In this hard-hitting, thoroughly researched, and crisply argued book, award-winning historian Robert P. Newman offers a fresh perspective on the dispute over President Truman s decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan in World War II. Newman s argument centers on the controversy that erupted around the National Air and Space Museum s (NASM) exhibit of Enola Gay in 1995.
Newman explores the tremendous challenges that NASM faced when trying to construct a narrative that would satisfy American veterans and the Japanese, as well as accurately reflect the current historical research on both...

Lillian Hellman's memoirs are as notable for what they omit as for what they reveal. In An Unfinished Woman (1969), she notes that, although she kept an extensive diary of her Moscow trip in the winter of 1944-45, "No where is there a record of . . . how close I felt then and now to a State Department career man whose future, seven or eight years later, went down the drain for no reason except the brutal cowardice of his colleagues under the hammering of Joe McCarthy."

The State Department career man is John Fremont Melby, principal author of the government's China White Paper...