>> testifies before the senate judiciary committee on the crossfire hurricane investigation that looks at interference in the 2016 election. watch live coverage tuesday 11 a.m. on c-span three. booktv continues with investigative journalist leslie bloom who looks at new york writer efforts to report on the fatal impact on the bombing of hiroshima. later about the soviet union's role in the nuremberg trials. >> good evening. welcome to tonight's virtual

program where we will be discussing the true impact of the atomic bomb. we are honored to host tonight's event speakers who will be joined in conversation. i'm the manager of the programs here at the historical society and while we wish we could welcome you to the physical locations, i'm still honored and have the privilege to welcome you to the virtual programs. we look forward to hopefully having you join us for more. before we get to the subject of the program i want to share a little bit about some things we have coming up. next week we of the former state

attorney general who will be sharing her new book. they will be exploring the connections between big money and the impact on the democracy. that will be on august 11th. following we will be hosting rick perlstein which continues the history of the republican party and modern american troops. one hundred years after the amendment which we will be taking off on the anniversary of the ratification of the amendment with issues pertaining

and how they continue to be with contingent. we look forward to hosting many more programs as they come together and you can learn more about the offerings on the website. in just a moment i will be welcoming tonight's speakers to the virtual space. this is a powerful conversation tonight and tomorrow is the 75th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb we are also talking about the role of journalism in sharing the story so people can truly understand the human cost and the danger

that it posed. on the recent passing of pete hamill that had the pleasure of hosting a few years ago i want to share a quote of his that is the work of the journalist to comfort the afflicted so today in the landscape of fake news and the potential danger of the misinformation propaganda and how it can help us see the truth. without further ado i would like to welcome tonight's speakers we are honored and glad to have them here with us tonight. an award-winning journalist, historian and "new york times" best-selling author whose work has appeared in "vanity fair," "the new york times," wall street journal, wall street

journal magazine, los angeles review, paris review daily, "the new york times" style magazine, the hollywood reporter and many, many more. she will be joining the conversation with the new yorker since 1986 and during the more than 30 years of the magazine, he's written hundreds of essays and personal memoirs to reviews and profiles along with much reporting from abroad along with fiction, humor and criticism. as the conversation unfolds, i want to remind you that we will be taking questions and if you have any questions for the speakers you can submit them on the q and a box at the bottom of the screen and the subject of tonight's discussion of course we have teamed up with our friends at the community bookstore based here in brooklyn if you would like to learn more and possibly purchase your copy you can do so with the link and without further ado, please

welcome. can you hear me. thank you both for being here. look forward to the conversation. >> thank you for hosting. thank you for doing this. >> first of all, congratulations on this book. should it be hiroshima or hiroshima? >> i mix them up the why shouldn't. >> a lovely moment in the book by the editor of the new yorker not only am i publishing this but i learned a new way to pronounce it more importantly

about the coverage of that event there is a very particular parochial interest in this book because it's very much about the history of the new yorker and the evolution of the development. but before we get to the new yorker and how the internal dynamics shaped this book what do you mean by the cover-u coved what was the state of play to do the reporting that produced the legendary peace that filled an entire issue the first time that it never happened? >> the audience should know since the very beginning when that started researching i

didn't realize the extent to which you can play a role in this narrative. i just really wanted to mention the back story. the story of hiroshima has always been about outside success. nobody looked at how we got the story in the first place. i started my career as a production coordinator and how the story comes down entirely to logistics and whoever controls the ground controls the story. when i started looking at how much general macarthur had total domination of japan i started to realize how impossible it would have been as opposed and the more that i researched the subject i had come across as an

administration how much he suppressed the foreign press and the japanese in particular. so the magnitude of the cover-up and by the scholars never to the extent i felt that it should have been and it ended up being central interestingly they seem to be ecstatically in this weapon on hiroshima with the 20,000 tons of tnt. the government released pictures of the mushroom clouds and the landscape devastation but what his editors were quick to pick up on was there was weirdly no recording on the human toll that

was the environment as we have discussed many times, the new yorker was in transition at that moment when they begin the reporting for this piece. it had changed in the course from the onset of the war at pearl harbor known for his

elegant stylist reporting but still very much the initial imprint they take on a much more ambitious and almost magisterial role in its reporting never at that point had the any operations to be a big news operation it would be paralleled he had been a news man before that and when pearl harbor happened, that was it. the magazine went right away and

one of his coeditors many of the writers were already finding themselves as writers and artists. a local feature writer that went off and became to report the war in north africa and the normandy invasion and the rest of it there's a pretty deep relationship in the department and operation they were working

for curtis in the npr throughout the whole whole or. >> for the armed forces the military editors and military figures. they were to "the new york times" goliath. he is the quote on quote lunch man where he would send his correspondence into the field and he didn't know what the group was going to be. he just knew there was going to

be one. >> he was actually sort of not born and bre bread as a new yor. he came from the organization. what made him trust that he could get this story? >> writing for "time" magazine and henry was the head of the new yorker and they hated each other like voluptuous lee publicly hated each other. he had been reporting for time since 1939 and he was grooming him to be [inaudible]

>> [inaudible] >> and also when you read what he wrote, they are a far crime from what he was writing for the new yorker. >> as someone who cares only about literary style, hold that for a moment. >> he had written a historical piece before that.

>> that is how he did come to the new yorker so he's far too chauvinistic and says thanks but no thanks and he had managed somehow to do a story. he had a story that was rejected and said come this way and it was the story of john f. kennedy in the pacific. his wife had been the former.

>> this is a significant class of people. >> so he's on his way back from the pacific, erase that, jfk was on his way back from the pacific. one night he's at a nightclub, he runs into hersey and his wife and jfk is telling her what happened, that jfk had been hacked by the japanese and he's like i want that story. he brings it to the new yorker and they are excited to have at last. in many ways that helps make kennedy's political career and by kennedy's campaign teams

every political campaign he had but it also helps make john's career because it provides him to the magazine that would make him famous. >> and you mentioned old joe kennedy hated the fact it appeared in the new yorker. that wasn't a big enough magazine. >> life would have been great, but it was little for him so he badgered him to having it vindicated i think in "reader's digest" which is another magazine he just despised. i don't know how kennedy twisted his arm but joe kennedy got his publication of that after all. a. >> a quick footnote another thing about those years of course it appeared in a smaller

addition making it important for those who came out in 1946. so then what happened, how does he get to japan and break through the walls of the cover-up? >> it's the first lesson not just of journalism, but life. >> remember they said never assume. >> but i did. because it does have this story it has the feeling of an exposé so i assumed it was him getting

in and getting out somehow because other reporters had made a run that way and went through crazy lengths. so august 1945 he hears about it and has mixed feelings about it and thinks that it's going to end the war and then there's this totally criminal action. he knows he's going to cover the bomb but he doesn't know exactly how just yet then they talk about the coverage and they realize that nobody was recording on that and it's likely that they knew the exte

extent. a lot of the colleagues probably knew he wasn't going to paddle a boat from guam. he would have to get military clearance. so, he starts to do a major reporting trip that starts first in china and then apply for clearance and he's going to be accredited and then having the staff reestablish itself aside from the clearance to get into tokyo. the reporters have less freedom because everyone expects you to conform to the needs of the

military, as a kind of 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. they expected to be traveling with guys that were writing. >> the buddy system throughout the war and that is what gave this advantage. they had written the profiles. he was a hero that helped evacuate wounded marines covering a battle between the u.s. and japanese forces most significantly perhaps he had written a growing biography of

douglas macarthur that he later wanted to take it out of circulation but it definitely helps the cause they were bidding the journalists to coming and going. they had been seen as a relatively innocuous a company man still. >> so he gets from china and japan and 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 the events. how do we find the people that will find? >> that was in an incredibly

important departure and it might seem obvious now to focus on a few individuals to bring out the human element but it was pretty revolutionary then because what he was proposing to do is humanize the japanese victims after the nazis because they attacked us directly. so, when he eventually admitted and he didn't because he was a company man under the operation and the fbi. he's on the ground, they notify but at the same time you don't want to read too much into it. but they gave clearance to go for two weeks.

when he gets there, she has the help of the german priest who's been living there and had returned and one other japanese minister who'd been educated. these gentlemen not only gave their own testimony but also made introductions among the survivors who had been returning to try to rebuild their lives so he would take six. >> coming back to something that

preoccupied me. one of the things that makes hiroshima such an important work on journalism and literatures that he saw his subjects in a novelistic way and as you reveal he had a novelistic pattern he was applying to his material. >> it wasn't just enough he was going to show it from the individual point of view. he decided it had to be these individuals whose lives intersected and also where they were at that moment and how their paths crossed in the hours and the days of the aftermath so

if you picked a profile what he was doing is creating empathy because not all of them will be able to fathom but they would be able to relate to the stories of a young mother with young kids or a doctor going about their business, getting on the bus to work at the moment the catastrophe strikes. >> i was thinking specifically the you mentioned the novel that gave him a kind of organizing principle on how fixed they share a moment of common

disaster. >> he literally did have that. the precursor to the china flu. >> so that's the way that i can tell the story of these. >> absolutely. it gave it as a structure to tell it and he knew he wanted it to be novelistic. people had incentives not to read his work. it was going to be graphic and confront people with the fact they had a fourth of july attitude about the bombing.

everybody had every incentive but if he could make it novelistic enough not to put it down she was a trojan horse reporter. >> what did, if anything what did he think he was going to be doing in hiroshima in the follow-up? >> there was evidence while he was in hiroshima and there was evidence he was out and about talking to people but they started letting in other reporters who were not reporting on the aftermath of hiroshima in

the story by that point so they were admitted to do these more fluffy stories if you can believe that. >> so people are back. >> that was the story that they imagined. you and i both reported things but it's hard when you are reporting something not to be altered by the people you meet. do we know the state of mind in the stories which are still hard

to read with people losing their entire existence how does this affect as he was in the midst of reporting that work? >> he had been around. he reported it in europe and concentration camps and he had seen the tokyo raid. one of his contemporary reporters described it looking like an ashtray with a cigarette butt. his frame of reference he was tough-minded but he was horrified by what he had seen not because of the worst of human nature in these unhealthy

doses but it was a single bomb that had done this. i don't want to be graphic in this podcast but they were flat in the graveyard so when he got there he was so disturbed by what he was finding their they were not entirely wrong. there was a regrowth but these things had been unnaturally stimulated so he vowed he was going to try to get the recording done as quickly as he could and get out of there. >> where did he actually do his writing? >> he decided he was going to do

his reporting and bring it back to new york. even though the censorship had ended in the states and in the fall of 45 they were still at war in the censorship and so he got out of hiroshima and came back to new york. >> this is the kind of detail writers relish. he had his notebooks from the interview. >> that is another thing i'm interested in. his protagonist leader recalled he had taken notes and his notebooks do not exist in his files, but they remember that and also could he learn

shorthand it's possible he did it that way because when they read the account later on they marked the accuracy of his memory and to take notes like that in real time you have to have a system. i don't know what happened to the notebook. i would give anything to know but he did make it from point a to point b with enough to create accurate. >> it's also appeared before any reporting. >> no voice recordings. >> i know one reporter who taught himself shorthand to be

able to do it. so he comes back to new york city and starts the process of writing. they know at this point they want the peace given the scale in very short order. >> originally there's the anniversary pay. it would be the first anniversary of the bombing and i guess it's important to mention they were there in early may and june so the only have eight weeks to turn it over. it ended up being this monster and so some of his books had been written that way and he was used to writing under the wartime pressure this one wasn't just that.

he knows what he is writing is going to embarrass the government and show the truth about the weapon. >> so, he produces this and then submits it to william and shawn persuades him to do something that was very balls he and unparalleled in this ambition to make an entire issue of the new yorker. >> which is what one called the unprecedented merge. they'd just gotten back to the postwar normalcy coming back into the magazine. >> part of the continuity of their lives to have that and we had to disrupt that continuity.

>> that was the question. again it presents them with a central question what is the purpose of this magazine. is it continuous purpose of reporting or does it revert entirely. >> you told us something the way howard finally persuaded himself to do what he admired and trusted and was pressing him to do wasn't to think about the future of the magazine but to think about the magazine' magaz, to think about its dna. >> he went back and looked at his original statement and the perspective that he had created and one of the sentences he had written himself in a moment of gravitas is that the magazine

had purpose despite the more, the reporting without favor which is important and so he brought inspiration for himself and comes back and says i will give you the green light. but he's the driver on this having championed it to run at full length and to run a single issue instead of four installments. >> it lost its essential form not just having them chronologically one after another. >> so it only works in one long piece. and so he's convinced to do it

and it's a hell of a gamble because not only are they about to drop this on their readers that have no idea but it's coming. they are not expecting a huge story. they are expecting they are in a moment of recovery and regaining normalcy or what albert einstein would say without having confronted the past. they were about to be confronted with the past. ..

>> and then there is absolutely no rhetorical attraction in any way. >> talk about writing for time to have a little swagger to it. that this is entirely about laying out the facts.

and the more effective it would be. and it really works because by a dialing it down from the vantage point they cannot put themselves into the shoes of those people in a fair way. >> so they persuade themselves with the writing and the testimony and then what happens? >> and the word explosive is not the word that i use but.

>> and that indicates the content. >> so this one the cover that was slated for the august 31st issue that people were horseback riding and with the table of contents with a magazine where. and i couldn't find anything. and then to speculate that it

really does symbolize the sleepwalking america and the more gruesome interpretation of that is that the part with hiroshima and later becomes a refuge for the black survivors. but that was the case where the cover clearly spoke and it is off the newsstands so coming back to the mainline page use the word commercially but with those contemporary

reporters that even if you don't read it that's all they will be talking about and in its entirety and is read verbatim. >> i could not get over that it was' read verbatim? >> and that the identity will not be revealed until it had a beard. >> so what was it people and they could not have imagined before they read it? >> to know what it's like to be a young mother with you the - - with your baby in your

arms and you have to do well before the fire consumes your neighborhood. and this was at the end of the most destructive war in human history. 30million were killed. so it is about the idea. and then on human flesh creating shadows on the walls. it was transformational that no one had ever imagined and no one had understood. the journalist and editors rightly after hiroshima and

then they had after many centuries of contriving but when you read the book remember at 15 you remember it at 75. and it is the casualties from the individuals who have no skin that may be slipped off. >> what is the risk of fallout? not everybody rose read about

it after hiroshima happened and with the testing site to show how little radiation there still was. and that was probably far more contaminate on - - contaminated because of the point of detonation of the bomb. it hit the ground so it was contaminated. hiroshima generally said the radiation flew back up into the atmosphere but that said there are reports that is not to say to totally understand what was created at that

point. >> in all the years or decades sense. no one has challenge the testimony. >> that is another thing when i was doing research and then to even in cold blood even the reporters went on the ground fact checking. but even several more years with the feelings. but with that lifted they were

international so then the reporter word contact and ask them to comment on their stories none of that to the best of my knowledge of working forward and then with those inaccuracies. >> it seems completely impeccable and incredibly resistant circumstances. >> to be honest with my career as a researcher and fact checker in the way that we do today in a way to fact check and go back and verify but the

little things for the reverend who is the name protagonist but later she took him to task and then for that granular accuracy and whether if you 54 hours of it's a doorway or doorframe. >>. >> after hiroshima to go on to distinguish.

>> ironically he always felt he could tell stories more effectively and fiction and then nonfiction so he is known for this work of nonfiction that he has done. he writes many novels after oshima. and the social conscience novel novels. >> and i feel like to be rediscovered for the sheer content for race relations and there is still good reporting but you are right with the headline of his obituary. >> and one of the things we were talking about not long

ago is that caught up at the end of his career in plagiarism i wouldn't call it a scandal but actually i was only a young editor at the magazine. and it was the beginning of a new kind of hyper scrutiny and saying to me part of that expectation of journalism is that you had a much broader license to take things without maniacally crediting the sources at every moment. >> and with those reports that

they referred to and then with that description and with the geography. so to imagine this reporter on deadlines has materials around him and a report with the effects of radiation and then there was one line in the report that says not only did radiation but he pulled out

for his own. >> and with accuracy. it's meant to be accurate. if you are including a source and using that information especially talking about medical terms. and then plagiarism to be pulled from the informational report for experts and journalist. >> i don't have much time but with the radical turn one that many people are asking abou about, still a question to debate and argue about is it the necessary if not the right

thing to drop the bomb? or was it a war crime and with everything of the writing about it? and to have a horrible or gentle or the fact with the total criminal action. so later he thought the memory of what happened this from the subsequent use of nuclear weapons, whether that is true or not it has been an element of concern. especially with the controversial opinion that hiroshima did not have to

happen but it did help. my personal feelings are that i still have found the then government argument about why they could not drop a demonstration bomb that was oppenheimer's desire after-the-fact if you drop it on the uninhabited area like a shipyard. >> and they had pressed junkets when they were testing and then to drop in the uninhabited area but the argument the government gave women and they assembled if it

didn't work notable and discrediting so they had to drop on the city with the largest population. >> and it's one of the reasons to be antiwar because it made it seem is not palatable but inevitable with the firebombing of tokyo actually more in terms of property loss than the actual bombing of oshima. people are caught up in the logic and it becomes almost impossible conveyor belt. >> i agree. i cannot remember the exact square miles but one night 100,000 lives lost but again

it was brought on by one single atomic weapon at the time and for the ability to wipe out every accomplishment in one fell swoop in the future. and apart from more conventional attacks. >> we still live under that shadow and then to come forward and it never really disappears but the story is permanent makes me proud to know that to write and extraordinary book about it and that is the idea you share with friends and then a major

work of reporting on its own. congratulations. and thank you for being with us. >> and a big thanks to the historical society if only we could be in brooklyn right now.

's. >> hello welcome thank you for joining us and on behalf of harvard bookstore i'm pleased to introduce the spiritual event and in conversation with joshua rubenstein harvard bookstore continues to bring authors and there