While historians certainly owe something to the public especially in a museum setting they should not have to try to make history fit a limited and incomplete view of what it is. In the end the exhibit was changed to a watered down version that stated that the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan. This exhibit did not follow that pattern, if anything showing a girl’s charred lunch box and a photo of someone with burns from the bombing shows how America may not have been so morally superior as some believe. The problem was also that as Americans we view World War II as a war that was justified, that we were on the side that was right and that we were above the Germans and Japanese because of the crimes they committed. To historians this wasn’t the whole picture and the whole picture was what they wanted to exhibit.
To many the atomic bomb was the fastest way to the war with the least cost to American lives. The biggest problem with the exhibit is that it did not match the memory of the veterans or the collective memory of the American people. While the curators of the exhibit had the best intentions with the exhibit they seemed to have underestimated the place of the Enola Gay in American history, especially at the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war. This turned into a debate about what history should be with many politicians saying that the museums interpretation of history was not history. On the other side was the museum, which said it wanted to show a balanced look at the atomic bomb by showing Hiroshima after the bomb. There was the one side, with veterans, politicians, and military people, who wanted an exhibit that made people feel good to be American and that praised the veterans of World War II. The controversy stemmed over how American history should be presented. The exhibit started out as an exhibit for the fiftieth anniversary of the ending of World War II. The exhibit became tangled in controversy from the beginning. I soon learned that the exhibit got caught up in a debate about what is history and whether history should simply be a comemoration of the past or if history should be interpreted and debated. When I heard that there was a controversy over the original exhibit I wondered how it came about that something that left such a huge impact on the twentieth century could have such a barebones exhibit. I have seen the exhibit of the Enola Gay,the airplane that dropped the atomic bomb, Little Boy, on Hiroshima in August 1945 at the National Air and Space Museum. Unlike other exhibits from the Smithsonian Institutes it did not leave much of an impression.