N I994, before book after book documented how c the tobacco industry had successfully manipulated i S the public's perceptions about smoking, the eminent I t historian and author Stephen E. Ambrose took the stand in a Louisiana case brought by Gere Covert, a Baton Rouge attorney who decided to sue after the death of his wife, a longtime smoker, from lung cancer. Testifying for the big four tobacco companies and their lobbying arm, Ambrose hammered home the industry's line: The risks of smoking have been known for decades if not centuries, so smokers who got sick made a knowing choice. Ambrose spun a compelling narrative, arguing that since Columbus first plucked tobacco from the Indians the public has had a sense that smoking can't possibly be healthy. For proof he cited the nineteenth-century anti-tobacco temperance movements, old slang like "coffin nails" and "cancer sticks," and the abundance of news stories printed in the I95oS and I9 6os as scientists began to accumulate data powerfully suggesting a link between cigarettes and lung cancer. Asked by the tobacco attorney what the public awareness of the health risks of smoking was in the zo years prior to I966, when warning labels first went on cigarette packs, Ambrose said, "When the warning went on the labels, you would have to have been deaf and blind not to have known that already in the United States." The jury found for the tobacco companies. Ambrose, of course, was paid (handsomely) by the tobacco industry. And he is not the only outside witness to testify for tobacco. Others include not just tobacco's natural ideological allies, but such liberal social scientists as Theodore R. Marmor, a Yale-based advocate of universal health insurance (and occasional writer for this magazine [The American Prospect]), and the distinguished medical historian