Atomic Memories of the Enola Gay: Strategies of Remembrance at the National Air and Space Museum

Atomic Memories of the Enola Gay: Strategies of Remembrance at the National Air and Space Museum Bryan Hubbard and Marouf A. Hasian Jr. On the morning of August 6, 1945, three B-29 Superfortresses arrived over Japan's Inland Sea. One of the aircraft, the Enola Gay, would drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Within a week, Russia would join the war, another bomb would be dropped on Nagasaki, and Japan would capitulate. For millions of Americans, President Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb was the primary causal event that ended World War If s Pacific chapter. While a few contemporary voices dissented, the overwhelming majority of U.S. citizens defended the use of the bomb as a legitimate response to Japanese aggression and imperialism.1 Fifty years after the bombing of Hiroshima, the American nation found itself embroiled in social controversy. When the National Air and Space Museum (NASM) decided in 1988 to interpret the flight of the Enola Gay, it opened dialogue between diverse communities that held competing and contradictory memories of the symbolic importance of that historic event. Remembered through a prism of Vietnam and the Cold War, the once unambiguous or "Good War" had become controversial, and the iconic Enola Gay became a lightning rod for contests over the meaning of the nation's history, its present morality, and future politics. What began as a technical debate over a museum script grew into a public spectacle. Within months academicians, curators, veteran groups, politicians, and ordinary citizens began defending their memories of the Enola Gay.2 For rhetoricians, the Enola Gay controversy provides several layers of texts for analysis. The renewed debates over the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki continue to influence budgetary issues, cultural wars, memory studies, and the power of discourse. Since "The Last Act" opened in June of 1995, several scholars have tried to account for the controversy.3 Primarily the products of historians and museum scholars, most of these analyses have been polemic critiques that either defended the position of the veterans or the curators. Many expected the Bryan Hubbard received his M.A. in Communication in 1997 from Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. He is currently serving in the United States Air Force. Marouf A. Hasian Jr. is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah. The authors wish to acknowledge the valuable help received from the Public Assistance Center of the Arizona State University College of Public Programs. © Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 1, No. 3,1998, pp. 363-385 ISSN 1094-8392 364 Rhetoric & Public Affairs NASM to memorialize the Enola Gay, while others wanted national displays to reflect new social histories that discussed the horrors of nuclear war. Each of these positions advanced interesting arguments and an analysis of the dialogic nature of this controversy improves our understanding of how groups practice "strategies of remembrance" as political action.4 While others have dealt with more specific communicative aspects of World War II events and atomic histories, this discussion deals with a national memory of a particularly powerful moment and how certain groups construct strategic remembrances to defend their memories. Although public affairs scholars have a number of options available to them, the body of work regarding collective memory and strategic remembrances provides one of the best frames for describing the rhetoric involved in the Enola Gay controversy . This article joins the discussion between those scholars who have noted the importance of memorialization in public persuasion by focusing on how competing strategies of remembrance create division or unity.5 To tell this story, the essay is divided into five main parts: 1) a perspective for discussing the relationship between rhetoric and strategies of remembrance; 2) a context for the Enola Gay controversy; 3) the veterans' recollections of World War II; 4) the curators' competing strategies of remembrance; and 5) a discussion of lightning-rod issues of deflections and distortions in each group's rhetoric. Framing Remembrance and Recollecting the Enola Gay In recent years, an important interdisciplinary movement has been the renewed interest in exploring the rhetorical dimensions of "collective memory."6 As Maurice Halbwachs explained, collective memories are...