Although uneasiness about the Enola Gay and its mission would often be called a product of a disaffected Vietnam generation, left-wing historians, or the politically correct, its roots are half a century old. There is probably no better place to start that reconstruction than with a simple fact that was largely ignored while the controversy was under way. So the following reconstruction of the ugly controversy that doomed the exhibition is meant not just as a record of the failures and errors of others, but also of what I proved incapable of imagining as events began to unfold. In fact, I felt remarkably sanguine about the problems or issues that might arise, and the record of the advice my colleagues on the committee and I offered the museum during its early script preparations indicates how little any of us foresaw what lay in the museum's path. But I expected, as had happened elsewhere, that the museum would overcome them and that a historically significant Enola Gay exhibit would open in 1995. I certainly imagined that such a show would raise difficulties for the museum-problems between the commemorative and historical voices, between a reverently held story and its later reappraisal. Nonetheless, nothing in my experience with memorial exhibits prepared me for what happened when the National Air and Space Museum tried to mount its Enola Gay exhibit to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. In addition, as a historian I was aware of how uneasily the atomic bombing of Hiroshima rested in the American consciousness.
By the time Martin Harwit called me, I had published a book on the problems of memorializing American battlefields, from Lexington and Concord to Pearl Harbor, and had for more than a year been observing from within the volatile creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Watching members of the Park Service-and Pearl Harbor survivors-grapple with such a seemingly simple matter as whether a Japanese airman's uniform should be displayed (in an attempt to give a "human dimension" to the former enemy), I came to a fuller appreciation of the inevitable tension between a commemorative voice-"I was there, I know because I saw and felt what happened"-and a historical one that speaks of complicated motivesand of actions and consequences often hardly considered at the moment of the event itself.
There, I had first heard curatorial decisions attacked and derided as "politically correct history," and as a craven caving in to "special interests" but there, too, I had watched as a complex interpretation of a mythic American event had successfully supplanted an enduring "first take." In the early 1990s, I studied the National Park Service's preparations for the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of World War II at the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor. Custer and the Seventh Cavalry into a historic site where different-often clashing-stories could be told. After all, for many years I had studied battles over battlefield memorialization, clashes over "sacred ground." In the late 1980s, I had spent much time with National Park Service personnel as they struggled to transform the Little Bighorn battlefield from a shrine to George A. When, in the fall of 1993, Martin Harwit, director of the National Air and Space Museum (NASM), asked me to serve on an advisory committee for that museum's upcoming Enola Gay exhibit, I was excited. All rights reserved.:ฤก ANATOMY OF A CONTROVERSY EDWARD T. He is the author of Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields and Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum. Penson Professor of Religion and American Culture at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh.