Martin Harwitt resigned as director of the Smithsonian Institution in May
1995 after a 10-year struggle to restore and show the Enola Gay at the museum.
It was the fiercest dispute in the museum’s history, and involved Second World
War veterans, the US Senate and the media. Initially, veterans favoured the
restoration of the bomber and its display. But the museum’s desire to put the
nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki into context raised the veterans’
ire—they favoured a “proud display”, rather than one which also carried
views from Japan and aired social and moral issues about nuclear weapons. Hear
it all from the horse’s mouth in Harwitt’s An Exhibit Denied (Copernicus, New
York, $27.50, ISBN 0 387 94797 3).
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