Silencing History
By Kai Bird
The Nation, February 20, 1995"I have concluded that we made a basic error in attempting to couple a historic treatment of the use of atomic weapons with the fiftieth anniversary commemoration of the end of the war." With those words on January 30, I Michael Heyman the Smithsonian Institution's newly appointed secretary, announced the museum's unconditional surrender to a coalition of veterans groups and politicians on the exhibition of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima As a result, what the public will see when the exhibition opens in May is a celebration of the Enola Gay. This cave-in is a blot on the Smithsonian's intellectual mission and a sad commentary on our collective inability as a nation to face our history. Our national museum has renounced the opportunity to educate millions of citizens on a seminal event of the twentieth century, one that symbolizes the end of World War II and the beginning of the cold war.
Early last year, the curators at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum had produced a preliminary script for a 10,000 square-foot exhibit centered on the atomic bomber. The script more or less fairly reflected a broad range of scholarship on President Truman's decision to use the bomb. It made it clear that "to this day, controversy has raged about whether dropping this weapon on Japan was necessary to end the war quickly."
Last spring the Air Force Association, under the pretense of providing friendly advice, obtained a copy of the script. Selective quotes from the 600-page document were released to the media. Taken out of context, the words made it appear that the United States would be depicted as waging a racist war of vengeance.
The real objection of the veterans organizations was to any discussion of the history behind the Enola Gay, which would raise awkward questions about the nature of the bomber's mission: the killing of more than 140,000 old men, women and children in the last days of a war that was already ending. From that moment, the goal of the veterans and their allies on Capitol Hill became censorship.
Faced with this pressure the Air and Space Museum's director, Martin Harwit, allowed the veterans to edit the script line by line. Any quotes from archival documents that even hinted Truman had alternatives to the bomb-and that he and his advisors knew it-were stricken. Ironically, this meant censoring such hallowed figures as Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, Adm. William Leahy, Gen. George Marshall and Harry Truman himself.
By last November, Harwit thought he had a script agreeable to the veterans. At that point, however, more than eighty historians from around the country signed a letter protesting what they called "historical cleansing." A delegation of these historians met with Harwit and impressed upon him that the censored script not only was unbalanced but contained out right fabrications, such as the wildly inflated U.S. casualty estimates reportedly given to president Truman. Barton Bernstein of Stanford University asked, "We have our documents. Where are yours to support these figures?" Harwit responded that the script probably would not undergo any further revisions. Then in mid-January, in response to Bernstein's citation of evidence in Admiral Leahy's diary, Harwit did the right thing. He wrote the American Legion that he felt compelled to lower the disputed casualty estimate from a quarter million to 63,000.
This revision cut out the heart of the vets' emotional justification for the use of the atomic bomb-that it had saved hundreds of thousands of American lives. The veterans responded by calling for Harwit's resignation and the cancellation of the script. Their allies on Capitol Hill weighed in with threats to cut the Smithsonian's budget and hold Congressional hearings. As liberal politicians remained silent, the fate of the exhibit rested entirely in Heyman's hands. He capitulated to the forces of patriotically correct history and gave the veterans what they wanted: a display of the airplane (and its crew) with no discussion of its deadly mission.
An ad hoc group, the Historians' Committee for Open Debate on Hiroshima, is issuing a call for a national teach-in to educate Americans on the full range of the scholarly debate regarding the atomic bombings. Scholars and historians across the country should urge their universities to schedule symposiums, debates and teach-ins to coincide with the May unveiling of the Enola Gay.[For further information, contact Laura Yamhure, Historians' Committee for Open Debate on Hiroshima, 1914 Biltmore Street N.W., Washington DC 20009; (202) 328-9659; fax (202) 332-4919.]
Kai Bird , a Nation contributing editor, is the author of The Chairman: John J. McCloy, the Making of the American Establishment (Simon and Schuster).