 To a Frenchman, or to a Dutchman, it's a pretty flower to a Indian. It's a monument to a smoker. It's a Kent, it's not Kent, to the Irish. You smoke a filter cigarette, try the taste of Kent. Famous Marlboro Red or new Marlboro 100s, the Longhorns. Come to Marlboro Country. CBS reports begins with this historic announcement by the Surgeon General of the United States on January 11, 1964. It is a judgment of the committee that cigarette smoking contributes substantially to mortality from certain specific diseases and to the overall death rate. That was three months ago. Today, the implications of this report to the nation's health and to its economy are just beginning to dawn. In the rural area, if we lose our tobacco, we're going to be hurting pretty bad now, that's for sure. If it would be a gradual process, we might. Some can survive. If it comes all at once, I think we're all going to go down to drink. At stake are the incomes of 750,000 families who farm the nation's fifth largest cash crop. The jobs of 96,000 men and women involved in tobacco manufacturing. The $8 billion a year tobacco industry would pay more than $3 billion in federal, state and local taxes, and $150 million worth of cigarette advertising with the ethical and moral problems it poses for all media, especially television. If a next-door neighbor came to you and said to your son or your daughter, hey, smoke, it's a good thing. Here, try this. It'll make you seem like a man. You'd probably throw him out of the house on his ear. Well, equivalently persuasive advertising is doing something very, very similar. How is CBS News correspondent Harry Reesner? This is the exhibit hall at the annual convention of the National Association of Tobacco Distributors, and some of the products being shown to these 6,000 wholesalers. Equally plainly, these men are not completely dependent on cigarettes. But equally plainly, anything that affects cigarette sales is big news to them. Last year, this country produced and distributed $8 billion worth of tobacco products. There are something like a million and a half retail outlets for cigarettes, many of which tempt smokers with everything from pens to playing cards. This is the size of the economic edifice that would be threatened by any substantial and permanent change in American cigarette smoking habits. Dr. Luther L. Terry, Surgeon General of the United States. My advice to the smoker would be to stop cigarette smoking. My advice to the person who has not started smoking is don't start. Tonight, we ask several questions. What has happened since the Surgeon General's report? Has there been, is there likely to be any remedial action? And finally, what moral or ethical obligation does this pose to the United States government? The tobacco industry. The advertising agencies that promote the sale of cigarettes to the tune of $150 million a year. The newspaper, magazine, radio and television stations and networks that carry this advertising, including the station and network you are now watching. The cigarette health controversy has caused a collision of interests on a grand scale. The forces of public health are attempting to change the smoking habits of 70 million Americans. To the farmers of North Carolina, the Surgeon General's report represents one kind of threat. To the teenagers of Newton, Massachusetts, it represents another. Now in the light of the Surgeon General's report on smoking, the report of the Royal College of Physicians and other similar reports, I consider it completely unnecessary to go into the medical evidence against cigarette smoking. I will give you one statistic only. If present trends in smoking continue, then one million present school children in the United States will die of lung cancer before they reach the age of 70 years. Dr. Eva Sauber, Senior Research Associate at Harvard School of Public Health, recently completed a four-year study of the smoking habits of 7,000 Newton, junior and senior high school students. Recently, the South African-born physician led a discussion at Newton South High School. I'm sort of inclined to believe that this report will die out as a lot of the other Senate investigating committees and governmental reports. It has an impact in the beginning and a lot of people say, oh, I'm going to die if I don't stop smoking when I stop smoking. I know several people who as soon as the report came out decided to stop smoking right then and there. But I look at the report as maybe a spark that sets off the flame. I think that now is the time to do something about what you've been wanting to do all along. And I also feel as Chuck does that if this report isn't continually repeated and stressed that it may die out and people will just forget about it. I don't think the report strikes close enough to home. I admit that it probably will discourage some smokers. But in general, I think that unless a person sees somebody who has been smoking for a long time and does develop a very bad cough or does eventually develop cancer, that I don't think it's going to do too much good. You see the advertisements on television and smoking just seems to be the thing to do. You see the attractive couples, you see them sitting on a beach and then instinctively light up a cigarette. I mean this is the thing to do. You see them walking in the country and they can't take a walk in the country without a cigarette. The cigarette isn't an essential part of the picture. It completes the picture. People smoking are always very attractive, very beautiful people and the advertisements usually portray either a very romantic setting or in sports sort of a very verile image of man and some advertisements have a man and a woman in a very romantic setting and subconsciously you could think of yourself in this place. Basically they say well if you smoke this beer and you'll have a new girl, a new job, you'll make $50,000 a year and you'll be a water skier. Now that I think has a great effect on the younger people. But I think I was basically influenced by my parents and my sister in the home life. My parents didn't make a great effort to start me. They told me that it wasn't good for me. The only thing they didn't want me to do was smoke in public. I feel it was more that my friends started smoking and we did it to make ourselves appear older when we were in junior high school we looked up and saw the high school students smoking and we wanted to associate ourselves with them. This I think is the main reason why I started and it just became a habit that was hard to break and I haven't as yet stopped. Father Thomas Garrett is the author of many publications dealing with business ethics and is professor of philosophy at the University of Scranton. Is it immoral for the media that carry cigarette advertising? Newspapers, magazines, television which is licensed in the public interest. Is it immoral for them to carry these ads? If the advertising were nothing but a simple picture of the package and the name of the product I don't think we'd see any real model problem. But when they stop let us say to urge the young to use cigarettes we've got a problem and notice Mr. Reasoner that in the last four or five years there's been a shift in cigarette advertising with the appeals directed to the young. Let's put it this way. The man who drives the getaway car in a bank robbery is as guilty as the man who goes inside and holds the gun on the teller. And when you're cooperating as a media owner or writer you're involved in it too. It's been suggested that the real cigarette test for this country is to find out whether something which is so good for us economically and apparently so bad for our health whether this kind of an issue can be resolved in a democracy, do you believe it can? Well, I believe it can be resolved but I wonder if it will be resolved. And I'll tell you why. I'm a little cynical as I said before. I'm afraid that there will be a big brouhaha of smoke and fire and the thing will die quietly off. And in between I think the eyes of the public will have goof-a-dust scattered in them. May I give you an example of that? Last night there was a commercial in Kuala Port X cigarette and it went something like this. We bring you an important message. No other cigarette according to any survey is better medically than ex-cigarette. This is not a claim. This is a fact practically applied. It was a public service. If you analyze that you'll see that that's pure unadulterated 100% goof-a-dust. It gives you the vague impression maybe there's something good about this and it tries to say poo-poo to all these reports. And I'm afraid we're going to have a rash of this type of counter-propaganda. Father Garrett, do you know advertising men who really believe that smoking is not harmful to health but the case hasn't been proven? I don't know any of them and after all they don't allow illiterates on Madison Avenue. Do you think that they see a moral situation? I would say most of them do but I'm a little cynical in that some of the most moral shall we say are those without cigarette accounts. I think we have to face this. Author of the recently published Confessions of an Advertising Man, the Scottish-born chairman of the board is David Ogilvy. He invented the man with the eye patch for hathaway shirts but he refuses to accept cigarette clients. We've handled two cigarette accounts in our day but that was before the Royal College of Physicians report. We read the Royal College of Physicians report when it first came out and seemed to us the conclusions were inescapable. We decided then as a company that we would not want to accept any cigarette advertising. We would not want to handle it and when the Surgeon's General's report came out we repeated that decision. What do you think about American cigarette commercials? Disgraceful. I watch these commercials. I see the handsome, athletic young man drawing in a mouth for a cigarette smoke and then inhaling it down into his lungs and I'm appalled to think that I belong to the profession which can perpetrate that kind of villainy. I see other cigarette commercials which are written by what we call in our business weasel merchants which are essays in the art of casuistry. They're intellectually dishonest. The men who wrote them and who paid for them know it. Mr. Ogilvy, suppose you had to prepare an anti-smoking campaign. What are some of the techniques you might use? We would show admirable people who do not smoke, people that the young would want to identify themselves with. We might show some of the people who are addicted cigarette smokers and what miserable, neurotic fellows there have to be. And I for one wouldn't hesitate to show the youth and all viewers once again what it's like when you have terminal lung cancer. What sort of a way it is to get out of this world. Some ad sportsmen say whatever can be sold legally can be advertised legally. What do you think of this argument? Pepsi's all comes down in the last to a matter of individual conscience. If there's an advertising man whose conscience is not troubled by advertising cigarettes, Pepsi can advertise them. If there's a network whose president's conscience is not troubled by taking money for his stockholders for running cigarette commercials, perhaps they can be run. Senator Maureen Newberger also testified. I'm most concerned about the cynical attitude of the tobacco industry that they don't want the Federal Trade Commission to issue any regulations that are going to fear with the economy as they call it of the industry. Well, I admit everywhere that this is a big multi-billion dollar industry in our country. But nevertheless, I think it's a pretty cynical attitude if we don't take a certain amount of consideration for the fact that the health and welfare of 190 million Americans is at stake. We asked Father Garrett if he favored the FTC's proposal to label cigarettes as a health hazard. What I'm afraid is, Mr. Reasoner, that this may be used as an excuse for doing nothing else. You know, we've been good boys, we've labeled them, the public is warned, and now let it drop. And human beings being what they are, it will drop. And people will go on just as they are with the printing down there at the bottom of the pack and no continual reminder of what's really at stake. Discover the clean difference. The clean, clean difference in today's smoking with new Bel Air cigarettes. Be easy. Bel Air has the clean difference in taste. New air-fresh menthol blend for the clean breath of freshness in every puff. Breathe easy. Bel Air has the clean difference of a deep-set recessed filter set deep where the filter belongs. Yes, breathe easy. Smoke clean with the clean difference in taste. The clean difference of a deep-set filter tip. The clean difference in smoking. Yeah, you seem happy today. Oh, why shouldn't I be? I have the two things that would make any man happy. A gorgeous wife, and I'm smoking a kid. Which do you like the best? Oh, there's a tough one. Let me see. For cooking and for dancing and kissing, you satisfy best. But for filter and taste, Kent satisfies best. I'll accept that.