Bonus Quote of the Day (John Hersey, Chronicling the Horror of Hiroshima)

“When he dared, [the Reverend] Mr. [Kyoshi] Tanimoto raised his head and saw that the rayon man's house had collapsed. He thought a bomb had fallen directly on it. Such clouds of dust had risen that there was a sort of twilight around. In panic, not thinking for the moment of Mr. Matsuo under the ruins, he dashed out into the street. He noticed as he ran that the concrete wall of the estate had fallen over—towards the house rather than away from it. In the street, the first thing he saw was a squad of soldiers who had been burrowing into the hillside opposite, making one of the thousands of dugouts in which the Japanese apparently intended to resist invasion, hill by hill, life for life; the soldiers were coming out of the hole, where they should have been safe, and blood was running from their heads, chests, and backs. They were silent and dazed.

“Under what seemed to be a local dust cloud, the day grew darker and darker.”—John Hersey, Hiroshima (1946)

I meant to write this post yesterday, on the anniversary of this landmark event in literary history, the publication of Hiroshima in The New Yorker, until circumstances intervened. But with one brief, unsettling reminder of catastrophe last week, another, more tangible event this past weekend, and the 10th-year anniversary of a truly devastating event next weekend, the time still feels right for this post.

On this date 65 years ago yesterday, The New Yorker, in probably the boldest act of its entire history, devoted its entire issue to an extended report by John Hersey on the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Virtually all of the trademark touches of this most cosmopolitan of periodicals—cartoons, one-liners, short stories that redefined the genre—were gone, leaving readers face to face with only this extraordinary account of the U.S. bombing of this Japanese seaport from the perspective of six survivors.

The quote I’ve chosen highlights the story of the first of these half-dozen victims as told by Hersey, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist (A Bell for Adano) as well as reporter. In a way, he is confirming the vow made by the American government as soon as it picked up the pieces from Pearl Harbor: that war would be visited in kind on the military machine that had forced death and disorder on America (not to mention Japan’s own Asian neighbors).

But, by the end of the account, it becomes clear that the blood all too apparent on the Japanese soldiers now weighs heavily, in a moral sense, on the United States as well. It has inaugurated a vast era of uncertainty, as indicated by some of the phrases in the above quote: a “sort of” twilight; a hole in which the Japanese soldiers “should” have been safe; what “seemed” to be a local dust cloud. The traditional fog of war has morphed into something more sinister: a cloud of dust that would bring death to 100,000 men, women and children, regardless of their responsibility for the war.

It would take many more years before the full physiological effects of the atomic bomb would be documented. But nobody reading Hersey’s account could fail to realize that, even less than a year after the attack (the author had interviewed the survivors in the spring of 1946, nine months after the bomb was dropped), the victims would not simply “recover”—their lives had been so irreparable damaged that it truly could be said that the living envied the dead.

In the last vignette closing the first chapter, the sixth survivor, a twentysomething office clerk named Toshiko Sasaki, is stunned as a bookcase collapsed on her: “There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books,” Hersey writes. That sentence, as loud as one of the sirens that resounded throughout Hiroshima August 6, 1945, is a warning that even one of the bulwarks of civilization is now powerless to save human life from violence wrought, in anger and vengeance, from the sky.

This Day in Presidential History (“New Yorker” Story Turns JFK Into War Hero)

June 17, 1944—“Survival,” a nonfiction narrative by John Hersey that appeared in The New Yorker, did more than just begin the 30-year-old writer’s association with the famous magazine. In telling how the crew of PT-109 was given up for lost, then lived through five harrowing days after being rammed in a nighttime action by a Japanese destroyer, it helped turn the American boat’s skipper, Lt. John F. Kennedy, into a national hero—and relaunched the political brand of his family.

Neither Hersey nor his New Yorker editors mentioned that the writer had a personal connection to the 27-year-old lieutenant. Hersey’s wife at the time, the former Frances Anne Cannon, had been a serious flame of the sailor until she became engaged to Hersey. It took a while for Kennedy to get over her loss—or as long as you’d expect, anyway, from someone with a famously wandering eye.

(Ironically, in the 1960 Presidential primaries, Hersey backed Adlai Stevenson, who was sitting on the sidelines but hoping for a convention deadlock. Nevertheless, he was in the audience nearly a year later on that cold January day when JFK delivered his memorable inaugural address.)

JFK was having drinks at New York’s Stork Club with the Herseys and other friends when he told the group about his near-death experience in the South Pacific in early August the prior year. Hersey was especially intrigued by the “dreamlike quality” of Kennedy’s description of the current bringing him back to the point where he had started to float after his ship had been split in two.

To his credit, Kennedy suggested that Hersey talk to three crewmates before interviewing him. Once he saw the initial draft he strongly urged the writer to devote more space to executive officer Lennie Thom.

Not that Kennedy was entirely naïve about what all of this meant to him personally. Before agreeing to sit down with Hersey, JFK called his father for advice. Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. was delighted not so much by the story itself, but by Hersey’s intended target—Life Magazine, a mass-market periodical then at the height of its influence.

For the last few years, the former Ambassador to Great Britain had remained publicly silent in the face of furious attacks on his isolationism and defeatism as war broke out in Europe. He’d been galled by the thought that his own chance to become the first Irish-Catholic President was over, but he intended to boost the political careers of his two oldest sons.

(It had long been assumed that the family patriarch had switched his attention to Jack only after Joe Jr. had been killed in the war. But an FBI wiretap that only came to light years later revealed that Joe Sr. had wanted to maintain the potential political viability of Joe and Jack as early as 1942.)

His hopes for elective or appointive office might be forever shot, but that did not mean that Joseph Kennedy Sr. had lost his ability to cajole, jawbone, manipulate, or use his money to get what he wanted. Now he swung into action on behalf of Jack.

Jack swallowed hard but remained a good sport when he learned that Life had turned down Hersey’s article but that The New Yorker had accepted it. With his father, it was an entirely different story.

Highbrows might be okay on occasion, such as imparting a patina of class for his sons at Harvard, but the circulation of The New Yorker simply did compare to others. So, if he could not get the piece on his son in Life, he would aim for Reader’s Digest, maybe an even bigger prize.

The stumbling block was Reader’s Digest’s policy on condensation and rights. New Yorker editor Harold Ross loathed abridging material, believing that his magazine had already edited everything that needed to be cut from any piece. Moreover, the Digest’s policy of purchasing rights in perpetuity, the better for constant reselling, was one he abominated.

In the end, Ross yielded in the face of two negotiating ploys by Joe Kennedy. First, Reader’s Digest would make an exception to its reprint policy, forsaking perpetuity in favor of a one-time-only exception. Second, the Digest agreed to contribute to a philanthropy involving the widows and orphans of naval personnel.

The Digest version, appearing in the August issue of the magazine, would be the one that the Kennedys would use at critical points in the rise of JFK: during his initial successful campaigns for Congress and the Senate, when hundreds of thousands of reprints would be used throughout Massachusetts.

The journalist Robert J. Donovan would pick up on the story and expand it into a bestselling book in 1961. Two years later, a film based on that, starring Cliff Robertson in the JFK role, appeared. (Warren Beatty had been JFK’s personal choice to play him.)

It wasn’t until more than 30 years after the event, and a decade after Kennedy had been shot, that journalists and historians probed deeper into the PT-109 incident. Nobody doubted his role in saving the life of at least one injured sailor, whom he had towed by the life jacket strap with his teeth.

But The Search for J.F.K., by Joan and Clay Blair Jr., questioned what had happened on the night when the boat had been cut in two—more specifically, if Kennedy had his men properly alert (nobody saw the destroyer bearing down on them until the last seconds).

Other, more recent JFK biographers, including Nigel Hamilton and Robert Dallek, contended that JFK behaved, in Hamilton’s words, “with commendable courage and intelligence given the chaos, cowardice and confusion” elsewhere on that night.

Nobody could gainsay the crew’s powerful devotion to Kennedy. They had already bonded with him even before the incident, and his performance under dire conditions (several were not aware that JFK towed the sailor despite the fact that the destruction of the boat had aggravated JFK's old back injury) only cemented their loyalty.

One sentence in the article brought me up short: Kennedy’s thought upon being hit by the destroyer Amagiri: “This is how it feels to be killed.” The question inescapably comes to mind whether the same thought flashed through his mind on November 22, 1963.

The story of the creation of the PT-109 legend, then, owes to two factors: JFK’s ability to fascinate and lead men and his father’s still-prodigious ability, even while in disgrace, to manage news and manipulate events. The same combination would eventually produce Kennedy’s victory in the 1960 Presidential campaign.