The report, compiled by a committee that reviewed over 7,000 scientific studies, was the first official U.S. government statement identifying smoking as a serious health hazard. It triggered warning labels on cigarette packs, advertising restrictions, and a decades-long decline in American smoking rates.
Luther Terry called the press conference for a Saturday specifically to minimize its effect on the stock market, knowing full well what the report would do to tobacco company shares. Inside, a hand-picked committee of scientists, chosen in part because none had publicly stated a position on smoking beforehand, laid out findings from more than 7,000 studies conducted over the previous decade.
The conclusion was unambiguous for its time: cigarette smoking causes lung cancer and chronic bronchitis in men, and probably in women too, contradicting decades of tobacco industry advertising that had enlisted doctors and even athletes to vouch for cigarettes' safety. Reporters packed the State Department auditorium, and the story ran on front pages nationwide the following Monday.
The fallout was immediate and lasting. Congress mandated warning labels on cigarette packages within a year, and later banned cigarette advertising on television and radio. Terry's report is widely credited as the opening act of the modern American anti-smoking movement, and adult smoking rates in the U.S., which stood above 40 percent in 1964, have fallen by more than half in the decades since.