Tobacco Détente: American Leaf in the Cold War, 1964-1977

Abstract

Everything changed for the American tobacco industry in 1964. Smoking had long since been suspected of being unhealthy. But now the US Surgeon General made it official: smoking is harmful to one's health. Suddenly, tobacco found itself in the crosshairs of antismoking forces in Congress and the American public. New regulatory and public relations challenges did not mean tobacco companies would accept losses; it meant they needed to find new markets. American tobacco companies looked beyond the Iron Curtain. While the Johnson administration encouraged liberalized trade with Eastern Europe during the 1960s, and the Nixon and Ford administrations sought to maintain the difficult balance of détente during the 1970s, tobacco delegations made up of private businessmen and members of the US Department of Agriculture visited the Soviet Union, while Soviet delegations visited the United States. Tobacco firms, chiefly Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds, set their eyes on vast, untapped eastern markets. In North Carolina, members of the Export Leaf Association and Tobacco Associates Inc. believed U.S. tobacco exports to the Soviet Union and its satellites would help the North Carolina farmer and called for unrestricted trade between the two superpowers. But, as thousands of industry documents available due to the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement show, which include delegation itineraries, business memos, and RJ Reynolds', Philip Morris's, and North Carolina's Tobacco Associates annual reports, tobacco played a bigger role than a simple commodity in an emerging East-West trade. Using an array of telegrams and memorandums found in the Office of the Historian's Foreign Relations of the United States and drawing on works such as Tricia Starks' Cigarettes and Soviets: Smoking In The USSR and Mary Neuburger's Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria, this work explores tobacco as a microcosm of détente during the years 1964-1977. Within these thirteen years, tobacco played a small but important part in foreign policy and the international economy. Plenty of North Carolinian cold warriors did not approve, but plenty did. Despite public and political protest, the proponents of liberalized trade won out. Tobacco was a moving piece of détente, and by the late 1970s, Marlboros were being manufactured and smoked in the Soviet Union.