Transcript of Dr. Kenneth W. Smith's Taped Message to Kent Wise on Who Decided What J-M Employees Were Told (1975)

A three-page typed transcription, dated September 12, 1975, of an audio tape that Dr. Kenneth W. Smith, Johns-Manville's former medical director, recorded for a man he addresses as Ken or Kent, whose father, Dr. Wise, had been the plant physician at J-M's Pittsburg, California plant. Smith explains that by company policy local plant doctors could not interpret chest X-rays or tell workers what they showed: at Pittsburg those decisions were made only by Dr. Reginald Smart of Los Angeles and Dr. Walter Anderson of Lompoc, and elsewhere by consultants at Saranac Lake. "The final decision of informing an employee of his health status - bad or good - rested with non-medical authorities in the New York office in Industrial Relations and the Legal Department."

What it shows

Smith describes a system set up before he became medical director, in which health matters were handled by Hugh M. Jackson of Industrial Relations and H. M. Ball of the Legal Department, and in which "the decision to inform an employee or not rested with other people rather than the local medical officer or my office." Of his own part he says: "I have been through the same role for many years and quite frankly, I don't like it. I would never do it again." The tape was made while Dr. Wise was being sued by a former worker who had not been told of his asbestosis (J-M's notes on a Wall Street Journal inquiry, August 1975). Smith's own earlier letters on telling workers their results include his 1954 letter on Waukegan.

In Johns-Manville's chronology

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

This document is a typed transcription of an audio cassette sent by Dr Kenneth Smith to Dr. Kent Wise, former Pittsburg, CA plant physician for J-M. Transcription is dated 9/12/75. Smith describes a corporate medical organization in which chest x-ray interpretations were to made by specified outside consultants reporting to senior J-M management.

For California workers diagnostic responsibility was vested in D. Walter Anderson in Lompoc, and Dr. Reginald Smart in Los Angeles According to Smith, "their medical decisions were final. "The final decision of informing an employee of his health status bad or good rested with non-medical authorities in the New York office in Industrial Relations and the Legal Department, and from them through the local specialists of the areas. . . . I think the day-by-day physical examinations were not completely reported to the individual because the local practitioner was not considered competent to interpret to the fullest extent all x-ray changes that might have been seen. He was not considered competent by non-medical people in general headquarters at the New York office." This document was offered as an exhibit in the trial of Speake v. J-M.