Judgment at the Smithsonian (ed. Philip Nobile)
Terzian, Philip
H ad the Smithsonian Institution's Air and Space Museum gone ahead with its planned exhibition for the fiftieth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan, unsuspecting summer visitors...
...Nor, for that matter, is it news that in subsequent years many prominent Americans (Dwight D. Eisenhower, Herbert Hoover, William D. Leahy, John Foster Dulles) expressed strong reservations about the use of the bomb...
...Harwit, at long last, called a halt to negotiations...
...We are no more likely to achieve unanimity of opinion on Hiroshima and Nagasaki than on whether McClellan could have pursued Lee into Virginia, or Pope Clement VII should have granted Henry VIII a divorce from Catherine of Aragon...
...This stylistic trick is essential to her appeal as an essayist, for when Ehrenreich does offer a straightforward observation or assertion of fact, she tends to wobble...
...but the newly appointed secretary of the Smithsonian, I. Michael Heyman, mindful of the source of his institution's income, pulled the plug on the exhibition, and Harwit resigned in May...
...To impose coherence she has grouped them under chapter headings: "Trampling on the Down-and-Out," "Sex Skirmishes and the Gender Wars," and so on...
...This is a world of "smoking guns," "Nixonian vapors," "grassy knolls," and an "old boy conspiracy...
...the longest couldn't be longer than 1700 words...
...Harry Truman is "obnoxious and unashamed," while the Smithsonian script is "immensely learned and clearly composed...
...In any case, absolute consensus is impossible...
...She opens her first essay on the family with the statement: "The U.S...
...This is the famous question of the estimated number of American casualties from an invasion of the Japanese homeland...
...divorce rate remains stuck near 50 percent...
...H ad the Smithsonian Institution's Air and Space Museum gone ahead with its planned exhibition for the fiftieth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan, unsuspecting summer visitors would now be gasping at its tendentiousness, revisionism, and reflexively leftist politics...
...I don't know, and neither, I suspect, does Ehrenreich, but "postmodern" is one of her favorite words, recurring even more often than such phrases as "apocalyptic frisson," "post–Judeo-Christian generation," "posttrend era," "post-feminist era," and "advanced capitalism"—the big, blowy tropes that dazzle editors while allowing a writer to elide from the concrete to the dubious, and from the self-evident to the debatable, without debate...
...meditations on the horrors of the bomb...
...This is not a question of censorship, but of judgment...
...But veterans of the Second World War are still very much among us, and once word leaked out about the character of the show, their various organizations, along with friends in the press and Congress, chose to take a stand...
...Indeed, by revealing the post mortem comments of Crouch, he underlines precisely what the critics had suspected: That the exhibition was not intended to illuminate the past, or strengthen understanding of a controversial episode, but to score political points and write history as propaganda...
...She writes: "Studies show [ditto!] that teachers tend to favor boys by calling on them more often, making eye contact with them more frequently, and pushing them harder to perform...
...The most recent and exhaustive survey, Sex in America, puts the figure at less than 15 percent...
...Even if we accept the lowest estimates, 26,000 dead Americans is a lot of corpses...
...Critics of the exhibition are "deniers," "Top Gun scholars," and the "pro-bomb bunch...
...B ernstein and his fellow revisionists contend not only that the bomb was unnecessary—the Japanese, they say, would have surrendered in any case—but also that the rationale for using it was based on a false premise...
...In the midst of a vicious war to the death in the Pacific, the American government had the time and inclination to study the nature of the bomb...
...Swiftly assembled by freelance journalist Philip Nobile, it contains two long essays by Nobile—one on the atomic bombs, another on the Smithsonian altercation—and a reprint of the (unrevised) text from the exhibition...
...This was the same Smithsonian that, not long ago, mounted a presentation on the settling of the American West as a specimen of capitalist genocide, and chronicled the 1914-18 air war as an exercise in failure...
...The fact that the national legislature should take an interest in the uses to which tax revenues are put is neither surprising nor imB arbara Ehrenreich's career as a journalist has followed an interesting trajectory...
...proper...
...For Nobile the controversy over the A-Bomb exhibit is not a passionate disagreement about history but a government conspiracy...
...I am just as uncomfortable about the Air Force Association exercising veto power as I would be about the National Organization for Women...
...That number, among the wartime memoranda, varied from as high as a million to as low as 26,000...
...j udgment at the Smithsonian is a curious book...
...For months before Hiroshima there were extended discussions among senior American officials—Henry Stimson, George C. Marshall, John McCloy, James B. Conant, Joseph Grew, James Byrnes—about the use of the bomb, and JUDGMENT AT THE SMITHSONIAN Edited by Philip Nobile Marlowe & Co./256 pages/ $12.95 (paper) reviewed by PHILIP TERZIAN The American Spectator August 1995 65 the ways and means of compelling Japan to surrender...
...Another point is the studied indifference of Nobile, Bernstein, and friends to the prospect of American casualties in Japan...
...Unlike Molly Ivins, she's a mom—a working mom!—and unlike the late Anna Quindlen, she never whimpers...
...It is no surprise to learn that, among those charged with the dread responsibility, opinions tended to differ...
...The American Legion and the Air Force Association entered into prolonged negotiations with the museum director, Martin Harwit, about the rhetoric in the script, its generous assessment of the Japanese war aims, and its lavish Philip Tertian writes a column from Washington for the Providence Journal...
...71 Postmodern Family," raising the question, right at the start, of what a postmodern family might be...
...Her facts, for example, aren't really facts...
...She is now so certifiably mainstream that mainstream publishers are happy to get out collections of even her most quotidian pieces...
...Yet he does no such thing...
...Newt Gingrich's "lowbrow ridicule" is compared to the "sainted pacifist A. J. Muste...
...Editorials, columnists, and congressmen took angry sides in the growing controversy...
...But, after all, the Smithsonian is a publicinstitution, not a private preserve for the amusement of its curators...
...The exhibition on the atomic bomb, which featured as its centerpiece the restored B-29 Enola Gay, which dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, was designed (in the words of "project manager" Thomas Crouch) not "to make veterans feel good," but to "lead our visitors to think about the consequences of the atomic bombing of Japan...
...He is also correct that history can be dangerously vulnerable to influence...
...This is a chestnut of newsmagazine chin-waggers, but in fact the divorce rate is 4.8 percent per 1,000 Americans...
...In this instance, the political pressure applied to the scholarly process—from the American Legion, from Congress, from the press—was valuable and largely right...
...In the future, however, there is no reason to doubt that other interested parties, in subsequent exhibitions, will make their views known, and to the detriment of history...
...The collection begins with "Life in the Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor for the Weekly Standard, which begins publication in September...
...The details of the subsequent struggle are well known...
...Nobile seems to believe that he has not only built a conclusive case to indict the American government of 1945 for war crimes, but has furnished considerable evidence of a massive collusion—among politicians, scholars, physicists and journalists—to camouflage the truth that the Smithsonian sought to reveal...
...Nobile is correct that the text of the Smithsonian exhibition is not quite what its critics contended: In some ways it is better, but in other ways it is worse...
...The essays here are brief without exception...
...The fat cats of "mainstream" journalism do not allow writers with Ehrenreich's attributes to languish on the leftward fringe, and so for the past several years she has been a featured essayist on the back page of Time magazine, where her unabashedly left-wing views make a pleasant contrast to the abashedly left-wing views found in the pages preceding it...
...Should the veterans of one-half century ago have been insulted by their government, or graciously acknowledged...
...According to surveys [block that phrase!], somewhere between 26 percent and 41 percent of married women are unfaithful...
...Appended to this is an essay by Barton Bernstein, the Stanford historian and dean of A-bomb revisionists...
...She is a witty, graceful stylist who first came to prominence in the Nation, Ms., and Mother Jones...
...Visitors to the Air and Space Museum now gaze upon the Enola Gay without benefit of instruction...
...The exhibition catalogue was revised, and re-revised...
...Actually, "studies show" that teachers THE SNARLING CITIZEN: ESSAYS Barbara Ehrenreich Farrar, Straus & Giroux /245 pages /$20 reviewed by ANDREW FERGUSON 66 The American Spectator August 1995...
...Hence The Snarling Citizen, a loosely packed duffel of Ehrenreichiana previously published in Time, the Nation, the Guardian, and elsewhere...
...There were few cowboys left on the range to argue about the West, and World War I aces are thin on the ground...
...Nobile and Bernstein reveal nothing new about these discussions...
...There are delightful misspellings ("Henry Steele Commanger," "Michael Waltzer...
...It is a silly enterprise...
...It is no wonder that those who were poised to invade Japan—William Manchester, Paul Fussell, William Styron, and others, fresh from the killing fields of Iwo Jima and Okinawa—were delighted to be spared, and "thank God for the atom bomb," in Fussell's memorable phrase...
...and painfully cute phrases, such as "bright, shining untruths" and "the merde hit the propeller...
...People may disagree about whether it was right or necessary to inflict the Bomb on Hiroshima, but they cannot reasonably argue that the decision was taken lightly...
Vol. 28 • August 1995 • No. 8
