Cook and Henderson

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This article is part of the Tobacco portal on Sourcewatch funded from 2006 - 2009 by the American Legacy Foundation.

The partners in the lobby firm Cook and Henderson were two old politicians from either side of the D-R divide. Dave Henderson was a Democrat Representative from North Carolina and Marlow Cook was a Republican Senator. Before becoming a Congressman, Cook was a lawyer with Shook Hardy & Bacon, the tobacco industry's main underhand legal lobbying firm based in Kansas City.

Despite being from opposite sides of the political spectrum, they had a singular vision about money-making, and joined forces to create a distinct political lobby firm which was able to pick up major clients and retain them which-ever party was in power. Both then worked through this front as corporate lobbyist with the Tobacco Institute being one of their major clients.

• Republican Marlow Webster Cook (July 27, 1926 – February 4, 2016) was an American politician who served a single term from his appointment in December 1968 until his resignation, in December 1974. He was a Rockefeller (Moderate) Republican Senator from Louisville, Kentucky. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marlow_Cook Richard E Scanlan, who went on to be the TI's Regional Vice President for the North East, was Cook's legislative assistant.

• His partner in this secretive lobbying firm was Democrat David Newton Henderson (April 16, 1921 – January 13, 2004), the Representative from North Carolina. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_N._Henderson

Documents and Timelines

1981 /E Gene Ainsworth of RJ Reynolds has prepared a confidential and critical report on the Tobacco Institute and its staff. He believes the TI has spent the last few years resting on its laurels.

My visceral reaction to the future of the Institute is that we need to have some type of trade association as our "front." Since we are such a concentrated industry and since we are such big fish in this pond, we need to have a front to absorb a lot of the heat that is generated with the Surgeon General's report etc.

He recommends new staff and lists the current staff problems. They need:

• a top-flight lobbyist, a heavy hitter with 5-7 staff, to replace Jack Mills. Jack Mills is too closely associated with his tenure as the Executive Director of the RNCC/RCCC, and is approaching retirement age.

He provides us with a commentary on the value of their present staff and PR consultants:

• • Fred Panzer is limited in effectiveness and is best dealing with the unions and the 'liberal fringe of the Democratic party.'
  • George Yenowine - should be chief administrator.
  • Sam Chilcote, Jack Kelly (misspelled), Roger Mozingo, Peter Sparber, Walter Merryman all get the tick of approval.
  • Mike Kerrigan -- "I wouldn't trust him to give me the right time of the day.
  • Bill Kloepfer -- "a goose egg".
  • Bill Prendergast: Bill has served in a consultant's role in the past year and to my mind has been worth his weight in gold. He has brought a fresh perspective to the job. His former life at DISCUS (the distilled spirits lobby) has exposed Bill to a number of situations that now threaten the tobacco industry.
    He has been able to make excellent suggestions that, woefully, no one in our industry had thought of. I hope that Bill will want to stay on a while longer at TI.
• TI has but one full time lobbyist, Jack Mills. The rest, Fred Panzer, Bill Prendergrast, Horace Kornegay, and Sam Chilcote are part-time at best. The outside law firm of Cook and Henderson is being utilized as in-house lobbyists and are being paid a very large fee for its services.
• [T]he federal lobby function should be primarily an "in-house" function of TI. There undoubtedly would be roles for law firms and consultants, but they should not be handled in the currently incestuous manner which TI, at Horace Kornegay's insistence, maintains with Marlow Cook and Dave Henderson.

http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/lwd88d00/pdf
[Note: Kornegay, Henderson and Cook were all Congressmen from the southern tobacco growing states.]

See many documents at the San Francisco Archives (Search for name)

<tdo>resource_id=28493 resource_code=cook_marlow search_term=Marlow Cook</tdo> <tdo>resource_id=30356 resource_code=henderson_dave search_term=Dave Henderson</tdo>