PARTNERS IN CRIME

Big Tobacco Had Plenty Of Help From Washington

IF you click your way through cable TV land, you're bound to run
across a World War II movie in which a soldier, dying for a smoke,
smokes while he's dying.

In such scenes, somebody nice, like William Bendix in ``Wake Island,''
has been mauled by enemy fire and isn't going to make it. His last
words to his squad are punctuated by puffs on a cigarette being held
for him by a buddy.

You have to wonder what Bill Clinton might be thinking when he watches
such episodes, perhaps late some night at Camp David. Clinton loves to
watch Hollywood movies even more than Ronald Reagan did back in his
prime. (Reagan acted in such wartime dramas.)

Can Clinton possibly see a link between smoking in wartime in years
gone by and his rejuvenated war on the tobacco companies?

Standing behind a podium in the smoke-free Rose Garden, the president
proclaimed: ``The tobacco companies should answer to the taxpayers for
their actions.'' He was voicing his support for a federal lawsuit that
accuses the tobacco industry of engaging in more than four decades of
``fraud and deceit'' over the perils of smoking.

As it happens, I was a taxpayer, although not much of one, when my
government superiors strongly urged me to start smoking. ``Smoke 'em
if you got 'em,'' the drill sergeants would tell us back in the 1950s
at Fort Dix, N.J. Standing around without a glowing butt in hand
during that hard winter could lead to orders to do something useful,
like scrubbing pots.

Having initially learned from the government that smoking could be
good for you, we had to wait for nearly a decade until government,
through the surgeon general, told us that smoking could kill you.

Do you think there is any chance that the government's suit will take
note that from Civil War times until 1956, federal law required the
military to provide nearly free supplies of tobacco to enlisted personnel?

More years passed until the military removed cigarettes from the food
rations that soldiers receive in the field. As you might expect,
current government tobacco subsidies also go unmentioned in the lawsuit.

Nor will you see anything in the papers filed in the courthouse about
Clinton's move last year to strip $15 billion in medical care and
disability pay to veterans harmed by smoking. Congress went along
because it was deemed the best way to enact a $203 billion highway
bill and still stay within fixed spending ceilings.

The supposed rationale for this move: Military personnel were never
required to smoke but did so by choice, as if they had chosen to
consume alcohol. But that's not how some veterans recall it.

In a bid to pacify the dying veterans whose care was cut off, a
provision was put in that huge highway bill that directed the
Department of Veterans Affairs and Justice Department to sue the
tobacco industry to pay for veterans' smoking-related illnesses.

Now that the federal government has acted, perhaps they can make a
movie. Doug McClure, a onetime sidekick of Bendix and the star of such
dramas as ``The Virginian,'' would have been good in the Clinton role.
But he died of lung cancer, at age 59, in 1995.

Andrew J. Glass is a columnist for Cox Newspapers.