By Chris Kornelis
At 10 a.m. on Dec. 3, 1976, Tony Garrett, chairman of England's Imperial Tobacco, called Hugh Cullman, president of Philip Morris International, to suggest a meeting. With their businesses under attack from governments, scientists and doctors, he thought it was time for the world's major tobacco companies to work together on a collective strategy. He called the gambit Operation Berkshire.
Representatives from seven tobacco companies met the following June at an Imperial mansion called Shockerwick House, where they agreed to work together on issues such as the "benefits of smoking" and to create an organization that became known as the International Tobacco Information Center, or Infotab. Cullman would serve as Infotab's first chairman of the board.
Cullman, who died at his home in Pittsboro, N.C., on Nov. 4 at the age of 100, was among the last members of his family -- what Stanford University professor Robert Proctor calls "the most important tobacco family in American history" -- to hold a leading role in the cigarette business. In his more than 30 years at Philip Morris, he sold both cigarettes and the idea that you couldn't prove that smoking was as bad as critics claimed. When U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler ruled in 2006 that tobacco companies had conspired for decades to conceal the health effects of smoking, she mentioned Operation Berkshire, Infotab and Hugh Cullman by name.
"Cullman was a pioneer of the tobacco industry's decadeslong elaborate global efforts to reassure smokers that anything they had been hearing about smoking causing deadly diseases should be brushed aside," said Simon Chapman, co-author of a paper that helped expose Operation Berkshire. "He led efforts to recruit tame doctors and scientists who would travel the world to douse popular and political concerns that his industry's product was killing numbers unparalleled by any other."
A tobacco family
Hugh Cullman came by his devotion naturally. The Cullman family had worked in tobacco since the 1800s, and Hugh Cullman's years in the business were some of the most successful for the family and consequential for the industry. During his tenure, the company reintroduced Marlboro as a symbol of masculinity and independence in a marketing coup that made it the bestselling cigarette in the world, and Philip Morris became one of the nation's largest corporations, a conglomerate that included Miller Brewing and General Foods.
But the ascent of Philip Morris and Cullman's rise within the company paralleled the release of increasingly dire public warnings about the dangers of smoking, wave after wave of government-mandated restrictions and a public reassessment of the tobacco business.
"I think Hugh was deeply ethical," his sister, Marguerite Cullman, said. "That's one of the reasons I knew it was very painful for him that the opinion about smoking changed. To think, somehow, they were profiting [on the pain of others]."
A tobacco executive's son
Hugh Cullman was born in New York on Jan. 27, 1923. His father, Howard S. Cullman, was a tobacco executive who became a director at Philip Morris. His mother, Elsie (Gottheil) Cullman, died when he was a boy.
Hugh Cullman was raised in Manhattan and attended the Kimball Union Academy in New Hampshire. His daughter Katherine Hedges said that he suffered a serious eye injury playing lacrosse while a student at the U.S. Naval Academy, so he memorized the school's eye-exam charts to ensure he could graduate and serve in the Navy.
"He probably had the greatest sense of duty of anyone I know," she said.
Cullman graduated from the Naval Academy in 1945 and served on a destroyer in the Pacific before going to work at the family's tobacco company, Benson & Hedges. After serving in Germany as an aide to an admiral during the Korean War, he returned to Benson & Hedges, which was acquired by Philip Morris in 1954. His older cousin, Joseph F. Cullman III, became president and chief executive in 1957.
Hedges said her father loved the business, especially the tobacco auctions in North Carolina.
"He loved people who grew tobacco, he loved going to the auctions, he loved the smell of it," she said. "There was a group of tobacco men and, at that time, they all loved the business."
He met his future wife, Nan (Ogburn) -- the daughter of a commodities trader who also owned tobacco farms -- at a dance during the auction season.
As a girl, Hedges remembers selling lemonade and peanuts at auctions, where people came from around the world to buy bright leaf tobacco. "In a way, it was a club," Hedges said. "They all knew each other and they would walk and describe the leaves and the quality of the leaves and the texture of the leaves, and they talked to the growers. It was its own world and he was a part of that world."
On the defensive
Cullman worked throughout the company: in market research, as brand manager for Parliament, company treasurer and eventually president of Philip Morris International, chairman and chief executive of Philip Morris U.S.A. and group executive vice president of Philip Morris. He sat on the board of directors from 1964 to 1988. Cullman helped bring Marlboro to the rest of the world, signing deals for manufacturing, distribution and licensing in, among other places, the Soviet Union, Japan, Poland and Ecuador.
Cullman wasn't as public a defender of the industry as his father and cousin. But his sister, Marguerite, says that he was "very defensive" about attacks on the industry and the evolving narrative around the tobacco business. The mountain of documents Philip Morris was required to make public as the result of litigation provides a look at Cullman's defense of the company, including his efforts to monitor detractors, dismiss health warnings and define his cause as a matter of civil rights.
"Today, tolerance for my smoking may be under attack," he said in a 1985 speech to a group of Black newspaper publishers, according to prepared remarks. "Tomorrow it may be tolerance for someone else's right to pray or choose a place to live."
"When people want to dodge the issues of poor black health," he said in a speech at a corporate event in 1986, according to prepared remarks, "they attack cigarette advertising directed at the black community rather than addressing themselves to the real issues of poverty and inadequate medical funding."
Cullman retired as vice chairman of Philip Morris in 1988. He was active with philanthropies and nonprofits throughout his life: He was chairman of the board of the United Negro College Fund in the late 1980s, established a scholarship program at Kimball Union for students to explore issues related to global and environmental issues, and he was a patron of a number of arts organizations, including the North Carolina Symphony, after he and his wife moved to the state in 1991.
Philip Morris Cos. changed its name to Altria Group in 2003. In 2008, it spun off Philip Morris International. PMI declined to comment for this article. Altria declined to comment beyond confirming Cullman's employment with the company.
In addition to his daughter Hedges and his sister, Marguerite, Cullman is survived by his son, Hugh Cullman Jr.; another daughter, Alexandra Haslingden; a brother, Brian Cullman; nine grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
Hedges said her father never talked with her about having any feelings of remorse or regret about his role in the cigarette business or suggested that the product was unsafe.
"I don't think anybody had that conversation," his sister said, adding: "It's kind of like questioning your soul."
Chris Kornelis is a writer in Bremerton, Wash. He can be reached at reports@wsj.com.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 08, 2023 13:18 ET (18:18 GMT)
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