Bill of Rights Tour Sponsor

Your article on the tour of the Bill of Rights to Los Angeles by Bob Pool (“Bill of Rights Display Opens to Protests,” May 9) provides further grounds for suspicion of “pool reporting.”

While ostensibly a report about a visit of a historic document to Los Angeles, the article in fact was not much more than a vehicle for the propagation of the anti-smoking movement’s now predictable campaign against the Bill of Rights tour.

Much play is made in the article suggesting that the tour, sponsored by Philip Morris, was in essence an attempt to advertise cigarettes. No evidence was provided and indeed no evidence could be provided. There isn’t any.

Your reporter quotes a leading anti-smoking activist as saying of the tour: “We encourage people to come, but to be mindful of the irony of a tobacco company being involved.”

We don’t quite see where the “irony” lies. Tobacco was bequeathed to Europe by the first Americans (i.e., the American Indian); it was the foundation stone of Virginia’s economy and without it the first settlement of this country would probably have failed; it was the source of pleasure for most of the authors of the Bill of Rights and many of them actually made some or all of their income from it.

We should also make it clear that Philip Morris is the world’s largest consumer-products company and America’s largest packaged-food company. We employ thousands of Americans, pay billions in taxes and contribute vastly to America’s balance of payments. To put it mildly, we really don’t need a lesson in being American.

If you have any proof that the Bill of Rights tour was used to advertise cigarettes, you should have produced it in the article. Is fair reporting too much to ask?

GUY L. SMITH IV

Vice President, Corporate Affairs

Philip Morris Inc., New York