As that gap narrowed, an unrelated professional trend aggravated the crunch, a trend among museums to become more articulate in their labeling. Here again judgment must bifurcate. In moderation, this was a healthy recognition that museums inevitably teach, and do better to teach explicitly than implicitly, by selection and display. Air and Space joined this trend with some new labels for the German V-2. ⁽¹⁾ A bloody photograph from Antwerp showed bodies lying about. "V-2s killed a total of 7000 people and terrorized millions." The captions told of the American recruitment of Wernher von Braun and the continuation of his work at White Sands, New Mexico. The museum boasted of its candor and the press comment was favorable. ⁽²⁾ But the museum had not gone overboard. The new labels were at waist level, below the towering V-2, and took up only about twenty short paragraphs, with about 15 pictures. A visitor could read them in five minutes. ⁽³⁾
 

But once freed from the traditional taciturn label, curators tended not to know when to stop, and judgment must register at least impatience. They developed the "book on the wall," and for crowded museums catering to the vacationing public, such as those on the Mall, this was at best futile. Few read the brief labels, much less the long. Several exhibits demonstrated the danger of this approach for a public museum: critics will always learn what the museum has said to offend someone but the neutral public will take in little. The Smithsonian was criticized for an exhibit about the World War II internment of the Japanese Americans on the west coast. One of the museums marked Columbus's 500th anniversary by noting some of the negative aspects of the conquest of the new world, causing the Wall Street Journal to suggest that the Smithsonian was "in danger of becoming the Woodstock Nostalgia Society." ⁽⁴⁾ The show "The West as America" emphasized the romanticizing of the American west by artists such as Remington -- hardly a controversial point -- leading some to denounce the museums as anti-American downers, spoilers of fond illusions and national myths. Critics frequently cited these exhibits in the Enola Gay controversy.
 

An excellent example of the book on the wall was the Air and Space exhibit that first turned the Air Force Association against the museum, "Legend, Memory, and the Great War in the Air." The entrance to this show was dominated by Snoopy in his goggles and aviator scarf. What could that be but an invocation of the legend of the World War I aces, daring young men in their flying machines? Few who see the exhibit were able to read enough of the text to learn that it was a debunking of that legend, and offered a well-reasoned critique finding air power in World War I both ineffectual and expensive -- especially expensive in the lives of daring young men. A duty to offer interpretation implies a duty to be clear, but most tourists who visited the museum were not aware that a point is being made, much less what it was.
 

But the book on the wall did not stand alone. There was a book in the bookstore, an $18.95 volume with the same name as the show and much of the same text and images. The book in the bookstore, especially if taken home to become a book in the hands of a reader, made the curators' points clearly and unambiguously. The curators said that air power in World War I was an irrelevant side show that got little attention at the time and passed into deserved oblivion in the pacifistic reaction of the early 1920s, only to be rescued and romanticized after Lindbergh's triumph in 1927, and later exploited by the advocates of air power as they began to plan for World War II.
 

We have called this a heroic mistake, the willingness to look critically at air power from within the National Air and Space Museum. Few people noticed it, but some did: ⁽⁵⁾ among them were the resolute disciples of Hap Arnold's faith at the Air Force Association. This may well be the point at which Harwit lost his job and the Enola Gay lost its supposedly redeeming captions, but it would take four years for nature to take its course.
 

The mystery is why it took so long. A glance at the charter ⁽⁶⁾ of the Air and Space Museum shows how unlikely it is that that museum would ever dissent from the enthusiastic boosterism of air power. The museum's advisory board includes the Chiefs of Staff of the Air Force and the Army, the Chief of Naval Operations, the Commandants of the Marine Corps and the Coast Guard, and the Administrators of NASA and the FAA. If any of these officials are too busy to represent their constituencies properly, they are supposed to name someone to sit in their place. ⁽⁷⁾ Most of the budget is from Congressional appropriation, and many of the better exhibits are donated by NASA and the Air Force. The museum's statutory duty is to "memorialize the national development of aviation and space flight," ⁽⁸⁾ but the governing structure assures that it will celebrate as well as memorialize.
 

It is difficult to say when the museum's drift toward dispaying the Enola Gay on the Mall became a commitment. The authorization for the Dulles extension ran into trouble from members of Congress who wanted to hijack the extension to various other places, notably Denver, so Adams and Harwit made a tactical decision to keep quiet about the Enola Gay until they had the extension nailed down. It was not till August 1993 that the Dulles authorization was finally signed into law. ⁽⁹⁾ Several months before then, however, in November 1992, a Congressional staffer on an appropriations committee asked some questions that provoked Adams to send for Harwit. Harwit's book does not make clear just what the Congressional staffer wanted done with the Enola Gay, nor what Adams wanted. At any rate, Harwit told Adams that he had found no way to display the entire plane at or near the Air and Space Museum, so the only possible use of the Enola Gay in 1995 would be an exhibit of part of the fuselage. Harwit added that this would be one item in a series of World War II aircraft. "Adams jumped at this possibility with evident relief, saying that if we exhibited the Enola Gay as part of an ongoing series of World War II aircraft, and only displayed its forward fuselage, it would appear to be less of a symbol. He had been afraid that because it was such an American icon, the Enola Gay would be especially controversial. I understood this well, but regretted the turn of events for just this reason. . . ." ⁽¹⁰⁾ Harwit, in other words, wanted the whole icon as a gleaming beacon for his exhibit of redeeming commentary. Adams both agreed to the limited fuselage display and at the same time withheld final approval and said he would have to see more detail. At that late date, Adams' indecision did not gain him effective control, but served only to reflect his doubts about exhibiting the Enola Gay at all.
 

Adams took his doubts with him on a trip to Japan, and when he returned he told Harwit to reframe the show to make it about strategic bombing, not just the Enola Gay and other aircraft. On June 10, 1993, Harwit revised the proposal along these lines and renamed it "Fifty Years On." Adams, Harwit, and the curators thereupon disappeared into a cloud of symbols, subtlety, and hair-splitting. ⁽¹¹⁾ At one point Adams said everything turned on the order of the phrases in the title -- "The End of World War II and the Atomic Bomb" versus "The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II." This distinction, he said, embodied "the underlying question of the overall stance of the exhibit that pervades all my other difficulties." ⁽¹²⁾ This sort of meaningless subtlety is often seen in people who are walking into disaster but cannot bring themselves to admit it. At one point in this debate the chair of the museum's Department of Aeronautics, Tom D. Crouch, wrote:
 

It is clear the Secretary is not focusing on what really concerns him. . . . I think that what really worries the Secretary is the fact that any morally responsible exhibition of the atomic bombing of Japan has to include a treatment of the experience of the victims. . . . Do you want to do an exhibition intended to make veterans feel good, or do you want an exhibition that will lead our visitors to think about the consequences of the atomic bombing of Japan? Frankly, I don't think we can do both.

July, 1993, memo of Tom D. Crouch, quoted in Harwit, Exhibit Denied, 189.

Harwit's response to this breath of reality was to demand from both of his subordinates working on the exhibit, Crouch and curator Michael J. Neufeld, that they assure him of their commitment to the exhibit or let others take it over. He complained bitterly of their slowness in figuring out and adopting Adams' suggestions. He did not ask for their resignations from the museum, but neither did he assure them of other assignments available for them if they walked away from the Enola Gay problem. So threatening memos joined hair-splitting and subtle distinctions as symptoms that the museum was heading full tilt toward disaster and was incapable of seeing it.
 

At about the same time, throughout 1993, the Air Force Association was building up its own head of steam. Its executive director, General Monroe W. Hatch, Jr., and the editor of its magazine Air Force, John Correll, came to the museum in November, 1993, and talked with Crouch, Neufeld, and Harwit. Correll made a memo of this meeting. He speaks of various things the museum plans to omit from the exhibit and says, "this, like Harwit's reluctance on Japanese atrocities, just happens to tilt the balance toward the point we believe they are really trying to make, and to which we object. . . ." ⁽¹³⁾ It is clear that Correll and Hatch had lost all trust in the leadership at Air and Space. ⁽¹⁴⁾ In fact, their level of activity in the next year suggests that they were in 1993 already planning a full scale public relations and lobbying blitz against the museum.

By January, 1994, with the fiftieth anniversary bearing down on them rapidly, the staff had produced their exhibit script. This "complete, original, uncensored script" has been published. ⁽¹⁵⁾ It was titled "The Crossroads: The End of World War II, the Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War."
 

The script had five units. "Unit 1: A Fight to the Finish," began with the first Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and went on to the rest of Japan's aggressions and atrocities. The emphasis was on the brutality of the Pacific war: "Iwo Jima: A Slice of Hell . . . Okinawa: A Battle of Unprecedented Ferocity." The R word was used in this context:
 

The distance separating Japan and the United States underscored the cultural gulf separating the two societies. Ignorance about the other's culture, combined with racism, desire for revenge, and the strain of total war produced virulent hatred on both sides.

Or two R words, revenge as well as racism. This unit concluded by noting how bitterly the Japanese were prepared to resist an invasion, with "'100 Million Hearts Beating as One' . . . 'our flesh against [American] steel.'"
 

The next part was "Unit 2: The Decision to Drop the Bomb." It began with a quote from Truman, "That was not any decision you had to worry about." It covered the origin and success of the Manhattan Project. Several sidebars dealt with "Historical Controversies," and it is worth setting out some of the conclusions offered:
 

Racial stereotypes may have had a role in this attitude [Grove's preference for Japan as a target], but the consensus of most, if not all, historians is that President Roosevelt would have used the bomb on Germany if such an attack would have been useful in the European war. . . .
 

Judgment, 30.
 

. . . A question like this can never be settled, but it is possible that there was a lost opportunity to end the war without either atomic bombings or an invasion of Japan, if Grew's advice [to guarantee the emperor's position] had been accepted.
 

Judgment, 38.
 

Was an Invasion Inevitable If the Atomic Bomb Had Not Been Dropped?

. . . Matters were not as clear in 1945 as they are in hindsight, because Truman and his advisers could not know how the war would actually end.
 

Judgment, 49-50.

And finally the crucial sidebar, "Was the Decision to Drop the Bomb Justified?"
 

. . . Many analysts continue to argue that the bomb ended the war quickly and saved lives. . . . It is also clear that there were alternatives . . . Since these alternatives are clearer in hindsight and it is speculative whether they would have induced the Japanese government to surrender quickly, the debate over "the decision to drop the bomb" will remain forever controversial.

Judgment, 56.

The conclusions, in short, were non-conclusions. The museum rose above the issues and refused to take sides. Anyone acquainted with the historiography of the atomic decision would find this unit even-handed and open-minded to a degree excusable only in official prose. The intercepted Japanese diplomatic telegrams of July, 1945, for instance, are crucial to any criticism of the atomic bombings, but the script did not quote them or show them. It referred to them only in general terms and said:
 

Some historians have claimed that the Truman Administration ignored the signs of a Japanese readiness to negotiate because of a desire to drop the atomic bomb on Japan in order to intimidate the Soviet Union. Other scholars have argued that the Japanese initiative was far from clear in its intentions. It is nonetheless possible to assert, at least in hindsight, that the United States should have paid closer attention to these signals from Japan. Like so many aspects of the "decision to drop the bomb," this matter will remain forever speculative and controversial.

Judgment, 36-37.

"Unit 3: Delivering the Bomb," was almost as long as the first two units together, and was a straight narrative of the technical accomplishments of Paul Tibbets and the 509th Composite Group. "Unit 4: Ground Zero," was the most dramatic part of the show, with photographs and artifacts from the devastated cities, supported by medical data on the effects of radiation. A final short "Unit 5: The Legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" discussed the arms race. This was the one section where the historians' Monday-morning quarter-backing candidly prevailed. Someone transported forward from August 1945 might have found the tone of these last two units alien to their memory of a time when America had the atomic monopoly and the atomic bomb killed "quickly and mercifully, like being hit by lightning," ⁽¹⁶⁾ but such is the function of history.

More important than the script's blandness was its length. Its 40,000 words, running 126 printed pages, take several hours to read in book form. Such curatorial garrulity gives a spurious credibility to the populist plea that artifacts should be allowed to speak for themselves. The impact of such a lengthy show would turn less on precise words than on presentation, as an artifact or picture will outweigh the most carefully crafted label if the label is too long to read. The wording of the script was not important if no one was going to read it.
 

At any rate, Air and Space had a proposed Enola Gay exhibit, and they called in an advisory board of historians to critique it. At the board's meeting in February, 1994, the criticism came from the direction expected. Martin Sherwin, the professor who had written A World Destroyed, one of the major works on the atomic decision, declared that any display of the Enola Gay would be obscene. That was the word he used. He did not think any amount of labeling, any book on the wall, could override the physical reality of displaying the Enola Gay near the Wright Flyer and the Spirit of St. Louis.
 

The rest of the advisors lined up against Sherwin to argue that their captions could give the obscenity redeeming social value. Air Force historian Richard P. Hallion told the museum, "You've got a great script, and nobody -- except Marty [Sherwin] -- is out to emasculate it." Later he and his Air Force colleague Herman Wolk submitted some suggestions and said, "Overall, this is a most impressive piece of work, comprehensive and dramatic, obviously based upon a great deal of sound research, primary and secondary." ⁽¹⁷⁾ The consensus of the advisors, except Sherwin, was that even working under the limitations of official prose, they could include enough information, not to mention awe, piety, and hand-wringing, to redeem the display of the Enola Gay from the celebration of raw power. The military historians, like many veterans and military people outside the museum, saw the honor of displaying any part of the plane on the Mall. They were not inclined to complain about the surrounding exhibit, whatever it said.
 

On February 28, 1994, the Smithsonian administration released $250,000 to Air and Space for the exhibit. Harwit gives this as the date of the final approval, ⁽¹⁸⁾ and this will do as well as any. But no approval could be truly final, as there would always be a new layer of people to deal with, a new set of political players who had not signed off on the last round of compromise. In March, 1994, the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration sent a pointed inquiry to Harwit saying that the Senators ⁽¹⁹⁾ had heard that the bombing decision was being presented out of context. The letter nevertheless was fairly civil, suggesting the errors might have crept in "inadvertently." Senator Nancy Kassebaum went so far as to ask Adams to turn the Enola Gay over to a museum that would display it "with understanding and pride," suggesting three in Kansas. Once again, the Smithsonian missed a chance to jump on this optimum solution. It was not too late to look at the gathering clouds and tell the tower that the flight was cancelled, or switched to a more sheltered field. But Harwit was committed, and stood firm, not noticing he was standing firmly on quicksand.

Then the Air Force Association let loose. John Correll opened fire with a press release and an article entitled "War Stories at Air and Space," in the April, 1994, issue of his magazine, Air Force, and the rest of the AFA staff mobilized their membership and the public for a full-scale campaign on Congress. ⁽²⁰⁾ Correll leapt over the Enola Gay, the atomic decision, and the entirety of World War II, and was candid about the grievances he had been nursing. He charged that Secretary Adams had sent all the Smithsonian museums off on a "political agenda," of "politically correct curating." He complained of the exhibit on the Japanese internments on the west coast, the Columbus exhibit, and "The West as America," which he said had depicted the winning of the west as "immoral." Correll noted that Adams was retiring, but said, "the Smithsonian has built up considerable momentum in the direction that he set." ⁽²¹⁾
 

Correll charged that Adams' politics has especially contaminated Air and Space. He cited "Legend, Memory, and the Great War in the Air," calling it "a strident attack on airpower in World War I," in which the curators "equated military airpower with 'scientific murder.'" He quoted Arthur H. Sanfelici, editor of Aviation Magazine, as charging that "a new order is perverting the museum's original purpose from restoring and displaying aviation and space artifacts to presenting gratuitous social commentary on the uses to which they have been put." ⁽²²⁾
 

As for the Enola Gay exhibit, Correll said he did not like it, but his specific criticisms were fairly focussed. He had no complaints about the first unit. It would be dominated by an Okha piloted suicide bomb and would describe "Japan's desperate last-ditch stand and the rising casualty toll." The unit on the decision to use the bomb would have a Fat Man plutonium bomb as its centerpiece. ⁽²³⁾ The unit on the mission itself would center around the Enola Gay, and Correll admitted that, "The 509th Composite Group, the unit that dropped the two atomic bombs, is covered extensively and with respect." His problem was with the Ground Zero unit. This would include a smashed wristwatch, a partially destroyed Buddha, a heat-fused rosary, and a child's lunchbox. "Graphic exhibits include Japanese dead and wounded, flash burns, disfigurement, charred bodies in the rubble . . ." This would be the "emotional center" of the exhibit, and "Visitors will take strong impressions with them as they leave." Correll saw such pictures of the atomic bombs' effects as serving the political agenda he attributed to Adams.
 

If Correll's article was the opening gun, the fusillade thereafter was a marvel of modern PR firepower: the AFA staff gave twenty-eight radio interviews and thirty TV appearances, and executive director Monroe Hatch was interviewed on CNN. ⁽²⁴⁾ From the start the AFA was determined to go over the Smithsonian's head straight to Congress, so the resulting stream of letters was directed to Senators and Representatives. It would not seem likely that the press and general public, which had seemed more amused than outraged at the "political correctness" of the earlier shows, would respond to Correll's alarm. The public could see that the Smithsonian museums looked very much like they had always looked, and the press could have gone to Air and Space and read the proposed Enola Gay script. But Correll was talking to veterans, not just of World War II but also of the cultural and geneational wars. More importantly, he had one of the most effective weapons one can have in a PR campaign, a embarrassing quote. Correll claimed that the Smithsonian script said, "For most Americans it was a war of vengeance. For most Japanese, it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism."
 

This was not in fact a literal quote, since the thirteen words "this war was fundamentally different from the one waged against Germany and Italy -- " were omitted without ellipses, but that did not change the meaning. What changed the meaning was tearing the two sentences out of their grammatical and referential context. The context read:
 

In 1931 the Japanese Army occupied Manchuria; six years later it invaded the rest of China. From 1937 to 1945, the Japanese Empire would be constantly at war.

Japanese expansionism was marked by naked aggression and extreme brutality. The slaughter of tens of thousands of Chinese in Nanking in 1937 shocked the world. Atrocities by Japanese troops included brutal mistreatment of civilians, forced laborers and prisoners of war, and biological experiments on human victims.

In December 1941, Japan attacked U.S. bases at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and launched other surprise assaults against Allied territories in the Pacific. Thus began a wider conflict marked by extreme bitterness. For most Americans this war was fundamentally different than the one waged against Germany and Italy--it was a war of vengeance. For most Japanese, it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism. As the war approached its end in 1945, it appeared to both sides that it was a fight to the finish.
 

Harwit, Exhibit Denied, 242; Judgment, xxxi-xxxii, 3.

(Continued in Segment 3.)