And so he has become addicted -- if that is the word -- to Breath Savers, one of the noncontroversial products manufactured by his company. He pops one into his mouth and, tagged by security agents, makes his way to the main conference hall. ''Let's go do this thing,'' he says. At the first opportunity, the anti-tobacco contingent crowds the microphones. The first to speak, a Virginia woman named Anne Donley, asks Goldstone to describe the provisions made by the company should ''you or the other directors be indicted.'' Goldstone maintains his equilibrium, thanking her for her question without providing an answer. Another critic, a Virginia physician named David Lewis, says to Goldstone: ''I had to tell one of your customers a few days ago that the shadow in her chest is lung cancer. I suspect that she is still crying. I believe there is higher power, Mr. Goldstone, and I believe that one day you will have to answer to that higher power.''

''Thank you, Dr. Lewis,'' Goldstone replies. He becomes testy only once, when another woman announces that a petition drive in support of a Nabisco boycott has already netted 12,000 signatures.

''I'm sorry that 12,000 people are not using Nabisco products,'' he says, a malevolent grin spreading across his face. ''We're doing a great job on Snackwell's, and when they see their weight going up they might come back.'' This draws a laugh from his cigarette-subsidiary executives, who fill the front rows and smoke like fiends through the meeting. They don't really trust Goldstone, who is decidedly not a tobacco man, but today he is a hero to them. He is a hero to his shareholders too. It's not because he has figured out a way to grow the cigarette business. Quite the opposite: he is certainly one of the only C.E.O.'s in America who tell their employees and shareholders that the most they will achieve for them is a ''slow and manageable decline in an increasingly obsolete industry.''

Nor is he a hero because he has formulated the magic arguments that would convince the country that his company never manipulated the nicotine levels in cigarettes, never marketed its products to teen-agers and never thought, even for a moment, that Joe Camel could be attractive to 5-year-olds. He is a hero instead because on April 8, he stood at the dais of the National Press Club in Washington and let Congress know that if it wanted to legislate his industry into oblivion, it could do so without his help. The man who marched his industry's C.E.O.'s into cease-fire negotiations with the states was marching them back to war. ''I finally saw that there wasn't a chance in hell of any resolution to this problem in the near future,'' he says.

Goldstone's pullout wasn't entirely impetuous: the C.E.O.'s had all been stewing for some time about the Republican Congress's election-year conversion to the anti-tobacco cause. But it was still something of a cliff jump. Goldstone says that he made his announcement with only the cloudiest sense of his industry's future. ''It would scare my shareholders to know this, but in my own mind I do not have an endgame plan,'' he would tell me later. ''The only thing we can do now is continue fighting.''