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I write this fully aware of a double standard at play. When a cause is just, it stands up to questioning and criticism. But it is wrong to cover up the suffering that it engendered, just as it is wrong for Hiroshima critics to ignore the suffering of American soldiers and the duty of their leaders to spare soldiers' lives whenever possible. Let me make this clear: I am not saying that it was wrong to drop the bomb _ not for a minute.
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Even with only a few pictures of victims and the wasteland the Enola Gay left behind, no visitor to this exhibit can walk through the sterile rooms of gleaming metal and not think of the victims. Leaders of groups who fought to eliminate the controversial exhibits may think they have won a victory.
Enola gay plane museum full#
Instead, the exhibit features rooms full of airplane facts and paraphernalia and the Enola Gay's fuselage, as well as a 16-minute video in which Enola Gay crew members, now seniors, explain what happened and why. Because of intense pressure from veterans groups, the museum canceled exhibits that questioned the decision to bomb or focused on its devastating toll. On that score, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum's controversial Enola Gay exhibit, which commemorates the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan, fails. And good history, which tells a story from many perspectives and does not try to bury unpleasant truths. The full truth takes some of the bloom off Jefferson's otherwise rosy image, but the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Inc. The tour offers a walk through the labor mills and the quarters of the 100-plus slaves who were forced to work for a man who professed to oppose slavery. Visit Monticello, home of Thomas Jefferson, and you will see much more than antiques and inventions.