Deadly Spin (3 page)

Affordable, quality health care wasn’t the only thing my folks didn’t have easy access to. Money was another. I’ve never met a smarter, harder-working, and more resourceful man than my dad, but I probably earned more in one year at CIGNA than he earned in the twenty-some years he worked in a brutally hot factory before retiring in 1980. Before his factory job, when I was born, he and Mom had a small farm (the main money crop was tobacco) and ran a little country store, Potter’s Grocery, on Spear Branch Road in Mountain City. Dad built both the store and our first house, next door to it, with help from a couple of my uncles. Like most of the houses on Spear Branch Road at the time, ours did not have an indoor bathroom. We would not have one, in fact, until we moved when I was six to what seemed to me a huge city, Kingsport, about fifty miles to the west.

For more than a year before we moved to Kingsport, Dad “commuted” to the Blue Ridge glass plant, where a relative had been able to get him a job while Mom tended the store. Sometimes Dad was so tired after working a double shift that he would sleep in the back of his 1949 Willys Jeep wagon rather than risk driving, exhausted, all the way back home to Mountain City. I didn’t see him a lot during that time. When Potter’s Grocery became a money loser, they had to close it and look for another way to support us. (It seems that Mom and Dad had let their out-of-work customers, all of whom were neighbors and many of whom were relatives, run up tabs they could never pay off.)

After that, we lived in a duplex close to the glass plant until Mom and Dad had saved enough money to make a down payment on a run-down house a few miles outside of town that Dad would spend months fixing up.

Dad never knew much about his own father. One day when Dad was in the third grade, his father walked away and never came back, leaving my grandmother to raise nine children herself. They all had to get odd jobs to help put food on the table. When he was in his early twenties, Dad joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, a Great Depression–era work program created during the Roosevelt administration. The CCC put him on a train and sent him across the country to help build a public works project in Doty, Washington. He mailed almost everything he made back home to his mother, as he did later when the army sent him to Europe and North Africa during World War II.

Mom and Dad were introduced by Dad’s older sister Frances and Mom’s older brother Otho, who were married in the mid-1930s. Mom and Dad dated for years before the war but decided not go get married until Dad returned (they hoped) from his tour of duty. While Dad was overseas, Mom got a wartime job working on an assembly line at a chemical plant in Kingsport. They were married a few days after Dad got back home. I didn’t arrive for another six years.

Neither of my parents was able to finish high school, having to work instead. They wanted nothing more than for me to have an easier life than they’d had, and they knew I wouldn’t have a chance unless I had a good education. They sacrificed years to save enough money to send me to college. I will never be able to repay them or thank them enough.

I became the first person in my family to earn a college degree when I graduated from the University of Tennessee in 1973.

After a rocky start—I was far more interested in going to frat parties than attending lectures during my first few months in Knoxville—I finally settled into a good enough routine to begin making decent grades. I’ve had many lucky breaks over the years, but none luckier than being assigned an adviser named Sammie Lynn Puett. She had a reputation of being so strict that some of my fellow students in the College of Communications told me that if I were smart, I would get another adviser.

I did try, but the school wouldn’t let me ditch Puett, for which I will always be grateful. She was indeed demanding, but she became my first-ever mentor. I soon realized that she was strict because she wanted her students to learn and to succeed. In addition to being my student adviser, she was my first journalism teacher. Believing that I might have some potential, she encouraged me to continue in journalism and to get a job at the student newspaper, the
Daily Beacon
. I did, and I fell in love with being a reporter. I spent more time in the
Daily Beacon
newsroom than anywhere else during my last two years at UT. I eventually worked myself up to editor during my senior year.

Puett always had a lot of irons in the fire, and one of her ambitions was to develop a first-class public relations program at the university. Like many other Puett groupies, I wanted to take every course she taught, even her PR courses. By the time I graduated, I had taken all the PR courses the university offered, including the graduate-level classes, and was torn between going into journalism and pursuing a public relations job when I left school. I was a charter member of the UT chapter of the Public Relations Society of America’s student arm, and I helped drive a UT van carrying Puett and several other PR students to the 1972 PRSA national conference in Detroit.

Not once during that time did I get any training in how to set up a front group or mount a deception-based, fearmongering campaign for a client. I do remember discussions about the importance of behaving ethically in both journalism and PR—and the distinction between propaganda and “good” PR—but it never dawned on me then that I would ever do anything of which Puett would disapprove.

Journalism won over PR as my career choice because of Watergate. I fancied myself a great investigative reporter, maybe even the next Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein. I had been lucky enough to get a summer internship between my junior and senior years at the
Memphis Press-Scimitar
, an afternoon paper. Offered a full-time job there after I got my B.A. in communications, I didn’t think twice about accepting—even though by then I’d talked to a couple of PR agencies.

A few months into my career at the daily, I stumbled upon a great story about corruption in the city auto-inspection department. My reporting caught the attention of the managing editor, Ed Ray, and within months I was offered a job in the paper’s Nashville bureau, covering the state legislature. Two years after that, I was promoted to Scripps Howard’s Washington bureau. Scripps Howard owned the
Press-Scimitar
(which closed in 1983) as well as the
Commercial Appeal
in Memphis and the
News Sentinel
in Knoxville. So, at the age of twenty-four, I was covering Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court.

AN INTRO TO PR LIKE NO OTHER

I liked Washington but, frankly, never got over being homesick for Tennessee. In 1978, a college friend introduced me to a wealthy Knoxville banker by the name of Jake Butcher, who was running for governor of Tennessee. When Butcher asked me to be his press secretary, I took the job, seeing it as a ticket back home. Butcher won the Democratic primary but lost the general election to Lamar Alexander, now the senior senator from Tennessee. (I was devastated when Butcher lost, but it was probably a good thing for the state that he did, because five years later his banking empire collapsed and he went to jail on bank fraud charges.)

I continued to work for Butcher after the campaign—in a very different role. As it turned out, Butcher (whose brother, C. H., also had a growing banking empire, which stretched from Kentucky to Georgia) headed a group of civic and business leaders trying to bring a World’s Fair to Knoxville. He asked me if I would be interested in working in one of his banks and doing some lobbying and PR work for the World’s Fair group. Not having anything else lined up after the campaign, I agreed.

It was a great gig while it lasted. I represented the group in Washington as a lobbyist because the Bureau of International Expositions, in Paris (which decides where World’s Fairs are held), insists that a city have its federal government’s backing and financial support before even being considered. After helping secure a congressional authorization for the fair, I got to travel around the world helping recruit countries to participate in it. The event itself, the 1982 World’s Fair and Energy Exhibition, was a six-month blast. I wrote speeches and press releases for Butcher, but mostly just had a great time hanging out with the Australians and Peruvians and Egyptians. My wife, a Knoxville native whom I met in Washington while I was lobbying, even got a job as manager of the Egyptian pavilion.

After the fair closed in October 1982, I continued to work in the PR department of Jake Butcher’s flagship bank in Knoxville, United American. Everything fell apart four months later—and ten days after our first child was born. Federal and state bank examiners were suspicious that the Butchers were moving problem loans from one bank to another to avoid detection. The Feds decided to mount a massive examination of all the Butcher banks at once, and they found what they were looking for. After attempts by Governor Alexander and others to keep the banks from failing, regulators shut them down on Valentine’s Day in 1983. One of C. H. Butcher’s banks was a savings bank not insured by the FDIC, meaning that thousands of people lost their life savings. Hundreds of people, including me, lost their jobs. It was a heck of a learning experience. As the spokesman for a failing banking empire, I learned the hard way what crisis communications was all about.

Luck smiled on me again, though, a few months after that. The Butchers had hired Hill & Knowlton Public Relations to help with both the fair and the bank, and I had gotten to know a lot of the firm’s executives in Chicago and Atlanta. Two of the Atlanta account executives, Kay McKenzie and Betty Rider Gordon, decided to hang out their own shingle, and they invited me to join them. Once again, having nothing else lined up, I said yes, and I moved to Atlanta with my family and helped launch McKenzie, Gordon, and Potter.

We made a good go of it for a few years, but eventually we dissolved the partnership. My family and I moved back to Knoxville, and I took a job as head of PR and advertising for the nonprofit and church-affiliated Baptist Health System of East Tennessee, which comprised three hospitals, a few clinics, and an HMO. I don’t think I’d ever heard of an HMO until then, but all of a sudden I was the PR guy for one. After doing that for a couple of years, I was given a chance to make a lot more money by moving to Louisville, Kentucky, and joining the PR team at Humana, a big for-profit company. At that time, in 1989, Humana had a huge division that owned and operated scores of hospitals in the United States and Europe and another division that operated managed care plans.

One of the executives at Baptist begged me not to go “to the dark side,” meaning cross over to for-profit health care. But I didn’t fully understand yet how different it would be, and I saw it as a great career opportunity. Taking a well-paying job with great benefits at a
Fortune
500 company seemed like a no-brainer.

So, it was off to Louisville (four of us this time: myself, my wife, our six-year-old son, and our two-year-old daughter) for my first exposure to the corporate world. I adapted well and was pretty proud to be working for one of the city’s biggest and most prominent employers in the city’s most conspicuous office building: a twenty-seven-story Michael Graves–designed postmodern pink-granite skyscraper with a pair of Giacometti sculptures in the lobby. My digs at Baptist were nothing compared to my office in the Humana building.

I supported the hospital division until Humana decided that operating both hospitals and managed care plans wasn’t working out as planned. For the hospitals to make money, they had to have a steady stream of paying patients. For the managed care plans to make money, they had to keep people out of the hospital—including Humana’s hospitals. When investors and Wall Street analysts told Humana’s executives that they needed to focus on one business and sell the other, they decided to spin off the hospitals. I was asked to stay with Humana, now a managed care company, and soon became head of communications.

MY TRIP TO THE MAJOR LEAGUES

A few months later, I got a call from another recruiter about an even better, higher-paying, and more prestigious job in Connecticut. How could I say no to CIGNA, one of the biggest and most highly respected insurers in the country?

CIGNA in 1993, the year I joined the company, was a large multi-line insurer that traced its roots back to the eighteenth century, when a predecessor company, Insurance Company of North America (INA), started selling fire and marine insurance in Philadelphia. This historic company merged in 1982 with the Connecticut General Insurance Company, known as Connecticut General (CG). (The name CIGNA is an anagram of the acronyms of the two companies.)

Although it was much larger than Humana and had become a big player in managed care as a result of acquisitions, CIGNA was still known primarily as a property and casualty company. I was hired to help boost awareness of CIGNA’s health care business. Moving from Kentucky to Connecticut (where CIGNA’s health care operations are based) and from Humana to CIGNA really felt like moving to the major leagues.

I hit a home run about a year after signing on when I arranged for a reporter with
Modern Healthcare
, the leading industry trade magazine, to do a big feature story on CIGNA. She wanted to “look under the hood” of a managed care company but hadn’t been able to get any of the others to let her do it. After persuading senior management that it would be worth the risk, I invited her to Bloomfield, Connecticut, to spend a day with us. I, of course, had spent many hours preparing the executives she would interview and made sure she only talked to people on an approved list. She was so appreciative that she wrote a glowing multipage story about the company and its “customer-focused” approach to managed care. It was so popular among CIGNA’s sales force that I couldn’t keep enough reprints in stock. Within three months, they ordered thirty thousand copies of the story to send to clients and use in sales presentations.

I also got noticed for developing a “rapid response” approach to handling media calls about member complaints, which we called “horror stories.” I worked closely with the chief medical officer to set up a kind of SWAT team to be called into action at a moment’s notice when a reporter called with a potential horror story. The objective was to get as much information as possible—as soon as possible—about the complaining member so my team and I could respond to the reporter with a statement or background information before the reporter’s deadline. We were able to keep many stories out of print or off the air just by being so unusually attentive to reporters when they called. It was media relations at its best, at least for CIGNA.