MoQers generally,
Attached is a rather long article from the September 1995 Air Force
Magazine. I thought that it was worthwhile forwarding to you because this
is a world wide forum and I dislike seeing misguided attempts to use
Pirsig's MoQ to morally discredit the US. If some of us can twist the facts
to make US actions immoral according to the MoQ then further such twistings
may be accepted. I contend that the dropping of the atomic bomb on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki was moral according to the terms of Pirsig's MoQ.
Admittedly it was most decidedly not to be desired but given the
circumstances it was the most moral practical choice. Of course if we agree
with Bill's suggestion to just back off and forgive then another course is
open to us.
The Activists and the Enola Gay
The Smithsonian has cleaned up its act, but the cause lives on with those
who claim we bamboozled the press, the Congress, and the public.
By John T. Correll, Editor in Chief
Air Force Magazine - September 1995, Pg. 18
------------------------------------------------------------------------
EVERY morning, a long line forms at the National Air and Space Museum in
Washington, D.C., to see the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic
bomb on Hiroshima fifty years ago. The exhibit opened June 28, and by the
end of July, 97,525 people had gone through it. More than ninety percent of
the comment cards turned in by visitors expressed favorable reaction.
This program -- as all the world must know by now -- is not the one the
curators originally had in mind. The previous exhibit, "The Last Act: The
Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II," was canceled when it became an
intolerable political and financial liability for the Smithsonian
Institution,of which the Air and Space Museum is a part.
It was the Air Force Association that exposed the museum's plan to use the
Enola Gay as a prop in a politically rigged program about the atomic bomb.
[See "War Stories at Air and Space," Air Force Magazine, April 1994.] Other
veterans' groups, Congress, and the news media picked up the issue and
scrutiny became intense. More than 30,000 letters poured in to the
Smithsonian, and patrons and subscribers quit in droves.
The Smithsonian canceled the ill-fated exhibit last January in favor of a
straightforward exhibit that would display the Enola Gay without political
trappings. The fire never really went out, though, and Dr. Martin O.
Harwit, director of the museum, resigned May 2, saying that nothing less
would satisfy the critics.
Veterans' organizations have praised the Enola Gay exhibition now running
at the Air and Space Museum, but those who backed the original exhibit plan
are now up in arms.
The Activists' Counterattack
Revisionist scholars, peace activists, writers, and others are pressing
their counterattack in books, journals, and statements to news media as
well as through various public programs and platforms.
* Gar Alperovitz is a founding father of revisionist theory about the
atomic bomb. In 1965, he said the evidence "strongly suggests" that "the
bombs were used primarily to demonstrate to the Russians the enormous power
America would have in its possession during subsequent negotiations." He is
a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland and the author of
The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, published in July 1995.
* Kai Bird is a former journalist who now describes himself as a historian.
He is co-chairman of the Historians' Committee for Open Debate on Hiroshima
and the author of The Chairman: John J. McCloy, The Making of the American
Establishment (1992). He says the Smithsonian caved in to veterans and
politicians and put on an exhibit that "dishonors the very principles of
free speech and free inquiry."
* Martin J. Sherwin is a professor of history at Dartmouth and Tufts and
co-chairman of the Historians' Committee for Open Debate on Hiroshima. He
is the author of A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance
(1976). In February 1994, in his capacity as an advisor to the Air and
Space Museum on the Enola Gay exhibit, he complained that the crew had
shown "no remorse" for the mission.
* Barton Bernstein is a professor of history at Stanford University. The
author note with one of his recently published essays identifies him as "a
leading revisionist scholar." He is less absolute than his colleagues on
some issues. He now holds, for example, that use of the atomic bomb was
"probably unnecessary." (Others in the revisionist lineup say it was
absolutely unnecessary.) His major theme is that US casualty estimates for
an invasion of Japan in 1945 were grossly exaggerated. In fact, it was
Professor Bernstein who -- on the basis of his reinterpretation of a June
18, 1945, entry in the diary of Adm. William D. Leahy, the President's
Chief of Staff -- persuaded Air and Space Museum Director Harwit to mark
the US casualty estimate down to 63,000. That led to congressional and
public outrage and eventually to Dr. Harwit's resignation.
* Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell are the authors of Hiroshima in
America: Fifty Years of Denial, which the publisher describes as "not just
historical analysis" but also "a landmark psychological study." According
to them, "after ordering the use of two atomic bombs, Truman spent the rest
of his life in the throes of unrealized guilt." He also "called forth is
'decisiveness' to block out remorseful reflection of any kind, in that way
suppressing conscious feelings of self condemnation." Dr. Lifton is a
former Air Force psychiatrist. Mr. Mitchell formerly served as executive
director of the Center on Violence and Human Survival.
* Stanley Goldberg is a "historian of science." He resigned in protest from
the Enola Gay exhibit advisory board because "the museum administration had
exposed the curators to the direct pressure of organizations such as the
Air Force Association and the American Legion." He punctuates his argument
with epithets like "thought control" and "McCarthyism."
ABC Chimes In
There are some differences of position among the revisionists, but the
central ideas of the movement are that (1) Japan was on the verge of
surrender;(2) the war would have been over soon without the atomic bomb;
(3) the US prolonged the war by insisting on unconditional surrender; (4)
the US dropped the bomb mainly to impress the Russians; (5) the decision
was driven by domestic political considerations; and (6) even if we had to
invade Japan, the casualties would not have been that severe.
The revisionists -- who had generally fared poorly in news media comment on
the Enola Gay controversy -- gained some prime-time support July 27 with a
Peter Jennings special, "Hiroshima: Why the Bomb Was Dropped," on ABC
television. It was a set piece of the revisionist line.
As the Washington Post review said, Mr. Jennings was led along by "a
largely stacked deck of revisionist historians" to the assessment of
President Harry Truman "as an intellectual and moral dwarf, propelled by
ambitious militarists and politicians to a nuclear slaughter of the
innocents."
Mr. Jennings said it was "unfortunate" that veterans' groups had "bullied"
the curators of the original Enola Gay exhibit. He declined to use the
material furnished to him and his producers by the Air Force Association.
According to Gar Alperovitz's publisher, Knopf, his new book, The Decision
to Use the Atomic Bomb, was the basis for the Jennings special.
Targeting AFA
With the decision past on how the Air and Space Museum will exhibit the
Enola Gay, the activists, scholars, and others turned their attention to
the record of how the controversy arose and unfolded. Attention soon
centered on the Air Force Association, which was the first organization to
tackle the museum's original exhibit plan and which produced the widely
cited content analyses of the exhibition scripts. The Air Force Association
was also the source of a collection of documents that virtually all
participants in the controversy, including the revisionists, draw upon.
In American Journalism Review, Tony Capaccio and Uday Mohan say that it was
"an aggressive public relations campaign by the Air Force Association" that
"doomed the museum's plans for a full-fledged exhibit on the atomic bomb."
In "Blown Away" in Washingtonian Magazine, Tom Allen and Norman Polmar say
that the editor of Air Force Magazine was "Martin Harwit's chief nemesis in
the Enola Gay battle." Dr. Harwit told them that "The Air Force Association
must have had an incredibly well-oiled public relations machine."
In Museum News, Professor Mike Wallace of John Jay College of Criminal
Justice says the Air and Space Museum "never quite realized who and what it
was up against" in the Air Force Association, which Professor Wallace
depicts as incredibly powerful and oppressive.
Professor Martin J. Sherwin told reporters that the attack on the
exhibition was "orchestrated" by Air Force Magazine and that "The Air Force
Association's agenda, in my view, was not simply to tweak an exhibit into
getting the story straight. It was a blatant and ultimately successful
attempt at getting Martin Harwit fired and regain [sic] control of Air and
Space for Air Force-friendly,noncritical mis-exhibits."
The Allegedly Bamboozled
The notion that AFA somehow managed to bamboozle the press, the Congress,
and the American public is hardly credible. It is even less credible that,
as suggested by some, we gulled the liberally inclined Washington Post. As
museum officials knew -- and as bamboozle theorists ought to know -- the
Post got some documents and analysis from AFA, but its reporters acquired
more materials on their own and spent months digging into the issue.
What rankled the revisionists is that the Post said in a January 1995
editorial that early drafts of the Enola Gay script were "incredibly
propagandistic and intellectually shabby" and had "a tendentiously
antinuclear and anti-American tone." The Post also said the curators had
repeatedly made things worse by their "misplaced condescension and refusal
to see the criticisms of bias as anything but the carping of the
insufficiently sophisticated."
In February, another Post editorial added: "It is important to be clear
about what happened at the Smithsonian. It is not, as some have it, that
benighted advocates of a special-interest or right-wing point of view
brought political power to bear to crush and distort the historical truth.
Quite the contrary. Narrow-minded representatives of a special-interest and
revisionist point of view attempted to use their inside track to
appropriate and hollow out a historical event that large numbers of
Americans alive at that time and engaged in the war had witnessed and
understood in a very different -- and authentic -- way."
In similar fashion, one congressman's statement contains an answer to
whether he bought a pig in a poke. In September 1994, Rep. Tom Lewis
(R-Fla.) said he learned of the controversy when a constituent wrote to
complain. "I obtained a copy of the exhibit's script to judge it for
myself," Representative Lewis said. "I did not think it could be as slanted
as the letter described. I was wrong."
In Hiroshima in America, Lifton and Mitchell say that "reporters rarely
took the trouble to examine one of the widely available scripts to
determine if the veterans' complaints were valid. Instead, they accepted at
face value the Air Force Association's interpretation -- including such
false assertions that the script did not mention Japanese brutality."
That account contains several curiosities. The source from which the script
was "widely available" was the Air Force Association, which distributed
hundreds of copies, many of them to reporters, whose follow-up questions
indicated that they had, indeed, read the scripts they received. The "false
assertion" line does not square with the facts. As Air Force Magazine's
first report said, the exhibit script "acknowledges Japan's 'naked
aggression and extreme brutality' that began in the 1930." Those
references, however, were slight. Even after museum officials acknowledged
among themselves that the exhibit was imbalanced and "that much of the
criticism that has been levied against us is understandable," the
exhibition plan said little about the events leading up to the mission of
the Enola Gay. A revised script allocated less than one page of text -- out
of 295 total text pages -- and only eight visual images (out of hundreds)
to any mention of Japanese military activity prior to 1945.
"History vs. Nostalgia"
At the press conference before the official opening of the Enola Gay
exhibit, Smithsonian Secretary Dr. I. Michael Heyman said, "I have
concluded that we made a basic error in attempting to couple a historical
treatment of the use of atomic bombs with the fiftieth anniversary
commemoration of the end of the war." He had said the same thing months
earlier when he canceled the "Last Act" exhibit.
AFA has repeatedly said this "history vs. nostalgia" theory is wrong. As
AFA National President R. E. Smith said at a Senate hearing in May, "The
problem was not the coupling of history with commemoration. It was that the
history had been given a countercultural spin. The problem was not that the
exhibition was analytical. The problem was that the analysis was
distorted."
Revisionists take the imputed history vs. nostalgia split even further and
say that the traditional or "commemorative" version -- that use of the
atomic bomb was a military action, taken to end the war and save lives --
is wrong. Gar Alperovitz, for example, argues that a "new consensus" has
developed among historians and that it supports the Air and Space Museum's
initial approach, which Dr. Alperovitz describes as "balanced."
The existence of any such "new consensus," however, is disputed by other
scholars, notably Professor Robert P. Newman of the University of lowa,
author of Truman and the Hiroshima Cult. Professor Newman says, "The
intellectual idea to which Hiroshima cultists are devoted is that since
Japan was about to surrender when the bombs were dropped, the slaughter of
innocents at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not motivated by military reasons.
It was instead motivated primarily by the desire to intimidate the Russians
(so-called atomic diplomacy),by racism (we did not drop the bomb on
Germany), by the desire of Robert Oppenheimer and company to experiment
with a new toy, by the fear of Secretary of War Henry Stimson and others
that Congress would investigate if their $ 2 billion expenditure was found
not useful, or by the sheer unthinking momentum of a bureaucratic
juggernaut (Manhattan project)." Professor Newman's book summarizes
mainstream scholarly evidence and shoots down the articles of revisionist
faith, one by one, with well-documented rebuttal.
Also in disagreement with the revisionists is Robert James Maddox,
professor of American history at Pennsylvania State University. He wrote
"Why We Had to Drop the Atomic Bomb" in the May-June 1995 issue of American
Heritage. He was one of the few nonrevisionists interviewed for the Peter
Jennings special, but he says ABC misrepresented his views and ignored
information he supplied. He called the show "the worst piece of garbage
I've seen."
The Peace Activists Enter
Peace groups first entered the exhibition fray in the fall of 1994 when the
original plan was rapidly coming unstuck. At his installation on September
19, I. Michael Heyman, new secretary of the Smithsonian, acknowledged that
the Enola Gay exhibit plan had been "deficient" and "out of balance." The
Senate unanimously passed a resolution September 23 calling on the National
Air and Space Museum to modify its "revisionist and offensive" exhibition
plan.
According to Philip Nobile in Judgement at the Smithsonian, a book
sympathetic to the curators, Dr. Tom D. Crouch, chairman of the museum's
Aeronautics Department and a principal in the Enola Gay controversy, sought
support from Father John Dear, a "peace Jesuit" who had hammered an F-15
fighter in a disarmament demonstration at a base in North Carolina. "You
have no idea of the forces opposing this exhibit, not in your wildest
dreams -- jobs are at stake, the Smithsonian is at stake," Dr. Crouch said.
Father Dear says that "Crouch urged me to organize the media and get to
Harwit, who he felt was being manipulated." Father Dear and "some
colleagues from the peace community" met with Dr. Harwit September 20. He
quotes Dr. Harwit as sayling, "Where have you been? You're too late." In
October, representatives of seventeen peace organizations -- with Father
Dear acting as spokesman -- called on the Smithsonian to renew the focus of
the exhibition on the suffering caused by the bombs.
On November 16, 1994, a group of forty-eight "historians and scholars"
delivered a letter of protest to Smithsonian Secretary Heyman demanding
that the imbalances and biases be restored. The scholars charged that by
giving in to change demanded by "special interest groups," the Smithsonian
had subjected the exhibition to "historical cleansing."
Among those signing was Noam Chomsky, a professor of linguistics at MIT. In
subsequent discourse, Professor Chomsky dismissed the Japanese attacks on
Pearl Harbor and the Philippines in December 1941 as no more than "bombing
military bases in two US colonies that had been stolen from their
inhabitants." These and other offenses by Japan "rank so low in the scale
of those that we have regularly committed, before and since, that no honest
person could take them very seriously as a justification for invasion [of
Japan in 1945]."
According to press accounts, a group of "peace and antinuclear activists"
had a "cordial but ultimately disappointing two-hour meeting" with Air and
Space Museum officials December 15, After January, when the Smithsonian
canceled the "Last Act," the activists moved to a different strategy.
The Open Debate
By March 1995, the group of forty-eight "historians and scholars" who
delivered their protest letter to the Smithsonian in November had
reconstituted itself as the "Historians' Committee for Open Debate on
Hiroshima" with Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird as co-chairmen.
The members called upon "our colleagues at colleges and universities across
the country to participate in a 'National Teach-In on Hiroshima,' both to
protest the Smithsonian's surrender to political censorship and to educate
Americans on the full range of scholarly debate regarding the atomic
bombings on Japan fifty years ago." Among the most ambitious programs was
staged at American University in Washington, D.C., which displayed, in
cooperation with the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, some of the artifacts
originally planned for the Enola Gay exhibition at the National Air and
Space Museum.
The American University program, "Constructing a Peaceful World: Beyond
Hiroshima and Nagasaki," concentrated on events after the bomb was dropped
and looked ahead to the nuclear arms race. The exhibit, which ran for most
of July, was held in conjunction with a course that included a two-week
study tour of Japan. The Japanese contributed more than half of the $
15,000 tour scholarship fund. The exhibit had twentyseven artifacts from
the Hiroshima Museum. Among them was a school child's lunch box with
charred remains of rice, barley, soybeans, and strips of radish. Between
July 8 and July 20, just over 1,000 persons had been through the exhibit.
The academic director of the program was Dr. Peter Kuznick, an associate
professor of history and one of the forty-eight signatories to the
"historians and scholars" petition last year. Professor Kuznick told the
Washington Post that the program dealt only with the aftermath of the bomb
because "space precluded" the inclusion of material about Japanese
aggression and atrocities and the reasons why the United States used the
bomb. In fact, when AFA Communications Director Steve Aubin and I saw the
program on July 21, there was an abundance of unused space in the exhibit
area.
Myths About What We Said
Judging from their published comments, few of the scholars throwing
brickbats at AFA and Air Force Magazine bothered to read what we actually
said. A number of myths are therefore taking root as assumptions pass from
one scholar to the next in the course of their research.
* The sudden ambush. It is said, for example, that we jumped prematurely on
a raw, first draft of the Enola Gay exhibition plan and that the curators
would have fixed it themselves if we had let them alone. The fact is that
the script we exposed was the fourth formal planning document, not the
first. It flowed directly from three concept papers that went before and
picked up the worst features of those earlier plans. AFA representatives
had tried for months to reason with museum officials, but they showed no
inclination to change. As the documentary record shows, they continued to
resist change after publication of the AFA reports.
* "Historical cleansing." It seems important for some revisionists to
believe that AFA and military veterans insist on an expurgated version of
history. None of them has yet explained how it is that my first report on
the atomic bomb controversy, "The Decision That Launched the Enola Gay, "
in Air Force Magazine for April 1994, discussed at length the very issues
we are accused of "cleansing away" -- ambiguity about the casualty
estimates and the belief by Army Air Forces Gens. H. H. Arnold and Curtis
E. LeMay that the war could be won by conventional bombing (albeit with
horrendous casualties). Many of the "historical cleansing" theorists
acknowledge having in their possession a longer, fully annotated version of
that report which documents even earlier Air Force Magazine coverage of
this information.
* "Taken out of context." This is the same complaint that Dr. Harwit made
in a letter to the Washington Times in March 1994. He said that AFA's
assessment of balance in the exhibit was inaccurate because "the exhibition
describes the 'naked brutality' of Japanese forces in concrete terms,
calling attention to the rape of Nanking, the treatment of POWs, the use of
Chinese and Koreans as slave laborers, and the conduct of biological and
chemical experiments on human victims."
It was that letter that led AFA on April 4, 1994, to deliver a copy of the
559-page script to the newspaper with an invitation to "judge for
yourself." All of the vaunted context cited by Dr. Harwit was contained on
just three of the 302 text pages in the initial script, compared to
seventy-nine text pages on Japanese casualties and suffering. The Air Force
Association thereafter provided copies of the script to other reporters and
interested organizations -- and would have copied and circulated subsequent
Enola Gay script revisions had not the Air and Space Museum copyrighted
these products to keep us from doing so. For AFA and Air Force Magazine,
the critical issues were balance and context, and the heart of our
"conspiracy" was to make the full record open to all who wanted to examine
it.
War Crimes
Among the most strident in his denunciation of AFA and in his defense of
the curators of the original exhibit is Philip Nobile, who bills his book,
Judgment at the Smithsonian, as containing "the uncensored script of the
Smithsonian's 50th anniversary exhibit of the Enola Gay. "
The press release promoting this book depicts Mr. Nobile as having blown
the lid off a cover-up after he "obtained a rare copy of the 300-page
document." A close reading of the "acknowledgements" section of the book
reveals that Mr. Nobile obtained his "rare copy" from the Air Force
Association, which made hundreds of copies available to reporters, members
of Congress, and veterans' organizations.
Furthermore, the document that Mr. Nobile received from AFA was not 300
pages but 559. Mr. Nobile reprints the intended wall label text but leaves
out the visual elements. Mr. Nobile was aware, certainly, that much of
AFA's criticism focused on the imbalance in the visual content. As my
colleague Mr. Aubin points out, ignoring the graphic parts of an exhibition
that is primarily visual is like watching television without looking at the
picture. Mr. Nobile's publisher says that he addresses the moral issues as
"a trained theologian with a pontifical degree." He hits a low point in the
book with a "mock war crimes trial of Harry Truman." According to the press
release, "Nobile's fictional cross-examination of Truman leaves little
doubt about the defendant's guilt."
It seems unlikely that many of the revisionist historians and scholars
would endorse this approach, but Barton Bernstein contributed a 129-page
"afterword" to the Nobile book, which conveys an impression of sorts simply
by being there. Colman McCarthy, a columnist for the Washington Post,
included Nobile's Judgment at the Smithsonian on a short list of "books of
reliable scholarship and balanced analysis" to counteract the spin he
attributed to "the easily peeved military lobby."
Fifty years after the atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the
fires of controversy burn on.
Clark writes:
Note the mention of Nobile's "Judgement at the Smithsonian" toward the
end of this article.
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