Taking the Blame
CORRY, JOHN
Taking the Blame DARK STAR By Ronnie Dagger World. 254 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by JOHN CORRY National news staff, the New York "Times" On August 6, 1945, from a reconnaissance plane six miles in...
...Dugger suggests the thing to be learned from Claude Eatherly is that we must not allow evil to be this way or we may all disappear in a radioactive cloud...
...I'm responsible.' This event in him—however it came to pass, for whatever complex, variously selfish and idealistic reasons—¦ helps us understand that mass killing is subject to personal as well as official blame...
...Dugger is probably right, and his suggestion is probably futile...
...His Eatherly is a loser, but almost certainly a civilized man too...
...Two psychiatrists testified that he was schizophrenic...
...Not long ago, I met a man who was intimately involved with the development of the atom bomb and the wartime drops on Japan...
...There is something to be learned from what he writes: "As long as we could maintain to ourselves that no one was to blame for Hiroshima, that it could not be helped, we felt all right...
...One said Hiroshima was a factor in the schizophrenia...
...Dugger, former editor of the Texas Observer, is a compassionate man and a fine reporter...
...Still, as Hannah Arendt has told us about the banality of evil, Dugger now tells us about the banality of guilt...
...Eatherly was a "good old boy" from North Texas, who became a swashbuckling pilot and then a haunted man who wrote bad checks, stumbled through alcoholism, and held up grocery stores with unloaded pistols...
...It is Claude Eather-ly's importance in history (quite a different thing from his personal circumstances) that he, a responsible officer with a significant discretionary role in selecting Hiroshima as the target for extermination, since then has said, 'No, wait...
...The legend is that he commits the crimes so he will be seized and punished for Hiroshima...
...he is not a cynic...
...His book about a man who is only a footnote to history (or, depending how you feel, only an aberration) might not mean anything—except that it raises the question of how, confronted with evil, we ought to act...
...he is not a sinner...
...Eatherly is sad and disturbed, and a little shabby and a little used up...
...though being a person, he is of these...
...I helped do it...
...Claude is not a strength," he writes, "he is not a weakness...
...He was decent and friendly and I liked him very much...
...Perhaps it does not matter...
...It happened a long time ago, and death and pain have never been comprehensible numerically...
...Occasionally, though, an ordinary person embodies much of the anguish and crisis of his times in the accidents of his own life...
...Dugger, who ticks off Huie in an epilogue, says Yes, Eatherly is guilty, and he knows it, and this is why he acts as he does...
...If a Senator believes Vietnam is wicked, should he decline to vote for an increasing arms budget and not worry about re-election...
...Legends, of course, have a good deal of untruth built into them...
...He argued that Claude Eatherly could not possibly have felt guilt over Hiroshima because he flew only the reconnaissance plane and not the "Enola Gay," and because he had not been told what an atomic bomb was before he took off...
...he is not a felon...
...For that matter, it is not on the side of those who rallied to Claude Eatherly and then peevishly renounced him when they discovered his sin had been too small and his punishment too drab...
...In 1964, William Bradford Huie wrote The Hiroshima Pilot, in which he maintained Eatherly was disreputable and his legend a fraud...
...The very earliest estimate was that 75,000 persons died because of that bomb...
...The fact is that except among some soreheads, personal guilt, publicly proclaimed, is not our style...
...He is a guilt hero to be received in sadness as one receives one's own impurity and lonely confusion...
...Morality is a luxury...
...Reviewed by JOHN CORRY National news staff, the New York "Times" On August 6, 1945, from a reconnaissance plane six miles in the air, Captain Claude Eatherly, noting it was a clear day above Hiroshima, commanded that a message be sent to the B-29 "Enola Gay...
...Dugger likes him...
...Ronnie Dugger extricates truth from untruth in this legend and finds on balance that it is true...
...One reason he is fine is that he will not say what he does not know...
...Proportionately, more young men than Senators will answer in the affirmative, suggesting, perhaps, that morality is a costlier luxury foi Senators...
...This has made him a celebrated man among peace groups, a reproach or a perplexity to the rest of us, and presumably a discomfort to the military...
...In late 1957—the same year that, heavy with errors, the first newspaper and magazine stories appeared about him—Eatherly stood trial in Federal court in Abilene, Texas, charged with the bungled burglaries of two small post offices...
...Should he even campaign for the Presidency...
...The most blatant evils nowadays are corporate and impersonal...
...Three years later he attempted suicide...
...The message, its words scarcely remembered now, meant weather conditions were suitable to drop the first atomic bomb ever used in atomic warfare, and this, in turn, meant a great many people were to be smashed, fried and suffocated...
...If he is a hero, he is a hero not of courage but of radical personal despair, not of moral grandeur but of lament for his own misappropriated honor, not of national honor but of the larger human cause...
...he is not a martyr...
...But if you doubt Claude Eatherly, as do Huie and the man I met and liked, the burden of evidence is not on your side...
...the other said it was an important symptom...
...He had, after all, flown only a reconnaissance plane...
...If a young man believes the war is wicked, should he decline to fight and risk Federal prison...
...I am not entirely sure what the psychiatrists meant by this...
...he is not an idealist...
...Psychiatry not being an exact science, perhaps they were not sure either...
...Soon afterward he fell into a dreary pattern of ill-conceived petty crime, arrest and trial, and commitment to mental institutions...
...he is not a saint...
...Nonetheless, in 1947 Eatherly, who was no longer in the Air Force, began to have shattering dreams about the carnage at Hiroshima...
...a few years ago the Mayor of Hiroshima said 23,000 would be a more accurate figure...
Vol. 51 • March 1968 • No. 6
