Nancy Vedera to J-M Attorneys Enclosing an Organization Directory for the Insurance Litigation (1984)

A memo of June 5, 1984, from Nancy Vedera to "All J-M Attorneys, Law Clerks and Legal Assistants," marked "Draft," sending a directory "of organizations which have been mentioned in the documents, and by witnesses in the insurance litigation case" (case J-10-49), with a form for corrections. The eleven-page directory sums up trade associations, insurers' bodies and research groups in J-M's history: the Asbestos Information Association, the Asbestos Textile Institute, the Industrial Health Foundation, the Insulation Industry Hygiene Research Program, Metropolitan Life, the Quebec Asbestos Mining Association, the Saranac Laboratory and others, noting J-M's membership, its people on committees, and where J-M's files on each were kept.

What it shows

The entries are J-M's own lawyers' account of its ties to these groups. The Asbestos Information Association, they wrote, was first proposed in December 1966 to J-M's Environmental Task Force and formed in December 1970, with objectives that included to "publicly rebut irresponsible and inaccurate criticism" and to "promulgate the indispensability of asbestos." Of the Industrial Health Foundation's digest they noted that it "was admittedly received by Hugh Jackson and routinely read by him" (see the Industrial Hygiene Digest), and that J-M's doctors had Dr. Paul Gross examine the tissues of employees who developed lung cancer or asbestosis. They recorded that J-M lent a full-time hygienist to the insulation workers' research program run with Dr. Selikoff and the asbestos workers' union, and that after Leroy Gardner died in 1946 the Saranac report was written "After much pressure from J-M and the other textile manufacturers." Of the insulation makers' association they wrote that "In late 1963, rumors of Dr. Selikoff's studies prompted discussions of asbestos health issues."