John L.

“the”
― Stephen E. Smith, The Year We Danced

“The company claimed to have interviewed some 2,210 “experts,” of whom it said 1,184 were exclusive Luckies smokers. Of these, federal investigators tracked down 440 and discovered that more than 100 denied smoking Luckies exclusively, 50 did not smoke at all, and some smoked other brands exclusively, some did not recall having ever been interviewed on the subject by American Tobacco, and some had no connection with the tobacco industry. Such details aside, the campaign and the company’s new media-buying strategy were hugely successful, and by 1941 Lucky Strike would narrowly reclaim the market share lead from Camel and widen it dramatically in ensuing years. “He was a dictator, of course,” Pat Weaver recalled of the newly triumphant George Hill of this period, but now he invited the input of others. “His strength,” said Weaver, “was his tremendous conviction about the importance of the business he was in. His weakness was tunnel vision—he was really obsessed with Lucky Strike, I’m afraid.” But not to such a degree that he failed to recognize the danger of his company’s dependence on a single brand amid the vicissitudes of a fickle marketplace. “One day, I came into his office,” Weaver remembered, “and I said, ‘Mr. Hill, I have a good idea.’ He said, ‘Great, what is it?’—he loved ideas.” Weaver’s was a not entirely harebrained scheme to get around the federal excise tax of six cents per pack of twenty cigarettes by putting out a brand in which each smoke was twice the normal length and the package would include a razor blade for slicing each one in two, thereby saving the customer the equivalent of three cents a pack. Hill listened and nodded,”
― Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris

“The events, the scenes, the persons and ideas”
― Eric Sevareid, Not So Wild a Dream

“was”
― Chris Wallace, Countdown 1960: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of the 312 Days that Changed America's Politics Forever