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The cancellation of the National Air and Space Museum's (NASM) original Enola Gay exhibition in January 1995 may constitute the worst tragedy to befall the public presentation of history in the United States in this generation. In displaying the Enola Gay without analysis of the event that gave the B-29 airplane its significance, the Smithsonian Institution forfeited an opportunity to educate a worldwide audience in the millions about one of this century's defining experiences. An exhibition that explored the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan--an event historians view as significant in itself and symbolic of the end of World War II, the beginning of the Cold War, and the dawn of the nuclear age--might have been the most important museum presentation of the decade and perhaps of the era. The secretary and the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian abandoned this major exhibition for political reasons: Veterans' groups, political commentators, social critics, and politicians had charged that the exhibition script dishonored the Americans who fought the war by questioning the motives for using the bombs, by portraying the bomb as unnecessary to end the war, and by sympathizing too much with the Japanese killed by the bombs and, by implication, with the Japanese cause. Thus one of the premiere cultural institutions of the United States, its foremost museum system, surrendered its scholarly independence and a significant amount of its authority in American intellectual life to accommodate to a political perspective.
The full implications of the cancellation are still far from clear, but an interpretation deeply disturbing to historians and museum professionals has begun to emerge. Smithsonian secretary I. Michael Heyman has suggested that the institution should perhaps eschew such controversial exhibitions and that its exhibitions cannot combine commemoration and celebration with scholarship. He has put on hold several projects, including a NASM exhibit on air power in the Vietnam War that avoided almost every controversy about that divisive war. He has promised to revise exhibits that have angered viewers, one by treating science and technology negatively, others by criticizing or seeming to disparage American character, society, or behavior. Anecdotal evidence suggests that elsewhere, planned commemorations of the end of World War II--even scholarly events--have been modified or abandoned.(1) These troubling developments have led some...