The Washington Post ran the following editorial today:
 
     In announcing a sharply scaled-back version, essentially a
cancellation, of its planned anniversary exhibit about the Enola Gay, the
Smithsonian Institution has ended up in about the only place it could
have. Secretary I. Michael Heyman says the National Air and Space Museum
will forget all the interpretive material about the war's end, the bomb's
effect, the decision to drop it and the dawn of the nuclear age; instead,
it will put on display the Enola Gay's [forward] fuselage, a label
explaining what it is and some footage about the mission and the crew.
While this is an intellectual abdication, a visitor shown the plane that
dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and ended World War II is unlikely
to go away without some reflecting[sic] on war and history.
 
     It is important to be clear about what happened at the Smithsonian.
It is not, as some have it, that benighted advocates of a
special-interest or right-wing point of view brought political power to
bear to crush and distort the historical truth. Quite the contrary.
Narrow-minded representatives of a special-interest and revisionist point
of view attempted to use their inside track to appropriate and hollow out
a historical event that large numbers of Americans alive at that time and
engaged in the war had witnessed and understood in a very different--and
authentic--way.
 
     The incident inflicts severe damage not just on its immediate
perpetrators but on the Smithsonian. Mr. Heyman said Monday he will
launch reviews of Air and Space Museum management and of the way the
Smithsonian handles potentially inflammatory topics; the regents who
backed him up include several who have called most loudly for oversight.
Mr. Heyman says, moreover, that he has "some problem with the idea that
our exhibits can be advocacy pieces"; he notes that curators, especially
at a national museum such as the Smithsonian, have broader public
obligations than academic scholars in departments. These are the right
questions to ask. They ought to get a full airing at the series of
symposia Mr. Heyman also proposes to run this spring with the University
of Michigan on the question of how museums handle controversial topics.
 
     Over the longer term, this confidence-undermining episode
constitutes a threat to the Smithsonian's stature and independence. But
the museum brought this danger on itself by the fecklessness with which
it left itself open to legitimate attack on a fiercely contested topic
whose delicacy and complexity it ought to have appreciated without all
the fuss.
 
                              -)*(-
 
     I've been forced to retreat from my reckless (feckless?) promise
to post "before and after" Enola Gay texts because the documents amount
to hundreds of pages, including variant versions that were sent to
various groups (which was a large part of the controversy). I think the
Washington Post's coverage of the affair has been full and fair, and that
of the New York Times nearly as good. The stories can be retrieved
through CompuServ and a number of other commercial servers. An index to
the Post's coverage follows:
 
     1994: May 31 (A15); July 21 (C2); Aug. 7 (op-ed essay by Director
Harwit); Aug. 14 (C8 & C9); Aug. 19 (A 27); Aug. 30 (C1); Sept. 3 (D1);
Sept. 20 (D1); Sept. 26 (A1); Sept. 30 (A1); Oct. 10 (B2); Oct. 16 (C3);
Oct. 21 (C2); Nov. 18 (F1); Dec. 16 (F1).
 
     1995: Jan. 19 (C1); Jan. 20 (D1); Jan. 25 (C3); Jan. 27 (A1); Jan.
30 (D1); Jan. 31 (A1); Feb. 1 (A14 & A18).
 
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Hank Burchard * Weekend Section * The Washington Post
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