Virtual book talk will discuss the reporter who exposed the truth about Hiroshima bombing
Journalist John Hersey read news reports coming out of Japan following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945. He felt that something was missing.
Most of the articles discussed the apocalyptic destruction in clipped terms of tonnage, dollars and science. They seemed to purposely avoid talking about the more than 100,000 people who died — and continued to — as a result.
That was the intent of the United States government, and officials had been overall successful. Then Hersey, a battle-tested war correspondent, got into Japan in May 1946 and became a witness. The book he eventually produced, “Hiroshima,” cataloged the desperate survival of six residents and became a standard of journalism.
The “why” and “how” of Hersey’s work is detailed in “Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed it to the World.” Author Lesley M.M Blume will discuss it during a virtual talk through the MacArthur Memorial at 7 p.m. Wednesday.
The book was released in August, the 75th anniversary of the bombings. It has been named a New York Times Book Editors' Choice and selected by Vanity Fair as one of the best books of the year. Blume’s “Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises” became a New York Times' bestseller in 2016.
Blume has said in interviews about “Fallout” that a few journalists initially reported on the “atomic plague” that the U.S. introduced as a way to end World War II. But the military clamped down on media access and denied that the radiation fallout caused ongoing death in Japan. Reporters on the scene were monitored, and where and when they could report was controlled. The primary images approved for media publication were ones that emphasized American might, Blume has said, such as blooming mushroom clouds and flattened cities where buildings once stood.
Hersey calculated the timing of his trip. He traveled to Japan months after the end of the war when war trials had begun in Tokyo and people thought the bomb story was old. Hersey also had an impeccable resume, Blume has said. He’d worked for Life and Time magazines as a foreign correspondent from 1937 to 1946 and had covered the war extensively. Hersey had already won a Pulitzer for fiction in 1945 and had written laudatory profiles of military leaders including Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who was in charge of the occupying forces in Japan.
As a writer for The New Yorker magazine, Hersey made a formal request through MacArthur’s office to go to Japan.
He did not write his story until he returned to New York, however, and did so in secrecy.
Hersey’s work was considered groundbreaking not only for its on-the-scene reporting and detail but also for how it was written. He concentrated on the people and humanized the Japanese who had often been depicted as buck-toothed, sub-human creatures before the war. Hersey introduced readers to a widow with three young children and a priest who was reclining on a cot in his underwear reading a magazine when the bomb detonated over Hiroshima.
Hersey also applied techniques often reserved for fiction writing such as allowing scenes to unfold and build suspense.
“People who couldn’t understand physics could understand what it was like to be a father, mother, shop clerk going to work one day when catastrophe strikes,” Blume said in an interview.
Hersey’s story filled the Aug. 31, 1946 issue of The New Yorker. It became an international sensation and a centerpiece of anti-nuclear war debates. It was later published in book form.
A Q and A will follow Blume’s Wednesday presentation. The talk is free and open to the public but requires registration at macarthurmemorial.org.
Denise M. Watson, 757-446-2504,denise.watson@pilotonline.com
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