Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.

• Author: RIPLEY, AMANDA
• Position: Representing the tobacco industry in Washington, D.C.

Why did one of Washington's most respected law firms agree to represent Big Tobacco?

HARRY MCPHERSON HAS A COPY of The Nation lying on his expansive desk in his corner office at Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson and Hand in downtown Washington.

The magazine subscription is a gift from his daughter, an amulet meant to ward off the evils lurking in her dad's chosen profession.

The subscription, McPherson says, smiling, "is just so that I won't become hopelessly enslaved to the corporate world" His daughter lives in Greenwich Village and writes for the Village Voice--a world away from Gucci Gulch, where McPherson and his fellow lobbyists do business. But McPherson sounds proud of his daughter's chosen vocation, aware of how ironically appropriate it is that his child would work for one of the aging landmarks of the left.

From 1965 to 1969, McPherson worked as White House counsel to Lyndon Johnson. He was, by almost all accounts, an icon of integrity, instrumental in helping to construct Johnson's Great Society legacy. And depending on whose lore you believe, McPherson was also the man who urged his boss to resign and to end the war in Vietnam. After he left the White House, McPherson authored a beautifully written autobiography, A Political Education: A Journal of Life with Senators, Generals, Cabinet Members and Presidents. In news clippings, his name is almost always preceded by the word "wise."

So after he came to Verner Liipfert in 1969, it was only natural that McPherson would bring along a team of friends and Democrats--who were one and the same back then: Lloyd Hand had worked as a staffer for Johnson when he was the Senate majority leader; Bed Bernhard had worked for JFK and LBJ and had run Edmund Muskie's unsuccessful 1972 presidential campaign. More recently, the firm has signed up even bigger-name ex-politicos--Ireland peace broker and former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, former Texas Governor Ann Richards, and former senator and Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen. Even after Republican Bob Dole joined the firm in 1997, Verner Liipfert retained its reputation as a Democratic stronghold--the kind of firm clients turn to when they need to get in the doors of minority party offices on Capitol Hill.

So nobody among Verner Liipfert's army of contacts and friends could explain what happened in 1997. That year, Verner Liipfert took more money from the tobacco industry than any other lobbying firm in Washington. Never before had the firm worked on tobacco's behalf. But over the next two years, Verner Liipfert would gross a whopping $18 million from tobacco companies looking to negotiate a legislative settlement with Congress.

To consumer advocate Ralph Nader, stories of honorable lawyers peddling their influence holds zero shock value. "All the lawyers who were special assistants do it all the time," he says. Still, even Nader was surprised when the players in that tired skit turned out to be Harry McPherson and George Mitchell. "I wouldn't have thought that those two gentlemen would have risked that much," he says. In June of 1998, the efforts to reach a tobacco settlement collapsed. But the attorneys at Verner Liipfert still got paid. For them, tobacco represented the most lucrative work they had ever known.

But for all the longtime admirers of the firm's lineup of progressive-minded leaders, the decision to represent tobacco was confusing at best, indefensible at worst. How to reconcile that Verner Liipfert had traded in its donkey mascot for Joe Camel? How could prototypical "great men" like McPherson and Mitchell be taking gobs of money from an industry that has targeted 13-year-olds as a key market? From the manufacturers of a drug that is responsible for nearly one in five deaths in the United States and that drains the economy of more than $100 billion in health care costs and lost productivity each year?

Staunch tobacco opponents say there is nothing mysterious about the firm's decision. Not even the so-called Democrats at Verner Liipfert could resist the sheen of piles and piles of tobacco money. "It was the biggest stealth lobbying campaign that was ever conducted," says John Banzhaf, a public-interest law professor at George Washington University and head of Action on Smoking and Health. "Everybody of every political stripe was being bought out by the tobacco industry."

But McPherson calmly rebuts the cliched, sellout accusations. Even now that he knows how the tobacco story turned out, he stands wholeheartedly behind the decision to represent tobacco. And then he goes one better: With a straight face, McPherson says working for Philip Morris was a public service.

Hired Hand

Verner Liipfert was transformed by its tobacco work. In 1997, it became the No. 1 lobbying firm in terms of revenue. The boost came almost entirely from tobacco money. "That money made them ... one of the premier lobbying firms in town," says a former partner who recently left the firm. "Before that, they weren't a Washington powerhouse."

And yet McPherson does not talk in terms of profits when he speaks of his decision to represent tobacco. He talks about the greater good.

"I was convinced then and remain convinced that that settlement was in the best interest of the country," McPherson says. Other partners at the firm refuse to discuss the tobacco work on the record, deferring to McPherson to make the case. "Harry was and still is the heart of the firm. If Harry believes in it, the firm believes in it," says one attorney who recently left the firm.

And indeed, McPherson serves as an able spokesperson. He patiently answers my inquiries about the decision to represent tobacco--standing up at one point to pace back and forth behind his desk, but never becoming defensive or...