I am writing this without having seen the actual exhibit script, and I
     am basing some of my comments on the "West as America" exhibit also
     mounted the Smithsonian or the National Gallery of Art.  As you may
     recall, that exhibit used pasinting to reinterpet the American
     experience in the West and it ran into a firestorm of critism and was
     rewritten.  I saw the rewritten version of the exhibtit and it seemed
     to met that in the effort to present the "alternative view" of the
     west, they overlooked key information and drew unwarrented conclusions
     from the paintings.  In short, it was appallingly bad history.  I fear
     that this is what happened to the Enola Gay Exhibit.
 
     I believe that ideologically based history, either Marxist, Patriotic
     or Politically Correct is generally bad history since it tries to fit
     the facts into a preconcieved conlusion.  The story is never that
     simple and there are always many sides to it.  Both exhibits, it would
     appear, are (were) based more on ideology than the facts.
 
     I believe that both the settling of the American West and the dropping
     of the Atomic Bomb draw ambivalent response from most people.  They
     think it was in general a good thing, but are disturbed by the human
     cost borne by the other side.  Perhaps a more ambivalent and balanced
     approach by the curators of both exhibits would have been acceptable
     to the general population and allowed them to explore the other side
     of the story.
 
 
     [The views expressed herein belong to the author and are not
     necessarily the views of the Department of Defense, Armed Forces
     Institute of Pathology or the National Museum of Health and Medicine.]
 
     Alan Hawk
     National Museum of Health and Medicine
     Armed Forces Institute of Pathology
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