#ENOLA GAY EXHIBIT 1995 OPENING DAY PROFESSIONAL#
He helped form the Historians' Committee for Open Debate on Hiroshima, which 'deplores the removal of historical documents and revisions of interpretations of history for reasons outside the professional procedures and criteria by which museum exhibits are created.' Among materials removed from the exhibit was an excerpt from the 1950 memoirs of Fleet Admiral William D. 'It was unconscionable that they removed documents that the American Legion found objectionable,' said Sherwin. 'They should have chosen a different medium, a symposium maybe, if they wanted to discuss historical scholarship.' After walking through the new exhibit, Aubin pronounced it 'a fine technology exhibit' and 'in the finest tradition of the Smithsonian.' However, historian Martin Sherwin, who served as one of the advisors for the museum's exhibit planners, was disturbed by the way the exhibit changed. 'I think it was just flawed from the start,' said Aubin.
The association protested the previous exhibit concepts as early as September 1993. The recast exhibit has satisfied the concerns of Stephen Aubin, a spokesman for the Air Force Association.
A visitor managed to lob some red paint onto the rug of the unopened exhibit area. A letter signed by 24 members of Congress in August, 1994, charged that an earlier version of the exhibit 'portrayed Japan more as an innocent victim than a ruthless aggressor, and cast Americans as being driven to drop the bomb out of revenge and for political reasons rather than out of concern for the hundreds of thousands of American lives that would have been lost during an invasion of Japan.' At the preview of the modified exhibit, Michael Heyman, secretary of the Smithsonian, said, 'I have concluded that we made a basic error in attempting to couple a historical treatment of the use of the atomic weapons with the 50th anniversary commemoration of the end of the war.' He likened the current, object-centered exhibit to 'the way we display other icons such as the star-spangled banner and Lincoln's hat.' Heyman explained the presence of extra security at the Enola Gay exhibit as a precaution against protests. The museum made the changes after more than a year of protests, largely by military veterans. The final exhibit focuses on the hardware of the plane itself, while the earlier plans showed dramatic images of warfare and the bombs' aftermath, including discussions of nuclear politics and alternatives to the bombing. WASHINGTON, June 27 - After more than a year of controversy, the National Air and Space Museum unveiled Tuesday the restored sections of the B-29 Enola Gay, the first plane to drop an atomic bomb, displayed in an exhibit that has radically changed from the museum's original plans.