What were they smoking? How the anti-tobacco movement blew the opportunity of a lifetime.

• Author: Schwartz, John
• Position: 'Smoke in Their Eyes: Lessons in Movement Leadership from the Tobacco Wars'

SMOKE IN THEIR EYES: Lessons in Movement Leadership from the Tobacco Wars by Michael Pertschuk Vanderbilt University Press, $49.95

IN 1997, THE TOBACCO WARS SEEMED TO be turning. The anti-tobacco movement, ever the loser against a wily, deep-pocketed industry, seemed on the verge of winning its most thorough victory since 1633, when Sultan Murad IV ordered tobacco users executed as infidels. The industry was on the run, hemmed in by lawsuits from state attorneys general, class-action lawyers, and a growing number of individual smokers and their survivors. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was gaining in its efforts to regulate tobacco products.

Then, in June 1997, the states and plaintiffs attorneys announced a sweeping settlement with the industry that included regulation by the FDA, including voluntary restrictions on advertising and marketing, and even a possibility of regulating cigarette ingredients that might have led to safer smokes. In return, the industry wanted some form of protection from lawsuits. New laws implementing elements of the settlement began making their way through Congress. It was nothing short of astonishing.

Within a year, though, the momentum had dissipated, and the effort to bring the industry into a new age had imploded. Though a settlement with states would be reached by the end of 1998, the broad initiatives proposed in June 1997 were replaced by relatively toothless reforms and a pile of money, which the states generally have used to fill potholes, meet budget shortfalls, and do anything but treat tobacco-related illness and reduce tobacco use. How did everything fall so far so fast? And why do so many other promising movements end in a tragic fizzle?

Part of the answer can be found in Michael Pertschuk's Smoke in Their Eyes: Lessons in Movement Leadership from the Tobacco Wars. The chairman of the Federal Trade Commission from 1977 to 1984, Pertschuk has spent recent decades training consumer activists through his organization, the Advocacy Institute. In this book, he asks "how a movement propelled toward a moment of historic opportunity by a cadre of passionate, resourceful, and gifted leaders fell victim, in part, to their conflicting visions of the Good."

He enjoyed a prime vantage point to view the shifting fortunes of the tobacco wars and knew all of the players on the activist side. Most of all, he knew Matthew L. Myers, a longtime anti-tobacco activist and a leader of the Campaign for...