G. Earl Parker to The New Yorker on Paul Brodeur's Asbestos Articles and Senator Hart (1985)

A three-page letter of July 3, 1985, from G. Earl Parker, Manville Corporation's senior vice president for law and public affairs, to William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker, answering Paul Brodeur's articles on asbestos litigation. Parker calls the articles "totally biased, unrelenting promotions" of contingent fee lawyers, and defends Senator Hart, whom Brodeur had criticized, as having worked on compensation legislation "not as a partisan for Manville" but to resolve a national problem. He says only Congress can bring the asbestos claims to "an honorable conclusion."

What it shows

Parker writes that "asbestosis, like silicosis and other occupational diseases, has yielded to industrial hygiene programs," that the "disease epidemic" was approaching an end, and that the task now was compensating the injured and "controlling the litigation epidemic." He objects to large awards for pleural thickening without impairment, and argues that blame is shared by the medical community, unions, the U.S. Public Health Service, the Navy and insurers. Society, he writes, should "reject the temptation to find fault, assess blame and punish." The letter sets out the company's public position three years into its bankruptcy: that its asbestos liabilities called for a legislated compensation scheme rather than lawsuits.

In Johns-Manville's chronology

Johns-Manville's own chronology of what the company knew describes this document as follows:

Letter from Earl Parker to William Shawn of The New Yorker, dated 7/3/85, setting forth an impassioned defense of Senator Gary Hart and a scathing criticism of the Broduer articles concerning asbestos health litigation and the Manville bankruptcy