Crimes, Cover-ups and History’s Judgment
Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World by Lesley M.M. Blume (Simon & Schuster) tells in absorbing detail how John Hersey of The New Yorker went to Hiroshima in the late spring of 1946 and revealed what the atom bomb dropped by the United States the year before had done to the devastated city, focusing on six survivors of the blast.
Experts often cite the resulting 31,000-word article that took up an entire edition of The New Yorker for Aug. 29, 1946 as the finest piece of journalism in the 20th century. Fallout gives us the full account of how Hersey gained access to the city, which other reporters had only seen under tight and essentially misleading circumstances. It also shows us who Hersey was as a writer and a man and how his editors, Harold Ross and William Shawn, mobilized their editorial skills and ingenuity to shepherd the piece to publication and manage the uproar that followed.
Seventy-four years later, the article’s book version from Alfred A. Knopf is still a best seller. The total number of copies sold around the world is in the millions.
What was exceptionally striking in Blume’s book was her telling of how the U.S. government handled the aftermath of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. The bombings quickly led to Japan’s surrender ending World War II, and the victorious American political and military leadership deliberately downplayed what the nuclear weapons had done to civilian populations in those cities. That the brutal “Japs” had it coming was a widely accepted attitude. Japanese cruelty to POWs in instances like the Bataan Death March of 1942 — in which thousands died — and what became known as “The Rape of Nanking” — the destruction of China’s then-capital city by the Japanese in 1937 in which as many as 300,000 people were tortured and murdered — justified the first ever use of the most lethal weapon ever deployed in wartime.
The immediate news coverage emphasized the physical destruction of the cities, acknowledging that there were many deaths — the number was about 100,000 — but minimizing the scale of loss and the aftermath of radiation poisoning among other consequences. Efforts were made to show that only months after the bombings, the two cities were recovering and Gen. Leslie Groves who led the Manhattan Project, the top-secret program which developed the bomb, was quoted in Senate testimony saying that radiation poisoning was “a very pleasant way to die.”
A combination of censorship and manipulation of reporters in Tokyo and Washington created the impression that the destruction and casualties from the atomic bombs had been significant, but was far less than what would have happened had the U.S. launched a land invasion of Japan. In truth the public casualty estimates of an operation on the Japanese mainland were vast, but the military’s private numbers were much smaller.
So in 1946, Hersey’s reporting came as a shock to the American population, who had heretofore been watching the ostensibly benign occupation of Japan by Gen. Douglas MacArthur from a distance. Hersey was supple enough to navigate the restrictions placed on other reporters and chose a handful of survivors to turn his microcosm into an epic portrait.
The Truman administration did what it could to counter Hersey’s account. A major defense was published in Harper’s Magazine by Henry Stimson, who as Secretary of War had recommended the use of the bomb to President Truman. Besides illustrating and elaborating this episode in history, Blume’s book provides conclusive proof that the U.S. government engaged in what was ultimately an unsuccessful cover-up of Hersey’s reporting.
The impact of Hersey’s Hiroshima then and thereafter is often credited as a reason that nuclear bombs have never again been used. While that is still true, of course, arsenals of these weapons remain in the U.S., Russia and elsewhere with enough power to decimate the human race. There will always be a question which Hersey could not deal with: does anything ever justify the use of atom or hydrogen bombs?
There is an axiom that the depredations of successive American administrations are magnified by the cover-ups that follow. Most recognizably the all-out effort of Richard Nixon and his associates to bury the Watergate burglary of the Democratic National Committee in 1972 led to a political crisis of historic proportions, jail terms and disgrace for the perpetrators and Nixon’s resignation.
In the modern era of war, the decade long U.S. role in Vietnam ended in defeat and debacle with millions of casualties including, 58,000 American deaths and made a mockery of the claims of impending victory from military and political leaders responsible for the conflict. The Pentagon Papers in 1971 were a revelation of the ways in which American duplicity and ignorance aggravated what was a civil war and made it clear that the U.S. government was well aware that popular support for the South Vietnamese regime was hollow. It had long been accepted in Washington that after a “decent interval” following the American withdrawal the North Vietnamese would prevail.
In the case of Iraq in 2003, the successful short-term overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the “mission accomplished” declaration by George W. Bush that followed was a cover-up for major strategic and tactical blunders which resulted in a war that continued in various forms for another fifteen years.
And now we are in another war, a struggle of deadly complexity: the coronavirus pandemic which as of this moment has meant more than 175,000 deaths in the U.S alone and a continuing inability to meaningfully counter the spread because the crisis has been systematically downplayed and misrepresented at the highest levels of our government. The flow of falsehoods from the White House is a new form of cover-up — an attempt to obfuscate actions that aren’t covert and hidden but instead obvious and absurd. And yet, it has happened.
What is different in our age is that cover-ups are harder to stage. There is so much media deployed on so many platforms that physical and social consequences of this disaster cannot be concealed. The irony is that for now, the attempted cover-up of the coronavirus has actually worked on a substantial number of Americans, who assert that the right-to-not-wear-a-mask is a definition of liberty. And they believe or are told to believe that they are not at real risk.
Cover-ups, as Fallout so vividly portrays, are inherently disingenuous and dangerous, because unless they are finally exposed, the continuing fallout can be unmitigated disaster.
