ROBERT DOLE AND CIGARETTE MAKERS: "AN IMPORTANT ALLY OF INDUSTRY"

In a lengthy article entitled "DOLE'S LINK TO BIG TOBACCO AGED IN YEARS OF DEALMAKING; GOP LEADER AN IMPORTANT ALLY OF INDUSTRY," the WASHINGTON POST reported on the close and supportive relationship which it said former Senator and former Senate leader Bob Dole has with the tobacco industry.

Here, for the information of everyone concerned about smoking, are excerpts from that article:

Over the course of four decades on Capitol Hill, Dole has become an important ally of the tobacco industry. As a supreme legislative dealmaker, he has been instrumental in setting its taxes and its subsidies. He has also supported its dramatic expansion into overseas markets and has fought its enemies, such as Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David A. Kessler, architect of the proposed ad ban.

In return, the industry has made significant contributions to his campaigns and has supported him with corporate plane trips and six-figure donations to foundations he has established. Indeed, Dole even owes the Senate majority leader post he is leaving to senators from tobacco states.

Nonetheless, Dole is near the top of the list of lawmakers who receive campaign contributions from the tobacco industry. Its executives and political action committees have donated more than $ 100,000 to Dole's campaigns over the past decade and another $ 250,000 to Dole's Better America Foundation, the conservative think tank he founded and later disbanded after critics charged it was serving as an arm of his presidential campaign.

The industry also contributed a record $ 2,369,534 last year in so-called "soft money" to the Republican National Committee and other GOP institutions to help pay for the party's nominating convention, voter registration and dissemination of political literature, all of which will indirectly assist Dole.

More often, Dole has been a willing partner in helping tobacco fulfill its legislative desires. Although there are no tobacco farmers in his native Kansas, Dole has been part of a coalition of farm state lawmakers that for decades has protected agricultural subsidies of all varieties. As a pivotal member of both the Senate Finance and Agriculture committees, he was especially well-placed to defend tobacco interests on tax matters as well.

In 1981 he was widely credited with rescuing the federal tobacco subsidy program after widespread resentment among senators of Agriculture Committee Chairman Jesse Helms's (R-N.C.) hardball tactics almost sunk it. An amendment to gut the program failed on the Senate floor by one vote after Dole intervened. The following year, Helms and fellow North Carolina Republican John P. East repaid the favor by not opposing the cigarette excise tax increase, part of a measure to reduce the federal deficit.

Within months of his victory, Dole was once again instrumental in aiding Helms and the tobacco industry. He took legislation to extend the life of the cigarette excise tax increase and tacked on the Tobacco Program Improvement Act of 1985, a broad 41-page amendment championed by tobacco farmers and cigarette manufacturers that Helms was having trouble getting through the Agriculture Committee.

In 1986, Dole joined Connecticut Sens. Lowell Weicker Jr. (R) and Christopher J. Dodd (D) in a letter to the the government of Hong Kong on behalf of UST Inc., a Connecticut-based smokeless tobacco manufacturer. The letter urged the British crown colony not to ban smokeless tobacco and implied that the United States might engage in trade retaliation if it did. "I imagine they thought it was more important to save a Connecticut firm's profits than Asian lives," wrote then-Surgeon General C. Everett Koop in his memoirs.

UST has provided Dole with 26 flights aboard its corporate jets since 1993 (Philip Morris also has provided six corporate flights for Dole over the past two years, records show). UST donated more than $ 40,000 to Dole's political committees and $ 50,000 to the Better America Foundation. And its senior vice president, Edward D. Kratovil, is a board member and fund-raiser for the Dole Foundation, which helps train and provide job opportunities for people with disabilities.

Dole also joined with Helms in lobbying foreign governments to open their markets to U.S. cigarettes. In July 1987 he, Helms and six colleagues met with the South Korean ambassador here to deliver a letter from 20 senators from both parties supporting "fair market conditions for U.S. cigarettes" in Korea.

As Senate majority leader in the new Republican-led Congress, Dole has supported the two items at the top of the tobacco lobby's current agenda: a bill limiting punitive damages in product liability lawsuits and efforts to defeat the proposed FDA regulations on youth smoking. Last September, Dole pledged before a breakfast meeting of pharmaceutical industry executives that if he became president, he would fire FDA Commissioner Kessler.

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