Crouch and lead curator Michael Neufeld both agreed to proceed with preparation work and the first script was finished in January, 1994.Even though Secretary Adams was concerned about how veterans would react to such a possibly contentious presentation, and Tom Crouch, Chairman of the Aeronautics Department, stated that it would probably be impossible to make veterans feel good at the same time as the public was being encouraged to think about the consequences of the bombings, Martin Harwit insisted that the museum could do both scholarship and commemoration. It stated that the exhibition's primary goal was to encourage the public to re-examine the bombings in view of the political and military factors which led to the decision to use the bombs, actions which brought suffering to Japanese civilians and had long-term implications. The museum began planning for the exhibition, and by 1993 a planning document was drafted.The exception was Noel Gayler, a retired antinuclear admiral who argued against the potential of celebrating destruction or memorializing the killing of so many civilians. Veterans had lobbied to have the airplane restored and displayed, and because of the Enola Gay's educational value in an exhibition, all but one of the committee members approved the restoration and display of the airplane. Discussion of a possible Enola Gay exhibition had begun years before the museum's Research Advisory Committee met in October 1987 to further consider the matter.Harwit shared Adams' philosophy and worked to improve scholarly standards at the museum. Smithsonian Secretary Robert McCormick Adams, an academic who wanted to encourage critical scholarship, appointed Martin Harwit director of Air and Space in August, 1987. Since the National Air and Space Museum opened in 1976, it had developed a reputation for celebrating technology and displaying famous artifacts, but offered minimal intellectual content.As the author views this matter as central to the turmoil that followed, he devotes considerably more time to this element than the others. The first element involved exhibition planning, particularly development and production of the exhibition script.His reconstruction describes the five elements separately, and then explains the effect and influence each had when combined with the other elements to produce the outcome of the exhibition's cancellation.
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He believes the reconstruction of events leading up to the cancellation as the best way to explain what happened. The author states that the controversy began when the Air and Space Museum opened about twenty years earlier and came to a head in 1994 when five elements essential to the exhibition's success conflicted.This article provides an exceptionally detailed account of the controversy by describing the preparation of the exhibit, the origins and types of objections raised, subsequent revisions in the exhibit, and the decision to cancel it. He bemoans the lost opportunity to educate a vast audience about a defining moment in history, and suggests that the Smithsonian's Secretary and Board of Regents abandoned the planned exhibition for political reasons.
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The tone of this article is set at the beginning when the author characterizes the January 1995 cancellation of the original Enola Gay exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum as possibly the greatest tragedy to befall the public presentation of history in many years.National Museum of African American History and Culture (88).Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum (258).Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (313).National Museum of the American Indian (375).Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (589).Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (698).Smithsonian Institution Building (1640).National Museum of American History (3323).
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