BIG TOBACCO WINNING THE MATCH.

Byline: Christopher Lehmann-Haupt The New York Times

Title: ``Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris''

Author: Richard Kluger

Data: 807 pages, Alfred A. Knopf; $35

Our rating: Four Stars

At the end of ``Ashes to Ashes,'' his mammoth history of the American tobacco industry, Richard Kluger writes of his sources that his most difficult task was ``to try to suspend moral judgment as long as possible in sifting through this immense and untidy collection of materials in order to craft a coherent social narrative about an industry that was, after all, a thriving enterprise well before a conclusive scientific consensus on the hazards of its products was achieved.''

One has to admire him for this. To be impartial about smoking cannot have been easy given the extreme change in attitude during the last four decades from general acceptance of what was looked upon as a pleasurable if annoying habit to widespread condemnation of what has come to be seen as a killing addiction.

Yet he has succeeded very well. On the one hand, he tells the story of an industry with a highly profitable product that it saw as no better or worse in moral terms than that of any other industry.

As Kluger writes it, that industry's main challenges were at first to sell this product to more and more users, and then increasingly to fend off meddlesome critics who began denouncing the harmfulness of the product on the basis of evidence that the industry viewed as purely conjectural.

Indeed, Kluger succeeds so well at being morally impartial that the tone of his narrative is almost celebratory as he traces how Philip Morris began as a Bond Street boutique that supplied tobacco to the English crown and became, through brilliant sales technique and clever diversification, America's biggest food company in the 1990s.

At the same time, he describes the agonizingly slow process by which critics of the tobacco industry established that cigarettes might be unhealthful and then gradually prevailed on the government to take the most minimal steps both to warn consumers and to control the manufacturers.

Unfortunately, Kluger's objectivity is what prevents the reader from being fully caught up by his narrative. For while you may admire his impartiality in principle, to experience that objectivity from page to page in the light of what smoking has come to mean today is repugnant in the extreme. Despite all Kluger's efforts to make several of the tobacco industry's leaders appear charming and creative, they rarely seem better than calculating merchants of death.

In fact, so skewed does Kluger's viewpoint become in his striving for disinterestedness that he is forced to overpraise the smallest virtue. For instance, he calls one Philip Morris executive ``visionary'' simply for writing in response to the U.S. Surgeon General's 1964 report on the ill effects of smoking that ``greater benefit will accrue from accepting the report's findings on face value and proceeding to the cure of ills, real and alleged as they may be, than from engaging in disputation and refutation of those claims.'' Realistic, yes, but ``visionary''?

What is perhaps most disturbing about reading this minutely detailed volume - at least to someone who smoked his way through three decades of Kluger's 100-year history - is to learn how completely manipulated one was. Not only is ``Ashes to Ashes'' another report of the banality of evil, it is also an exercise in horrifying nostalgia.

No cigarette brand is mentioned without its slogan or jingle coming instantly to memory! And then comes the humiliating discovery that you were always smoking exactly the brand that the most successful manufacturer at a given time wanted you to.

Several sections of the book are engrossing simply as well-narrated history: the account of the Rose Cipollone case, in which a lung-cancer victim unsuccessfully sued the cigarette industry for liability; the story of R. Ross Johnson's attempt at a leveraged buyout of RJR-Nabisco, previously told in the best-selling book ``Barbarians at the Gate,'' by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar; and the parts relating how secondhand smoke, or so-called environmental tobacco smoke, was finally established as hazardous.

Mainly, however, ``Ashes to Ashes'' inspires moral outrage. If ever Marx was right about economic interest being the ground of human behavior! The enormity of the story told here suggests that only slavery exceeds tobacco as a curse on American history.

Finally, even Kluger throws up his hands, concluding that the only way to resolve the conflict between smoking and human health is to cut a deal with the tobacco manufacturers.

In exchange for exempting them from all personal injury claims by smokers, let them agree to a set of restrictions that would minimize the damage done by smoking as much as possible.

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