[Mb-civic] Amy Goodman: Hiroshima Cover-up

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

CommonDreams.org - August 10, 2004
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0810-01.htm

Hiroshima Cover-up:
How the War Department's Timesman Won a Pulitzer

by Amy Goodman and David Goodman

  "Governments lie." -I. F. Stone, Journalist

At the dawn of the nuclear age, an independent Australian journalist named
Wilfred Burchett traveled to Japan to cover the aftermath of the atomic
bombing of Hiroshima. The only problem was that General Douglas MacArthur
had declared southern Japan off-limits, barring the press. Over 200,000
people died in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but no
Western journalist witnessed the aftermath and told the story. The world's
media obediently crowded onto the USS Missouri off the coast of Japan to
cover the surrender of the Japanese.

Wilfred Burchett decided to strike out on his own. He was determined to
see for himself what this nuclear bomb had done, to understand what this
vaunted new weapon was all about. So he boarded a train and traveled for
thirty hours to the city of Hiroshima in defiance of General MacArthur's
orders.

Burchett emerged from the train into a nightmare world. The devastation
that confronted him was unlike any he had ever seen during the war. The
city of Hiroshima, with a population of 350,000, had been razed.
Multistory buildings were reduced to charred posts. He saw people's
shadows seared into walls and sidewalks. He met people with their skin
melting off. In the hospital, he saw patients with purple skin
hemorrhages, gangrene, fever, and rapid hair loss.  Burchett was among the
first to witness and describe radiation sickness.

Burchett sat down on a chunk of rubble with his Baby Hermes typewriter.
His dispatch began: "In Hiroshima, thirty days after the first atomic bomb
destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying,
mysteriously and horribly-people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from
an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague."

He continued, tapping out the words that still haunt to this day:
"Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster
steamroller has passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write
these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as
a warning to the world."

Burchett's article, headlined THE ATOMIC PLAGUE, was published on
9/05, 1945, in the London Daily Express. The story caused a worldwide
sensation.  Burchett's candid reaction to the horror shocked readers. "In
this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible
and frightening desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed
Pacific island seem like an Eden. The damage is far greater than
photographs can show.

"When you arrive in Hiroshima you can look around for twenty-five and
perhaps thirty square miles. You can see hardly a building. It gives you
an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man-made destruction."

Burchett's searing independent reportage was a public relations fiasco for
the U.S. military. General MacArthur had gone to pains to restrict
journalists' access to the bombed cities, and his military censors were
sanitizing and even killing dispatches that described the horror. The
official narrative of the atomic bombings downplayed civilian casualties
and categorically dismissed reports of the deadly lingering effects of
radiation. Reporters whose dispatches convicted with this version of
events found themselves silenced: George Weller of the Chicago Daily News
slipped into Nagasaki and wrote a 25,000-word story on the nightmare that
he found there. Then he made a crucial error: He submitted the piece to
military censors. His newspaper never even received his story. As Weller
later summarized his experience with MacArthur's censors, "They won."

U.S. authorities responded in time-honored fashion to Burchett's
revelations: They attacked the messenger. General MacArthur ordered him
expelled from Japan (the order was later rescinded), and his camera with
photos of Hiroshima mysteriously vanished while he was in the hospital.
U.S. officials accused Burchett of being influenced by Japanese
propaganda. They scoffed at the notion of an atomic sickness. The U.S.
military issued a press release right after the Hiroshima bombing that
downplayed human casualties, instead emphasizing that the bombed area was
the site of valuable industrial and military targets.

Four days after Burchett's story splashed across front pages around the
world, Major General Leslie R. Groves, director of the atomic bomb
project, invited a select group of thirty reporters to New Mexico.
Foremost among this group was William L. Laurence, the Pulitzer
Prize-winning science reporter for The New York Times. Groves took the
reporters to the site of the first atomic test. His intent was to
demonstrate that no atomic radiation lingered at the site. Groves trusted
Laurence to convey the military's line; the general was not disappointed.

Laurence's front-page story, U.S. ATOM BOMB SITE BELIES
TOKYO TALES: TESTS ON NEW MEXICO RANGE CONFIRM
THAT BLAST, AND NOT RADIATION, TOOK TOLL, ran on
September 12, 1945, following a three-day delay to clear military censors.
"This historic ground in New Mexico, scene of the first atomic explosion
on earth and cradle of a new era in civilization, gave the most effective
answer today to Japanese propaganda that radiations [sic] were responsible
for deaths even after the day of the explosion, Aug. 6, and that persons
entering Hiroshima had contracted mysterious maladies due to persistent
radioactivity," the article began.3 Laurence said unapologetically that
the Army tour was intended "to give the lie to these claims."

Laurence quoted General Groves: "The Japanese claim that people died from
radiation. If this is true, the number was very small."

Laurence then went on to offer his own remarkable editorial on what
happened: "The Japanese are still continuing their propaganda aimed at
creating the impression that we won the war unfairly, and thus attempting
to create sympathy for themselves and milder terms... Thus, at the
beginning, the Japanese described 'symptoms' that did not ring true."

But Laurence knew better. He had observed the first atomic bomb test on
July 16, 1945, and he withheld what he knew about radioactive fallout
across the southwestern desert that poisoned local residents and
livestock. He kept mum about the spiking Geiger counters all around the
test site.

William L. Laurence went on to write a series of ten articles for the
Times that served as a glowing tribute to the ingenuity and technical
achievements of the nuclear program. Throughout these and other reports,
he downplayed and denied the human impact of the bombing. Laurence won the
Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.

It turns out that William L. Laurence was not only receiving a salary from
The New York Times. He was also on the payroll of the War Department. In
March 1945, General Leslie Groves had held a secret meeting at The New
York Times with Laurence to offer him a job writing press releases for the
Manhattan Project, the U.S. program to develop atomic weapons. The intent,
according to the Times, was "to explain the intricacies of the atomic
bomb's operating principles in laymen's language." Laurence also helped
write statements on the bomb for President Truman and Secretary of War
Henry Stimson.

Laurence eagerly accepted the offer, "his scientific curiosity and
patriotic zeal perhaps blinding him to the notion that he was at the same
time compromising his journalistic independence," as essayist Harold Evans
wrote in a history of war reporting. Evans recounted: "After the bombing,
the brilliant but bullying Groves continually suppressed or distorted the
effects of radiation. He dismissed reports of Japanese deaths as 'hoax or
propaganda.' The Times' Laurence weighed in, too, after Burchett's
reports, and parroted the government line." Indeed, numerous press
releases issued by the military after the Hiroshima bombing-which in the
absence of eyewitness accounts were often reproduced verbatim by U.S.
newspapers-were written by none other than Laurence.

"Mine has been the honor, unique in the history of journalism, of
preparing the War Department's official press release for worldwide
distribution," boasted Laurence in his memoirs, Dawn Over Zero. "No
greater honor could have come to any newspaperman, or anyone else for that
matter."

"Atomic Bill" Laurence revered atomic weapons. He had been crusading for
an American nuclear program in articles as far back as 1929. His dual
status as government agent and reporter earned him an unprecedented level
of access to American military officials-he even flew in the squadron of
planes that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. His reports on the atomic
bomb and its use had a hagiographic tone, laced with descriptions that
conveyed almost religious awe.

In Laurence's article about the bombing of Nagasaki (it was withheld by
military censors until a month after the bombing), he described the
detonation over Nagasaki that incinerated 100,000 people. Laurence waxed:
"Awe-struck, we watched it shoot upward like a meteor coming from the
earth instead of from outer space, becoming ever more alive as it climbed
skyward through the white clouds.... It was a living thing, a new species
of being, born right before our incredulous eyes."

Laurence later recounted his impressions of the atomic bomb: "Being close
to it and watching it as it was being fashioned into a living thing, so
exquisitely shaped that any sculptor would be proud to have created it,
one

... felt oneself in the presence of the supranatural."

Laurence was good at keeping his master's secrets-from suppressing the
reports of deadly radioactivity in New Mexico to denying them in Japan.
The Times was also good at keeping secrets, only revealing Laurence's dual
status as government spokesman and reporter on August 7, the day after the
Hiroshima bombing-and four months after Laurence began working for the
Pentagon. As Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell wrote in their excellent
book Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, "Here was the nation's
leading science reporter, severely compromised, not only unable but
disinclined to reveal all he knew about the potential hazards of the most
important scientific discovery of his time."

Radiation: Now You See It, Now You Don't

A curious twist to this story concerns another New York Times journalist
who reported on Hiroshima; his name, believe it or not, was William
Lawrence (his byline was W.H. Lawrence). He has long been confused with
William L. Laurence.  (Even Wilfred Burchett confuses the two men in his
memoirs and his 1983 book, Shadows of Hiroshima.) Unlike the War
Department's Pulitzer Prize winner, W.H.  Lawrence visited and reported on
Hiroshima on the same day as Burchett.  (William L. Laurence, after flying
in the squadron of planes that bombed Nagasaki, was subsequently called
back to the United States by the Times and did not visit the bombed
cities.)

W.H. Lawrence's original dispatch from Hiroshima was published on
September 5, 1945. He reported matter-of-factly about the deadly effects
of radiation, and wrote that Japanese doctors worried that "all who had
been in Hiroshima that day would die as a result of the bomb's lingering
effects." He described how "persons who had been only slightly injured on
the day of the blast lost 86 percent of their white blood corpuscles,
developed temperatures of 104 degrees Fahrenheit, their hair began to drop
out, they lost their appetites, vomited blood and finally died."

Oddly enough, W.H. Lawrence contradicted himself one week later in an
article headlined NO RADIOACTIVITY IN HIROSHIMA RUIN. For this article,
the Pentagon's spin machine had swung into high gear in response to
Burchett's horrifying account of "atomic plague." W.H. Lawrence reported
that Brigadier General T. F.  Farrell, chief of the War Department's
atomic bomb mission to Hiroshima, "denied categorically that [the bomb]
produced a dangerous, lingering radioactivity." Lawrence's dispatch quotes
only Farrell; the reporter never mentions his eyewitness account of people
dying from radiation sickness that he wrote the previous week.

The conflicting accounts of Wilfred Burchett and William L. Laurence might
be ancient history were it not for a modern twist. On October 23, 2003,
The New York Times published an article about a controversy over a
Pulitzer Prize awarded in 1932 to Times reporter Walter Duranty. A former
correspondent in the Soviet Union, Duranty had denied the existence of a
famine that had killed millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933. The
Pulitzer Board had launched two inquiries to consider stripping Duranty of
his prize. The Times "regretted the lapses" of its reporter and had
published a signed editorial saying that Duranty's work was "some of the
worst reporting to appear in this newspaper." Current Times executive
editor Bill Keller decried Duranty's "credulous, uncritical parroting of
propaganda."

On November 21, 2003, the Pulitzer Board decided against rescinding
Duranty's award, concluding that there was "no clear and convincing
evidence of deliberate deception" in the articles that won the prize.

As an apologist for Joseph Stalin, Duranty is easy pickings. What about
the "deliberate deception" of William L. Laurence in denying the lethal
effects of radioactivity? And what of the fact that the Pulitzer Board
knowingly awarded the top journalism prize to the Pentagon's paid
publicist, who denied the suffering of millions of Japanese? Do the
Pulitzer Board and the Times approve of "uncritical parroting of
propaganda"-as long as it is from the United States?

It is long overdue that the prize for Hiroshima's apologist be stripped.

Amy Goodman is host of the national radio and TV show "Democracy Now!.
This is an excerpt from her new national bestselling book The Exception to
the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media that
Love Them, written with her brother journalist David, exposes the
reporting of Times correspondent William L. Laurence

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