May Script Public Assessment Private Assessment Martin Harwit, internal memorandum to museum staff, April 16, 1994 … A second reading shows that we do have a lack of balance and that much of the criticism that has been levied against us is understandable.” “Though I carefully read the exhibition script a month ago, I evidently paid greater attention to accuracy than to balance. … It should not come as a surprise to anyone that the Air Force Association … was able to find clumsy or unrefined label text among the several hundred pages which compromise the total script.” I welcome this opportunity to set the record straight. “After having read the article in Air Force Magazine myself, I can certainly understand your concerns. A Washington Post editorial observed the “curatorial inability to perceive that political opinions are embedded in the exhibit” and said the Smithsonian “needs to do more listening.” The Wall Street Journal said the museum was “in the hands of academics unable to view American history as anything other than a woeful catalog of crimes and aggressions against the helpless peoples of the earth.” Jeff Jacoby wrote in the Boston Globe that “the exhibit could be worse” had not veterans’ groups, military historians, and AIR FORCE Magazine “forced the Smithsonian to soften the angry, politicized - even anti-American - tone its curators have chosen.” Caught by Surprise-Twice January Script Public Assessment Private Assessment Little of it has been favorable to the Air and Space Museum or to the parent Smithsonian Institution.
Press coverage and comment has been almost continuous for months. It contained some definite improvements, but veterans’ groups said it was only a first step toward correcting the problem. At the end of August, the curators produced a new script. That position soon disintegrated under withering fire from the public and Congress. Museum officials accepted a few marginal criticisms but waved off the rest as “disinformation.” In June, the curator issued a surprise announcement declaring the exhibit plan final. Early drafts depicted the Japanese as desperate defenders of their homeland and culture, while the Americans were cast as ruthless invaders, bent on revenge.Īfter an article, “War Stories at Air and Space,” in AIR FORCE Magazine reported on this plan, protests from veterans grew.
The initial exhibit plan picked up the story of World War II in 1945 as the end approached. In effect, the Enola Gay would have been used as a prop in an unbalanced, emotionally charged program about the horrors of the atomic bomb. Unfortunately, what the curators had in mind was more political than aeronautical. After a lengthy period of restoration, the aircraft is scheduled to be part of an exhibition in 1995 on the fiftieth anniversary of its famous mission. The Enola Gay is the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. If the Enola Gay goes on display at the National Air and Space Museum next May, it won’t be the historically distorted show that was originally planned.