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. Taken out of context, the words made it appear that the United States would be depicted as waging a racist war of vengeance. Selective quotes from the 600-page document were released to the media. Last spring the Air Force Association, under the pretense of providing friendly advice, obtained a copy of the script. 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." The script more or less fairly reflected a broad range of scholarship on President Truman's decision to use the bomb. 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.Įarly 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. 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.
"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 HiroshimaĪs a result, what the public will see when the exhibition opens in May is a celebration of the Enola Gay.