First Into Nagasaki (34 page)

On September 12 Farrell held another briefing in Tokyo, to convey the results of his science expedition to Hiroshima. Bill Lawrence’s coverage for the
New York Times
was headlined “No Radioactivity in Hiroshima Ruin.” Farrell denied that the atomic bomb “produced a dangerous, lingering radioactivity.” He also countered a frequent Japanese accusation, stating that “no poison gases were released” at the moment of explosion—which was literally true. Lawrence, from what he’d seen with his own eyes and even written a week earlier, would have known that the press conference was deliberately misleading, but there was no skepticism in his article. (As he bragged in a 1972 memoir, “even politicians know that I can keep a secret.”)

Stateside, there was significant activity from the greatest atomic authority in the press. Whatever MacArthur’s spokesman might have said when laying down the laws restricting correspondents’ movements in Japan, it was now military policy for reporters to spearhead the
propaganda—
an equally significant occupation.

The lever of this propaganda was the science writer for the
New York Times,
William L. Laurence. Laurence had been born in Lithuania in 1888 of a highly religious Jewish family, some of whom were later killed by the Nazis. He made it to the United States as a poor young man, fought for his adopted country in World War I on the battlefields of France, and succeeded at the American dream. By age fifty-seven he had two Harvard degrees and a Pulitzer Prize, having been with the
Times
since 1930. But for four months he was paid dual salaries. On loan from his newspaperman role, without the knowledge of his colleagues he became the privileged witness, official chronicler, press-release author, reporter-at-large, and unnamed spokesman for the War Department, for the Manhattan Project (which developed the atomic bomb), and for President Truman. When the bomb went off over Nagasaki on August 9, Laurence was in one of the B-29s, having cradled the device in his tremulous hands scant hours before. It was, he wrote for the
New York Times
but on behalf of the government, “a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes.”

Historians have written much, especially recently, about this symbiotic relationship. What appears today a flagrant conflict of interest was little remarked on a couple of decades ago, and even praised by analysts of the press twenty years before that. Laurence had written about atomic energy since 1929 and, as the first and most eminent newspaper science reporter in the land, enjoyed an oracular status. General Leslie Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project, approached the newspaper’s publisher and its senior editor on behalf of the War Department and arranged to borrow Laurence in April 1945 as special consultant for a top secret project. The implication was that when events exploded, the
New York Times
would have a monopoly.

What deepens the stain on all parties involved is how far it went. The
Times
abandoned any stance of impartiality or code of ethics; W. L. Laurence gave vent to his own sense of divine mission, and seems never to have felt his journalistic duties were compromised; and the U.S. government proved a masterly puppeteer. As often with an embedded reporter, if the sense of privileged access is flattering enough, obedience will be total—the message will be delivered not only as instructed, but with an extra flourish.

Groves already had public relations people on the Manhattan Project, but a respected journalist was needed to supply an imprimatur and a gravitas. Laurence was proud of his new role, since he believed that atomic power would prove the greatest scientific achievement of the twentieth century, which he quotably dubbed “The Atomic Age.” For 119 privileged days he flew all over the country to laboratories and test sites and plants, interviewed the Allies’ top physicists, had his wastebasket contents burned daily, told his wife practically nothing, and turned out scads of press releases or official reports—which were stamped
TOP SECRET
and locked in a vault until needed.

From behind the Atomic Curtain, as he termed it, he witnessed the July 16 Trinity test in New Mexico, the very first, and thought it a “Genesis . . . as though one were present at the moment of creation when God said: ‘Let there be light.’” Laurence even saw a gigantic Statue of Liberty take shape in the mountain of clouds. He drafted the War Department’s worldwide press release that accompanied Truman’s August 6 radio speech on Hiroshima, calling it “unique in the history of journalism . . . No greater honor could have come to any newspaperman, or anyone else for that matter.” He’d written an early draft of the president’s own statement, but it was rejected by the White House as “exaggerated, even phony.” His role was proudly displayed by his newspaper on August 7, touting him as the voice behind “pounds of official reports and bales of War Department handouts designed to enlighten laymen on the working of the atomic bomb.” It did not disclose his dual-salary status.

Laurence’s role in the carom of the story was only beginning. In mid-August, rather than being allowed to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki as was planned, he was yanked back from the Pacific to the United States. He was still on both payrolls. On September 9, the
New York Times
ran his exclusive eyewitness account of dropping Fat Man on Nagasaki (“a thing of beauty to behold”). This was a month after the bombing, the same day that three more of Weller’s Nagasaki dispatches, including extensive interviews with Japanese doctors and visits to hospital wards jammed with the dying, were stopped by the censors.

All the other reporters had stayed in Hiroshima for a few hours, written one story, then moved on. Only Weller was turning out an entire series from a nuclear site, with each article pivoting on the last, enlarging it, deepening it, revising his earlier assumptions and impressions.

On September 12, the
Times
featured Laurence’s front-page story from Ground Zero in New Mexico where, along with thirty fellow reporters and photographers, the job was to prove that at the very “cradle of a new era in civilization,” two months after the Trinity test, there was no dangerous radioactivity. He quoted General Groves: “You could live there forever.”

At this point all speculation becomes moot about any enthusiasm the
Chicago Daily News,
had they received Weller’s dispatches, might’ve shown for challenging a competitor. On September 14 the War Department sent “in confidence” to all editors of newspaper, magazine, and broadcast media a note from President Truman asking that any information about the “operational use” of the atomic bomb be kept secret unless quite specifically approved by the War Department. The purpose was “the highest national security.” In other words, no substantive coverage without approval. This was not, it was stressed, censorship. Of course it had the same effect.

By this time Weller was busy piling up dispatches among the prison camps of Kyushu—the eyewitness accounts of seeing both bombs explode.

On September 18 MacArthur enacted a new censorship regime for all media in Japan banning, among the code’s ten clauses, “Anything . . . that would promote hatred or disbelief in the Allied forces.” This meant the bomb. All newspaper or magazine articles and photographs had to be passed by a censorship board before publication. However, it was forbidden to mention that there was any censorship. These strictures were soon extended to books, radio broadcasts, movies, and mail. The censorship did not end in Japan until October 1949;
^*
scientific papers were not liberated until 1951.

Truman’s censorship in the States didn’t apply to Laurence, though. Starting September 26—the day Weller gave up on Nagasaki and set off by ship for Guam—the
New York Times
ran a ten-part series that Laurence had prepared for the government, detailing the scientific history of the bomb, praising the past and future of atomic power, and all but omitting any mention of radiation. The articles were vetted by the War Department, but the biblical allegories, the references to pioneer America and other mythologies, were pure Laurence. The series was then offered by the government, via the
Times,
free to papers around the country for reprint, and made into a free pamphlet for distribution in schools and to the entire public.

And the reward? Laurence’s
Times
salary was $150 a week. On loan to the U.S. government, he believed he would pocket a bit more by serving two masters. In 1977, the year he died, at age eighty-nine, he would claim he’d been diddled by both the War Department and the
New York Times
for his seventeen weeks of dual-salaried work. Expecting to more than double his income, he felt cheated out of just under $3,000 by the military and just over $2,000 by the newspaper. He wrote to the
Times
demanding the extra money; they refused. More than twenty years had passed, after all.

However, as a result of his work-for-hire stories on the atomic bomb, in 1946 Laurence did receive his second Pulitzer Prize and a commendation by the War Department. Those counted for something.

In
Shadows of Hiroshima
(1983), Burchett recalls a 1978 conversation:

In getting my report through I was more fortunate than a colleague, George Weller of the
Chicago Daily News.
I learned of what happened to his reports from Nagasaki only thirty-three years after the event. Passing through Paris where I was then based, he got my telephone number from a mutual friend and called to congratulate me . . . “But why now, after so many years?” I asked. “Because I’ve never had the chance of talking to you before,” he replied. “I greatly admired your feat, the more so because you succeeded in doing in Hiroshima what I failed to do in Nagasaki . . . I wrote a series of articles, totalling 25,000 words. As a loyal, disciplined member of the press corps, I sent the material to MacArthur’s press headquarters for clearance and transmission . . . Eventually I arrived in Guam with my leg in a plaster cast. I immediately looked for what I hoped would be congratulatory messages—or at least acknowledgment that my series had arrived. The paper had received nothing. MacArthur had ‘killed’ the lot. I had always been an enemy of MacArthur’s censorship. Now I think he decided to punish me.”

Weller, in a 1990 radio interview, praised Burchett for beating him in, and remembered the Aussie as “a very sharp and careful reporter whom I had known at the battle of Buna.” In his view, Burchett succeeded by

not being troubled by the qualms I was of putting MacArthur on the spot. He saw the chink in the censorship—that the U.S. Navy had been involved for the entire war in a struggle for power with General MacArthur—sometimes cooperating, sometimes not cooperating. It was a bitter pill that MacArthur, who fought a relatively tame war, was getting chief command of the entire Pacific, and censoring whatever he wished to. Burchett figured this out and said:
I am sure, now that peace is here, that the Navy will allow me to see Hiroshima.
And the Navy did not prevent it. He went in, wrote the story of Hiroshima—more deaths, if you will, than Nagasaki—and got his story out. I instead sent mine straight to MacArthur to force the decision on him. His censors stopped them on the grounds I was there illegitimately. They didn’t accept my idea that because peace had broken out, I had a right to report.

VI

“All censored information is fundamentally propaganda,” Weller wrote in
Bases Overseas,
published a year before the war ended. He was speaking from deep experience, and with nuclear prescience. In a never-published 1947 satirical article called “How to Become a Censor” that he managed through gritted teeth (the taste is bitter: “If you don’t get your chance
in
the next war, you may get it
after
the next war”) he points out censorship’s disastrous and overall effect on the public understanding of an event:

The moment when it could have been understood politically is missed, suppressed. The possibility of comprehension will never return again . . . And the porcelain men of history will pose forever in these lying attitudes.

The aim of well-timed censorship is to instill this simple idea:
it probably never happened.

He adds that one of the most effective censors he knew spent the whole war perfecting a flawless sense of timing to be used only after Japan had surrendered. He was “trained in the MacArthur school of censorship”:

. . . a tall lean lieutenant-colonel, greyfaced and greyhaired, who smoothed out his swing on a whole series of stories of mine about Nagasaki. I went to the atomized port while the ruins were still smoking, when the only American alive—besides errant ex-prisoners—was a single survivor of a crashed B-29, who thought he was still on Saipan . . . I fed my stories by special messenger to the grey lieutenant-colonel in Tokyo. With one ashen shot after another he holed them into obscurity . . . The war was over, but he . . . kept right on playing my Nagasakis into the upper drawer of the “file and forget” until all were wasted. That was timing.

Twenty thousand skulls pulverized in an hour beside Nagasaki’s dour creek—who would believe them censorable today?

All this suggests that Weller knew his nemesis on MacArthur’s staff. It seems plausible; he had turned out several Tokyo stories prior to the treaty signing, and might’ve dealt with the man. Weller had already encountered his double in the Philippines, en route to Japan via Manila, then MacArthur’s headquarters. There the following dispatch was blocked, as Weller’s penciled scrawl indicates. It provides a preview, only a week after Japan had caved in, of MacArthur’s muzzling of the press as a fundamental technique.

Manila, August 22, 1945—1830 hours

[
Killed by censorship
]

The iron curtain of censorship was clamped down today at MacArthur’s headquarters on all details regarding the coming occupation of Japanese-held territory. In the meantime, Tokyo Radio and the Domei news agency continued to pour forth a flow of purported details of how, when, and where all Japanese-held territory was destined to be occupied.