An exhibit denied : lobbying the history of Enola Gay

ISBN: 0387947973 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN: 9780387947976 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Physical Description: xxv, 477 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.
Publisher: New York, NY : Copernicus, c1996.

Book

An exhibit denied : lobbying the history of Enola Gay / Martin Harwit.

Harwit, Martin, 1931- (Author).

Summary:

A national frenzy, fanned by lobbyists and the media, thwarted the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum's attempt to mount an exhibition featuring the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Martin Harwit, the director of the museum at the time, recounts the decade-long effort to restore the Enola Gay, the largest restoration project ever undertaken by the museum; recalls the help and support initially provided by General Tibbets and a small.

band of men he had commanded on the atomic missions to Hiroshima and Nagasaki; shows how a handful of World War II veterans became disillusioned and began to oppose the museum's display of the aircraft; and describes how these men succeeded in calling on powerful veterans' organizations, aerospace lobbyists and congressmen for help in their cause. All the while, a separate drama was unfolding in Japan, where the prospects of an exhibition of the Enola Gay, in a national.

museum in the heart of Washington, raised an entirely different set of concerns.