“We made a basic mistake,” Heyman said at the time. When congressmen began calling for hearings on the issue in January, Heyman and the Smithsonian board junked the proposed exhibit and ordered it replaced with a small substitute featuring only the fuselage of the bomber and a few artifacts from the mission. The Enola Gay, named after the pilot’s mother, was to have gone on display this summer in an exhibit devoted to the atomic bomb’s role in the Japanese surrender.īut last year, veterans’ groups and some members of Congress complained that the proposed script and wall texts for the show treated the Japanese as innocent victims rather than brutal aggressors who started the war. Heyman noted, however, that the exhibit as planned by Harwit “has been fraught with controversy.”
In a statement, Heyman credited the former Cornell University astronomer with guiding the restoration of the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in August 1945. The issue then was whether the Smithsonian should be the national. Harwit, director of Washington’s National Air and Space Museum since 1987, quit rather than accept a demotion to the post of senior scientist in astrophysics. Not since 1855 has the Smithsonian been riven by a controversy to equal that precipitated by the proposed Enola Gay exhibit. Michael Heyman, that “I believe that nothing less than my stepping down from the directorship will satisfy the museum’s critics and allow the museum to move forward with important new projects.” Fittingly, the Smithsonian Institution plans to mark the 50th anniversary of these pivotal events with an exhibit featuring the Enola Gay at the National Air and Space Museum next year. Martin Harwit said in a letter of resignation to the Smithsonian’s secretary, I. This accession also includes a press release and concept outline for a photographic exhibition, War in the Pacific: An American Perspective, which. Exhibition drawings for Crossroads accompany the script. The director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum resigned Tuesday, citing the “continuing controversy and divisiveness” over the exhibit of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima 50 years ago.ĭr. The concept for the exhibition was eventually dropped and the Enola Gay was presented in a factual exhibition with little interpretation.