Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)
Review:
Lesley Blume's “Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed
It to the World”
Lawrence Wittner
June 30, 2021
History News Network
In this crisply written, well-researched book,
Lesley Blume, a journalist and biographer, tells the fascinating story of the
background to John Hersey’s pathbreaking article “Hiroshima,” and of its
extraordinary impact upon the world.
In 1945, although only 30 years of age, Hersey
was a very prominent war correspondent for Time magazine—a
key part of publisher Henry Luce’s magazine empire—and living in the fast
lane. That year, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, A Bell
for Adano, which had already been adapted into a movie and a Broadway
play. Born the son of missionaries in China, Hersey had been educated at
upper class, elite institutions, including the Hotchkiss School, Yale, and
Cambridge. During the war, Hersey’s wife, Frances Ann, a former lover of
young Lieutenant John F. Kennedy, arranged for the three of them to get
together over dinner. Kennedy impressed Hersey with the story of how he
saved his surviving crew members after a Japanese destroyer rammed his boat,
PT-109. This led to a dramatic article by Hersey on the subject—one
rejected by the Luce publications but published by the New Yorker.
The article launched Kennedy on his political career and, as it turned out,
provided Hersey with the bridge to a new employer – the one that sent him on
his historic mission to Japan.
Blume reveals that, at the time of the U.S.
atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Hersey felt a sense of despair—not for the
bombing’s victims, but for the future of the world. He was even more
disturbed by the atomic bombing of Nagasaki only three days later, which he
considered a “totally criminal” action that led to tens of thousands of
unnecessary deaths.
Most Americans at the time did not share
Hersey’s misgivings about the atomic bombings. A Gallup poll taken on
August 8, 1945 found that 85 percent of American respondents expressed their
support for “using the new atomic bomb on Japanese cities.”
Blume shows very well how this approval of the
atomic bombing was enhanced by U.S. government officials and the very compliant
mass communications media. Working together, they celebrated the power of
the new American weapon that, supposedly, had brought the war to an end,
producing articles lauding the bombing mission and pictures of destroyed
buildings. What was omitted was the human devastation, the horror of what
the atomic bombing had done physically and psychologically to an almost
entirely civilian population—the flesh roasted off bodies, the eyeballs
melting, the terrible desperation of mothers digging with their hands through
the charred rubble for their dying children.
The strange new radiation sickness produced by
the bombing was either denied or explained away as of no consequence.
“Japanese reports of death from radioactive effects of atomic bombing are pure
propaganda,” General Leslie Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project, told
the New York Times. Later, when, it was no longer possible
to deny the existence of radiation sickness, Groves told a Congressional
committee that it was actually “a very pleasant way to die.”
When it came to handling the communications
media, U.S. government officials had some powerful tools at their
disposal. In Japan, General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander of
the U.S. occupation regime, saw to it that strict U.S. military censorship was
imposed on the Japanese press and other forms of publication, which were banned
from discussing the atomic bombing. As for foreign newspaper
correspondents (including Americans), they needed permission from the
occupation authorities to enter Japan, to travel within Japan, to remain in
Japan, and even to obtain food in Japan. American journalists were taken
on carefully controlled junkets to Hiroshima, after which they were told to
downplay any unpleasant details of what they had seen there.
In September 1945, U.S. newspaper and magazine
editors received a letter from the U.S. War Department, on behalf of President
Harry Truman, asking them to restrict information in their publications about
the atomic bomb. If they planned to do any publishing in this area of
concern, they were to submit the articles to the War Department for review.
Among the recipients of this warning were Harold
Ross, the founder and editor of the New Yorker, and William
Shawn, the deputy editor of that publication. The New Yorker,
originally founded as a humor magazine, was designed by Ross to cater to urban
sophisticates and covered the world of nightclubs and chorus girls. But,
with the advent of the Second World War, Ross decided to scrap the hijinks
flavor of the magazine and begin to publish some serious journalism.
As a result, Hersey began to gravitate into
the New Yorker’s orbit. Hersey was frustrated with his
job at Time magazine, which either rarely printed his
articles or rewrote them atrociously. At one point, he angrily told
publisher Henry Luce that there was as much truthful reporting in Time magazine
as in Pravda. In July 1945, Hersey finally quit his job
with Time. Then, late that fall, he sat down with
William Shawn of the New Yorker to discuss some ideas he had
for articles, one of them about Hiroshima.
Hersey had concluded that the mass media had
missed the real story of the Hiroshima bombing. And the result was that
the American people were becoming accustomed to the idea of a nuclear future,
with the atomic bomb as an acceptable weapon of war. Appalled by what he
had seen in the Second World War—from the firebombing of cities to the Nazi
concentration camps—Hersey was horrified by what he called “the depravity of
man,” which, he felt, rested upon the dehumanization of others. Against
this backdrop, Hersey and Shawn concluded that he should try to enter Japan and
report on what had really happened there.
Getting into Japan would not be easy. The
U.S. Occupation authorities exercised near-total control over who could enter
the stricken nation, keeping close tabs on all journalists who applied to do
so, including records on their whereabouts, their political views, and their
attitudes toward the occupation. Nearly every day, General MacArthur
received briefings about the current press corps, with summaries of their
articles. Furthermore, once admitted, journalists needed permission to
travel anywhere within the country, and were allotted only limited time for
these forays.
Even so, Hersey had a number of things going
for him. During the war, he was a very patriotic reporter. He had
written glowing profiles about rank-and-file U.S. soldiers, as well as a book (Men
on Bataan) that provided a flattering portrait of General MacArthur.
This fact certainly served Hersey well, for the general was a consummate
egotist. Apparently as a consequence, Hersey received authorization to
visit Japan.
En route there in the spring of 1946, Hersey
spent some time in China, where, on board a U.S. warship, he came down with the
flu. While convalescing, he read Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning
novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which tracked the different
lives of five people in Peru who were killed when a bridge upon which they
stood collapsed. Hersey and Shawn had already decided that he should tell
the story of the Hiroshima bombing from the victims’ point of view. But
Hersey now realized that Wilder’s book had given him a particularly poignant,
engrossing way of telling a complicated story. Practically everyone could
identify with a group of regular people going about their daily routines as
catastrophe suddenly struck them.
Hersey arrived in Tokyo on May 24, 1946, and
two days later, received permission to travel to Hiroshima, with his time in
that city limited to 14 days.
Entering Hiroshima, Hersey was stunned by the
damage he saw. In Blume’s words, there were “miles of jagged misery and three-dimensional
evidence that humans—after centuries of contriving increasingly efficient ways
to exterminate masses of other humans—had finally invented the means with which
to decimate their entire civilization.” Now there existed what one reporter
called “teeming jungles of dwelling places . . . in a welter of ashes and
rubble.” As residents attempted to clear the ground to build new homes,
they uncovered masses of bodies and severed limbs. A cleanup campaign in
one district of the city alone at about that time unearthed a thousand
corpses. Meanwhile, the city’s surviving population was starving, with
constant new deaths from burns, other dreadful wounds, and radiation poisoning.
Given the time limitations of his permit,
Hersey had to work fast. And he did, interviewing dozens of survivors,
although he eventually narrowed down his cast of characters to six of them.
Departing from Hiroshima’s nightmare of
destruction, Hersey returned to the United States to prepare the story that was
to run in the New Yorker to commemorate the atomic
bombing. He decided that the article would have to read like a
novel. “Journalism allows its readers to witness history,” he later
remarked. “Fiction gives readers the opportunity to live it.” His
goal was “to have the reader enter into the characters, become the characters,
and suffer with them.”
When Hersey produced a sprawling 30,000 word
draft, the New Yorker’s editors at first planned to publish it in
serialized form. But Shawn decided that running it this way wouldn’t do,
for the story would lose its pace and impact. Rather than have Hersey
reduce the article to a short report, Shawn had a daring idea. Why not
run the entire article in one issue of the magazine, with everything else—the
“Talk of the Town” pieces, the fiction, the other articles and profiles, and
the urbane cartoons—banished from the issue?
Ross, Shawn, and Hersey now sequestered
themselves in a small room at the New Yorker’s headquarters,
furiously editing Hersey’s massive article. Ross and Shawn decided to
keep the explosive forthcoming issue a top secret from the magazine’s
staff. Indeed, the staff were kept busy working on a “dummy” issue that
they thought would be going to press. Contributors to that issue were
baffled when they didn’t receive proofs for their articles and accompanying
artwork. Nor were the New Yorker’s advertisers told
what was about to happen. As Blume remarks: “The makers of
Chesterfield cigarettes, Perma-Lift brassieres, Lux toilet soap, and Old
Overholt rye whiskey would just have to find out along with everyone else in
the world that their ads would be run alongside Hersey’s grisly story of
nuclear apocalypse.”
However, things don’t always proceed as
smoothly as planned. On August 1, 1946, President Truman signed into law
the Atomic Energy Act, which established a “restricted” standard for “all data
concerning the manufacture or utilization of atomic weapons.” Anyone who
disseminated that data “with any reason to believe that such data” could be
used to harm the United States could face substantial fines and
imprisonment. Furthermore, if it could be proved that the individual
was attempting to “injure the United States,” he or she
could “be punished by death or imprisonment for life.”
In these new circumstances, what should Ross,
Shawn, and Hersey do? They could kill the story, water it down, or run it
and risk severe legal action against them. After agonizing over their
options, they decided to submit Hersey’s article to the War Department – and,
specifically, to General Groves – for clearance.
Why did they take that approach? Blume
speculates that the New Yorker team thought that Groves
might insist upon removing any technical information from the article while
leaving the account of the sufferings of the Japanese intact. After all,
Groves believed that the Japanese deserved what had happened to them, and could
not imagine that other Americans might disagree. Furthermore, the
article, by underscoring the effectiveness of the atomic bombing of Japan,
bolstered his case that the war had come to an end because of his weapon.
Finally, Groves was keenly committed to maintaining U.S. nuclear supremacy in
the world, and he believed that an article that led Americans to fear nuclear
attacks by other nations would foster support for a U.S. nuclear buildup.
The gamble paid off. Although Groves did
demand changes, these were minor and did not affect the accounts by the
survivors.
On August 29, 1946, copies of the “Hiroshima”
edition of the New Yorker arrived on newsstands and in
mailboxes across the United States, and it quickly created an enormous
sensation, particularly in the mass media. Editors from more than thirty
states applied to excerpt portions of the article, and newspapers from across
the nation ran front-page banner stories and urgent editorials about its
revelations. Correspondence from every region of the United States poured
into the New Yorker’s office. A large number of readers
expressed pity for the victims of the bombing. But an even greater number
expressed deep fear about what the advent of nuclear war meant for the survival
of the human race.
Of course, not all readers approved of Hersey’s
report on the atomic bombing. Some reacted by canceling their
subscriptions to the New Yorker. Others assailed the
article as antipatriotic, Communist propaganda, designed to undermine the
United States. Still others dismissed it as pro-Japanese propaganda or,
as one reader remarked, written “in very bad taste.”
Some newspapers denounced it. The New
York Daily News derided it as a stunt and “propaganda aimed at
persuading us to stop making atom bombs . . . and to give our technical bomb
secrets away . . . to Russia.” Not surprisingly, Henry Luce was
infuriated that his former star journalist had achieved such an enormous
success writing for a rival publication, and had Hersey’s portrait removed from
Time Inc.’s gallery of honor.
Despite the criticism, “Hiroshima” continued to
attract enormous attention in the mass media. The ABC Radio Network did a
reading of the lengthy article over four nights, with no acting, no music, no
special effects, and no commercials. “This chronicle of suffering and
destruction,” it announced, was being “broadcast as a warning that what
happened to the people of Hiroshima could next happen anywhere.” After
the broadcasts, the network’s telephone switchboards were swamped by callers,
and the program was judged to have received the highest rating of any public
interest broadcast that had ever occurred. The BBC also broadcast an
adaptation of “Hiroshima,” while some 500 U.S. radio stations reported on the
article in the days following its release.
In the United States, the Alfred Knopf
publishing house came out with the article in book form, which was quickly
promoted by the Book-of-the-Month Club as “destined to be the most widely read
book of our generation.” Ultimately, Hiroshima sold
millions of copies in nations around the world. By the late fall of 1946,
the rather modest and retiring Hersey, who had gone into hiding after the
article’s publication to avoid interviews, was rated as one of the “Ten
Outstanding Celebrities of 1946,” along with General Dwight Eisenhower and
singer Bing Crosby.
For U.S. government officials, reasonably
content with past public support for the atomic bombing and a nuclear-armed
future, Hersey’s success in reaching the public with his disturbing account of
nuclear war confronted them with a genuine challenge. For the most part,
U.S. officials recognized that they had what Blume calls “a serious
post-`Hiroshima’ image problem.”
Behind the scenes, James B. Conant, the top
scientist in the Manhattan Project, joined President Truman in badgering Henry
Stimson, the former U.S. Secretary of War, to produce a defense of the atomic
bombing. Provided with an advance copy of the article, to be published
in Harper’s, Conant told Stimson that it was just what was
needed, for they could not have allowed “the propaganda against the use of the
atomic bomb . . . to go unchecked.”
Although the New Yorker’s editors
sought to arrange for publication of the book version of “Hiroshima” in the
Soviet Union, this proved impossible. Instead, Soviet authorities banned
the book in their nation. Pravda fiercely assailed
Hersey, claiming that “Hiroshima” was nothing more than an American scare
tactic, a fiction that “relishes the torments of six people after the explosion
of the atomic bomb.” Another Soviet publication called Hersey an American
spy who embodied his country’s militarism and had helped to inflict upon the
world a “propaganda of aggression, strongly reminiscent of similar
manifestations in Nazi Germany.”
Ironically, the Soviet attack upon Hersey
didn’t make him any more acceptable to the U.S. government. In 1950, FBI
director J. Edgar Hoover assigned FBI field agents to research, monitor, and
interview Hersey, on whom the Bureau had already opened a file. During
the FBI interview with Hersey, agents questioned him closely about his trip to
Hiroshima.
Not surprisingly, U.S. occupation authorities
did their best to ban the appearance of “Hiroshima” in Japan. Hersey’s
six protagonists had to wait months before they could finally read the article,
which was smuggled to them. In fact, some of Hersey’s characters were not
aware that they had been included in the story or that the article had even
been written until they received the contraband copies. MacArthur managed
to block publication of the book in Japan for years until, after intervention
by the Authors’ League of America, he finally relented. It appeared in
April 1949, and immediately became a best-seller.
Hersey, still a young man at the time, lived on
for decades thereafter, writing numerous books, mostly works of fiction, and
teaching at Yale. He continued to be deeply concerned about the fate of a
nuclear-armed world—proud of his part in stirring up resistance to nuclear war
and, thereby, helping to prevent it.
The conclusion drawn by Blume in this book is
much like Hersey’s. As she writes, “Graphically showing what nuclear
warfare does to humans, `Hiroshima’ has played a major role in preventing
nuclear war since the end of World War II.”
A secondary theme in the book is the role of a
free press. Blume observes that “Hersey and his New Yorker editors
created `Hiroshima’ in the belief that journalists must hold accountable those
in power. They saw a free press as essential to the survival of
democracy.” She does, too.
Overall, Blume’s book would provide the basis
for a very inspiring movie, for at its core is something many Americans admire:
action taken by a few people who triumph against all odds.
But the actual history is somewhat more
complicated. Even before the publication of “Hiroshima,” a significant
number of people were deeply disturbed by the atomic bombing of Japan.
For some, especially pacifists, the bombing was a moral atrocity. An even
larger group feared that the advent of nuclear weapons portended the
destruction of the world. Traditional pacifist organizations,
newly-formed atomic scientist groups, and a rapidly-growing world government
movement launched a dramatic antinuclear campaign in the late 1940s around the
slogan, “One World or None.” Curiously, this uprising against nuclear
weapons is almost entirely absent from Blume’s book.
Even so, Blume has written a very illuminating,
interesting, and important work—one that reminds us that daring, committed
individuals can help to create a better world.
Donations
can be sent to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame
Lane, Apt. 206, Baltimore, MD 21212. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email:
mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The
master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought
the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while
the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially
their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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