Source: The Nation
Date: 2010-02-25
Author:  Jon Wiener

Last summer Robert Proctor, a Stanford professor who studies the
history of tobacco, was surprised to receive court papers
accusing him of witness tampering and witness intimidation, along
with a subpoena for his unfinished book manuscript. Then in
January he got another subpoena, this one for three years of
e-mails with a colleague, and also for his computer hard drive.
Attorneys for R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris USA are trying to
get him barred from testifying in a Florida court as an expert
witness on behalf of a smoker with cancer who is suing the
companies. . . .

Proctor hadn\'t tampered with any witnesses; all he had done was
e-mail a colleague at the University of Florida asking about grad
students there who were doing research for Big Tobacco\'s legal
defense. But he\'s had to hire his own lawyers and spend days in
depositions, defending himself from the charges. He told me he
had recently spent "sixteen hours under oath, twelve lawyers in a
room overlooking San Francisco Bay, a million dollars spent on
deposing me and going after these e-mails."

There\'s a reason Big Tobacco would like to keep Proctor out of
the courtroom. He\'s one of only two historians who currently
testify on behalf of smokers with cancer--while forty historians
have testified on behalf of the tobacco industry. . . .

In these cases, history has become a key component in the
tobacco attorneys\' defense strategy. In the past, when smokers
with cancer sued for damages, the companies said they shouldn\'t
have to pay, because there was a "scientific controversy" about
whether smoking causes cancer. But in recent years they have
given up that argument and now argue something like the opposite:
"everybody knew" smoking causes cancer. So if you got cancer from
smoking, it\'s your own fault.

To persuade juries, they need historians--experts who, for
example, can testify that newspapers in the plaintiff\'s hometown
ran articles about the health hazards of smoking in the 1940s or
\'50s or \'60s, when he or she started. So Big Tobacco has been
spending a lot of money hiring historians--and is stepping up the
harassment of Proctor. . . .

The charges of witness tampering and witness harassment
concerned history grad students at the University of Florida who
had been hired to do research for Big Tobacco by Gregg Michel, a
historian at the University of Texas, San Antonio. Proctor
learned about the grad students from Michel\'s deposition. (Michel
did not respond to requests for an interview.) "I e-mailed a
colleague at the University of Florida asking about this,"
Proctor said--Betty Smocovitis, a historian of science. "She
wrote back and said she was horrified. Said it couldn\'t be true.
Then she found that it was." . . .

Given the deception practiced by Big Tobacco, how are the
historians who work for tobacco attorneys able to blame the
smokers? As they admit under cross-examination by plaintiffs\'
attorneys, in their "research," they fail to examine the most
important source of information on the history of smoking: the
archives of the tobacco manufacturers and their public relations
firms, which are readily available online at tobaccodocuments.org

Why, over the past fifteen years, have forty historians wanted
to help Big Tobacco? I asked a dozen historians on Kyriakoudes\'s
and Proctor\'s lists. Virtually all declined to be interviewed,
including Otis Graham, emeritus at the University of California,
Santa Barbara; Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman of San Diego State; and
Terry Parssinen of the University of Tampa,  . . .

Historians earn big money working for Big Tobacco: Stephen
Ambrose, who taught at the University of New Orleans and was
famous for writing bestsellers about D-Day, Lewis and Clark, and
Eisenhower as a World War II general, was asked in a deposition
why he was testifying for the companies. His answer was brief:
"for compensation." Tobacco companies paid him $25,000 for just
one case in 1994, according to Laura Maggi in The American
Prospect. (Ambrose, a smoker, died of lung cancer in 2002, when
he was 66.)