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The Soldier And The Cigarette: 1918-1986, Joel Richard Bius

Dissertations

The military-industrial complex has been the topic of intense conversation among historians since President Dwight Eisenhower first gave the phrase life in January 1961. The term typically conjures up images of massive weapons procurement programs, but it also ironically involved one of the world’s most highly-engineered consumer products, the manufactured cigarette. “The Soldier and the Cigarette: 1918–1986” describes the unique, often comfortable, yet sometimes controversial relationships among the military, the cigarette industry, and tobaccoland politicians. The dissertation argues that the federal government’s first cigarette warning in 1964 changed a relationship between soldiers and cigarettes that the Army had fostered for …