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History has often been enlisted in the service of politics, but the history of United States diplomacy, so frequently influenced by the memoirs of government officials, has been particularly vulnerable. How Americans came to understand their government's decision to use atomic bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a classic case of a historical narrative shaped by government insiders to serve their view of the national interest. The controversy over the planned exhibition, centering on the Enola Gay (the plane that bombed Hiroshima), at the National Air and Space Museum (NASM) on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II is a reminder that, even in the post-Cold War United States, history remains a hostage to politics, past and present.
Henry L. Stimson, secretary of war from 1940 to 1945, was the most important formulator of the history of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; in modern political parlance, its chief "spin doctor." Writing in 1947 to President Harry S. Truman, Stimson explained that his seminal article, "The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb," was in part "intended to satisfy the doubts of that rather difficult class of the community which will have charge of the education of the next generation, namely educators and historians."(1)
To satisfy those potential doubters, Stimson explained that the Truman administration faced the choice of either using atomic bombs or invading Japan. The sole motivation for the atomic attacks, he wrote, was to save American lives by ending the war as quickly as possible. Missing was the idea, frequently discussed in his diary, that a dramatic wartime demonstration of the bomb would help control Joseph Stalin's postwar ambitions. Nor did he discuss Japanese messages intercepted by United States military intelligence indicating that the Japanese had been trying to surrender "conditionally" since June 1945. Assisted by the chilling effect that the Cold War had on debate and the long delay before the relevant documents became available to historians, Stimson achieved his goal. Many Americans--and for a long time perhaps most educators and historians--accepted his explanation.(2)
Ending the war quickly was certainly one motive for using the atomic bombs. But other motives promoted, reinforced, and perhaps even overtook the one put forward by Stimson. These included: (1) the hope that...