Surgeon General Luther Terry's Report

In response to the confusion surrounding the role of cigarette smoking in health, President Kennedy charged Surgeon General Luther Terry with the task of completing a consensus report to put the debate to rest. The effectiveness of the resulting report can be traced to many of the decisions made by Terry in the creation of the committee. Terry sent a list of 150 possible candidates for the committee to various medical groups, such as the American Heart Association, and also to the Tobacco Institute (a private group in-charge of tobacco related PR). These groups could strike out any candidate they seemed unfit, for any reason. This allowed for the conclusion of the report to not be undermined by any group on the basis of committee member credibility.The

It included a surgeon, a pulmonary specialist, pathologists, a cancer expert, a toxicologist, an organic chemist, a bacteriologist, an epidemiologist, and a mathematician specializing in statistics. All committee members had never prior their instatement, taken a public stance on tobacco, therefore past bias could not be affiliated with the results. The result of Terry's foresight allowed for the creation of a "political document that was scientifically unimpeachable", an immunity to the industry's tactic of generating confusion.

The creation of the committee by the Surgeon General and its purpose was publicly available information. The importance of the report can in some ways be characterized by the subject of the report's attitude. In this case the subject was the tobacco industry. The results of the report can only be appreciated after gaining the perspective of industry during the report's formulation. In the 1994, the inner dialogue occurring between tobacco companies, their public relations personnel, and their science wings, were leaked. In one of these reports, the director of B&W, the primary PR firm for big tobacco, had sent a letter to his head of marketing 6 months prior to