Under intense political pressure, the director of the Air and Space Museum, Martin Harwit, lost his job.Īmong the very first lines of the original exhibit was the utterly factual observation that, "To this day, controversy has raged about whether dropping this weapon on Japan was necessary to end the war quickly." It was this notion that the Air Force Association and the guardians of patriotically correct history wished to expunge from the museum. The proposed exhibit, reflecting 50 years of rich archival evidence, was initially rewritten line-by-line and-when that did not satisfy the critics-was finally scrapped altogether. America's history, these critics cried, was being hijacked by a cabal of revisionist historians of dubious patriotism. The battleground was the Air and Space Museum, which was preparing to mount a massive exhibit on the Enola Gay's mission and the end of World War II. And the result is not just of interest to historians but to anyone worried about the dumbing down of American public life.Ī year ago, angry veterans-egged on by the leaders of the Air Force Association and a bevy of pundits and editorialists-succeeded in gaining control of the public presentation of the long-runnning debate over the necessity and the morality of using the atomic bomb.
One year after the controversy over the Smithsonian's Hiroshima exhibit, the dismantled plane has become not just the symbol of the atomic bomb but of the sorry fact that America was more tolerant of honest, intelligent debate about Hiroshima in the 1940s than it is today. The Enola Gay now lies in pieces-a fuselage, a tail, a piece of the wing, an empty bomb-bay-on the ground floor of the Air & Space Museum.