them.
But the day finally arrived
to cash out for good. Come 2008,
the family sold off its remaining piece of Lorillard.
From then on, they were spared the discomfort
of exploiting, and causing, ill — ill at a level
to make your typical genocidal mass murderer
look like a piker.
Hyperbole? 480,000 deaths from smoking
in the U.S. alone. Annually. Still.
But it is years since the Tisches
made their tobacco fortune.
The former customers have disappeared
into memory and what lies beyond memory.
The family’s generous philanthropy
has dimmed the spotlight on their murderous history.
Doing their part to save the world,
the Tisch family enters its future
assured of respectability and power and prestige.
They flourish.
But before the curtain descends
for good on the old days, the fake names
I had planned to use are out,
and the real ones are in.
I owe my sister Judy that much.
Envoi
May the ghosts of those who forked over
good money for Newport, Kent, and Old Gold
rise from the populous earth. Guide them,
O Vengeance, past the doormen and nannies
guarding the well-appointed nurseries
of all born into the Tisch family.
Shadows, haunt their dreams!
But I confess a soft spot for the winning boy
I once knew, so give dispensation
to Jon, to his pretty wife, and to his kids
and grand-kids down the line.
One last thing, Dark Faced One.
When you muster the spectral legion
To its mission of justice, for my sake
Excuse two phantoms from the ranks:
my sister (Newports, see above)
and dad (Kents like I said)
Don’t make them haunt the wrongdoers.
I witnessed both earn, the hard way,
their right to wreak a fearful revenge,
but grant them rest.
____________
(1) Memo from executive T. L. Achey to Lorillard President Curtis Judge 1regarding Newport brand, August 30, 1978. It took nearly forty years for Lorillard to disclose the memo — under compulsion — in the case of United States v. Philip Morris, 116 F.Supp.2d 131 ( D.D.C. 2000). Judge Gladys Kessler’s 1,683-page opinion finally brought Achey’s memo to light. {page cite}
(2) Stephanie Saul, Profits in Hand, Wealthy Family Cuts Tobacco Tie, 2N.Y. Times, June 11, 2008.
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