Clements, Earle C.
(TI President, '67-70) President of the Tobacco Institute, Inc. from 1967 to 1970.Biographical Information:
Earle Chester Clements was born in Morganfield, Union County, Kentucky, on October 22, 1896, the youngest of six children of a sheriff who later became an attorney. After attending the University of Kentucky, he worked as a carpenter until the outbreak of World War I, when he joined the United States Army and rose to the rank of captain.
After the war, he dabbled in farming before following in his father’s footsteps, serving as sheriff of Union County from 1922 to 1925. He gradually established himself as a major player in local politics, being elected clerk of Union County in 1926 and then county judge in 1934. The latter position had some judicial duties, but was primarily an administrative position and Clements proved excellent at getting new roads built in the county.
A pivotal moment in his career came in 1935, when Democrat Thomas S. Rhea asked Clements to chair his campaign for the Kentucky governorship. Only weeks after accepting, Rhea’s rival for the Democratic nomination, Albert Benjamin “Happy” Chandler, asked Clements to accept the same position in his own campaign. Chandler was a boyhood friend, but Clements was forced to decline. The campaign marked Clements’s arrival into state politics, but it was also the beginning of a schism that would widen until Kentucky Democrats were divided into Clements and Chandler factions.
Rhea lost the gubernatorial election and Earle Clements returned to Union County but in 1942 he was elected to the Kentucky senate. He served as majority floor leader in 1944, then was elected that fall to represent Kentucky’s 2nd Congressional District in the House of Representatives. In the fall of 1947, he ran for governor of Kentucky and defeated a protégé of Chandler, who was now Commissioner of Major League Baseball.
Clements’s tenure as governor was marked by progressive reform, including great increases in investment in state parks, schools and infrastructure. The building of new roads was again one of his hallmarks, and the number of county highways and rural roads that were finished during the next three years led his administration to be dubbed as the period when Kentucky farmers started to “come out of the mud.” Clements also made effective use of his background in law enforcement to abolish the state highway patrol and replace it with the Kentucky State Police.
In the fall of 1950, Clements ran for the U. S. Senate and was elected to a six-year term, serving from November 27, 1950, to January 3, 1957. During these years, he served as Democratic whip, becoming a close ally of powerful majority leader Lyndon Johnson and making innumerable contacts in Washington. Clements was defeated in his 1956 campaign for reelection, in large part because of the Eisenhower landslide but it was no help that Chandler – who was again governor of Kentucky – offered no support. With his career at a crossroads, he spent two years as director of the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee and a year as Kentucky highway commissioner before returning to Washington as a lobbyist for the American Merchant Marine Institute in 1961.
Lobbying proved a perfect fit for Clements, especially after Lyndon Johnson became president as a result of the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy. Johnson’s ascendance gave Clements a close friend in the nation’s highest office and his only child, Bess Abell, became social secretary to Lady Bird Johnson (and would later serve in a similar capacity for Vice President Walter Mondale). Meanwhile Earle Clements was hired as a lobbyist for Philip Morris and became a powerful advocate for the industry, using his beltway influence and connections to convey the message that the link between smoking and cancer remained unproven.
Two years later, in 1966, George Allen stepped down as president of the Tobacco Institute and Clements was chosen to replace him. A press release announcing the choice noted, “Earle Clements, like George Allen, is a native of a tobacco state and has a long familiarity with the industry. He is a successful farmer and knows that the roots of this industry lie in an important farm commodity. He has achieved an outstanding record of public service in the Congress and as the governor of a great state.”
Over the next decade, Clements proved very adept at using his influence to benefit the tobacco industry. Although Lyndon Johnson had been forced to give up smoking as a result of a 1955 heart attack, there was no mention of smoking in his 1965 proposals for public health initiatives. In the years to come, Clements masterminded the industry’s strategy for avoiding and delaying governmental action even as an increasing amount of evidence tied smoking to lung cancer.
Clements was far too good of a politician to rely entirely upon denial in his role as Tobacco Institute president. His wide network of connections in Washington enabled him to anticipate when regulation was inevitable and, rather than fighting it to the bitter end, making it appear that the industry had voluntarily consented to police itself. One result of this canny strategy was the industry’s voluntary Cigarette Advertising Code, which had fewer teeth than governmental legislation would have been likely to contain. Another example was the push to require warning labels on cigarette packages. When the wily Clements realized that some sort of warning label was inevitable, his advice to the industry was, “Let’s us write it.”
Clements remained president of the Tobacco Institute until 1976, when he retired and returned to his native Morganfield. He died there on March 12, 1985.
Sources:
Allan M. Brandt, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America (New York: Basic Books, 2007).
Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002).
“Former Senator Earle C. Clements Named Tobacco Institute President,” Brown & Williamson Press Release, February 23, 1966 (http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/ctl21c00).
Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes: America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).
Thomas H. Syvertsen, “Earle Chester Clements,” in Lowell Hayes Harrison, editor, Kentucky’s Governors: Updated Edition (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004).
Synonyms
Clements, E. C.Clements, E. C. (Jr.)