Chapter 1: “Anatomy of a Controversy” by Edward T. Linenthal Summary
Last Updated November 3, 2023.
Historian Edward T. Linenthal dissects the development—and subsequent failure—of the Enola Gay exhibit of 1995. In 1993, Martin Harwit, the director of the National Air and Space Museum (NASM) at the Smithsonian, invited Linenthal to serve on an advisory committee for the upcoming exhibit. Harwit wanted to display the Enola Gay bomber in a historical context, instead of merely commemorating it. Thus, the aircraft would be shown along with the effects of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While Linenthal expected some public opposition to the nuanced portrayal of the B-29 battleship (the Enola Gay is a B-29 bomber, a giant aircraft known as a Superfortress), he “felt remarkably sanguine about the problems and issues that might arise.” In retrospect, the entire advisory committee was taken off-guard by the virulent opposition to the exhibit. The exhibit’s cancellation can be attributed to the naivete of the advisory panel as well as the mixed messages sent out by Harwit’s team.
Though the sentiment in the 1980s and 1990s was different, the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had not been universally lauded in 1945; in fact, the press of the time was muted in its celebration of the event. The returning Enola Gay was seen as controversial, a symbol of the destructive potential of nuclear power. The aircraft was shifted from one airport facility to another, its disassembled components ultimately landing in NASM’s Maryland storage facility. Over the 1970s and early 80s, senators began to press for the restoration of the aircraft, labeling its low-key location in Maryland “akin to mothballing the Statue of Liberty or the first space capsule that landed on the moon.”
Given the criticism, the Smithsonian began to restore the aircraft in the 1980s. By 1988, museum employees, including Harwit and Smithsonian Secretary Robert McCormick Adams, began considering showing the Enola Gay in the context of the devastation of strategic bombing, the wartime practice of air raids on civilian targets in order to achieve quick results. As the idea of a history museum itself evolved from a celebratory “temple” to a “forum” of ideas, museum exhibits had become more thoughtful than ever before. In November 1991, the Smithsonian exhibit “Legend, Memory, and the Great War in the Air,” presented aircraft from World War I in the context of the devastation they caused. The National Museum of American Art had held an exhibition called “The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920” which questioned the myth of the American frontier and addressed the atrocities committed by settlers against Indigenous Americans.
In 1993, it was decided that historian Michael Neufeld—a curator at NASM—ensure the Enola Gay exhibit wasn’t celebratory. The viewer would see a brief text and artifacts and photos from the Hiroshima bombing before coming to the Enola Gay, surrounded by “giant black and white photographs of Hiroshima after the attack.” The exhibit’s title would be “The Crossroads: The End of World War II, the Atomic Bomb, and the Origins of the Cold War.” But, from the very moment news of the Enola Gay exhibit broke, protests arose, especially from B-29 veterans, that the fuselage of the Enola Gay should be displayed neutrally, without any commentary. But as museum critic Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett notes, every museum exhibit is commentary, even when supposedly neutral. What conservative critics were protesting, therefore, was the attempt to forge a new narrative, one that gave voice to minorities and challenged the monolithic theme of American greatness.
The Enola Gay script was completed in January 1994 and was meant to take the viewer through the journey of the allied...
(This entire section contains 1386 words.)
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forces from the liberation of Dacahu in Europe to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Its opening section recognized Japan’s brutalities against its neighbors and Allied forces, including the infamous Nanking massacre, in which the Japanese Imperial Army slaughtered and raped hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians over six weeks in 1937. The second section—titled “The Decision to Drop the Bomb”—recounted the history of the building of the bomb, a project which cost billions of dollars. The section also explored factors contributing to the decision to use atomic bombs on Japan, including the need to intimidate Russia, a growing threat to the United States. This section particularly bothered critics, since it suggested the decision to drop the bomb was questionable.
The third section—“Delivering the Bomb”—was the longest. In this section, visitors would see the Enola Gay and the casing from a uranium atomic bomb. The script covered the creation of the B-29, the rationale behind using it in the war, and the role of thirty-year-old Colonel Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay. While this section celebrated the bravery of soldiers, “the fourth section, ‘Ground Zero,’ was meant to jar visitors out of the cockpits of American B-29s and into the horror of the bombing itself.” It would exhibit real artifacts that represented the devastation of the war, including some which were to prove the most controversial: the lunch box of a schoolgirl who was never found and a fused rosary. The final and shortest section, “The Legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” discussed the role of the bombings in the surrender of Japan, the beginning of the Cold War, and the dangers of a nuclear arms race. For the artifacts to be used in Section Four, Harwit and Tom Crouch, chairman of NASM’s aeronautics division, visited Japan to borrow iconic items from Japanese museums. They met the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and agreed to share the script of the exhibit with them. Thus, Harwit and Crouch felt they had informed all involved constituencies about the plan for the exhibit.
However, back home in the United States, opposition was brewing, some from within the museum itself. Adams told Harwit the exhibit should focus on commemorating the victory of World War II, rather than on the dangers of the atomic bomb. But the biggest attack came from the influential Air Force Association (AFA), an organization of veterans with tie-ins with the military aviation lobby. In 1993, vitriolic editorials began appearing in the AFA journal Air Force Magazine that the Enola Gay script not only treated Japan and the United States as equal aggressors, but also presented the Japanese as the sole victims of the war. Though Harwit recognized that the AFA were serious opponents, he still saw them as a fringe group with an extremist viewpoint.
As clamor grew for changing the script, Harwit continued to believe it could both satisfy the veterans’ groups and question the use of atomic weapons. Crouch, on the other hand, believed the exhibit could not simultaneously make veterans feel good and “lead our visitors to think about the consequences of the atomic bombing of Japan.” Other historians on the advisory board felt the script was intellectually sound and should not be revised. In January 1994, the draft copies were sent to the AFA. The AFA publicly blasted the exhibition and lobbied considerable media support. Still believing the gap between the AFA and the original script could be bridged, Harwit agreed to revise the script in consultation with military historians and a group of air force veterans that came to be known as the Tiger Team. Based on their suggested revisions, Harwit and his advisers began rewriting the exhibit’s script. However, even after thirty of the Tiger Team’s forty-two suggested revisions had been incorporated, the AFA continued to lambast the script. Mainstream media outlets, including the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, fanned the flames, condemning the script without having read it in full or studying the long history of ambiguity around the atomic bomb.
Reeling under the onslaught, NASM continued to whittle down the script, until “the exhibit now had been subjected, in the words of one NASM curator, to ‘death by a thousand cuts.’ ” The truth was the AFA would never have been satisfied unless their vision was replicated. As the Republicans won the 1994 polls, historians on the committee—including Harwit—were pressured to resign. The actual exhibit ended up being an anticlimactic affair, displaying the fuselage of the Enola Gay and commemorating its crew, without any larger context. This was a loss of an opportunity to understand the complex story of the nuclear bomb and the perils of the atomic age.