In 1972, Richard Nixon's new Surgeon General, Dr Jesse Steinfeld, published the latest report on smoking and health which confirmed smoking as the major cause of lung cancer in the United States and implicated it as a contributor to coronary heart disease, low birth weights and premature birth. All of this had been suspected for some time. What set Steinfield's report apart was the suggestion that 'secondhand smoke' was more than a mere nuisance and could be life-threatening to nonsmokers.

The report itself did not provide any solid evidence for this - there was none - but Steinfield used the accompanying press conference to call for the creation of a nonsmokers' rights movement, saying:

"Nonsmokers have as much right to clean air and wholesome air as smokers have to their so-called right to smoke, which I would redefine as a 'right to pollute'. It is high time to ban smoking from all confined public spaces such as restaurants, theatres, airplanes, trains and buses. It is time that we interpret the Bill of Rights for the nonsmokers as well as the smoker."

With this statement, the Surgeon General went further than any of his predecessors had dared to go and the rabble-rousing may have been too much for the Republican administration. Steinfeld was not reappointed for Nixon's second term and no replacement was made for another four years. Although it may have cost him his job, Steinfield's rallying cry hit a nerve with disgruntled nonsmokers across America and the first significant wave of anti-smoking activity since the war began to take shape...

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