For the Tobacco Industry, Ex-Smoker Waxman Is the No. 1 Foe in Congress

Not long ago, fighting the tobacco industry was considered hazardous to a lawmaker’s health.

When Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) took over the House health and environment subcommittee in 1979 and began using it as a bully pulpit to attack the cigarette makers, he was largely on his own. Some of Waxman’s colleagues, while admiring his stand, did not relish a fight with one of the country’s richest and most powerful lobbies.

Things are different today. The sea-change in public attitudes toward smoking has washed over Congress, where it is now fairly safe, even trendy, to attack the tobacco industry. Members now line up to put their names on anti-smoking bills. There’s even a bipartisan Congressional Task Force on Tobacco and Health with 48 members.

But while new leaders have emerged, Waxman remains, in the words of House ally Mike Synar (D-Okla.), the industry’s “No. 1 enemy” in Congress and “godfather” of its anti-smoking efforts. Now, buoyed by a wave of criticism of tobacco marketing practices, Waxman is embarking on a new legislative assault on smoking, one that would severely restrict tobacco companies’ ability to link their brands with glamorous and appealing models in print ads and on billboards.

The measure, which was introduced last week, faces intense opposition from the industry as well as its powerful billboard, advertising and publishing allies. They have attacked it as government censorship, an infringement of their right to free speech.

For Waxman, the bill is a return to smoking wars fought mainly in recent years by others, such as Synar and Rep. Richard J. Durbin, (D-Ill.), author of the airline smoking ban and co-chairman of the congressional tobacco and health task force formed in 1988. Although somewhat in the background in recent years, Waxman’s longtime involvement in the issue and key subcommittee chairmanship still make him de facto leader of the anti-smoking forces.

“There are many others in the House who have joined his choir,” said Rep. Charlie Rose (D-N.C.), who represents many tobacco growers. “But Henry is still the leader of the band, and they all look to him for coordination.”

It was Waxman’s bill in 1984, for instance, that created the current series of rotating warning labels on cigarette packs and advertising.

Waxman has been flaying the tobacco firms since 1979. Helped by the smoking issue, he bucked the House’s hallowed seniority system that year to defeat Rep. Richardson Preyer (D-N.C.) and become chairman of the health and environment subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Waxman, a prolific fund-raiser, made campaign contributions to committee colleagues, which won him criticism in some quarters as well as support. The only negative for Preyer, a respected and senior House member, was his ownership, by inheritence, of pharmaceutical stock.

Then Waxman’s candidacy got an unexpected boost with the release of a surgeon general’s report on smoking and health in January, 1979. Preyer immediately joined the rest of Tobacco Road in assailing the study. Congress rarely had challenged the cigarette makers but was reluctant to embarrass itself by giving a high-profile health leadership post to a member who publicly questioned the evidence on smoking and health.

Waxman was elected shortly thereafter.

Over the last decade, the 50-year-old Waxman has used the influential post to conduct about a dozen well-publicized hearings on the hazards of smoking and cigarette advertising. These hearings, featuring such diverse witnesses as former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and actor John Forsythe, contributed to the vast change in public opinion about smoking.

Waxman certainly has more to show for these efforts than former Rep. John Blatnik (D-Minn.), who shattered a long-standing taboo by holding the first-ever congressional hearings on smoking and health in 1957.

A heavy smoker, he puffed his way through the hearings, inviting questions about his sincerity. “I’m not hypocritical, I’m addicted,” he later recalled saying.

Before he could get to his second round of hearings, he was outmaneuvered by tobacco state lawmakers, who used their leverage with the House leadership to see to it that Blatnik’s panel was “reorganized” out of existence.

Waxman has suffered no such fate. In a sense, his 1984 bill creating rotating warning labels for cigarettes represented the tobacco lobby’s first real defeat in Congress. The labels warn of cancer, heart disease, emphysema and risks to unborn babies. The few previous anti-smoking initiatives--such as the original weak warning label on cigarette packs and a subsequent ban on broadcast advertising--had actually been endorsed by the industry.

Officials with the Tobacco Institute, the industry lobbying group, declined to discuss Waxman for this article. In the past, they have belittled the diminutive lawmaker as “Hollywood Henry,” suggesting he is a publicity hound who is out of touch with the rest of the country.

Other times, he has been portrayed as a ruthless dictator, intolerant of dissent on his subcommittee. In Philip Morris Magazine, published by the leading U.S. cigarette maker, a mug shot of Waxman included this ominous-sounding caption: “A lot of people distrust the idea of power. I don’t.”

But these negative assessments are partly for public consumption, a former industry official acknowledged. In fact, the industry views Waxman with “a combination of fear and respect,” he said.

Waxman was “very businesslike, very substantively oriented and didn’t go into some of the grandstanding and easy media exposure” that other tobacco foes did, he said.

One example was Waxman’s alliance with Koop, another scourge of the tobacco industry. Early in his tenure, Koop was attacked as a reactionary crank for his views on abortion, homosexuality and other issues. The liberal Waxman was one of his harshest critics.

To tobacco officials, the ideological split between two such enemies was fortuitous. Over time, however, Koop grew in the eyes of Waxman, who was willing to admit that he’d misjudged him. In the end, Waxman “ate crow on Koop,” the former tobacco official said. As a result, they became an effective team.

Although health activists applaud Waxman’s anti-smoking stand, some question his low profile on alcohol abuse, considered the nation’s second-ranking preventable cause of death.

Michael Jacobson, head of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Washington-based health advocacy group, said Waxman had been “frankly . . . disappointing” on the alcohol issue.

Others suggest that tobacco, which is not grown in California, is an easier mark for Waxman than wine or beer, both important in the state.

“Henry is probably not immune to higher aspirations,” said O’Toole of the American Assn. of Advertising Agencies. “And if he’s going to go any further in the state of California, he better not have the entire wine industry on his back.”

Waxman denies such assertions. He supported a 1988 measure, originating in the Senate, that put a warning label on alcoholic beverages, including wine. He said his subcommittee also held a hearing on fetal alcohol syndrome several years ago.

“But I don’t believe that there’s the same kind of problem,” he added. “After all, when you use a tobacco product as intended, it is harmful. Abuse of alcohol is the problem, not simply the use of the product.”

As are many of his anti-smoking colleagues, Waxman is a former smoker. He started at age 17 “because I wanted to be adult real fast.” After eight years of smoking up to three packs a day, he quit while a law student at UCLA. “It was not easy,” he recalled with a grimace.

Waxman’s law school classmate, close friend and political ally Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City) continues to smoke. Has Waxman tried to get him to stop?

“Many times,” a mutual friend said.

Although the industry maintains that Waxman and his allies really want to ban smoking, he insists prohibition of such a widely used substance could not work.

“But what we can do is to try to convince people that smoking is very dangerous,” Waxman said.

“We certainly have a very difficult time convincing people . . . when the industry spends billions of dollars each year trying to make cigarette smoking look attractive and desirable and plays on the insecurities” of young people and women.