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 September 5, 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. 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.

Laurence  boasted "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 were 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 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1401301312/commondreams-20/ref=nosim/, written with her brother  journalist David, exposes the reporting of Times correspondent William L.  Laurence  Democracy Now! http://www.democracynow.org/  is a national radio and TV program,  broadcast on more than 240 stations.

See our archive of deep insider emails at http://www.WantToKnow.info/coveruparchive