Martin Harwit, Cornell professor emeritus and former director of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., talks to a Clark Hall audience Oct. 9 on the controversy that surrounded the museum's planned Enola Gay exhibit. Adriana Rovers/University Photography
The aftershock of the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima that killed about 80,000 people traveled nearly 50 years in time to Washington, D.C., last year where it was felt by Martin Harwit, then director of the Smithsonian's National Air & Space Museum.
Harwit resigned at the height of pressure from veterans groups and Congress, because of the controversy over a proposed Smithsonian exhibit containing the Enola Gay, the United States B-29 bomber that delivered the first atomic weapon dropped on human beings. Harwit, Cornell professor of astronomy emeritus, talked about that experience in an Oct. 10 lecture "An Exhibit Denied -- Lobbying the History of the Enola Gay" in Clark Hall.
Responding to pressure from veterans groups, 81 Congressmen demanded the exhibit be rejected. In his lecture and in his new book of the same name (Copernicus, 1996), Harwit explored the politics surrounding the exhibit and its demise.
"The losers in this drama were the American public, and most particularly the veterans of World War II who ... would have found the exhibition informative and inspiring," Harwit said. He described the Enola Gay exhibition incident as "the most violent dispute ever witnessed by a museum."
The once proud B-29 bomber Enola Gay lay rotting in a field at Andrews Air Force Base, Washington, D.C., years after World War II, becoming a victim of the weather, corrosive bird droppings and even vandals looking for souvenirs. Then it was moved to a hangar at Suitland, Md. Veterans had urged the museum to restore the plane, so in the mid 1980s the museum began restoring the plane for exhibition -- the museum's largest restoration project, Harwit said.
When he became director of the National Air & Space Museum in 1987, Harwit said, he wanted to depict aviation history in a fair and historically accurate way. Aviation changed the way we traveled, the way we gained insight and the way we fought wars, he said. "I wanted to portray aviation's impact on warfare."
Harwit described how the museum took great care to collect enough history surrounding the Enola Gay -- through previously unseen war documents -- to create an informative exhibit. Months prior to the exhibition, veterans groups lobbied Congress to withdraw funding from the museum and fire Harwit, because they felt the museum was portraying the military bombing of Hiroshima in a light unflattering to Americans. In January 1995 -- months before the exhibit was scheduled to open -- the Smithsonian's new secretary, I. Michael Heyman, bowed to that pressure.
On explaining to Congress why the exhibition was canceled, Heyman (Harwit's boss) wrote: "We made a basic error in attempting to couple an historical treatment of the use of atomic bombs with the 50th anniversary commemoration of the end of the war.... [Veterans and their families] were not looking for analysis, and frankly, we did not give enough thought to the intense feelings such an analysis would evoke."
It was decided the plane would be exhibited alone, devoid of historical context, which pleased the veterans and Congress. But Harwit argued that years of working with veterans groups and historians had presented a fair portrayal in the original exhibition.
He explained, during his lecture, that in bowing to Congressional demands on how to portray history, the American people were the losers -- in that they would not be allowed to interpret the history for themselves. A few months after Heyman conceded to Congress' wishes, Harwit resigned.