The Enola Gay Fiasco: History, Politics, and the Museum

To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum (NASM) had planned to open an exhibition centering on the Enola Gay, the bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. During its many years of preparation, the exhibit project became so controversial that the Smithsonian canceled it on 30 January 1995. In June of that year, the NASM opened another version of the exhibit, sharply reduced in size and radically expurgated in content.

With the cancellation of the original Enola Gay exhibit, everyone lost. The NASM and the Smithsonian lost, not only for the obvious reasons of wasted effort and loss of prestige but also because the cancellation broke off, irreversibly so far as can be seen, a promising new direction for the NASM. The opposition forces who brought down the project lost, for history will view them poorly: the resulting literature will see to that. ¹ Observers who watched the controversy unfold wasted their energies because they were not permitted to judge the end product for themselves. The public lost, too. It was deprived of the opportunity to discuss an issue of acute concern and left with the nagging memory of an illiberal thing happening before its eyes with virtually no one rising to prevent it. Clearly, the Enola Gay exhibit should have been presented to the public in the mature form forged by its creators during a long and painful gestation period. How good it would have been, we cannot know. I suspect that it would have been a decent exhibit, not without flaws, to be sure, but one that would have performed a useful and honorable role, and that would have offended nobody, not even those who so hysterically opposed it.

All that remains now is the opportunity to learn from the misadventure. ² As usual in such cases, the cause of the Enola Gay fiasco was a coincidence of several adverse factors. No matter; for the curators, historians, and administrators of the Smithsonian the task was to succeed on behalf of their institution, and they failed. The failure is of interest here because it was a professional failure.

The public has little understanding of what museums can and should do, the people who run them, and the conditions that govern their operation. The efforts of museums are subject to certain basic limitations that lie in their very nature. For the most part, these limitations stem from the obligations of museums to society, their dependence upon financial supporters, and the sources of their intellectual authority.

Museums are not financially self-sufficient; they survive only with the help of large, regular subsidies (often three-quarters or more of their annual budgets), usually from the public. In return the institutions are understood to serve the public. Not only are they committed to perform two specific public services, collecting and education, they are also expected, within their area of specialization, to help with various minor tasks presented by almost anyone. These burdens must be borne; inadequate responses will gradually use up a museum’s credit of public goodwill. With regard to the main task, collecting and education, different museums interpret these mandates differently. Traditionally, the priority was on collecting; more recently, on education. A good museum, however, maintains a balance of both because the two activities stimulate and reinforce each other.

If education, properly understood, is an essential duty of museums, then the chief instrument of education is the exhibit. Exhibits, everyone agrees, should not be boring; they should be—to list some adjectives frequently used in praise—interesting, amusing, entertaining, stimulating, provocative, controversial. In principle, then, there is nothing wrong with a controversial exhibit—quite the contrary. Still, it has its limits.

In return for indispensable financial support, museums give up some autonomy. While the details of what and how much has to be given up will vary from case to case, museums inevitably owe their chief financial supporter some accountability. This obligation will be reflected in their corporate hierarchy, which always roughly displays three layers. At the bottom is the museum...