Hiroshima

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Lesley Blume: My name is Lesley Blume, and I am a journalist and historian. I wrote the book Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World, which documents New Yorker reporter John Hersey’s landmark, blockbuster 1946 investigation into the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima. While the research for my book took place on three continents and in four languages, many of Fallout’s biggest revelations came from The New Yorker papers here at The New York Public Library.

You are currently looking at a June 1946 letter from Mr. Hersey to his editor at The New Yorker, William Shawn. Mr. Hersey was a veteran war correspondent who had covered many fronts during the Second World War. And seven months earlier, in late 1945, he had been eager to return to Asia and report on the war’s aftermath there.

Mr. Hersey and Mr. Shawn decided together that Hersey should try to get into Hiroshima and report on what it had been like to experience the world’s devastating first nuclear attack, which had killed tens of thousands of civilians, and document the aftereffects of the bombing on survivors. 

There was no guarantee that Mr. Hersey would even be able to get into Japan. Travel around that country was permitted only at the discretion of occupation forces. But Mr. Hersey managed not only to get into that country—he indeed got into Hiroshima, interviewed surviving witnesses, and then managed to hitch a ride back to the United States on military transport. The letter that you’re looking at was written by Mr. Hersey just after he got back to New York from Japan and was preparing to write his report.

The project was top secret, even within The New Yorker. Given the contentiousness of the material, only a handful of the magazine’s employees knew about the project, including Mr. Shawn, New Yorker founding editor Harold Ross, and what was then called a make-up man, or an editor who formatted the story into proofs. As you see from the letter, Mr. Hersey originally envisioned the Hiroshima feature as a four-part series, but once he handed in a full draft, which is a staggering 30,000 words long, Mr. Shawn realized that the story might lose its powerful impact if it was broken up into installments, which would run in four consecutive issues.

He walked into Mr. Ross’s office and informed him, “Look, this has to all run at once.” At first, this seemed like a crazy splurge, but the editors also concluded that there might be major PR benefits to creating an issue solely devoted to a single, highly charged, and deeply revelatory story as well. So, Mr. Hersey, Mr. Shawn, and Mr. Ross huddled in Mr. Ross’s office, editing the long story in secret and preparing their historical issue.

When the article, simply titled “Hiroshima,” came out in the August 31st, 1946, issue of The New Yorker, Mr. Hersey’s reporting made headlines around the globe. The story was also quickly turned into a book, which became an international bestseller. In the letter that you are looking at, Hersey mentions that he has photographs of his story’s six survivor protagonists, and those images adorned the back cover of the early editions of the book.

He and his New Yorker team had managed to make unimaginable horror into essential reading, and the reporting has long been credited with helping to create a taboo around nuclear warfare in the decades since.