Kathy Rogers, Memorandum Summarizing J-M's "Dr. Leroy Gardner" File (1982)

A 15-page memorandum of September 8, 1982, by Kathy Rogers, apparently of Johns-Manville's legal department, to file J-10-49, summarizing a file labelled "Dr. Leroy Gardner" found that spring or summer "in Box A-11-6-A-3 on B level" at J-M's world headquarters. Because most of its papers were written by, to or copied to Vandiver Brown, she concludes it was probably kept by Brown or his staff. After a three-page history of the Saranac asbestos study, she describes dozens of documents from 1944 to 1952 one by one, with margin tags such as "CANCER," "DELETIONS" and "LABELS."

What it shows

The memo traces, from J-M's own file, how the companies that paid for Leroy Gardner's animal experiments at the Saranac Laboratory handled the report after his death in 1946. It notes Brown's 1947 reply to word of lung cancer in Gardner's mice, "The finding referred to looks like dynamite" (the Brown and Bowditch letters), and the November 1948 meeting at which, the memo records, it was the "unanimous opinion that the reference to cancer and tumors should be deleted" (Brown's letter to Kelly). It quotes Brown in 1950 saying the companies had "never intended to suppress information" but wanted time to "make such defensive moves as might be appropriate," and Dr. Kenneth W. Smith in 1951 advising J-M to wait for "proof of no causal relationship between asbestos and pulmonary cancer" before publicizing the report (Smith's memo).

Rogers also observes that some papers in the file duplicate the Sumner Simpson Papers found in Raybestos-Manhattan's vault. Until the Gardner file turned up, she writes, J-M had maintained that it could not authenticate the Simpson-Brown correspondence because no copies were in its own files: "Query whether this position is still tenable."