A hole in history: America suppresses the truth about Hiroshima.

In the past year, I've found myself near the center of the struggle over the Smithsonian exhibit commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It has never been easy for Americans to reconcile dropping the bomb with a sense of ourselves as a decent people. Because this conflict remains unresolved, it causes pain, anger, and confusion. There is no historical event Americans are more sensitive about: Hiroshima remains a raw nerve.

This raw nerve was responsible for the controversy that erupted over the Enola Gay exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Officials have called the exhibit the most divisive ever attempted at any of the Smithsonian's national museums.

Nearly every newspaper (most prominently, The Washington Post) attacked the Smithsonian when curators designed an exhibit that would fully explore the decision to use the bomb and discuss its effects. Columnist George Will and members of Congress accused the curators of being anti-American. Both houses of Congress passed resolutions condemning the exhibit. House Speaker Newt Gingrich declared that the Smithsonian had become "a plaything for leftwing ideologies."

Yielding to pressure, the museum made massive deletions and revisions in the script for the show, culminating in a humiliating, line-by-line editing session with representatives of the American Legion. What emerged was a script that endorses in every detail the official version of Hiroshima that has endured since 1945: that the atomic bombings were necessary to prevent an invasion of Japan and save up to one million American lives. The exhibit failed to explore questions raised by scholars based on crucial evidence that has emerged over the past three decades. And, prodded by the veterans, officials cut every comment critical of the bombing - even one by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who asserted in 1948 that Japan was already defeated at the time of the atomic attack.

At one point in the Smithsonian controversy, I was virtually the only outsider who had analyzed every version of the script. Dozens of journalists, scholars, writers, filmmakers, and peace activists called for information. I talked to officials at the museum who bitterly (although not for attribution) denounced museum director Martin Harwit and Smithsonian secretary Michael Heyman for "selling out" the exhibit. I even submitted a 10,000-word critique of the script to Harwit, pointing out the dozens of factual errors or distortions. This resulted in three very minor changes in the script.

When a group of scholars met with Harwit in November, I pointed out some of the odd juxtapositions in the American Legion-approved script: for example, there were seven photographs of the mushroom cloud and only one image of dead victims of the bomb; there was one photo of survivors suffering from radiation disease and two pictures of Americans treating these patients.

Barton Bernstein of Stanford University, perhaps the leading authority on the archival records of Truman's decision, challenged the script's estimate of the number of Americans the military expected to die in the invasion of Japan - deaths allegedly averted only by the use of the bomb. The script estimated at least a quarter of a million; Bernstein proposed the figure 63,000. Harwit said he would look into it.

A few weeks later, Harwit notified the Legion that, after studying the matter, he planned to insert Bernstein's figure in the script. The Legion, other veterans' groups, their many allies in the new Republican Congress, and the media protested this tiny deviation from the political line. The script maintained the official story at every turn and continued to ignore any contrary evidence. But Harwit had the temerity to question the official narrative and for this he would be punished.

Lobbied by veterans, Congress threatened to cut off funds for the Smithsonian unless secretary Heyman canceled the exhibit. In late January, he capitulated. But the Enola Gay, he said, would still go on display, marked only by a neutral plaque with words to the effect: "This is the plane that dropped the bomb."

Legion commander William Detweiler hailed this as a victory over those "driven by a fervent ideology." He offered a disturbing comparison, calling the fight over the exhibit a metaphor for "the very war it purported to record and its outcome a metaphor for the war's climactic last act. The winners, just as they were fifty years ago, are the American people."

He seemed to imply that the Smithsonian dispute was another battle between patriotic warriors and a hated enemy - this time, their fellow countrymen (the curators). The outcome, like the Pacific war, was determined by the use of phenomenal firepower - in this case, political pressure. The battle over the exhibit ended with little left standing. The enemy had surrendered, unconditionally. And the Japanese victims, and questions about the decision to use the bomb, were nowhere in sight.

Several weeks later, Heyman revealed that the plaque would not be neutral, after all: it would declare the bomb directly led to the end of the war and saved thousands of American lives. Asked if it would also mention the Japanese lives lost, he replied: "Remember, this is a restrained show. I'm trying to keep it restrained." In the weeks that followed, the constrained exhibit kept expanding - in one political direction only - to include artifacts and a video related to the bravery of the airmen who dropped the bomb.

In April, Bill Clinton announced that he supported the censorship at the Smithsonian and asked Americans to, essentially, put Hiroshima behind them.

In May, Martin Harwit, under pressure, quit as museum director.

In late June, the Enola Gay exhibit opened, met by protests by disarmament activists and historians, who have labeled the censoring of the script "historical cleansing."

Appropriately, what first drew me to Hiroshima was the suppression of historical evidence. After visiting Tokyo in 1976, I immersed myself in Japanese film, but had no particular interest in nuclear issues. Then in 1982, I attended a press conference in New York that preceded the screening of a new Japanese movie: the first documentary making use of recently discovered color footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki just months after the atomic bombings.

One of the speakers was Herbert Sussan, a member of the U.S. Army film crew that shot the footage and later a pioneering network television director. He explained that the footage was so powerful the U.S. military declared it top secret and kept it from being shown to the public. Sussan had approached everyone from President Truman to Edward R. Murrow, trying to locate the footage and produce a network documentary. He believed that if the American people ever saw what the bomb had done to human beings they would demand an end to the arms race. (For decades the only film of Hiroshima that Americans were allowed to see focused on rubble, not people.) But the footage could not be found, and no one else was very interested in finding it.

Then in the late 1970s, a chance remark by Sussan to a Japanese peace activist led to the discovery of the recently declassified film footage. Citizens of Japan purchased segments of the film, and the result was the release of the first film incorporating these horribly affecting images.

As I watched the film, I realized that I understood nothing about Hiroshima until that moment. Only color film could capture the grotesque effects of flash burns, keloid scars, and radiation disease on the human body. And these injuries were not merely captured in the close-up; they were connected to actual people, posing uncomfortably, sometimes angrily, for the camera, in the midst of a city whose devastation can barely be suggested in black-and-white photographs.

What drew me in even more, however, was the story of the suppression of these images. If the use of the bomb against the Japanese was necessary to end the war, and therefore unavoidable, as I had always been told, why would the United States go to such lengths to hide what happened?

A few months later, partly motivated by my brush with Hiroshima, I became editor of the anti-nuclear magazine, Nuclear Times. The first article I assigned was on Herbert Sussan, who was dying from lymphoma, quite possibly the result of the weeks he spent in Hiroshima, according to his doctors.

After a lot of detective work, I found Daniel McGovern, the officer in charge of the American film unit that shot the color footage in Japan. McGovern explained why officials had been told to "bury" the film footage: "They were fearful because of the horror it contained. They didn't want the material shown, because it showed effects on men, women, and children.... they didn't want that material out, because they were sorry for their sins - and because they were working on new nuclear weapons."

I also interviewed Erik Barnouw, the famed documentarian, who told me a somewhat parallel story. A Japanese newsreel crew had shot black-and-white footage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in September 1945, which was seized by the U.S. occupation force and, like the color footage, classified top secret. (The army officer who carried it back to the Pentagon was Daniel McGovern.) Barnouw learned in the late 1960s that the footage had finally been declassified and edited into an eloquent 16-minute film, entitled Hiroshima/Nagasaki, August 1945. Like Herb Sussan, he discovered that the major networks were not interested in the subject, but eventually, in 1970, public television put it on the air. Twenty-five years after Hiroshima, Americans finally caught a glimpse of the actual human effects of the bomb.

In 1984, I spent several weeks in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on a journalism grant, interviewing dozens of atomic-bomb survivors. It was a profoundly disturbing yet transcendent experience. In the memory of Hiroshima survivors reside special truths that exist nowhere else. Their narrative is one of actuality, of consequences.

A visitor can learn much from Hiroshima, I discovered, even if one rarely encounters a survivor. Even noticing that there are really no tall or old trees in the city takes an emotional toll. The atomic bombing still reverberates in Hiroshima. In a sense, it has never left the city. If not a palpable presence, it is there in the imagination. Yet one of the most compelling images does not suggest itself immediately. First you must travel to the highest point in Hiroshima.

Hijiyama Hill overlooks the city. It has a haunted feeling, for it is a place where many victims of the atomic bombing fled on August 6, 1945, and where many of them died. A survivor, a history professor, later told my colleague, Robert Jay Lifton, of climbing Hijiyama Hill on that day and then looking back at the city. "I saw that Hiroshima had disappeared," he said. "I was shocked by the sight.... What I felt then and still feel now, I just can't explain with words.... But Hiroshima didn't exist-that was mainly what I saw - Hiroshima just didn't exist."

Today, from Hijiyama, you can see that the new city of Hiroshima not only exists but thrives. Yet it is still very easy, from this vantage point, to imagine the old Hiroshima, for the topography has not changed. You see the bay, the six branches of the Ota River snaking through the city, and the hills that surround the city on nearly every side. These are the hills that provided what the Manhattan Project's targeting committee warmly referred to as a "focusing effect" that would turn the force of the first atomic blast back on the city.

Looking down from Hijiyama you can observe the urban sprawl. Hiroshima has more than twice the population it had half a century ago, but in general appearance it is much the same: a densely populated Japanese city in the bottom of a bowl. But another vision inevitably comes to the visitor: a weapon of mass destruction exploding in a bright flash over the center of that bowl - not aimed at a specific target, such as the industrial colony by the sea, but high in the air, directly over the middle of the city. You can almost see the flash, and the rays of the heat, and the radiation shooting out to envelop nearly every inch of the bowl, fierce and inescapable. That image sadly conveys, better than any historical document, the intentional targeting of great masses of people for instant, indiscriminate. and certain death.

In the years after climbing Hijiyama Hill, I wrote dozens of articles about Hiroshima for national publications, including an annual piece for The Progressive. I left Nuclear Times and wrote about Upton Sinclair's campaign for governor of California, but my interest in Hiroshima never waned. In 1993, I began researching and co-writing a book on this subject with Robert Lifton. But unlike most of our writing on Hiroshima, this book would not focus on the effects of the bomb in Japan, but rather the impact of the bomb in the United States. Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial would be a story of manipulation, distortion, suppression, avoidance, and cover-up-themes that Herbert Sussan had introduced to me back in 1982.

The American suppression, as I soon learned, did not begin or end with film footage. Early newspaper stories from Hiroshima were censored by the U.S. military; the first account from Nagasaki was killed entirely. Authorities at first denied, then downplayed, the fact that thousands of survivors were dying from radiation disease. The military confiscated all pictures taken by Japanese photographers in the atomic cities, and none was published in the United States until 1952. That the bomb had killed American POWS in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was denied for nearly forty years. Documents and decoded Japanese cables that raised doubts about Truman's decision were classified for decades (some still are). Even a Hollywood film on the first bomb was heavily revised, under orders from the Truman White House.

The American denial took more subtle forms as well. Few historians raised questions about Truman's decision until the mid-1960s, and when they did. they were often ridiculed by their peers. The media, while expressing empathy for the Japanese victims, rarely challenge the use of the bomb. (A network TV reporter recently told me: "I agree with you. but my bosses would never put an honest look at Hiroshima on the air.") Hollywood has produced only three films related to Hiroshima; novelists have virtually ignored the subject. American Presidents with the exception of Eisenhower) have never deviated from the official narrative.

Hidden from the beginning, Hiroshima sank. unconfronted and unresolved, into the depths of American awareness. As early as 1946, the writer Mary McCarthy was calling Hiroshima "a hole in human history." Thirty years later, physicist Ralph Lapp, who worked on the atomic bomb, asked, "If the memory of things is to deter, where is that memory? Hiroshima has been taken out of the American consciousness, eviscerated, extirpated."

Whatever our avoidance and numbing, Americans remain haunted by the atomic bombings.

What is remarkable is that the terms of the Hiroshima debate have changed so little since August 1945.

From the start, Americans were not shown the human effects of the bomb, and nearly fifty years later the same impulses were at play in the Smithsonian dispute. Curators, under pressure, removed from the exhibit nearly every photograph of dead or badly injured Japanese civilians. There remains today a reluctance to face squarely what America did; there's a desire to excuse it, perhaps even wish it away.

The debate over the decision to use the bomb follows a familiar pattern. The official justification was always one of necessity. The claim that the bomb saved more lives than it cost upheld a sense of American morality. Critics, on the other hand, have asserted that "it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing" (as Eisenhower put it) to end the war without an invasion. These arguments, for and against the use of the bomb, remain virtually unchanged today. Significant new evidence has appeared, including personal diaries of Truman and others who took part in the decision, but still the debate seems stuck in time, and that time is the 1940s.

That there was no alternative to dropping the atomic bombs on two Japanese. cities remains an article of faith. Those who present arguments to the contrary are often denounced as "revisionists" or accused of "revising history" - as if history is something static, and new facts and interpretations are necessarily wrong. In fact, those who cling to the arguments used to justify the bombing of Hiroshima have been revising history to support their views all along. A Congressman critical of the original plans for the Smithsonian exhibit condemned the museum officials: "Their job is to tell history, not rewrite it." What history? Whose version of history?

For nearly half a century following World War II, Eisenhower remained the only President who questioned the use of the atomic bomb against Japan. Only two Presidents, Nixon and Carter, visited Hiroshima.. and they did so either before or after their years in the White House.

Then along came Bill Clinton and the fiftieth anniversary of the decision to drop the bomb. It would be a time for taking stock, and anything seemed possible. After all, Clinton had once protested U.S. bombing of civilians in Vietnam, and he is the first postwar President who did not serve in the military during World War II.

But Clinton felt so strongly about the atomic bombing that he did not wait until the August commemoration to declare his views. In early April, Clinton announced that he would not apologize to Japan for the atomic attacks. This shocked no one; Japan still has not sincerely apologized for Pearl Harbor and the carnage that followed. What surprised many, however, was that Clinton, instead of waffling, strongly affirmed that President Truman had made the right decision "based on the facts he had before him." A few days later, Clinton again defended Truman's decision, adding that a commemorative year was not "an appropriate time to be launching a major inquiry" into the use of the bomb. He asked Americans and Japanese to look to the future - "that's the way to get this behind us."

Quite the opposite may be true, however. What a person, or a nation, "leaves behind," unsettled, will almost surely return to cause torment. And a major anniversary is precisely the time to reexamine disturbing episodes in America's past. If not in a commemorative year, then when? Indeed, a fiftieth anniversary represents the last opportunity to come to terms with a traumatic event during the lifetime of those who survived it - as perpetrators or as victims.

To commemorate is to combine memory and ceremony, to remind or be mindful - to witness again. In that sense, America is clearly far from being ready to commemorate Hiroshima in 1995. The Smithsonian's failure of will was a national one, a product of the tenacity of the official narrative, which emerged with Truman's announcement of the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and has held sway ever since.

Although the Smithsonian affair was a disturbing step backward, the struggle over the Hiroshima narrative continues. The Smithsonian debacle brought national attention to the Hiroshima debate and inspired both peace activists and historians to take their case to the public. The Smithsonian's "historical cleansing" did not solve anything; it only postponed an inevitable coming to terms with Hiroshima. With its broadening of interest in the atomic bombings, the Smithsonian controversy, and other commemorative activities, served as a stimulus for a radical expansion of Hiroshima consciousness, even for the kind of knowledge that contains the possibility of wisdom.

Hiroshima set a precedent for the use of the weapon - and America is still suppressing the facts about it. As long as we continue to defend and justify the Hiroshima model through denial and misrepresentation, we risk making that kind of decision again.