For Humphrey, Outcome Marks a Personal Victory

ST. PAUL, Minn. —  The $6.6-billion settlement of Minnesota’s big anti-tobacco case represents a huge personal triumph for state Atty. Gen. Hubert H. Humphrey III, whose contrarian, hard-line assault on Big Tobacco belied his image as a steady, honest, but unremarkable, public servant stuck in the shadow of his famous father.

In forcing cigarette makers to settle rather than risk the wrath of jurors, Humphrey extracted a windfall 50% higher than his state would have received under the giant tobacco peace accord proposed last June--which is now a dead letter thanks, in part, to Humphrey’s opposition.

And by dragging tobacco companies through a punishing, 3 1/2-month trial before settling at the eleventh hour, Humphrey assured that the industry got a public thrashing and that millions of previously secret documents came to light.

“By insisting on going to trial, and obtaining the industry’s most incriminating documents, Atty. Gen. Humphrey has done a great service,” Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) told The Times on Friday.

While vindicating Humphrey’s stance, the outcome also is sure to enshrine the balding, 55-year-old lawyer as a leading hero of the anti-smoking cause. And it can only raise his popularity heading into the September gubernatorial primary, where his Democratic opponents include two other Minnesota political scions: Ted Mondale, son of former Vice President Walter F. Mondale, and Michael Freeman, son of former U.S. Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman, also a former governor. (Pundits have dubbed the race “My Three Sons.”)

Suit Prompts Reappraisal of Career

Even before Friday’s announcement, Humphrey’s dogged pursuit of Big Tobacco was prompting reappraisal of his career. Although widely respected as principled and hard-working, he lacked the color and fire of his dad, Hubert H. Humphrey Jr., known as “the Happy Warrior” and the most famous politician in state history.

“This is a man who has been trying to carve out his own identity for some time,” said Eric Johnson, the younger Humphrey’s administrative assistant.

Political associates say Humphrey seemed to grow more aggressive after his disapointing loss to GOP Sen. David Durenberger in 1988, when he tried to win the seat his father had held.

Soon after, said Ruth Stannoch, a veteran activist of the state’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, she noticed a sharp change in Humphrey, who became more focused, more intense and more willing to take risks.

“It was like a burden had been lifted from him about the expectations of becoming a senator,” Stannoch said. “He was listening to his own internal drums rather than someone else’s.”

By summer 1994, Humphrey was ready to make a truly bold move. He sued the nation’s cigarette makers, alleging that they had engaged in a 40-year “conspiracy of fraud and deception designed to peddle an addictive, killer product to the American public.”

He was only the second of 40 state attorneys general to sue the industry to recover smoking-related health-care costs. At the time, blistering anti-tobacco rhetoric already was politically correct, particularly in the anti-smoking bastion of Minnesota. But mounting a novel, seemingly quixotic legal attack on an industry that in 40 years had never lost or settled a case was something else.

“The day he filed that case, his political opponents were cheering the demise of Skip Humphrey,” said Joe Loveland, Humphrey’s former press secretary. “Everyone said . . . this is an industry that never forgets and pounds its political foes into the ground. You couldn’t have said he was doing this for political advantage.”

Refused to Go Along With Pact

But in a bolder move yet, Humphrey was a holdout last June when other attorneys general and industry negotiators proclaimed a $368.5-billion agreement that, with congressional approval, would resolve all the major tobacco lawsuits. A few attorneys general voiced misgivings, but Humphrey was the only one to actively campaign against the deal, blasting it as a bailout for a rogue industry.

Among other things, he contended that cigarette makers should not get legal protections and that all of their internal documents must be made public before any serious talk of a settlement.

While Humphrey’s trenchant rhetoric earned plaudits from anti-smoking leaders, it angered tobacco officials and some fellow attorneys general.

For assailing the deal and insisting on taking his case to trial, he was criticized by former allies--such as Mississippi Atty. Gen. Mike Moore, lead negotiator of the tobacco truce--and by Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson.

Humphrey “never seemed to want to work together,” Moore complained.

Humphrey acknowledged having lonely moments as the holdout, especially during the annual meeting last summer of attorneys general in Jackson Hole, Wyo., days after Moore had triumphantly announced the deal.

“I remember looking out at the Grand Tetons,” Humphrey recalled recently. “They were standing there alone, and so was I.”

But Humphrey--who has been called Skip since his grandfather nicknamed him “the Skipper”--soon rallied other critics of the deal. And as more embarrassing revelations surfaced in the Minnesota case and elsewhere, congressional support for the tobacco deal all but vanished.

“Humphrey has been a tremendous hero,” said Richard Daynard, who heads the Tobacco Products Liability Project at Boston’s Northeastern University. “The proposed . . . deal might have moved like a steamroller without his opposition.”

“Most [attorneys general] look at this as the question of how do I get money for the state,” said Daynard. But Humphrey “went into the case for the right reasons and he never deviated.”

Tobacco’s Scourge an Unassuming Figure

For a scourge of Big Tobacco, Hubert Horatio Humphrey III is an unprepossessing figure. A stocky 5 feet, 7 inches, he totes a canvas Land’s End briefcase and likes to go to the Dairy Queen. He has been married to the same woman for 33 years.

He was born in Minneapolis in 1942, the second of four children of Hubert and Muriel Humphrey. When he was 3, his father became the city’s mayor, and in his first crusade set about cleansing the city of organized crime. The elder Humphrey became a national figure at the 1948 Democratic National Convention, delivering a short, dramatic speech advocating a stronger civil rights plank.

He was elected to the U.S. Senate that year and was a dominant figure in the Democratic Party for three decades, serving as a spokesman for liberal causes, as Lyndon Johnson’s vice president and as the party’s unsuccessful presidential candidate in 1968.

The younger Humphrey spent the bulk of his youth in the nation’s capital, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in political science at American University before returning home for law school at the University of Minnesota.

Humphrey joined a small law firm but had his eyes on a political career. Within three years, he was elected to the state Senate.

After a decade in the Legislature, he was elected attorney general in 1982 and has been handily reelected three times to serve as the state’s top law enforcement officer, overseeing a staff of 225 lawyers.

Humphrey has not always been an anti-tobacco zealot.

As a teenager, he bummed Viceroy cigarettes from friends but quit after his high school swimming coach said it would hamper his performance in a sport he still enjoys. In college, Humphrey helped raised money for his fraternity by collecting and turning in empty cigarette packs.

As a state legislator, after hearing how students had accidentally started a fire while smoking, he introduced a bill to set up areas at schools where teens could smoke with parental permission.

But since becoming attorney general, Humphrey has been a thorn in tobacco’s side, said Jeanne Weigum, who heads the Assn. for Nonsmokers--Minnesota.

Among other things, Humphrey pushed for warning labels on smokeless tobacco and a ban on distributing free samples of tobacco products. Moreover, Humphrey and his mother, Muriel Humphrey Brown, led a successful campaign to bar tobacco ads in the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, home of the baseball Twins and football Vikings, the first professional sports stadium to enact such a policy.

In recent months, Humphrey has taken on another industry whose success in court even topped that of the tobacco industry: Major League Baseball.

His attorneys have demanded a pile of internal documents, dating back to 1903, as part of an antitrust investigation of the Twins’ proposed move to North Carolina. Baseball’s lawyers include Dorsey & Whitney, a Minneapolis firm that represented Philip Morris Cos. in the just-concluded tobacco case.

Humphrey’s large, homey office on the first floor of the state Capitol is adorned with mementos from his career as well as his father’s.

There are photos of then-Vice President Humphrey voting in the 1968 election and campaigning in 1960 with John F. Kennedy, along with a bound volume of testimonials that followed his death from bladder cancer in 1978.

At a recent public appearance, Humphrey joked about his father’s garrulous nature and attempts to quit smoking.

“Dad smoked two to three packs of Lucky Strikes a day for a long time,” Humphrey recalled recently while chatting with members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars at the Coon Rapids Kiwanis Club. “Then he went cold turkey. He tried a pipe for a while. To keep it lit, you had to keep your mouth shut. That didn’t work very well.”

Humphrey said he did not learn until years later that research has linked smoking with the type of cancer that killed his dad.

But Humphrey said his anti-smoking zeal was not a personal vendetta.

Rather, he maintained, it was a matter of a law enforcement official trying to make the tobacco industry obey the law.

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Terms of the Deal

* Payment of $6.6 billion to the state of Minnesota and the other plaintiff, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota.

* No more tobacco product placement in movies or television shows nationwide.

* Disclosure of money paid for lobbying.

* Disband Council For Tobacco Research, an industry-funded research organization.

* No name or logo of tobacco brands on merchandise sold in Minnesota.