important as those things are. it's the example we set. the functioning and vibrancy of our democracy. when we have equality for all americans, our economy grows at a healthy clip or in this case how we respond to a foreign challenge no one around the world gets up at a morning and says i want to do this just like america, i really respect how they are doing it. inconceivable that sentiment is being expressed. >> to watch the rest of this program visit our website booktv.org and search richard haass or the title of his book the world. >> the evening. to two nights virtual program. we will be discussing breaking the truth of the true impact of the atomic bomb. we are honored to host tonight speakers come lesley blume, the author of the new book united states who will be joined in

conversation by adam gopnik. my name is bo mendez, manager of program progressive communications. brooklyn historical society. while we walk in the tort physical location -- i am still honored and have opposed to welcome you all to our virtual programs. we look forward to hopefully having you join us for more in the coming weeks. before we get to the subject of two nights program i want to share a little bit about some things we have coming up, things to look forward to more virtual programs. we will be hosting next week will be hosting former new york state attorney general kenneth philby shared her new book in the conversation with -- they will explore the connection between big money and impact on our democracy. that would be on august 11. following week will be hosting

rick perlstein in a conversation with jeffrey toobin discussing his new book which continues in the expiration we been doing with the recent history of the republican party in modern american conservatism. that will be august 19. 19th. we are also proud to partner with the ms. foundation on an upcoming series entitled women in power, or just after the 19th amendment which will be kicking off on august 18, the 100 year anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment, with the discussion of body power. they will discuss issues pertaining the bodies of women throughout time and have continued to be spiked with contention and often oppression. we look forward to hosting many more virtual programs as they come together to learn more about the offerings will do for you on your website, brooklyn history.org. in just a moment i will be

welcoming to nights speakers to the virtual space. this is a powerful conversation we are looking for to tonight where tomorrow is the 75th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on hiroshima, and tonight is the 75th anniversary of -- [inaudible] these are events that shaped much of the 20th century, and while we will be discussing the events themselves and their immediate impact we are also talking about the role of journalism in sharing stories with people so we could truly understand the potential of atomic warfare, the human cost and the danger that it post. reflecting today on the recent passing of legendary journalist pete hamill we also had pleasure posting a few years ago i want to share a quart of his that is the work of a journalist to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

so today in our landscape of fake news, such a narrative of potential danger of misinformation and propaganda and how journalism can help us cut see the truth, it's something that is all the more important. without further ado i would like to welcome to nights 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," she is an award winning journalist, "new york times" best-selling author her work is been "vanity fair," the "new york times," the "wall street journal," "wall street journal" magazine, the los angeles review of books, paris review daily, both, the "new york times" style magazine, the hollywood reporter, slate and many, many more. she will be joined in conversation by adam gopnik was been writing for the new yorker since 1986, during his more than

30 years of the magazine he has written hundreds of essays from personal memoirs to reduce and profiles along with much reporting from abroad along with section, schumer and art criticism. as the conversation unfolds i want to remind you that we will be taking questions if you have any questions you can submit them via the q&a box at the bottom of your screen and begin the subject of tonight discussion is of course the book "fallout." we have teams with the friends at community bookstore baster in brooklyn if you 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 adieu please welcome lesley and add in. can you hear me? >> loud and clear. >> thank you both for being here. looking forward to this conversation, and thank you all for participating. >> thank you for hosting. adam, thank you for doing this. >> delighted to do it. first of all congratulations on this extraordinary book. i will hold up the hardcover.

>> this is my second born. >> the hiroshima cover. by the way is it hiroshima or hiroshima? >> i mix them up and it should because it should be hiroshima but if i lapse, please forgive me. >> there's a a lovely small mot in the book were the editor of the new yorker said that only in my publishing -- i have learned a new way to pronounce it. it should be pronounced hiroshima, not hiroshima. it's an extra ordinary book. it's about both catastrophic event but even more and more portly about the coverage of that event and how it was turned into words. you call it hiroshima cover up. i have as you know lesley a very particular and i'm afraid very

parochial interest in this but because it's very much about the history of the new yorker and evolution of the developer of the new yorker that before we get to the new yorker and the internal dynamics of the new yorker shake this book in many ways, what do you mean by the cover-up? what was the state of play when john hirschi went off to japan to do the reporting that produced is legendary piece, hiroshima which filled an entire issue of the new yorker, the first time that had ever happened, a year after the bombing. >> the audience should know you are a sounding board for me since the beginning. when i first are researching this project i didn't realize the extent to which the cover-up we even play a role in this narrative at all. i just would want to to know the back story. the story of hirschi has was been about outside success. nobody ever look at how they got

the story the first place. i started my career in "nightline" news and where you learn how the story comes out entirely to logistics and whoever controls the ground controls the story. i wanted to look at how they got in. when i started looking at how much general macarthur and his occupation force had total domination of japan at the time i start to realize how impossible it would've been for hirschi to get in as independent reporter as opposed -- the more i researched, i started come across historical accounts of macarthur, administration, how much he crush the foreign press and the japanese press in particular. the magnitude of the cover-up. it is been addressed previously but never to extent i felt it should of been and into being

extremely central story. >> what with the covering up in a sentence or two? >> interestingly, the government and president rivlin seem to be advertising the bomb that they drop maggot experiment a weapon on hiroshima. it was 20,000 tons of tnt. it was a big bomb that it ever been used in history of warfare. the government released pictures of the mushroom cloud. they released pictures of the devastation but there was weirdly no reporting on the human toll. noting no is happening, human beings have been among the humans in his at the receiving end of this bomb. >> let's move then, that was the environment in which her she

began reporting this piece. let's talk about the new yorker in 1945. >> please. >> and where it was. as we discussed many times, the new yorker was in transition at that moment when hersey begin reporting for this. it had changed in the course of four years from 1941 from the onset of the war to pearl harbor until the end of the war. more dramatically than press ever changed in it now 90 history because, as you write in the book beautifully it then essentially not entirely but essentially an schumer and local reporting magazine noted for its fiction, noted for its elegant and stylish reporting but pretty much in the initial imprint of how it brought inspiration. then the war broke out, and when editor in particular i think played an outsized role in

making the magazine take on a much more ambitious and almost at registrable in its reporting, and that was william cheung. >> absolutely. they both were newsmen in disguise in a way. the magazine have been started 20 years earlier, as a human magazine. harold ross never at that point had any aspirations for it to be big news operation. he had been a news man before that and as you say when pearl harbor happened, that was it. the magazine went to wartime printing right away. harold ross wrote to one of his coeditors, quote nothing feels funny anymore. >> and many of the writers were already on hand went off to work and really outdid themselves as

writers anarchists. i think about a. j. a bubble who is a local feature writer who then went off and became, went off to report the war and north africa, eventually the normandy invasion and the rest of it and was whole generation who made that trip. >> they dispatch correspondence all over the world, in many theaters of war and they had a pretty deep relationship with the war department and their public relations operations. [inaudible] -- whose work i once edited was working for curtis lemay npr throughout the whole or so he was the linchpin of the new yorkers operation. >> was a lot of overlap like that, a lot of, not a lot but a handful of the correspondence anarchists were in the armed forces also acting for the armed

forces. the new yorker ran a ton of profiles on military, sometimes the editors even commissioned stories from military figures, something even public relations man just to keep things cozy with the war department. for the most part they were serious. they were in the mix. very much so. william shawn is quote-unquote the hunch meant what he would send one of this corresponds into the field and he didn't know what the scoop is going to be. he just knew there would be one. >> he trusted his writers. he believed in his writers here so why john hersey? hersey was actually not read, born and bred as a new yorker. he came from -- what made

hersey, what made shawn trust that hersey could get this story? >> hersey couldn't have been less of a new yorker. he's writing for time magazine. they hated each other. hersey reported for the times in 1939, and they were grooming him to be heir apparent to time inc. >> not to enroll, it's very timing by sq to say now, he was of that type turkey was not a fat new york jew. he wasn't elegant figure. >> and he was also, you know, from yale school.

and also when you read this, the time and the way, the dispatches hersey wrote, they were a far cry from what he was writing for the new yorker later on. .. and he says thanks but no thanks and he's the heir apparent to this burgeoning

media empire. he's a freelancer in 1945 but in 1944 he had managed somehow a story that william sean at the new yorker had released and percy had a story that rice had rejected and he brought it to sean and sean said come this way and it was the story of john f. kennedy in the pacific. pt 109. so percy's wife had been her former paramore of jfk. >> this is a significant class of people. >> they all knew eachother . and so percy's on his way back from the pacific. i'm sorry, erase that. jfk was on his way backfrom

the pacific. he's in new york and one night he's at a nightclub , he runs into percy and his wife and jfk is telling her she the story of what had happened . that jfk had had this pt boat whichwas swiped in half by a japanese destroyer . and percy is like i want that story. he always said it was significant not just because he was joseph kennedy's son but it was a great story in its own right so he brings it to the new yorker and william sean is excited to have it at last. in many ways that story else make kennedy's political career and that got trotted out by just kennedy and kennedy's campaign team for every political campaign he has it also helps make her she's career because it provided this inroad to the magazine because he knew he was going nowhere fast. >> you mentioned that old joe kennedy hated the fact it appeared in the new yorker. i was not a big enough

magazine. >> life would have been great but the new yorker was just a little piece of the pie for him . he even badgered harold ralston and having it syndicated in reader's digest which was another magazine that harold despised. and i don't know how kennedy twisted his arm but he did syndicate in reader's digest so kennedy got his mass publication of that story after all for his son. >> if you click footnotes another thing about the new yorker in those war years is what was the so-called phony edition which appeared in a smaller addition which was available to servicemen. it was key in driving up its circulation and making it more important for the guys coming home who would buy it in 1946 . hershey has this relationship with sean on the pt 109 piece

and then what happens? how does it get to japan and how does he break through the walls of the cover-up? >> like i said, one should never assume. it's the first lesson of not just journalism but life. >> is a line in a burn movie too. she said never assume. >> i was initially a very bad journalist. i can't find myself publicly for that right now but because hiroshima does have this story it has all the feeling of anexpose . i assumed that it was in getting in and getting out somehow because of the reporters had made a run of the story that way and it went through crazy length. so hershey is in new york in august 1945 when the bomb explodes and hehears about it

. he has mixed feelings about hiroshima, mostly horrified . he thinks it's criminal action and he knows he's going to not just yet and he has onewith wallace shawn . and what happened to the human beings under that class . nobody was reporting on that. it's likely that they knew the extent or some of the extent of the restrictions that were being placed on both foreign and japanese reporters by mccarthy'sforces . the journalism community was closely related back then and a lot of her she's friends were part of the occupation force though they probably knew that the only way in was the paddle boat from juan

into japan. he was going to have to get military clearance to get in so he starts his, major reporting trip that starts in china which is the country he was born in and applied for clearance. it is going to be accredited in china and establishing himself with themilitary there . apply for clearance to get into tokyo and it works. he gets cleared. >> what was interesting to me reading your wonderful book is the reporters in this period in a certain sense less freedom because everyone expects you to conform to the needs of the military. there's a kind of patriotic reflex but at the same time more because the whole business of post-vietnam of the military wanting to keep reporters as far away as humanly possible wasn't in place yet. expected to be traveling.

>> it was a buddy system throughout the war and they have this huge advantage when they came to get in because hershey has been quite a buddy to the military during the war. he had written blowing profiles and of military figures includingjfk . he was a commended war hero. he helped evacuate wounded marines in the solomon islands while he was covering a story, covering a battle betweenus and japanese forces . most significantly he had written a glowing biography of general unless macarthur which he later bought was so laudatory he wanted to take it out of circulation but that definitely helps the cause when you're applying to general macarthur to come to the country. so even though oshima on nagasaki were restricted

topics and they were really vetting journalists comingand going into japan , percy may have seen or been seen as a relatively innocuous. >> reliable man. >> exactly, a company man. so then he gets to china, he gets tojapan and when he gets to hiroshima finally , you can tell us how he does that. the extraordinary step forward is he talks to people rather than reporting on events . how does he begin to find the people who will form the spine of the greatpc rights ? >> that was an incredibly important departure and it might seem obvious now to just focus on a few individuals to bring out the human element of the story but it was revolutionary then and especially because the what he's proposing to do is to the humanized japanese victims and japanese enemy

number twobecause they attacked us directly . so when hershey eventually is admitted to tokyo and by the way he did not have free reign just because he's a company man. he's not only being monitored by staff which is macarthur's operation there, but the fbi so he's on the ground and they notify fbi dc. they're surveying but at the same time you don't want to read too much into it . they know what you thought, how many cigarettes you smoke every day but they gave hershey clearance to go to your oshima for 2 weeks which might sound substantial but includes 24 to 36 hours of travel to get there in that time . and when he gets there, he has the help of the german priest who had been living

there and had returned and spoke english and through the german priests, and one other japanese minister who had been educated at emory university and therefore spoke english these two gentlemen not only gave hershey their own testimony but they also made introductions for hershey among the survivors who had been returning to hiroshima to try to rebuild their lives among the actresses and ultimately later on hershey didn't remember exactly how many hehad interviewed . will just say several dozen. he would saysix . >> coming back to something that preoccupied me i don't thinkfrivolously , one of the things that makes your oshima such an important work of journalism and literature is that hershey saw his subjects and he even as you reveal at

a very specific novelistic pattern and template that he was applying to secure. >> it wasn't just enough that he was going to show the events from the individual point of view. he decided he was going to, these individuals whose lives intersected. and also their lives in the moments leading up to where they were at that exact, at the moment of detonation and how their paths crossed in the hours and the days of the aftermath, sometimes in pretty shocking ways. and so it was basically he was leading a neighborhood narrative in a way and because ultimately the profile, his testimony fit the profile were regular folks, what he was doing was he was creating empathy for them. for american readers not all

of them were going to be able to fathom the physics of how the bomb works or be able to fathom what all out nuclear war looks like they would be able to relate to the story of let's say a young mother with three young school-age kids for a young clerk for a young doctor going abouttheir business , families getting on the bus to work . at the moment catastrophe strikes. >> i was thinking as you mentioned that thornton wilder's novel clearly was, gave him an organizing principle for the story of how six strangers themselves share a moment of common disaster . >> that's not theoretical, he had as his inspiration while he was covering in china. he had gotten horrible flu and was laid up. >> china flu leslie.

>> the precursor to china flu . >> you read wilder's great novel while he was recovering in china and he saw when he began to tryas we all do when we reporting something with any kind of ambition , said that's the way i can tell the story of these intersecting lives. >> absolutely, it gave it a really cohesive structure to tell. he knew he wanted to be novelistic. let's face facts, people have real incentive. it was going to be graphic, it was going to confront people with the fact that they had had one person called a fourth of july attitude about the bombing area everybody had every incentive to potato it out of their hands but if he could make it novelistic enough and enthralling enough for people not to put it down then it was almost like he was a

trojan horse reporter and this was the latest trojan horse material into people's homes and lives. >> coming back for one step, this is the occupying, what with did the occupying force and he was going to be doing in hiroshima , about the aftereffects of the bombing. >> he was going down there and there's evidence that he interacted with military police and there's evidence a new he was out and about but by that point they had started letting other reporters in who were not reporting on the aftermath of your oshima anymore. it was considered an old story bythat point . so when reporters were admitted , they were really there to view these more fluffystories if you can believe that . >> is a-year-old.

>> but what the gardens of your oshimalook like, this is hiroshima coming back . >> if the military had something in mind it was your oshima is coming back. having an atomic bomb dropped on. >> that wasn't so bad. >> that was the story that they imagined. >> i would think you and i have both reported thinking ambitiously on a more provincial new york scale but it's hard when you are reporting something not to be altered by people you meet. what was, do we know hershey's state of mind as these stories which are still hard to read people losing, not only losing family losing their entire system, this moment of disbelief. how does this affect hershey psychologically as he was in the midst of reporting this .

>> he's hardened wars correspondent, i don't mean bitter or callous or anything like that but he's been around . he reported in your. let's just say he's seen everything in his war reporting from combat to concentration camps and he has seen tokyo raise. somebody described one of his contemporary reporters described tokyo looking ãray with a cigarette butt sticking out of it. his frame of reference, will just say he was tough-minded but when he got to hiroshima he was horrified by what he had seen not because he wasn't used for seeing devastation and let's face it the worst of human nature in healthy doses or unhealthy doses rather but because it was a single bomb had done this. your oshima was level and i don't want to be graphic in this broadcast but there were

flattened graveyards and when you got there, he was so disturbed by what he was finding that even seeing, they weren't entirely wrong. there was a regrowth of laura but things have been unnaturally stimulated to grow back. everything about it was audible and unnatural so he vowed he was going to try to get reporting done as quickly ashe could and get out of there because it was so traumatizing . >> and did area where did he actually dohis writing ? >> he and william sean decided he was going to do his 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. and since he got out of

hiroshima and came back to new york. >> this is the kind of detail only writers relish but i do. he had his notebook from the interview. >> that was another thing i was interested in is how did hershey take his, we knew that his protagonist later recalled that he had taken notes . in lou of notebooks, his notebooks do not exist in his file. but they remember that. and also, my question which was unanswered is that he wrote in shorthand because he learned shorthand from lewis who had been an assistant to beforehand so it's possible he did it that way because all his protagonists when they read the account later on remarks at the extreme accuracy of his memory and to take notes like that in real time. you'd have to have some kind

of system to get everything though unfortunately, i don't know what happened to the notebooks. i give anything to know what happened to the notebooks but he did make from point a to point b with material enough to create an accurate account . >> it's mind-boggling but this is a period before there's any tape recording. >> no voice recordings. >> i know one great reporter alice wilkinson taught himself shorthand with that idea inmind . he be able to do it. so he comes back to new york city and he starts the process of writing. and they know at this point or sean knows that they once to heat and what would seem to us given the scale of the ambition, very short order. >> originally there's the

anniversary, it would be the first anniversary of the bombing and i guess it's important to mention her she was there in maine, early june so they would only have eight weeks to turn it over. and so i think that they all knew how huge the story was going to be when he started writing it and of course it ended up being this 30, 30,000 word monster. but hershey said he needed to andhe would write and what you call a white teeth . and his, some of his previous books have been written that way and he was used for writing under the wartime pressure of a deadline that this wasn't just that, he was doing it under enormous pressure to because he knows what he's writing is going to really embarrass the us government and show the truth about their experiments on weapons. >> so he produces this and then submit it to william sean and then sean persuades

howard roth to do something that was very balky . and unparalleled in its ambition and that's to make an entire issue of the new yorker. >> which is what one former new york editor called an unprecedented splurge . harold roth, are you crazy? a year later they had just gotten back to postwar footing . there's a sense of normalcy coming back. >> people wanted to meet the talkshow account, is part of the continuity of their lives and wallace wants to disrupt that continuity. >> and presents them with a really central question,what is the purpose of this magazine . it what is the continuous wartime purpose of the fearless reporting or does it

revert entirely . >> you tell us something that was unforgettable which is how howard roth persuaded himself to do what william sean and me inspired and trusted him to do was not to think about the future of the magazine but to think about the magazines pass. think about it's very dna. >> he went back and looked at his original statement that he had published in 1925 and also the perspective that he had created in 1924 when he was trying to convince backers to back to the new yorker and one of the sentences that he had written himself and it's probably in a moment of gravitas was that the magazine was always to have a serious purpose despite the frivolity, the nature of levity that this magazine had and it was going to report not fear or without favor which is an important line. harold roth draws inspiration

from himself and he comes back and he says to sean i'll give you the green light but william sean is really the driver on this whole story and in terms of having sent percy in the first place, championed it to run at full length, championed it to run in full issues . it would have had an impact. >> it's lost its essential form because it's form was the intersection of those stories not having them chronologically one after another . >> so the cliffhanger 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 are they about to drop this on their readers who have no idea coming and let's say that they're in peacetime mode. they're not expecting a huge wartime atrocity story. they're expecting, they're in a moment of recovery.

of regaining again the feeling of normalcy and what albert einstein would say the easy pleasures. they were about to be confronted with the past . >> think it's vital to what this story is about, reporting in a kind of robotic journalistic form and writing with great attention to structure and i think hershey's work demonstrates that area one of the good points to make is that her she had written about the bomb before. time life a lot about the bomb that it was always in terms of this enormous generalizations about the fate of man and the destiny of the adam and the promise of science and the damnation. exactly, they all existed at this impossibly high level of

rhetoricalabstraction . and continue to what her she was doing is absolutely no rhetorical abstraction in any way. >> they boiled it down and when you're talking about him writing for time, his time writing was prettypronounced . it had a little slider to its . this was stripped-down and hershey said he didn't want to event any outrage, it was entirely about laying out the facts to people who he had, who had given him their testimonies to speak in their own words and to let the story unravel in that way. he felt less of the story smacks of outrage the higher, the more effective it was going to be and it really worked. because by dialing down from

this god i point of view down to the human vantage point that allow people to put themselves into the shoes of the people he in this very fair sort of way was recounting. >> the piece comes out, sean persuades rob, rob persuaded himself through sean and percy right if ac that's still astounding considering the exquisite quality of the writing and the testimony. it comes out and what happens ? >> hershey uses the word explicit to describe the reaction. that's not i use for obvious reasons but the sentiment is accurate. it created aninternational furor . >> there's nothing on the cover of the issue that indicates the content of the issue . >> which was a fascinating decision.

new york new better than i do, new yorker covers atleast been decided a week in advance . this one, the cover that had been slated for the august 31 issue was this sort of really dreamy park landscape, a summer park and the people were horseback riding and playing tennis and lying dreamily in streams and the new yorker and i don't writing on the cover. or even a table of contents. to indicate what the contents of the magazine were so the editors decided to keep this cover on their. i couldn't find anything from sean or roth on the record i decided to keep this one can speculate that it really does symbolize a sleepwalking america. we're back at leisure after war and a more gruesome interpretation is it looks a lot like a part that is described in oshima where people are enjoying themselves and it later

becomes a refuge for many of the migrants who are dying out. >> david resnick made the same decision to take out all the cartoons and the talk section a week after 9/11 so that was a case where the cover spoke to the events. it comes out and it's sells off the newsday. >> there are contraband new yorkers after that. i interruptedyou . >> just coming back to the main line of the story, it is a success both i hate to use the word commercially but it's all anybody talks about the weekend comes out. >> one of hershey's contemporary reporter reported and they said i guarantee even if you don't read it all you'regoing to be talking about and it was true . it was indicated not just in its entirety in papers across the country around the world and nbc read it verbatim over

four nights. >> i couldn't get over that, just read verbatim. >> for actors read it, no music, nothing like that and the identities of the actors were even revealed until after it aired it detract from. >> what was it that people learn that they could not have imagined before they read? >> what it's like to be a human being on the receiving end of nuclear catastrophe. you learn what it was like to be a young mother with a baby in your arms when your house collapses around you and running out before a storm consumes yourneighborhood . i don't want to be geographic but you learn about what happens. >> the point you make is people were in certain times accustomed . this was at the end of the most destructive war in human history, 30 million people

were killed and germany was in ruins. london was in ruins. it wasn't destruction alone, it was something about the idea of destruction on this scale and of this finality. it was destroying the skin on humanflesh . it was imprintingshadows on the walls . it was transformational destruction of a kind that no one had ever imagined before and no one understood. >> it was trulyapocalyptic . journalists and editors rightly after hiroshima quickly recognize it was the story not just of the war but of modern times because amenity and finally after minutes centuries of contriving the worst possible methods of warfare and finally managed to eviscerate themselves in the most gruesome way possible and some of this is in her she spoke.

if you read it when you're 15 you remember it when you're 75 . it's completely horrific and it's a great and ghoulish reminder that your happens to individuals. casualties, 56 are composed of individuals who have gained that can be switched off. >>, asking and it's a good question, was hershey concerned about nuclear contamination or fallout a year later and was there any risk of that? >> it's unclear if he was worried about it all the other people were and interestingly when after hiroshima happened, general leslie groves and oppenheimer went on a press junket to show how they brought a bunch of reporters to show how little radiation and they

said in japan you can live there forever. the fact is that the trinity site was far more contaminated and your oshima and nagasaki were a year later because ofthe point of detonation of the bomb . the trinity testing and on the ground and thegrounds were contaminated . hershey generally said that a lot of the radiation went back up in the atmosphere that said there have been reports that when us occupation forces came to approach a robust areas around the hydrostatic fear of possible residual radiation because the fact that they didn't totally understand what they had created at that point. >> another thing that strikes me as extraordinary in all the years since, the decades since your oshima was published no one has challenged any of his testimony or of its factual basis.

>> that was another thing i was interested in proving did anybody ever try to discredit percy or to discredit the testimony because it was embarrassing and even when truman capote did in cold blood legions of reporters went in and tried to cover him, they were on the ground fact checking him but first of all the occupation lasted for several more years after percy was on the ground and it wasn't easy to get in to interview these protagonists and check what their feelings were about the accuracy of their story but then after occupation lifted, they , there were international thinkers on the anniversary of the bombing reporters would contact hershey's protagonists and asked them to comment on their stories and none of them to the best of my knowledge ever came forward and said that they

had been misquoted and nobody ever seemed to find, misquoted or had their experiences mischaracterized . and again the best of my knowledge no reporters ever seemed to find inaccuracies. >> team to be completely impeccable piece of reporting on a difficult and incredibly resistant circumstances. >> there were a few little things. to be honest i started my career as a researcher and a fact checker and they didn't have checking. the way that we you today, there was a way to get in and go back and verify everything , all the recording he had brought home area little things but for instance one of hershey's main protagonists, e-book profiles him and his wife and their daughter coco and her she characterizes her as an

infant son instead of an infant girlwhich she later took him to tack for . but really things like that and otherwise harold watson and william sean were maniacs for granular accuracy. they would fight for hours about whether somethingshould be called a doorway or a doorframe . >> dumping that still goes on . hershey after hiroshima. his career goes on but you never write anything quite fun this scale or the significance again. >> ironically, he always he could tell stories more effectively in fiction and nonfiction so it's ironic he's best known for this work of nonfiction. he writes many novels after hiroshima and a lot of them are interesting and social conscience novels.

>> very much in the tradition of sinclair lewis . >> i feel like percy is going to be rediscover . just for the sheer of his interest alone, youare interested in race relations . there's still good reporting that went into even as fictional works butagain, you're right . he's never as known whenever you see john first, there's that headline of his obituary was john percy. >> we don't have a lot of time left. i can go on talking to you about this indefinitely and one of the things we were talking about not long ago is that hershey got caught up at the end of his career in a kind of plagiarism, i wouldn't call it a scandal what a kerfuffle kind. that i actually was witness to you i was at a young

editors magazine to place area and it was the beginning of a new kind of hyper scrutiny that was being given to journalism all kinds. it was very much part of the moment we're living innow . he would say to me what part of the expectations of journalism in hershey's time was you had a much broader license to take things from many places without maniacally crediting sources at every moment . >> even though hershey's notebooks and his interviews no longer exist, i won't say that they don't exist on paper on yale. if they emerge i want to be the first to get a crack at them but they do include many of the reports that he referred to when he was writing hiroshima and my researchers werelooking through them and every once in a while there were like , this is a description that

was very close to how it had ended up in your oshima but like for instance a report description of the geography of it . your oshima being fan shaped several rivers and it was an informational paul so you imagine this reporter was writing on deadline has a fan of materials around him. there was a report that he had the effects of radiation on botanical growth in hiroshima and there's one line in the report that says not only did the radiation not kill certain plants, stimulated them so you seethe word stimulated . the poll that language for his own. >> directly from the report he was looking at. >> it's meant to be accurate. if you're quoting a source, you're using the source of information , he pulled an

additional translator on the ground especially when talking about medical systems . the question of whether something like that or plague plagiarism was pulled from an informational report that is therefore the reference of the public and for expertsand for journalists . >> we don't have much time but i want to make a radical turn from process to point i guess. i have to say is one many people are asking about . how hershey felt is still something we argue about today. did we do the right thing by dropping the bomb or was it a war crime? how did percy feel about that after he'd written hiroshima and how do you feel about it having everything about the writing of your oshima? >> in the immediate aftermath

hershey self hiroshima, he had complicated feelings about it. horrible death toll was inevitable . he felt bad about what it portended for humanity and nagasaki he felt was a total criminal action. he thought that the memory of what happened at your oshima is what had kept the world safe from subsequent use of nuclear weapons. whether that's true or not i think we can definitely say it's beenan element and it has been a deterrent . it's actually a controversial opinion. that's your oshima didn't have to happen to prevent future hiroshima's but it did help. personal feelings are that i still have found the then government argument about why

they drop a demonstration bomb in an uninhabited area i find that to be inadequate. >> that was oppenheimer, did you know. that was oppenheimer's desire to announce it after the fact that they should have dropped it at least on an uninhabited area , a shipyard or a purely unpopulated zone. >> they had pressedjunkets in bikini , they could have had a press junket and dropped it in an uninhabited area one of the arguments, in the retort was that when they have assembled the world even in light of if it didn't work that it would have been discredited so they had to drop onto city with a largely civilian population. >> you mentioned this to and it's one of the reasons to be resolutely antiwar as much as we can be.

the logic of warfare and brutality of warfare made it seem if not palatable at least been inevitable. after all you went out bombing the firebombing of tokyo as wewere talking about , it was more destructive in terms of land loss and property loss in the actual bombing of your oshima. people get caught up in this he is logic of destruction and it becomes on almost impossible conveyor belt to escape from . >> i agree and their ghoulish and differentways . tokyo i can't remember the exact amount but the in on this part that was destroyed in one night, 100,000 lives lost and it's as gruesome as what you saw in your oshima but here oshima was brought on by one single tentative atomic weapon at the time and what that portended for our ability to wipe out every accomplishment, every human life in one fell swoop in the future , that is the thing

that sets nuclear attack apart from more conventional attack. >> we live under that shadow still and we've lived under it and it seems to come forward and it never really disappears but percy's story is prominent and it makes me proud to have spent my adult life at the new yorker to know that was a key moment in our history and you'vewritten an extraordinary book about . it's rare that you see a book begin as a training acorn of an idea. if you think there's anything in that and it becomes a major work of reporting. congratulations leslie,thank you so much . and thank you all for being with us . >> thank you to the historical society forhosting .

>> if only we were free to be in brooklyn right now. >> here are some of the current best-selling nonfiction books according to the washington post . topping the list pulitzer prize winning author isabel wilkerson explores what she calls a hidden caste system in the united states and then in how to be an antiracist interim candy argues america must choose to be antiracist and work towards building a more equitable society. after that in too much and never enough president trumps niece mary trump takes a critical look at the president and his family followed by activist lenin doyle's memoir untamed. wrapping up our look at some of the best-selling nonfiction books according to the washington post is truth is marching on, historian john meacham's biography of a congressman and civil rights leader john lewis. some authors have appeared on tv and you can watch them online at booktv.org.

next, heritage foundation director mike gonzalez argues on identity politics is dividing america and an activist and real justice pack cofounder sean king reflects on his work in social justice movements and later breitbart news senior editor joel pollock offers his thoughts on the 20/20 presidential election. find more schedule information on your program guide or online at booktv.org. now here's mike gonzalez on the impact ofidentity politics . >> thank you to everyone for joining us, i am greg scott rector of media at the heritage foundation and i'm honored to work welcome you to the plot to change america , "the plot to change america: how identity politics is dividing the land of the free" that is why the new book "the plot to change america: how identity politics is dividing the land of the free" is so important and