Mike Wallace examines the AFA’s role in getting the Enola Gay exhibit cancelled, in the larger context of the culture wars worsening from the 1960s onward. The AFA was instrumental in protesting the exhibit, with John T. Correll, editor of Air Force Magazine, running a sustained campaign in print against NASM. As the Enola Gay debate erupted in the public eye, many publications simply copied bits from Correll’s writings. While many people at the time, including museum director Martin Harwit, considered the AFA a nonprofit organization of air force veterans, the organization has vested interests. In fact, the AFA is “the air wing of what Dwight D. Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex.” It was set up in 1946 to lobby for the air force and to fight cutbacks in the aviation budget in particular. Needless to say, this suggested ties with manufacturers of warplanes. Thus, any exhibition that made viewers pause to consider the ethical implications of using bomber aircraft was bound to anger the members of the AFA.

As the Cold War—and then the Vietnam War—ended, lobbying for nuclear weapons and military aircraft lost its steam. The AFA now turned its attention to fighting the enemy within: liberals, whom they assumed were pressing for cutbacks in the defense budget. With the advent of the 1970s, fewer young people were choosing the armed forces as a career. For Correll, this was due to anti-patriotic sentiments being roused by negative portrayals of American history in the news and the movies. Thus, the AFA were already alarmed at the changing landscape of American culture.

The Enola Gay exhibit was always going to be under the AFA’s scrutiny, because the aircraft represented “arguably the one instance in which strategic bombing, not an army invasion or a navy blockade, triumphantly ended a major war.” The AFA wanted the exhibit of such an aircraft to be nothing short of celebratory. Harwit’s proposed exhibit, which wanted to present the aircraft in its historical and sociological context, seemed to the AFA a virtual war cry against American values. Meanwhile, a backlash against so-called “revisionism” of history had been growing through the 1980s and 1990s. Critics like conservative political commentator Rush Limbaugh lamented that liberal voices had taken over the media and academia, dismantling traditional American values. No longer could people take pride in the American spirit. Instead, they were being taught that white America was built through repression of Black Americans, Native Americans, and women. What Limbaugh was critiquing was the move to make American history more inclusive. Scholars increasingly wanted to teach history from the perspective of not just the white settlers of America, but also its minorities. Obviously, teaching history from different perspectives would require students to reexamine the myth of American supremacy and rightness.

To stem the supposed takeover of institutions by scholars and liberals, the traditional view of America had to be reiterated to common Americans. Republican Newton (Newt) Leroy Gingrich started telecasting a college course called “Renewing American Civilization” to more than 130 classrooms across the country and to the ten million subscribers to National Empowerment Television. Though Gingrich was a professor of history, his specialty was European and not American history. His course analyzed little of America’s past, but instead espoused the doctrine of American exceptionalism, the idea that America is special in many ways. He also constructed a static, ideal past to which one needed to return. The years since 1960—significantly, the years of the Women’s Liberation and the Civil Rights movements—had disconnected the links to this perfect past.

Right around the Enola Gay exhibit debacle, the culture wars...