Sam Johnson, R-Texas, called for the resignation of Martin Harwit, director of the Air and Space Museum. Peter Blute, R-Mass., later said he understood the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee would conduct a hearing. He asked Clinton to do what he could to call off the exhibit.ĭetweiler pressed his case at a meeting with a few congressmen. “The hundreds of thousands of American boys whose lives were thus spared and who lived to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their historic achievement are, by this exhibit, now to be told their lives were purchased at the price of treachery and revenge,” Detweiler wrote. Detweiler wrote President Clinton that officials of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum insisted on including “highly debatable information which calls into question the morality and motives of President Truman’s decision to end World War II quickly and decisively by using the atomic bomb.” A spokesman declined to say if the first public exhibit of the B-29, the Enola Gay, might be canceled.
The American Legion demanded Thursday that the Smithsonian Institution cancel an exhibit of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, charging that despite five revisions it still portrayed the United States as the aggressor.
