Pitching a nicotine fit.

• Author: Scheer, Lisa
• Position: R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.'s Jim Johnston

As front man for the tobacco industry, Jim Johnston strikes a conciliatory tone: Show a little respect for smokers -- and the industry behind them.

Jim Johnston's idea of relaxation is roaring across Lake Norman on his Waverunner, a bone-rattling, high-speed jet ski. "You can jump the waves and spin around," says the 48-year-old chairman of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. "I absolutely love it." He also looks forward to an annual outing at the Charlotte Motor Speedway, where he gets to spin around the track at 175 mph.

But for real thrills and chills, Johnston need never leave his Winston-Salem office. There, he grapples with the federal government, which threatens to tighten regulation and raise taxes on cigarettes; Philip Morris Corp., the larger, richer competitor that has been thumping his company in the marketplace; RJR Nabisco Holdings Corp., the debt-ridden corporate parent that might spin off its tobacco business and dump a heavy share of that debt on its back; and an in-bred corporate culture he's trying to strip down and change.

Any one of those problems might cripple a company. Together, they could crush the giant cigarette maker, which sold $8 billion of Camel, Winston, Salem and other brands last year. But James W. Johnston confronts them with the same enthusiasm he brings to his high-risk hobbies. "I enjoy the pressure," he says. "I enjoy the challenge. The more serious the issue, the more focused I get."

Johnston depicts himself as a conciliator. "My reputation as a person and as a businessman would be one of finding common ground, of defusing tense situations," he says. He affects a sort of gee-whiz bewilderment toward his opponents in the public-health arena. "They have consistently characterized us as evil people, maybe even criminals. We aren't viewed as ordinary businessmen. Can you imagine any legal industry in the United States where honest, hard-working people are characterized this way?"

For a tobacco-industry executive, he sounds almost confessional when discussing the dangers of smoking. "We have consistently acknowledged the risk factors involved in smoking," he says. "Our position gets mischaracterized as the tobacco industry saying that smoking doesn't cause these things.

"I've never said that. My company's never said that. What we've said is that smoking involves risk, just like cheeseburgers, skydiving, whatever. They're all on a spectrum. Are the risk factors for smoking and certain diseases significant? You bet they are. Does smoking cause these diseases? It may. Is it clear that it does, in a rigorous, scientific sense? No, it is not clear."

Johnston, who made $955,727 in salary and other compensation in 1993, not counting long-term incentives, is not immune to the logical leaps that have cost his industry much of its credibility over the years. Blithely pronouncing that only one in 20 smokers will get lung cancer, he ignores the fact that the disease was virtually unknown in the United States until the introduction of mass-market cigarettes or that 80% of lung-cancer patients have been smokers. Like it or not, tobacco executives have been thrust into the position of defending themselves and their industry as if they were war criminals, and their chief strategy has been to use denial as an offensive weapon.

Still, critics and supporters alike remark on the cool, engaging style that set Johnston apart from his fellow CEOs at congressional hearings this spring. Scott Ballin, head of the Coalition on Smoking OR Health in Washington, a major anti-tobacco organization, says, "He is not afraid to put himself as an individual out there on the front lines." Charles Harvey, president for the North Carolina Tobacco Growers Association, echoes the sentiment from the other side of the aisle. "Johnston is not afraid to face the issues," he says.

Alone among major tobacco executives, he has been featured personally in the multimillion-dollar public-relations blitz the industry mounted after the hearings. Full-page ads in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and other national publications show him looking confident, almost cocky, cigarette in hand, above text that claims: "We do not 'spike' our cigarettes with nicotine." At the bottom runs the conciliatory tagline, "Together, we can work it out."

"The language in the campaign is his," says Tom Griscom, the Reynolds executive vice president who worked in public relations for the Reagan administration. "The messages would not be out there if he were a table pounder."

He adds, "People here get angry and frustrated at times. They wonder, 'Why are all these things happening in Washington?' They look to the top for direction and leadership. Jim works hard at keeping open the lines of communication."

The conciliatory tone goes only so far, though, in explaining the man and his success. To survive in a business where he's been fired, rehired and publicly reviled, Jim Johnston has had to be plenty tough. To succeed against the many problems his company faces, he will have to be tougher still.

Johnston greets visitors to his office at the door of the executive suite, a Winston Select in hand. He goes through as many as three packs a day, though he often lets them burn down after several puffs. He is dressed casually on a Friday morning, a custom he introduced to this tradition-bound company. Behind a large desk, his receptionist is smoking, too.

If the headquarters of Reynolds Tobacco is a redoubt under siege, it is a plush one indeed. A scaled-down...