Albert E. Hutchinson, From the General President, The Asbestos Worker (August 1968)

The August 1968 issue of The Asbestos Worker, the journal of the insulators' union, opens with a two-page letter to members from its general president, Albert E. Hutchinson. He recounts a year of meetings on health hazards with Dr. Irving Selikoff, members of Congress, the Bureau of Mines and industry, and reports that at a meeting on July 15, Bert Jobe, a Johns-Manville vice president, made "a very generous commitment on behalf of his company" to fund research through Mount Sinai's Environmental Health Research Fund. Much progress had been made in eight years through Selikoff's work, Hutchinson writes, but "while we have been talking about these same problems for forty years, nobody has been able to provide the funds to finance the research which is necessary to secure the facts."

What it shows

Hutchinson writes that an industry-wide research council had failed in June 1968 because "we could not get a unanimous commitment," and that J-M then stepped forward on its own. The program would be run by an advisory group including Jobe, Selikoff, Hutchinson and Dr. George Wright, J-M's medical adviser. A photograph in the issue shows Jobe, Selikoff and Hutchinson at a meeting in New York on July 29, 1968. This is the program whose public announcement J-M asked its public relations firm to manage (see the Hill and Knowlton memo of September 1968). See also Asbestos Workers Union.

In Johns-Manville's chronology

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

In the 8/68 edition of Asbestos Worker magazine there appears a letter from Albert Hutchinson (General President of Union) to union members. Hutchinson states that while much progress has been made in the last 8 years through Dr. Selikoff's research, there is much still to be done. "While we have been talking about these same problems for 40 years, nobody has been able to provide the funds to finance the research. . . ."