When was the enola gay exhibit scrapped

Mitchell formerly served as executive director of the Center on Violence and Human Survival. In fact, it was Professor Bernstein who — on the basis of his reinterpretation of a June 18, , entry in the diary of Adm. William D. That led to congressional and public outrage and eventually to Dr.

Lifton is a former Air Force psychiatrist. The centrepiece of the exhibit was supposed to be the restored Enola Gay, the airplane which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It was a set piece of the revisionist line. 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.

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. Officials say they'll downgrade the Enola Gay project from an exhibit to a display - devoid of any commentary about the impact or long-term effects of the A-bomb mission on Japan.

The problem was that the analysis was distorted. As the Washington Post review said, Mr. He declined to use the material furnished to him and his producers by the Air Force Association. This program — as all the world must know by now — is not the one the curators originally had in mind.

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 museum, which serves as trustee of the nation’s heritage, had planned to use the Enola Gay--the B Superfortress that carried the first atomic bomb--as the central exhibit in a display.

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. More than 30, letters poured in to the Smithsonian, and patrons and subscribers quit in droves.

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.

The exhibit opened June 28, and by the end of July, 97, people had gone through it. But the Smithsonian's board, yielding to the pressure, decided to all but scrap the Enola Gay exhibit, eliminating all of the 10,square-foot display except for the plane's restored fuselage. Quite the contrary.

His major theme is that US casualty estimates for an invasion of Japan in were grossly exaggerated. The exhibit generated an outcry amongst veterans, members of Congress, and others who felt that it depicted the Japanese as victims in World War II and questioned the morality behind the decision to drop the atomic.

More than ninety percent of the comment cards turned in by visitors expressed favorable reaction. A revised script allocated less than one page of text — out of total text pages — and only eight visual images out of hundreds to any mention of Japanese military activity prior to It was that the history had been given a countercultural spin.

Professor Martin J. 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 problem was not that the exhibition was analytical. 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.

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. I was wrong. In September , Rep. Tom Lewis R-Fla. It is even less credible that, as suggested by some, we gulled the liberally inclined Washington Post.