Some Good News About Smoking

Weekly commentary by CBS Evening News chief Washington correspondent and Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer.

It wasn't on the front page, of course, but deep inside yesterday's New York Times there was a story about a new exhibit at the New York Public Library that tells how successful the tobacco industry has been over the years at conning us into smoking.

That is good news, yes, because we have come to understand what a con it was - and how far the industry was willing to go to convince us to smoke.

The exhibit gave an example: In 1929, when only "loose women" were thought to smoke, the industry put a PR man named Edward Bernaise on the case and convinced ten genteel ladies to smoke cigarettes while marching down Fifth Avenue in the Easter Parade.

The newspapers ate it up, and pictures appeared across the country.

Suddenly it was acceptable for ladies to smoke outdoors. And, of course, they did.

Today, one fifth of all American women still smoke, and they have come full circle - in most places they can only smoke outdoors, and the young of both sexes crowd the sidewalks of our big cities.

The heartening thing is that smoking is not nearly as popular as it once was, and most of us have figured it out - that smoking is the single most preventable cause of death, that the third of all cancer deaths are caused by smoking.

But what a con it was.

And what saps we were to buy it for so long.