How Governments Hide The Truth
The lessons of the U.S. establishment's suppression of the truth in 1945 still remain relevant today.
No citizen’s political education can be said to be complete until they are let down by the government they love.
This is one of several fascinating strands explored in Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World by the journalist Lesley M.M. Blume. It is about how the U.S. government did its best to suppress the truth about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bombs, and how a journalist persevered to reveal the story.
The journalist was John Hersey. He was also a war hero and an American patriot.
As World War II ends, Hersey finds himself without a job. He has just resigned from Time magazine and is courted by New Yorker, then a magazine not known for its hard-hitting journalism.
Hersey’s journalistic friends in Europe and Asia bring him dispatches about the war and the after-effects of the atomic bombs. There is widespread reporting about the devastation to Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s buildings, but none of it focuses on the human suffering.
The United States wants to hang on to the narrative of being one of the heroes of World War II and therefore cuts off access to the two cities in post-war Japan. The Americans also control information flow. They do so by flying in ‘friendly’ journalists who will write what they’re told.
In one case, the New York Times edits out the first Western report out of Hiroshima by Leslie Nakashima:
omitting nearly all references to radium and uranium poisoning, and adding an editor’s note stating that “United States scientists say that the atomic bomb will not have any lingering after-effects in the devastated area.” The heavily edited story now indicated that victims were dying solely of burns and injuries incurred from the blast, not radiation poisoning.
The establishment also tells outright lies.
As one U.S. General puts it, radiation poisoning is a “very pleasant way to die”.
But John Hersey and his editors, Harold Ross and William Shawn are convinced that there is a completely different story to tell:
But for Hersey and Shawn, something essential was missing from the reporting. They identified what had seemed so disturbing and incomplete about the coverage so far.
“Most of the reporting up to that time had to do with the power of the bomb and how much damage it had done in the city,” Hersey later recalled. While it seemed like the coverage had been comprehensive, most of the information had dealt with landscape and building destruction. Months had passed since the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, and still very little had been published on how the atomic bomb had affected its human victims.
Several months later, Hersey manages to get into Hiroshima. He meets several survivors and learns the horrifying details of what happened to them and those who died. And roughly a year after the bombs were dropped, the story comes out in a 30,000 word report. The New Yorker publishes it as a single-story issue.
The lies of the U.S. government are exposed, and the world now knows that nuclear bombs and the accompanying radiation is pretty much a horrible way to die. Eventually, the world realises that they should find ways to ensure no country ever explodes another nuclear device over a population.
Fallout is a brilliant account of how the scoop of the century came to be. It is gripping and entertaining, despite its subject matter. For history and World War II buffs, it is a must. For journalists, it is an education.
Fallout is also a handy reminder for us that governments tell lies, and that eventually the objective truth regarding any event will come out. (For that to happen however, we need a free press.)
I picked it up because I was looking for a good example with which to build on my previous piece titled, Yes, there is such a thing as ‘objective truth’. I was also looking for a non-Indian example because in my experience, Indian examples tend to polarise people. Imagine using the BJP-led government or previous governments as examples for anything!
Still, using Fallout as a proxy, we can think about what we’ve been told by the establishment, whether we speak about the Delhi violence of this year or the pandemic. Or any other event, present and past.
Here’s the video that came out of it.
Thanks for this. I hadn't heard about the New Yorker piece on Hiroshima when I prepared my quiz on Scoops. However, I did mention the only other time the magazine devoted an entire issue to one article, the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador. There too the U.S. government under Reagan denied a massacre took place, and the flow of military aid continued. Unlike Hiroshima though, U.S. media in the 1980s was to its credit more willing to ask questions.