IB: Can you give me a brief biography of Edward Bernays?

LT: He was a strange guy who was born in Germany and came over here when he was an infant and grew up in this all-American setting in NY City and became this consummately American figure but he always had a strain in his background of the Old World. And the Old World reflected maybe, most notably, by his famous uncle, Sigmund Freud, who he would go and visit every year when he would go to Vienna on summers and go for long walks with his uncle and that became a touchstone that he was in touch with this elegant old world of Europe but he was Sigmund Freud's, what Freud called his consummately American nephew.

IB: Tell me about their relationship, both personal and professional

LT: It was a relationship that was filled with all the contradictions that embody who Edward Bernays was and more importantly, who his profession of PR was. He had a 20 year correspondence with his uncle that reflected the extraordinary help that Edward gave to Freud when Freud was trying to escape the Nazis and get to England and what he need more than anything in that period was money and his nephew Edward helped him do translations, get the early translations of his works into English going that helped give Freud the money he needed to escape. And Bernays though, was, on the one hand, offering to do anything he could to help his uncle and yet some of the ways he offered to help, even in this period of crisis, were more than Freud could tolerate. He basically wanted to know if Freud wanted to take his works and popularize them into little ditties that housewives and others could relate to; basically coming up with this notion of pop psychology that, to Freud was an anathema. So even though he needed the money, even though he was extra appreciative of what Bernays was doing for him, at times he was just going too far and this Americanization and spinning of his psychology was more than Freud could tolerate.

IB: How important was Bernays to getting Freud's views and theories into the American consciousness?

LT: He was very important in terms of helping to arrange the translations and even though he didn't do the translating, he helped see that some of those things happened so he helped bring the works to the wider public. On the other half of that relationship it was very much what B would've called the two-way street. Freud's works were instrumental in everything that B did in his 80 plus years as a PR practitioner and helping found this profession. He founded his ideas of how to change people's behaviour on F's notions of what created that behaviour in the first place.

IB: Could you be more specific about how Bernays took Freud's theories and applied them to PR?

LT: Sure, can I tell you that through a story of one of Bernays' most famous campaigns? It was back in the 1920s and Bernays was working for what was then the biggest tobacco company in the world, American Tobacco. And essentially during WWI, the tobacco companies had succeeded in getting an entire generation of American men addicted to cigarettes. That during the time when provisions went over from the Red Cross and other relief orgs during the war, they had stuck into those relief packages, cigarettes, the men had gone to war with cigars and pipes but when you're fighting a trench war, the idea of taking the time to light up a pipe or a cigar was impractical. So they got these cigarettes and their ration packs and they came back smoking the cigarettes that American Tobacco wanted them to. But the tobacco company was smart enough to realize that was only half of the American market; the other half was the female half and they promised to make Bernays a very rich man if he could figure out a way to get women smoking cigs. And B did in that case what he always did: he took American Tobacco's money and he went to one of Freud's disciples in America, a guy named Dr. AA Brill, and he said to Brill, "Why is it psychologically that women are not smoking cigs?" And Brill said, "It's very simple. It's a social taboo. Men have convinced women and women have convinced themselves that it's socially unacceptable for them to smoke a cigarette, it's un-lady-like. If you can attack that taboo, you can get women smoking cigarettes," and Bernays thought that was brilliant. It was taking psychology and understanding the root of the behaviour that he was trying to change. So what he did was he went out and got an entire group of debutants to agree to light up cigs on the holiday that most symbolized freedom of spirit. On Easter Sunday, on a street in America that was America's main street, 5th Avenue NY, he had these women walk down 5th Avenue, lighting up what he called their torches of freedom. And just to make sure that nobody missed what he was doing, he had arranged for photographers from every newspaper that mattered around the world to be there and to capture that scene. And the next day in newspapers all over the world and the next week on editorial pages all over the world, there were the scenes of what they called "The Torches of Freedom Parade." And it was taking this notion that women had seen it as a social taboo and transforming it into an equally important social notion which was, this idea of striking a blow for women's freedom and liberation by lighting up a cigarette. And when we see it from today's perspective in terms of understanding the health risks, it's perverse that he got an entire generation addicted to cigs using Freudian psychology, using his uncle's disciple. But it was brilliant back then in terms of a marketing ploy, it is today a campaign that kids study in PR schools all around the world and it was Edward Bernays and unwittingly Sigmund Freud teaming up to change a major aspect of behaviour.

IB: The key to that was AA Brill's insight into what was preventing women from smoking in public.

LT: Exactly. The key to that was Brill's insight based on his training with Freudian technique on why women wouldn't smoke in the first place in order to change them to smoke.

IB: And this was one of the first times that PR had gone to that next level-trying to figure out what was the inner motivation of people, instead of just providing info to the public.

LT: Exactly. Normally PR had been, in the days of even greats like Ivy Lee, PR had been trying to fill up news pages with free stories, being basically publicists. Bernays took it to a new level. He tried to understand the roots of behaviour in order to change that very behaviour so rather than just flooding the papers with how nice it was for women to smoke cigarettes, he did something that was a master stroke; he created this brilliant event that would be forged in the American imagination that got editorial writers all across the country talking about whether it was okay for women to smoke cigarettes and that even later on, when we saw these campaigns for companies like Virginia Slims-if your listeners are old enough to remember those campaigns-those were seen as it's somehow being liberating for women to smoke cigarettes. This also planted the first seed as I think of as the moral decay of the profession because there aren't many people who knew back then how dangerous cigarettes were to women and men and Edward Bernays was one of them.

IB: And it didn't matter to him?

LT: Well, it mattered to him at home because he told his daughters to take their mom's cigs and crush them little brittle bones and flush them down the toilet. So he understood what was going on and yet at work he was helping addict a generation of women to this horrible habit that he didn't want his wife picking up on.

IB: So EB used his secretary to get women to come out to the Torches of Freedom Parade, so he pioneered the use of front groups to disguise who's really pulling the strings, right?

LT: He did. He understood that if the debutants understood that it was Edward Bernays and the American Tobacco Co. recruiting them for this march, that they would see themselves as having been used for a commercial purpose. It was much better to have his secretary, without identifying who she worked for, enlist them to strike a blow for women's freedom and that was, he always talked about marshalling, about hitching his private cause to a public cause, and again, it was a Freudian technique; people want to think that they're doing something for some great cause, they don't want to think they're peddling cigarettes for a wealthy tobacco company.

IB: And this idea of using the front group, we see that all the time now in PR.

LT: We see a lot of these insidious techniques, we see the things that we know now that the tobacco companies went on to do, not just in the 20s and 30s when Bernays was working for them, but through the modern generation and we see front groups having become something that was used throughout history to promote causes that were unpopular. If you think of, as recent as the wars in Iraq, much better to look like it's neutral groups pushing for whatever the cause is, including taking a country to war, than to have it look like their vested interests.

IB: When he comes back from WWI in the 1920s, what sets him apart from people like Ivy Lee?

LT: What set him apart and I think that he was brasher, he was more arrogant and he was more brilliant than even the great ones like Ivy Lee. Ivy Lee did a brilliant job of transforming an image of a guy who was very unpopular at the time, John D Rockefeller Jr., but Bernays didn't just transform individual's images, he transformed the behaviour of an entire country in major areas, be it smoking cigarettes, being the colour that they happened to like in a particular season that jived with a colour that one of his client's was trying to sell. The kind of bacon people bought. He could do it on just about any issue. And he was much more versatile and much more vertical in his thinking. The general publicist back in that era looked at things in a very vertical way, a very traditional way of just doing straight up publicity. Edward Bernays founded what he called the science of PR.

IB: Could you give me another ex of one of his campaigns that is an ex of how he pushed the envelope in terms of PR?.

LT: Yes, I will give you another example of how he pushed the envelope in terms of believability as well. He was working for a co back before the halfway mark in the 20th C, he was working for a co called Beechnut Packing, which was a big bacon maker and they said, we want to sell more bacon, people aren't eating as much bacon for breakfast anymore and we really want to get people doing that. And Bernays, instead of going out and trying to get a bigger slice of the market for his client Beechnut Packing, he tried to recreate the whole market. He went out and did what he often did, which was he did a survey of, in this case, America's leading physicians, and he said, "what do you think of as the all-American breakfast," only he didn't just give them a wide open choice. He put the choice: the rushed breakfast that people are eating today or do you think of it as the good, hardy bacon and eggs breakfast? And he always did his polling like that, in a way that there was almost no choice. That he phrased things in way that pollsters today would say would get an entirely biased result. And the result was that just about all the docs he surveyed said, yes, a hardy breakfast is important and he had defined hardy as bacon and eggs. So what he did was publicize those results and he encouraged an entire country to see what we think of as the all-American breakfast as bacon and eggs. Now, the fact that we learned later and that many people knew then that it was the ultimate artery-clogging breakfast, who cared? I mean, he was selling bacon and he created this market. Beechnut already had a nice chunk of that market, the market as a whole enlarged and Beechnut became wealthy and so did Edward Bernays.

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