Hahn, Paul Meyer
(ATC President (1950-63); TIRC Chairman (1954))Paul Meyer Hahn
Paul Meyer Hahn was born in New York City on March 6, 1895, to Austrian immigrants. His father, Richard Hahn, a jewelry importer, had arrived in America in 1883 as a teenager, while his mother, the former Eugenie Oppenheimer, made her way across the Atlantic two years later. Paul was the older of their two sons and he was educated at City College, then studied law at Columbia University, where he served as editor of the Columbia Law Review. Upon graduation, he joined the law firm of Stanchfield & Levy and began moving up the ranks. In 1924, this firm was taken over by Thomas L. Chadbourne, Jr., and, under the new name of Chadbourne, Stanchfield & Levy, its prominence as a Wall Street law firm increased.
Hahn’s stock was also on the rise; he was made a partner in 1926 and in 1929 was put in charge of the American Tobacco Company’s account. Over the next two years he defended the company’s interests on many fronts, most notably against Federal Trade Commission complaints about misleading Lucky Strikes advertisements. ATC president George Washington Hill thought so highly of Hahn’s work that he offered him a position. In February of 1931, Hahn was named Hill’s assistant and he became a disciple of the legendary president’s then-novel philosophy, the pinnacles of which were public relations and saturation-level advertising. As Hahn would later state in his sworn testimony, “Mr. Hill’s principal interest was in the field of advertising, and my assistance to him was principally in that field as well as in the field of definite sales problems and policies.”
Hahn was promoted to vice president in 1932 and, in his words, his “responsibilities in the field of advertising broadened. I was given supervision over the field of public relations, stockholders’ relations.” He was soon entrusted with addressing stockholders at the company’s annual meeting and, after the 1937 death of the managing director, was put in charge of the company’s British subsidiary.
In 1940 Hill named Hahn president of the company’s largest subsidiary, the American Cigarette and Cigar Company. Hahn quickly demonstrated that he had learned his lessons well by launching an aggressive advertising and promotional campaign for the Pall Mall brand, which had recently been reintroduced. The campaign proved so successful that it was credited with starting an industry-wide trend to king-sized cigarettes. Yet Hahn was also embroiled in controversy on several occasions during these years. On December 1, 1932, he and Hill traveled to Warm Springs, Georgia, to discuss tobacco policies with President-Elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was subsequently revealed that Roosevelt’s son had asked the president-elect to “be nice” to Hill because he had had prior business dealings with him and was trying to sell him a large life insurance policy.
Neither Hahn nor Hill was shown to be complicit in the Roosevelt matter, but Hahn’s involvement in another shady deal that same year nearly led to his disbarment. While presiding over a lawsuit against the American Tobacco Company in May of 1932, Federal Judge Martin T. Manton accepted a $250,000 loan that had been arranged by Hahn and his former law partner, Louis S. Levy. When the story finally broke in 1932, along with the news that the “loan” had never be repaid, Manton was convicted of bribery and became one of the few federal judges in U. S. history to be imprisoned, while Levy was disbarred. Hahn somehow escaped a similar fate, with the judge finding him guilty of only “poor judgment.”
Hill died suddenly in 1946 and another member of his inner circle, Vincent Riggio, was chosen to succeed him. But Hahn remained at the helm of the American Cigarette and Cigar Company and when Riggio retired in 1950 he was tabbed to become ATC’s new president. The choice of Hahn was undoubtedly made with the belief that the former Hill protégé would be the ideal person to arrest the company’s declining market share. Hahn did indeed retain the presidency for the next thirteen years, but the company's market share continued to decline under his tenure. Hahn continued to emphasize advertising, but the rest of the industry had caught up, giving American Tobacco Company no particular advantage. Consistent with his position that cigarettes were not a health hazard, Hahn resisted the idea of filter cigarettes. Meanwhile, American Tobacco Company's competitors capitalized on the public's health concerns by implicitly promoting filter cigarettes as a safer alternative, while at the same time contending that smoking was not really a proven health hazard. ATC's market share was greatly harmed as a result. Nevertheless, Hahn's experience in marketing and public relations provided the basis for becoming the chief architect of the industry's successful strategy for dealing with the ever increasing scientific evidence of the dangers of tobacco use, a strategy that protected the industry for forty years, resulting in countless billions of industry profit and incalculable damage to the public's health.
Thus in 1953, with the industry reeling from the landmark study linking smoking and lung cancer by Graham,Wynder and Croninger, as well as other research linking smoking to cancer, it was Hahn who took the lead in treating news of these developments as a public relations crisis. He sent an urgent telegram to the presidents of the other major tobacco companies and arranged a secret meeting in New York City in December to discuss the situation. The major steps that came out of that meeting included the hiring of public relations expert John W. Hill of Hill & Knowlton, the issuing of the Frank Statement, and the creation of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee. In addition, Hahn personally dismissed the reports as “loose talk on the subject” and his company, in one press release, complained that “Unwarranted attacks on tobacco products are as old as the industry itself.” When the Frank Statement was issued, Hahn’s was the first signature beneath its list of promises. When the Tobacco Industry Research Committee came into being, Hahn served as its chairman and shaped its direction. He chaired its first meeting on January 18, 1954, presiding over a gathering of twenty men that included thirteen tobacco executives, three lawyers (not including Hahn himself), and four Hill & Knowlton public relations men. And when the meeting was finally called to order, Hahn began with a review of events and then announced the formation of a Law Committee made up of five prominent legal firms. Named as chairman of the Law Committee was George W. Whiteside of Chadbourne, Parke, Whiteside, Wolff & Brophy – the surviving remnant of Hahn’s old firm.
The Hahn-led decision to respond to scientific studies by means of public relations tactics became the standard practice of the tobacco industry. Paul Hahn’s denial of the health risks of smoking continued throughout his tenure and caused him to often tightrope on ethical boundaries. The secret meeting that he called in December of 1953 was secret precisely because such a meeting was a potential violation of anti-trust laws. So too, many of the activities of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee were of questionable legality.
In 1957, reports surfaced that Hahn had used his influence to voice his displeasure with articles about the dangers of smoking being published by Reader’s Digest. According to sources quoted in the New York Times, the same advertising agency – Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, Inc. – serviced both Reader’s Digest and the American Tobacco Company until the “tobacco company reportedly said, in effect: ‘either The Reader’s Digest goes or we go.’” Naturally, the ad agency abruptly ended its twenty-eight year relationship with the magazine, leaving its executives “furious.” But one of Hahn’s associates denied the claim and he was “not available to comment.” Similarly, when CBS aired a program entitled “The Teenage Smoker,” Hahn went directly to CBS president Frank Stanton to complain that the show was biased against the industry and demand equal time to present the other side. To his credit, Stanton stood his ground, characterizing the show as a “fair and objective demonstration of both sides.”
In accordance with his company’s mandatory retirement policy, Hahn stepped down as president in March of 1963 – the month in which he celebrated his sixty-eighth birthday. By all accounts, he was in excellent health and had every reason to expect a long retirement. Hahn had married late in life and had no children, but he and his wife of twenty-two years, the former Nanette Hogan Wells, had made extensive plans for their retirement. Nanette Hahn was an accomplished abstract artist, and her husband intended to learn more about art and to devote more time to his passions for gourmet cooking and theatre. The couple already owned a large home in the Berkshire foothills and were planning to indulge their love of travel. Instead, five months after his retirement, Paul Hahn was admitted to Manhattan's Doctors Hospital because of a cerebral hemorrhage. Within days he was dead.
Sources:
Allan M. Brandt, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America (New York: Basic Books, 2007).
“Cigaret ‘Health Scare’ Ebbing, Says President of American Tobacco,” Wall Street Journal, February 24, 1955, 14.
“Dewey Says Judge Manton Got $400,000 from Litigants; Sends Charges to Congress,” New York Times, January 30, 1939, 1.
Neil M. Loynachan, “Paul M. Hahn,” The Tobacco Leaf, January 3, 1963.
“Martin Thomas Manton,” in Mark Grossman, Political Corruption in America: An Encyclopedia of Scandals, Power, and Greed (Santa Barbara, Cal.: ABC-CLIO, 2003).
Joyce Haber, “Lee Marvin: Best-Loved Bad Guy in Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, February 20, 1972, AA15.
Paul M. Hahn, Testimony in American Tobacco Company, American Suppliers, Inc ., George Washington Hill, James E. Lipscomb, Jr., Paul M. Hahn, and Vincent Riggio, Appellants, Vs. United States of America, Appellee, [1940-1941 case], http://tobaccodocuments.org/atc/60200712.html.
Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes: America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).
“Levy Guilt Proved, Referee Asserts; Lawyer’s Story of $250,000 Loan in Manton Case Is Held ‘Unbelievable,’” New York Times, June 8, 1940, 15.
“New Light for Lucky,” Time, April 17, 1950.
“Paul Hahn, Former President of American Tobacco, Is Dead,” New York Times, August 10, 1963, 17.
“Roosevelt Son Admits Asking Favor for Two,” Chicago Tribune, August 19, 1938, 2.
Carl Spielvogel, “B.B.D.O. Resigns Digest Account,” New York Times, July 18, 1957, 51.
Tobacco Industry Research Committee Meeting Minutes, January 18, 1954, http://tobaccodocuments.org/pm_ex/JD093292.html.