hershey to report on the short-term and long-term effects on the american bombing of hiroshima in 1945. then business strategist offer their thoughts for approving how the american political system works. also tonight, activist shawn king reflects on his involvement in social justice movements, breitbart joel pollak ways and moments 2020 election and nicholson baker talks about the challenges he faced uncovering a secret 1950s air force program created to develop chemical and biological weapons. checker program guide for more schedule information. here is journalist lesley blume on the fallout of the bombing of hiroshima. >> good evening, welcome to the knights virtual program we will be discussing breaking the truth of the true impact of the atomic bomb. we are honored to host the

guests ãb i am honored and have the privilege to welcome you to the virtual programs we been able to shift to. we look forward to lovely having you join us for more in the coming weeks. before we get to the subject of the next program i want to share a little bit about some things we have coming up, things to look forward to, more virtual programs hopefully you might be interested in joining us. he will be hosting next week will be hosting ãb anticorruption expert and former new york state attorney general candidate sharing ãb exploring the connection between big money and the impact on the democracy. that will be august 11 the following week we will host rick perlstein in a conversation with jeffrey

toobin discussing his new book ãbwhich continues in the exploration we been doing with the recent history of the pelican party and modern american ãthat will be on august 19. we are also proud to partner with the ms. foundation on an upcoming series entitled "women in power" 100 years after the 19 ãwhich will kick off on august 18 the 100 year anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment. with a discussion of body power welcoming mcmillan cotton, jennifer boylan and moderator raquel willis to discuss issues pertaining to bodies of women throughout time and how they continue to be spiked with contention and oppression. we look forward to hosting many more virtual programs as they come together, to learn more about the offerings we will have for you on our website. in just a moment i will be welcoming tonight speakers to the virtual space.

this is a powerful conversation we are looking forward to tonight. tomorrow is the 75th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb in hiroshima. and the night is the 75th anniversary ã these are events that shaped much of the 20th century and will be discussing the events themselves an immediate impact, we are also talking about the role of journalism and sharing stories with people so we could truly understand the potential of the atomic warfare, the human cost and the danger that it posed. reflecting today on the recent passing of the legendary journalist pete hamill we also have the leisure of hosting a few years ago, i want to share a quote of his that is the work of a journalist who ãbtoday

in the landscape of fake news, such a narrative of potential danger of misinformation and propaganda and how journalism can help us cut through to see the truth it's something that rains all the more important. without further ado i like to welcome tonight speakers, we are very honored and glad to have them joining us tonight, tonight we will be joined by lesley blume, who of course is the author of "fallout". ãb she will be joined in conversation by adam ãwriting for the new yorker since 1986 during his more than 30 years in the magazine he's written

hundreds of essays from personal memoirs to reviews and profiles along with much reporting from abroad along with fiction, humor and art criticism. as the conversation unfolds i want to remind you that we will be taking questions if you have questions for our speakers you can submit them via the q&a box at the bottom of your screen and begin the subject of tonight's discussion is of course lesley's book "fallout". we have teams at our community bookstore here in brooklyn if you'd like to learn more about the book and possibly purchase your copy you can do so via the link that is in the chat now. without further ado, please welcome lesley and adam, can you hear me cannot. >> loud and clear. >> thank you both for being here, looking forward to this conversation and thank you for participating. >> thank you for hosting. and, adam, thank you for doing this. >> delighted to do it, first of

all congratulations on this extraordinary book. >> my second born. >> the hiroshima cover-up, by the way should it be hiroshima or hiroshima? >> i mix them up and i shouldn't because it should be hiroshima. >> there's a lovely small moment in the book where harold ross, the editor of the new yorker said not only in my published thing this dam thing i learned a new way to pronounce it. >> it's an extraordinary book. it's about both deepak marking and catastrophic event but even more and more importantly about the coverage of that event and how it was turned into words. you call it the hiroshima cover-up. i have a very particular and i'm afraid very parochial interest in this book because it's very much about the

history of the new yorker and the evolution of the development of the new yorker but before we get to the new yorker and how the internal dynamics of the new yorker shaped this book in many ways, what do you mean by the cover-up? what was the state of play when john hershey went off to japan to do the reporting to produce his legendary peace "hiroshima" which filled an entire issue of the new yorker the first time that ever happened, a year after the bombing. >> the audience should know that you are a sounding board for me since the beginning. when that first started researching the project i didn't actually realize the extent to which a cover-up would be playing a role in this narrative at all. i just really wanted to know the back story. i was approached the story and journalist covering another journalist and the story of her she's hiroshima had been about outside success. nobody ever looked at how they got the story in the first place will.

i wanted to look at logistics of how he got in. when i started looking at how much general macarthur and his total domination of japan at the time started to realize how impossible it would have been for him to get him as an independent reporter and the more i researched the subject i started to come across historical accounts of macarthur administration, how much he had suppressed the foreign press and the japanese press in particular, and the magnitude of cover-up. it's been addressed previously but never to the extent i felt it should have been and ended up being extremely central to the story.

>> what were they covering up, in a sentence or two. >> interestingly, the government seems to be ecstatically advertising that they drop this mega ãbecho went to 20,000 tons of tnt, the biggest bond that had ever been in the history of warfare, the government released pictures of the mushroom cloud, pictures of the landscape devastation but where hershey and his editors were quick to pick up mom is there was weirdly no reporting on the human toll, nobody knew what was happening to human beings who have been among the only humans on the receiving end of the nuclear pack.>> and still are to this day.

new york where was ãbnew yorker was in transition when he began the reporting it had changed over the course of four years and the onset of the war from pearl harbor to the end of the war, more dramatically perhaps and it's now 90 year history because as you write beautifully, it had still been essentially, not entirely but essentially a humor and local reporting magazine noted for its fiction, noted for its elegant and stylish reporting but still very much in the initial imprint of how it brought inspiration. then the war broke out and warm editor in particular played an outsized role in it making magazine take on a much more

ambitious and almost magisterial role in its reporting and that was role william chung. >> both william sean and harold ross, they were news men in disguise and away. even 20 years earlier, harold ross never at that point had any aspirations for the magazine to be a big news operation.we paralleled the news, we don't report the news, he had been a news man before that and so was william sean, and when pearl harbor happened, that was it for the magazine went to work time quitting right away. harold ross wrote to one of his coeditors, can it be a humor magazine because nothing feels funny anymore. >> and many of the writers were already on hand when off to war

had found themselves as writers i think about ajay liebling, who was a local future writer who went off and became ãb went off to report the war in north africa, eventually the normandy invasion and the rest of it. there was a whole generation who made that trip. >> they dispatch correspondent and all over the world. many theaters of war they had a pretty deep relationship with the war department with the public relations operation. >> he was the linchpin of the new yorker's operation. >> there was a lot of all ãa lot of overlap.

sometimes the editors even commissioned stories for military figures, sometimes even public relations, just to keep things good with the law department. for the most part, they were serious. they were in the mix. very much so. he would send one of his correspondence into the field and he didn't know what the scoop was going to be, he just knew there would be one. >> he trusted his writers. so why john hersey? he was not born and bred as a new yorker, he came from the ã ãwhat made sean trust that

hershey glass they hated each other. hilariously publicly hated each other. hershey reporting since 1939 and at one point he was really grooming him to be the ã [multiple speakers] >> he was of that type, he was not a fat new york jew he wasn't elegant figure. >> he was also, from yale, ã [inaudible]

also, when you read this, the time and the distractions that hershey broke, it's a far cry to what he was writing for for the new yorker later on. >> as somebody who cares only about literary style, it's a hugely important point. >> you run with it. >> he had written one hugely significant piece, in historical terms, incredibly significant piece for the new yorker before that, set in the pacific. >> i'm going about it back to you after i tee it up, that's how hershey did come to the new yorker. he breaks up with ãis far too chauvinistic for him and he said, thanks but no thanks. instead of being heir apparent

he's a freelancer in 1945 but in 1944 he had managed somehow to do a story that william sean at the new yorker had really wanted to bring hershey in and hershey had a story that wife had projected and sean said come this way. it was the story of john f. kennedy in the pacific. hershey's wife had been the former paramore of jfk, jfk had been ã >> this is a large class, a significant class of people. >> they all knew each other. hershey is on his way back from the pacific ãbjfk was on his way back from the pacific, he's in new york, one that he got a nightclub, some said the martinique club, he runs into

hershey and his wife. jfk is telling hersey and his wife that ãblike to have your wayside, not to confuse joseph kennedy but it was the whole story but he rejected that he brings it to the new yorker and they were excited to have it. in many ways that story helps make kennedy's political career, i got trotted out by kennedy and kennedy's campaign team for every political campaign they have but it also helps make john hersey's career because it provided and enter to the career because he was going nowhere fast. >> you mentioned that joe kennedy hated the fact that it appeared in the new yorker. that was not a big enough magazine. >> right.

life would've been great but the new yorker was a little pie for him. so then he badgers harold ross into having it vindicated in reader's digest. another magazine that harold wrote. i don't know how kennedy twisted his arm but it did vindicate in reader's digest, he got his story. >> another thing about the new yorker and the war years was the so-called pony addition appeared and a smaller addition which is available the key thing and driving up circulation hersey has this relationship with ãincredibly on the pt 109 piece. then what happens? how does it get to japan?

how does he break through the walls of the cover-up? >> one should never assume the first lesson of life. [inaudible] i was initially a very bad journalist, i chastise myself publicly for that right now. hersey's hiroshima has this feeling of it expose. i assumed it was him getting in and getting out somehow unilateral because of the reporters had made a run of the story that way. they went there crazily length

he has mixed feelings about hiroshima, nagasaki you think is a total criminal action. he knows he's going to cover the bomb but he doesn't know exactly how just yet. then he has lunch with william sean and they talk about the coverage. they realize that what had been missing his stories about the human toll, what happened to the human beings under those bustling crowds? nobody was reporting on that. it's likely that they knew the extent, or some of the extent, of the restrictions being placed on foreign and japanese reporters because the journalism community was very close knit back then. a lot of lesley blume's wartime friends and colleagues were part of the occupation so they probably knew the only way in was, he wasn't gonna prattle about ãbpaddle a boat from

guam. he would need clearance to get in. he was gonna do a major reporting trip that started in china, the country he was born in, apply for clearance.he would be accredited in china and then having reestablished himself with the military there, apply for clearance to get into tokyo. and it works. he gets cleared. one things interesting to me in reading your wonderful book, lesley, the reporters in this period both have in a certain sense, less freedom because everyone expects you to conform to the needs of the military, there is a patriotic reflex but at the same time, more because whole business of post-vietnam of the military wanted to keep reporters as far as humanly possible wasn't in place yet. they expected to be traveling with guys who be writing. >> it was a buddy system

throughout, that's one of the things that gave her see this huge advantage because hersey had been play buddy to the military during the war. he had written glowing profiles of many military figures including jfk. he was a commended war hero. he helped evacuate wounded marines while covering the story, covering a battle between us and japanese forces. he had written a really glowing biography of general douglas macarthur, which he later thought was so auditory he wanted to take it out of circulation. that definitely helps the cause even though hiroshima and nagasaki were restricted topics, they were really

vetting journalists coming and going into japan. hersey had been seen as a relatively innocuous ã >> liable man works exactly. company man still. >> he gets from china, he gets to japan. >> when he gets to hiroshima, tell us about how he does that, the extraordinary step forward is that he talks to people rather than reporting on events, how does he begin to find the people who will form this spine of the great pc right? >> that was an incredibly important departure and it might seem obvious now to focus on a few individuals to bring out the human element of the story but it was pretty revolutionary then. especially because what he was proposing to do was humanize japanese victims and japanese were enemy number two because

they attacked us directly. when hersey eventually is admitted to tokyo ãbhe did not have free reign there just because he sent the company man, he's not being monitored by staff, which is macarthur's operation there. the fbi knows he's on the ground to notify the fbi dc. at the same time, you don't want to read too much into it, what you ate, how you thought, how many cigarettes you smoked every day. they gave hersey clearance to go to hiroshima for two weeks, which might sound substantial but it includes travel in 24 to 36 hours of travel to get there in that time. when he gets there he has the help of the german priest who had been living there and had

returned who spoke english and through this german priest one of the japanese minister who had been educated at emory university and therefore spoke english not only gave her see their own testimony but they also ãbultimately ã >> coming back to something that preoccupied is me, i don't think frivolously, one of the things that makes hiroshima such an important work of journalism and literature is that hersey saw ãbeven as he revealed had a very specific

novelistic pattern and template he was applying to his material. >> it wasn't just enough that he was going to show it events from the individual point of view. he decided he was going to, it had to be six individuals whose lives intersected. also their lives in the moments that leading up exactly where they were at that moment of detonation and how their paths crossed. in the hours and the days of the aftermath. sometimes pretty shocking. it was like he was leaving a neighborhood a neighborhood narrative and because he had people they picked their profile were regular folks and he was creating empathy for them because american readers, not all of them were going to

be able to understand the civics of how the bombs worked or the all-out nuclear war looks like but they would be able to relate to the stories of young mother with three young school-age kids, young clerk, young doctor going about their business feeding their families, getting on the bus to work. >> i was thinking specifically that as you mentioned, thornton wilder's novel clearly was gave him an organizing principle with the story of how six strangers share a moment of common disaster. >> that's quite theoretical. he literally did have that as inspiration. he got the horrible flu, laid up ã >> the china flu, lesley.

>> oh, god. [laughter] >> you read while there is great nowãbthat's the way i can tell this story of these intersecting lives. >> absolutely, it gave it a really cohesive structure to tell it and he knew he wanted it to be novelistic because, let's face the fact, people had real intentions not to read this, it was going to be graphic, it was going to confront people with the fact that they had had what one person called a 4th of july attitude about the bombing, everybody had every incentive to ãbhot potato out of their hands. if he could make it novelistic for people not to put it down, it was almost like he was a trojan horse reporter getting

into japan, >> coming back one step, what did if anything, what did the occupying force, the army, think he was going to be doing and hiroshima, basically a follow-up piece about the aftereffects of the bombing. >> they knew he was going down there and there is evidence there was evidence they knew he was out and about talking to people, they had started letting other reporters and who were not reporting on the aftermath of hiroshima it was considered a old story by that point. when reporters were admitted, they were there to do the more fluffy stories, if you can believe that. >> hiroshima, a year old, going into fluff.

>> it was like this is hiroshima coming back, people are back and not just building it. >> correct. if the military had something in mind it was hiroshima coming back. >> it wasn't so bad. >> that was the story that they imagined. you and i have both reported things, you more ambitiously, me on a more conventional new york scale, it's hard when you're reporting something not to be altered by the people you meet. do we know hersey's state of mind, the stories which are still hard to read, people losing not only losing family but losing their entire existence in this moment of existential belief. how does this affect hersey psychologically, >> he's a hardened war correspondent.

he's been around. he reported in europe. he seen everything in his reporting from concentration camps and he had seen tokyo raised, somebody described one of his contemporary reporters described tokyo as looking like an ashtray with a cigarette butt sticking out of it. 's frame of reference, let's just say, he was tough-minded but when he got into hiroshima he was horrified what he had seen that because he wasn't used to seeing devastation and, the worst of nature in unhealthy doses but because it was a single bond that had done this. hiroshima was leveled. i don't want to be graphic in this broadcast but ãbthey are still finding remains in hiroshima today, it was a

flattened graveyard. when he got there he was so disturbed by what he was finding there, even the stories weren't entirely wrong. there was a regrowth of flora but things had been unnaturally stimulated, everything about it was horrible and unnatural he vowed to get reporting done as quickly as he could and then get out of there because it was so traumatizing. >> where did he actually do his writing? >> he very smartly, they decided to do reporting and bring it back to new york because even though wartime censorship had ended in the states in the fall of 1945, japan and america were still officially at war with the censorship when the censorship

happened. he got out of hiroshima and came back to new york. >> this is the kind of detail that only writers relish but i do, he had his notebooks from the interview. >> that's another thing i was really interested in, how did hersey take note, his protagonist leaders recalled he had taken notes and little notebooks, his notebooks do not exist in his files. but they remember that. also, my question which was unanswered as he did he do them shorthand because he learned shorthand from sinclair theã sinclair lewis. to take notes like that in real time, you have to have some kind of system to be able to get everything.

unfortunately i don't know what happened on the notebook i would give anything to know what happened at the notebook. he did make it from point a to point b with his material to enough to create an accurate account no voice recordings, no apparatus like that. >> alex wilkinson taught himself shorthand with that idea in mind to be able to do it. what would seem to us given the scale of membership it's very short order. >> originally if the anniversary pegs, it would be the first anniversary of the bombing it's important to

mention that hersey was there and may and early june they were really only have a couple have eight weeks to turn over. i don't think that they all knew how huge the story was going to be when you started writing it in terms of it ends up being this 33 month monster. hersey said when he needed to he would write what he called white heat and some of his previous books were written that day he was used to writing and a wartime pressure this wasn't just that he was eating the anniversary of pegs he knew what he was writing is going to embarrass the u.s. government and show the truth about their weapon. >> he produces this and then submits it to william shawn and

then sean persuades howard ross to be something that was very baldly and unparalleled business ambition and that's to make it an entire issue of the new yorker. >> which was what one former new yorker called unprecedented splurge. harold ross was like are you crazy? a year later they had just gotten back to postwar footing, a sense of normalcy coming back into magazine. >> the students that wanted to read the talk of the town, part of the continuity of their lives to have that. >> that's the question, it presents them with a really essential question, what is the purpose of this magazine? does it continue of wartime purpose of fearless reporting or river entirely to something quick to tell us something i

thought was unforgettable which is that the way howard ross finally persuaded himself to do what william shawn and he admired and trusted, was not to think about the future of the magazine but to think about the magazines past and it's very dna. >> he went back and looked at his original statement he had published 1925 and also the perspective that he had created in 1924 when he was trying to convince backers to back the new yorker and one of his assumptions that he had written himself and probably in a moment of gravitas was that the magazine was always to have a serious purpose despite their frivolity the nature of levity that the magazine had and would report without favor which is really important line. harold ross joined inspiration from himself he comes back and

says to sean, i will give you the green light william shawn is really the driver on this whole story. in terms of having sent hersey in the first place champion to run at full length, champion to run the single issue instead of foreign installments. >> it would've lost its essential form the essential form was the intersection of those stories not just having them chronologically one after the other. >> exactly, the cliffhanger in the story it only works if it's one long piece. so ross is convinced to do it and it's a hell of a gamble because not only their about to drop this on their readers who have no idea it's coming, they are in peace time mode at this point but not expecting a huge wartime atrocity story, they are expecting they are in a moments of recovery, of

regaining the feeling of normalcy or what albert einstein would say, escaping into easy pleasures without having confronted the past. they were about to be confronted in the past. >> i think it's so vital today everything that this story is about, the division between reporting facts reporting in a kind of robotic journalistic form and writing with great attention to structure it's a false division. i think hersey's work demonstrates that. one of the great points you make is that hersey had written about the bomb for, time life wrote a lot about the bomb but it was always in terms of these enormous aura time generalizations about the fate of man and the destiny of the adam and the promise of science and ã >> yes. >> it all existed impossibly

high level of rhetorical extraction. the key to what hersey was doing is absolutely no ã >> when we were talking about him writing for time, his time writing was pretty pronounced, pretty slyly, it had a little swagger to it. this was strict sound. hersey said he didn't want to ã giving them testimony to speak in their own words and let the testimony the more the more effective it was going to be. it really worked. by dialing it down from god's point of view down to the humid

advantage point it allows people to put themselves in the shoes of he and is very spare sort of way experiences recounting. >> the piece comes out sean persuades ross, ross persuades himself through ross, hersey writes it to added speed that still astounding considering the exquisite quality of the writing and the testimony. it comes out and what happens? >> hersey uses the word explosive to describe the reaction. that's not the word i you use. the sentiment is accurate. to create an international hero. >> there is nothing on the cover of the issue that indicates the content of the issue. >> no, which is a fascinating decision. new yorker covers are decided or at least then decided weeks

in advance. >> months in advance so this cover that had been slated for the august 31 issue was sort of really dreamy park landscape of the summer park and people were horseback riding, playing tennis, lying dreamily ãbthe new yorker had no writing on the cover, or even table contents to indicate what the contents of the magazine were so the editors decided to keep this cover on their and i couldn't find anything from sean or roth on the record on why they decided to keep it. it really does symbolize the sleepwalking america, a more gruesome interpretation of that is that it looks a lot like a park that's described in hiroshima where people are enjoying themselves and later becomes a refuge for many of

the black survivors. >> david remnick makes the decisions to take out all the cartoons and the talk section week after 9/11 but that was in the case somewhere the cover creatively spoke to the event. comes out and it sells off the newsstands and becomes. >> the contraband new yorkers. >> right. >> sorry, interrupted you. >> coming back to the main line of the story, i hate to use the words commercially, but it's all anybody talks about when it comes out.>> there was one of hersey's contemporary reporters did a report on it and they said, we guarantee you this week even if you don't read it it's all you will be talking about. it's true. it was syndicated not just to be in its entirety and papers across the country but around the world and abc it's read

verbatim ã >> i couldn't get over that, it was read verbatim. >> the identities of the actors weren't revealed until after it aired so i didn't want to distract from it. >> what was it that people learned that they could not have imagined before they read it? >> what it's like to be a human being on the receiving end of this. you learn what it's like to be a young mother with your baby in your arms and suddenly your house collapses on you and you have to dig your way out of rubble before firestorm consumed your neighborhood. hi don't want to be too graphic but you learn about ã >> people were in the certain sense ãbthis was at the end of the most destructive war in human history, 30 million

people were killed, germany was in ruins, london was in ruins. it wasn't destruction alone that was the story, something about the idea of destruction on this scale and of this finale, it was destroying the skin on human flesh it was creating shadows on walls, it was transformational destruction of the kind that nobody imagined before and no one had understood until hersey brought it down ...... you reddit when he 15,

remember when you're 75. it is horrific. it is a ghoulish reminder that happens to individuals they are composed of individuals that can be. [inaudible] >> leslie simmons asking a specific question two. was christie concerned about nuclear contamination? about fall out a year later? >> it is unclear if he was worried about it. although other people were. interestingly, after hiroshima, oppenheimer was down in new mexico for the trinity testing site to see how little radiation there still was. in japan you can live there forever. the fact is, trinity site was

probably far more contaminated than hiroshima and not enter nagasaki were. because of the point of detonation of the bomb because it had been on the ground the ground been contaminated. hiroshima is generally said a lot of the radiation went back up into the atmosphere. with that said there had been reports of the u.s. occupation forces came into hiroshima they were areas with fear of individual radiation. perhaps they didn't totally understand what they had created that point. cement another thing that strikes me as extraordinary in all the years since it was published, no one has ever really challenged any of the testimony of factual ethics. >> guest: that was another thing i was interested in

proving when i was doing research has anybody ever tried to discredit percy or discredit the testimony there really embarrassing. and truman in in cold blood. legions of reporters went and tried to cover it up. they were fact checking in. but several things, occupation was for several more years, it wasn't easy to get in to interview the protagonists or about the accuracy of their stories. when is an occupation listed, they were international figures. every year on the anniversary of the bombings, reporters would contact the protagonists and asked them to comment on their stories. in none of them, to the best of my knowledge, ever came forward and said that they had

been misquoted. and nobody ever seems to find misquoted or had their experiences mischaracterized. and again to the best of my knowledge, no reporters ever seem to find inaccuracies. sue hackett seems to be impeccable peace of reporting on an incredibly difficult and resistant circumstance. >> there were a few things. to be honest maybe that's just me pretty started my career as a researcher. on as a fact checker. but we do say there's no way to get in fact check, go back and verify all the reporting that he brought home. the little things but for instance, reverend which is one of the protagonists, the book profiles him on his daughter what she later took in the task force when she could've been first.

but just really little things like that. and otherwise, they were maniacs granular accuracy. they would fight for hours over a doorway or doorframe. >> something that still goes on. after hiroshima, his career goes on, he never writes anything quite on this scale again does he? soon i can know. ironically, he always felt that he could tell stories more effectively in nonfiction bread so it's ironic that is known for this work of immortal nonfiction that he is done. he writes many novels after hiroshima, interesting and social conscious novels but i have a feeling. >> very much in the tradition

of sinclair lewis would've been his mentor early on. >> absolutely. i feel that's going to be rediscovered. it is for the sheer content of the interest in situation. and you know, there was still good reporting that went into even the fictional works. again, whenever you see him, the headline of his obituary was john. [inaudible] >> dealt have a lot of time lef left. so want to talk to you about the subject and definitely, one of the things we were talking about, not long ago is that percy got caught up at the end of his career in a kind of plagiarism. i wouldn't call it a scandal. but a tussle of a kind. that i actually was witnessed stupid as a young editor to magazine when that took place.

and it was the beginning of a new kind of hyper scrutiny that was being given for all times or is very much part of the moment we are living in now. he was saying what part of the expectations in journalism and percy's time was you had a much broader license to polling, to take things from places without maniacally crediting sources at every moment. >> host: even their books or miss interviews and longer exists, they don't exist among the papers. [inaudible] >> i mean if they emerge i want to be the first to get the crack at them. they do include many when he was writing hiroshima heard one of my researchers went through them and we are like google, this is bootsy in the report a description that was very close to how it had ended

up. it was for instance a report of a description of the geography. with hiroshima being fan shaped with rivers. it was an informational pole. so you imagine this reporter is writing on the lines of a fan of materials around him and picking and picking and picking. there was a report of the group and hiroshima and one line in the report that says not only the radiation not kill certain that stimulated them. he pulled that language. >> from directly from the report he was looking out. >> guest: its accuracy. it's made to be accurate. if you are quoting a source. you are using it for some information but he pulled an additional translator on the

ground. especially your track not medical terms if you absolute accuracy. so the question of whether something like that with plagiarism is being pulled from informational report that is therefore the reference of the experts and journalists. sue at leslie we don't have time for it i want to now make a radical term is one many people are asking about in the question two. it's a question that we debate and argue about today. with we do the necessary of not right thing by dropping the bomb? or was it a war crime? an active evil? how did hersey feel about that after he'd written hiroshima and after do you feel about it after everything about a writing about it? >> guest: in the media he felt hiroshima, had complicated

feelings about it, and horrible death toll inevitable. and it's not exactly as he thought with a total criminal action. i think later on, he thought that the memory of what happened at hiroshima is what had kept the world. [inaudible] stuart of nuclear weapons? >> guest: whether it's true or not it has been an elements in a deterrent. actually a controversial that hiroshima did not have to happen from here shema with health. my feelings are that have found the then government argument about why they demonstrated in the area.

>> host: that was oppenheimer as you know. oppenheimer's desire for his announced desire after the fact that they should have or at least on an uninhabited area, shipyard a purely. it would they had that key when they were testing for the could have been international and dropped it on an uninhabited area. but one of the argument is in a retort what had been done. assembled the world to see in light of the things among the work. it was acutely discrediting so therefore they had to drop its. >> i guess to, you mentioned that it's one of the reasons of the antiwar and is much as we can the logic of warfare and the brutality of warfare made it seem, if not palatable

at least inevitable. with the firebombing of tokyo. it was actually more destructive in terms of land loss in the actual bombing of your shema. people get caught up in the logic and it becomes an almost impossible conveyor belt. >> guest: they are ghoulish in different ways. tokyo, camera for the exact square miles but it was a norm is destroyed one at a thousand lives. as gruesome as what you saw in hiroshima. but again her shema, was brought on by one single primitive atomic weapon. and with that intended for our ability to wipe out like every accomplishment, every human life in one fell swoop in the future. that is the thing that sets

nuclear attacks apart from more conventional attacks. >> we live under that shadow still. we have lived under it. and it seems to receive income for it and it never really disappears. but percy's story is permanent. it makes me proud that have spent my adult life as a new yorker to know that was a key moment in our history. and you've written in a store in a it is rare you see a book again of the training idea. please share with friends and said you think there's anything in that? and then it becomes a major work. congratulations leslie thank you so much. >> guest: thank you my friend. >> host: thank you all for being with us. >> thank you. thank you for the book on historical society for hosting. >> host: if only we were free to be in brooklyn that right

now. >> here's a look at some publishing industry news. author and journalist dale sheehy died last week at the age of 83. guilty also of 17 books which include a best-selling title, passages it was published in 1976 sold 10 million copies. the "new york times" reports an already busy publishing season is got more hectic due to the lack of capacity the two largest book printing companies, elsie printing which filed for bankruptcy meant april and is up for sale or trying keep up with the increased workload is books that were delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic compete with titles that were already scheduled for the fall season. in other news best-selling french economist has refused to edit portions of his latest book, capital one ideology to make it available for the chinese market for it he says quote, they basically wanted to cut almost all parts

referring to contemporary china and in particular an equality in china. also the news npd book scan reports print book sales were up 8% for the week ending august 22. adult nonfiction books continued their positive sales trend to just over 9%. and the miami book fair has announced it will be a virtual festival for the first time in its history. author events be held from november 15 until the 22nd i will include more than tuna 50 authors. the book fair program director , reflected on pivoting from it in person to online event. telling the miami herald, quote, feel like i'm building a bridge across the grand canyon as i'm walking. it's like put up or down, take a step, but the next board down, take a step. it is a work in progress. book tv will continue to renew new programs and publishing news. you can also watch all of our archive programs anytime booktv.org.