the search bar at the top of the page. >> weeknights this month we feature booktv programs to preview what's available every weekend on c-span2. tonight as part of our 2020 year in review we focus on books about u.s. history. >> that all starts at 8 p.m. eastern. enjoy booktv this week and every weekend on c-span2 here. >> good ending. welcome to the knights virtual program we will be discussing breaking the truth of the true impact of the atomic bomb.

we are mentally honor toast tonight speakers come lesley blume is the author of the new book tonight who will be joining the conversation by writer adam gopnik. my name is bo mendez, the manager programs of digital communications here from the historic society. while we wish we could look into our physical locations i am still honored and have the privilege 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 tonight. >> in my what you share a about some things we have coming up, things to look forward to, more virtual programs and hopefully you may be interested in joining us. we will be hosting next week we will be hosting debra teacher, anticorruption expert and former new york state attorney general candidate who will be sharing her new book in a conversation

with -- they will be exploring the connection between big money and its impact on our democracy. that will be on august 11. following leak we will be hosting rick perlstein in a in a conversation with jeffrey toobin discussing rakes new book which continues an exploration we been doing recent history of the republican party and modern american. that would be august 19. we are also proud to partner with the news foundation on an upcoming series entitled women in power, 100 years after the 19th amendment which will kick off august 18 come the 100 year anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment. with a discussion of body power we will be welcoming mcmillan cotton, jennifer boylan and moderator racquel was to discuss issues pertaining to bodies of women throughout time and how they continue to be sites that

contention and often oppression. we look for to hosting many more virtual programs as a come together. you can learn more about the offerings we will have for you at our website. in just a moment i will be welcoming to knights speakers to the virtual space. this is powerful conversation that will look for to tonight. tomorrow is the 75th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb hiroshima and tonight is a 75th anniversary of the same thing happening. these are events that shaped much of the 20th century and while we will be discussing the events themselves and their impact we are also talking about the role of journalism in 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 who we

also had the pleasure of hosting a few years ago, i want to share a quarter of his that is the work of a journalist to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. so today in the landscape of fake news such a narrative of the potential danger of misinformation and propaganda, how journalism can help us cut through to see the truth is something that is all the more important. without further ado i would like to welcome tonight speakers. we are very honored and glad to have been joining us tonight. tonight will be joined by lesley blume of course is the author of "fallout." she is an award-winning journalist, the story and york times best-selling author your current work has appeared in "vanity fair," "new york times," the "wall street journal", "wall street journal" magazine, the los angeles review of books, paris review daily, "vogue," the

"new york times" 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 are doing is more than 30 years at the magazine he has written hundreds of essays on personal memoirs to reviews and profiles along with much reporting from abroad along with fiction, humor, and art criticism. as the conversation unfolds, i would remind you that we will be taking questions. if you have any 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 discussion is of course wesley spoke "fallout." we have teams with the friends at community bookstore based in brooklyn if you'd like to learn more about the book and possibly purchase your copy you can do so via the lake that is in the chat box. please welcome lesley and adam. can you hear me?

>> loud and clear. >> thank you both for being here. looking forward to this conversation and thank you all for attending. >> thank you for hosting. adam, thank you for doing the. >> delighted to do it. first of all congratulations on this extra ordinary book. i hold up the hardcover. >> my second born. >> the hiroshima cover-up that by the way, should be hiroshima or hiroshima? >> you know, i mix them up and they should because it should be hiroshima but if i -- please forgive a. >> columbus momo indie book where harold, the death and europe are said that only a publishing only a publishing for stenting, i learned a new way have to pronounce it. >> exactly. >> you had to say hiroshima, not hiroshima. an extraordinary book. it's both deep marking and catastrophic event but even more and more important leak about

the coverage of that event and how it was turned into words. you call it the hiroshima cover-up. i have as you know lesley, 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. before we get to the new yorker and have 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 hersey went off to japan to do the reporting that produced is legendary peace, , hiroshima, which filled an entire issue of the new yorker? the first time that it ever happened a year after the bombing. >> on signal, the audits should know that you are a sounding board for me since the very beginning. when i first started researching this project i didn't realize the extent to which the cover-up was even play a role in this narrative at all.

i just what he wanted to know the back story. i approached the story as a journalist coming and other journalist. the story has been about his outside success but don't bear looked at how in hell to get the story in first place. i started my career in nightly news from as a production correlator. they make you that sigar learn how the story comes out in time to logistics and other controls the ground controls the story. when i started looking how much general macarthur and his occupation forces had total domination of japan at the time i started to realize how impossible it would event for hersey to get in as an independent reporter as opposed to get in with hell. the more i that i researched the subject i really 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 the cover-up. it's been addressed previously by scholars but never to the extent i felt it should have been and it 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 obama they announced the drop this make extremity weapon on hiroshima. it was 20,000 tons of tnt. it was the biggest bomb that it revenges and history of warfare. the government released pictures of the mushroom cloud pic they released pictures of the landscape devastation for hersey and his editors were quick to pick up on was there was weirdly no reporting on the human toll. nobody knew what was happening that human beings who had been among the only humans in the

history on the receiving end of a nuclear attack. >> blessedly still are to this day. let's move then, that was the environment in which hersey begin reporting this. let's talk about the new yorker in 1945. >> please. >> and where it was. we have discussed many times of course the new yorker was in transition at that moment when hersey begin the reporting for this. it had changed in the course of four years from 1941 on the onset of the war from pearl harbor until the end of the war. more dramatically than perhaps it has ever changed and is now 90 year history because, as you write, it had been still 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 this inspiration. then the war broke out, and one editor in particular i think played outsize role in making the magazine take on a much more ambitious and almost magisterial role in its reporting, and that was in my right, cheung? >> absolutely. both were newsmen in disguise anyway. even in the magazine was started 20 years earlier as a sophisticated niche humor magazine harold never had any aspiration for magazine to be big news operations. he had been a news man before that and it was william and as you say what's pearl harbor happened that was it. the magazine went to a wartime printing right away. harold ross boasted one of his

coeditors, it could be human magazine in more because quote nothing feels funny anymore. >> and many of the writers were already on hand, went off to war and really count themselves as writers and his artist, think about h a liebling was a local feature writer who then went off and became come would have to report the war in north africa, eventually normandy invasion and the rest of it. as a whole generation home made that trip, was there not? >> they dispatch corresponds all over the world. many theaters of war, and they had a pretty deep relationship with the war department and their public relations operation. >> mikell way who is, whose work i once edited was actually working for curtis lemay throughout the whole war so he was the linchpin of the new

yorkers operation. >> there was a lot of overlap like that, a lot of am not a lot but a handful of the correspondence anarchists work and armed forces were also acting for the armed forces. the new yorker ran a ton of profiles on military come sometimes it editors even commissioned stories from military figures, sometimes even public-relations man here, just to keep things cozy with the war department. for the most part the war reporting was serious. they were in the mix very much so. the description of william quote-unquote hunch man where he which is sent one of his correspondence into the field and he didn't know what this group is going to be. he just knew that there would be one. that was an important role. >> he trusted his writers picky believed in his writers here so

why john hersey? hersey was sort of not bread and born as a new yorker. he came from the loose organization. what made hersey, what made sean trust that hersey could get this story of all hard stories? >> hersey couldn't have been left on the new yorker. he was running for time magazine and ahead of time inc., harold ross, the new yorker hated each other, voluptuously, holiday say, publicly hated each other. hersey had been reporting four times since 1939. at one point really grooming him to be the heir apparent to time inc. >> not to interrupt, i very timing five as kids would say now. he was of that type. he was not a fat new york jewellike a. j. liebling. he was an delicate figure.

>> and he was also from yale, across -- [inaudible] >> right. >> sorry. also when you read this, that time and the light dispatches hersey wrote, the rfi cry -- vra far cry for what he is writing for the new yorker later on. >> as somebody who cares only about literary style i think that's a future important point. >> you run with it. >> he had written one hugely significant piece come in historical terms, and currently significant piece for the new yorker before that, right? >> i'm going to back to back you in the second after a teacup but that's how hersey did come to the new yorker. he actually breaks up with lewis

because lewis is far too chauvinistic, patriotically chauvinistic for him, and he said thanks but no thanks. instead of being a repaired, because this burgeoning media empire he's a freelancer in 1945, but in 1944 he had managed somehow to do a story at the new yorker to bring her cnn hersey had a story that life had rejected and then he brought it to sean and shawn said come this way. it was the story of john f. kennedy in the pacific, pt 109. hersey's wife had been former parramore of jfk. jfk had -- >> this is a significant class of people, white? >> they all knew each other.

you know, so hersey on his way back from the pacific, i'm sorry, the race that eric jfk was on his way back from the pacific. he's in new york and one night he got -- he's at it nightclub come he runs into hersey and his wife. jfk is telling hersey the start of what happened. jfk had been ahead of this pt boat which was sliced in half by a japanese destroyer, and hersey is like, i want that story. he always said insignificant not just because he was kennedy's son but because it was a hell of a store in its own life. life rejects it it and he brings it to new yorker and they're tht cetera traffic. in many ways that story helps make kennedy's political career. it got trotted out by candice campaign teams for every political camming that he had but it also helped make john

hersey's career because it provided him to the magazine made them famous. you mention old joe kennedy had the fact it appeared in the new yorker. that was not a big enough magazine. >> right. like, life would've been great but the new yorker was just a little pie for him. he even badgered harold ross into having it vindicated i think in reader's digest which was another magazine that harold ross despised, and it still, i don't know how kennedy twisted his arm but it did indicate in reader's digest. >> speaking of reader's digest, another thing about the new yorker in those war years of course was so-called pony edition that appeared in a smaller addition which was available to service been. it was a key thing in driving up its circulation and making it

more important for all the guys who were coming home who would buy it in 1946 when it came out. hersey had this relationship with shawn bates. then what happens? how does he get to japan and had to see breakthrough the walls of the cover-up? >> like i said one should never assume, it's the first lesson of not just journalism but life, but -- >> there's a a line in a movie, remember on the death that she e said never assume. >> i did. i initially was a bad journalist. i chastised myself publicly for that right now. because hiroshima does have the story it has all the feeling of an exposé. i assumed it was him getting in and getting that somehow unilateral because of the writers had made a run at the

story that way and they went through crazy length into hiroshima and nagasaki. so hersey was in new york in 1945 when the bomb goes off when he hears about it. he has mixed feelings about hiroshima, mostly horrified. nagasaki thinks it is a total criminal action. he knows he's going to cover the bomb but he does know exactly how just yet. he has lunch with william shawn and the talk about the coverage and they realize that what had been missing again is stories about the human toll. what happened to the human beings from those roiling mushroom clouds? no one 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 foreign and japanese reporters by macarthur forces in tokyo because the journalism community was very close to it

back in. a lot of hersey's former wartime friends in college were part of the occupation so they probably knew that the only way in was you would have to paddle boat from wanting to japan. you would have to get military clearance to get in. ..

the same time more because of the whole business of post-vietnam of the military wanting to keep reporters as far away as humanly possible wasn't in place yet . expectto be traveling . >> was a buddy buddy system throughout the war and that's what the gate that huge message whenit came to being cleared . he had written glowing profiles of military figures including jfk. he had, he was a committed war hero. you evaluate wounded marines while he was covering a story , covering between us and japanese forces. most significantly perhaps he had written a really glowing biography general douglas macarthur and his forces which he later thought was so laudatory that he wanted to

take it out of circulation. definitely helped cause. applying to general macarthur to come to the country so even though hiroshima was a more restricted topic and they were really letting journalists coming and going into japan , percy may have been seen as a relatively innocuous quest a reliable. >> company man still. >> then he gets to china, gets to japan and when he gets to humans you must finally you can tell us about how you the extraordinary step forward as he talks to people rather than reporting. how does he begin to find people who will form the spine of the writing? >> 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 pretty revolutionary and especially because when he was proposing to do was to humanize japanese victims japanese and a number two after the japanese attackedus directly . so when percy actually is admitted to tokyo by the way, he did not have free reign. because he was accompanying that he was always being monitored by staff which is the macarthur operation there behind, he's on the ground and theynotified the fbi . they're surveying him but at the same time you don't want to read too much into it . a survey everybody. they knew what you eat, what you thought, how many cigarettes you smoke everyday but they gave percy clearance to go to hiroshima for two weeks which might sound pretty substantial and includes travel and that

would have been 24 to 36 hours of travel at that time. and when he gets there, he has to help a german priest who had been living there and had returned and spoke english and through this german priest, and one other japanese minister who had been educated at emory university and therefore spoke english these are only gave percy her own testimonies but an introduction among the survivors who had been returning to hiroshima to try to rebuild their lives among the ashes you later on didn't remember how many he had interviewed so we will just say several dozens are most accurate, he wouldpick six . >> coming back to something that preoccupies me, one of the things that makes hiroshima such an important

work on journalism and literature is that percy saw his subject in a novelistic way and he even as you reveal at a specific novelistic pattern that templates that he was applying to his material. >> it wasn't just enough that he was going to show it, show the events from the individual point of view. he decided he was going to how these six individuals whose lives intersect . and also their lives in the moment that would lead up to where they were at that exact , at the moment of detonation and how their pass crossed and hours in the days of the aftermath, sometimes in shocking ways. so it was basically like reading a neighborhood narrative in a way and

because the people who picked these profiles, these testimonies the relative relatively normal folks he was creating empathy for them because as american readers, not all of them were going to be able to fathom the specifics of how the bomb worked or be able to fathom all out nuclear war look to but they would be even to relate to the stories of sacred mother with three young school-age kids or a young clerk or a young doctor goingback to business , their family getting on the bus to work. at the moment of catastrophe strikes. >> i was thinking specifically that as you mentioned, that the board in wilder novel, clearly was a kind of gave him an organized principle for the story of how six people, strangers themselves share a moment of common disaster. >> theoretical, he clearly

did have that as his inspiration. but covering in china, he had gotten horrible flu and hewas laid out in a . >>. >> a china flu, leslie. >>. >> the precursor to china flu. >> you read wilder'sgreat novel while he was recovering in china . and said, and saw when he began totry as we all do when we are reporting something with any kind of ambition , so that's the way i can tell the story of these intersecting lives . >> absolutely. it did a really cohesive structure to tell it and he knew he wanted it to be novelistic because look, face facts, people had incentive not to read this work. it was going to be graphic. it was going to confront people with the fact that they had one what oneperson called a fourth of july attitude bombings . everybody had every incentive to hot potato it out of their

hands. but if he could make it novelistic enough and instrumental in drawingenough for people not to put it down, then he , it was, he was a trojan horse reporter getting into japan and this was a way to trojan horse the material into peoples homes and lives. >> coming back one step leslie, what if anything and you talk about here, what did the occupying force think he was going to be doing in hiroshima. basically doing the kind of follow-up piece about the aftereffects of the bombing. >> they knew he was going down there there's evidence that he favored military police while he was in hiroshima and they knew he was out and about talking to people but by that point they had started letting other reporters in who were not reporting on aftermath of your shema . and so a lot of, when reporters were admitted, they

were ostensibly there to write more fluffy stories if you can believe that . >> it's a-year-old, go in and do a fluff piece. >> tell us what the gardens of hiroshima look like, this isyour shema coming back and people are rebuilding . >> if the military had something in my was your shema is coming, having an atomic bomb dropped. >> it wasn't so bad. >> was the story that they imagined. i would think you and i have both reported things, you more ambitiously than me 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 were still triple and hard to read a people losing not only, losing family but losing their entire existence of

this moment of disbelief, how does this affect him psychologically as he was in the midst of reporting. >> he's a hardened war correspondent, i don't mean, bigger or callous or anything like that but he's been around. >> he's reported in europe. he's seen everything in his war reporting from concentration camps and he had seen tokyo raise. somebody described his contemporary reporter described tokyo as looking like an ashtray with a cigarette butt sticking outof it . so his frame of reference, let's just say he was tough-minded when he got to hiroshima he was horrified by what he'd seen not because he wasn't used as a devastation and let's face it the worst of human nature and healthy doses are unhealthy doses rather but because it was a single bomb that had done this.

hiroshima was leveled and i don't want to be graphic. i mean, they're still finding remains at hiroshima today, there were flattened graveyards . when he got there, he was so disturbed by what he was finding that even seeing the stories weren't entirely wrong. there was a regrowth of flora but things have been unnaturally stimulated to grow back. everything about it was horrible and unnatural so he now he was going to try to get the reporting done as quickly as he could and get out of there because he was so traumatized. >> and did. where did heactually do his writing ? >> he and william sean decided he was going to do is reporting and bring it back to new york because even though wartime censorship and

ended in the states in the fall of 1945, and america were still officially at war. so he got out of hiroshima and came back to new york and -- >> this is the kind of detail only writers relish but i did , he had his notebooks from the interview. >> that was another thing that what i was interested in is how did hershey renew that? his protagonist later recalled that he had taken notes . in a little notebook. his notebooks did not exist in his files. but they remember that. and also, i mean my question which was unanswered is did he do them shorthand because, did he learn shorthand and he had been an assistant so it's

possible he did it that way. all of his protagonists when they read the account later on remark at the extreme accuracy of his memory and to take notes with that in real time. you have to have some kind of system to get everything so unfortunately, i don't know what happened. i'd give anything to know what happened to the notebook . but he did make it from point a to point b with material enough to create an accurate account. >> it's mind-boggling but it's also a training before there's any reporting, any tape recordings. >> no voice recordings, nothing like that. >> i know one reporter, was a great report alex wilkerson taught software and with that idea in mind that he be able to do it. so because back to new york city. and he starts the process of writing and they know this point or sean knows that they want a piece in what would

seem to us given the scale of the ambition, a very short order . >> originally there the anniversary. it would be the first anniversary of the bombing and i guess it's important to mention that hershey was there in may and early june so that would onlyhave eight weeks to turn it over . and so i don't think that they all knew how huge the story was going to be when you started writing it in terms of length but ended up being 30, 31,000. it was a monster. but he does, hershey immediately set out to write in what he called a white heat . and his, some of the previous books have been written that way he was used writing under a wartime pressure of the deadline for this one was just that . he was meeting the anniversary, doing it under enormous pressure because he

knows what he's writing is going to really embarrass the us government show the truth about their experiments. >> so he produces this and then, submitted to william sean and then sean persuades howard roth to do something that was very bulky. and unparalleled in its ambition that's to make it an entire issue of the new yorker. >> was what one former new yorker editor called an m unprecedented urge. harold roth, are you crazy? year later they had just gotten back to postwar, putting their sense of normalcy coming back with the cartoons. >> one point they want to re-talk of the town, it's part of the continuity of their lives . sean and to disrupt back continuity. >> that's the question, it presents them with a really

essential question. what is the purpose of this magazine, is it continuous wartime purpose of fearless reporting where does it revert entirely to something. >> you tell us something that i thought was unforgettable which is the way howard roth finally persuaded himself to do william sean and me admired and trusted, expected him to do was not think about the future of the magazine but think about the magazine's past, it's very dna. >> he went back and looked at his original statement published in 1925 and also the perspective that he had created in 1924 trying to convince backers toback the new yorker . and one of the sentences is that he had written himself and it probably in a moment of gravitas, was that the magazine was always to have serious purpose. despite the frivolity or the

nature of levity this magazine had and it was going to report without fearand without fever which is an important line . so harold roth started for himself. he comes back and he says to sean , i'll give you the green light but there, william sean is really the driver. on this whole story and you know, in terms of having spent in the first place, championed it to run its full length, champion it run in a single issue instead of four installments that so that people would have lost interest, then. >> it lost its essential form because the essential form was the intersection of the stories not just having them chronologically one after another. >> cliffhangers in the story are sort of the as you research only works if it's 11 piece . >> and so roth is going to get convinced to do it and

it's a hell of a gamble because not only are they about to drop this on their readers have no idea it coming. they're in peacetime mode at this point. they're notexpecting you wartime atrocities story . they're expecting, they're in a moment of recovery. of regaining again this feeling of normalcy or what albert einstein would say escaping into easy pleasure without having to be confronted with the past. they were about to be confronted with the past. >> it's so vital to everything the story is about . the division between reporting facts, in a kind of robotic term and writing in, with great attention to structure and sentences. but i think hershey's work demonstrates that. one of the good points you make is that hershey had written about the bomb before. time life wrote a lot about the bomb but it was always in terms of these enormous wartime generalizations about

the destiny of the atom and the promise of science. >> exactly, it's all existed at impossibly high level of rhetorical abstraction. and continue to what hershey was doing is no rhetorical abstraction in any way . >> they broke it down, again when you're talking about him writing for time, his time writing was pretty style he. it had little swagger to it. this was strict stripped-down and hershey said he didn't want to commit any outrage, it was entirely about letting the people who he had, who had given him their testimony speak in their own words. let the story unravel in that way. he felt the less the story smacked of outrage, the more

effective it was going to be. and it really worked. because by dialing down from this god's eye point of view down to the human vantage point it allow people to put themselves into the shoes of the people who see in this very spare sort of way, these experiences he was recounting . >> so the peace comes out, sean persuades roth, roth suites himself through sean, hershey write it through and at the still astounding, considering the inclusive quality of the writing and testimony. he comes out andwhat's happened ? >> hershey uses the word explosive to describe the reaction, that's not a word i use in my book for obvious reasons . but the sentiment is accurate . it created an international furor. it's funny.

>> there's nothing on the cover of the issue that indicates the content of the issue . >> it is fascinating decisions, so new york knew better than i do, new yorker covers were decided week in advance. and so this one, the cover that had been slated for the august 31 issue was this sort of really dreamy part landscape and people were horseback riding and playing tennis lying dreamily by streams. the new yorker then had no writing on the cover. or even a table of contents. that would indicate what the contents of the magazine work so the editor decided to keep this cover on there. i couldn't find anything from sean or roth's record about why they decided to keep it but one speculates that it really does symbolize the sleepwalking america, back at

leisureagain after war . the more gruesome interpretation of that is that looks a lot like a part that is described in hiroshima. where people are enjoying themselves and it later becomes a refuge for many of the last survivors who were dying out. >> it's curious, david resnick made the same decision to take out all of the cartoons and talksections the week after 9/11 . that was the case where the cover really spoke. it comes out and it sells off the newsstands. >> there are contraband new yorkers. i'm sorry, i interrupted you which is terrible. >> coming back to the main line of the story, it is a success, i hate to use were commercially but it's all anybody talks about the weekend comes out. >> one of hershey's contemporaries did a report on it and said i guarantee

you even if you don't read it it's all you're going to be talkingabout and it was true . it was indicated not just in its entirety in paper across the country around the world and is read verbatim over four nights class i couldn't get over that, it was read verbatim. >> have four actors read it, no music, nothing likethat . the identities of the actors were revealed until after it had entered . >> briefly, 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 . you learned what it was like to be a young mother with a baby in your arms when suddenly your house collapses on you and you have to do your way out of trouble

before all firestorm consumes your neighborhood . i don't want to be too graphic but you learned about what happens to human skin . >> i think to, people were in a certain sense accustomed. this wasat the end of the most destructive war in human history, 30 million people were killed and germany wasin ruins still . london was in ruins . it wasn't the structure alone was destroyed, it was something about the idea of dysfunction on this scale and this finality. it wasdestroying the skin on human flesh . it was pending shadows on the walls.it was transformational destruction of the kind no one had imagined before and no one and understood until generations down. >> it was apocalyptic. journalists and editors rightly after hiroshima quickly recognized that it was a story not just of the warmth of modern times because humanity and finally after many centuries of

contriving the worst possible methods of warfare and finally had to eviscerate themselves in the most gruesome way possible that some of this is seen in hershey's book. when you read it if you read it when you're b,15number it when you're 75 . it's really completely horrific and it's just a great and ghoulish reminder that war is, it happens to individuals. it's to casualties, the statistics are composed of individuals who have skin that can be flipped off. so. >> someone asking and it's a good question, was pretty concerned about nuclear contamination or concern about fallout a yearlater and was there any risk that . >> when he's recording obviously in hiroshima. >> it's unclear if you was worried about it all the other people were and the interestingly when after hiroshima happened, general

oppenheimer led a press junket now down in new mexico at a trinity testing site to show how little radiation there still was and something like in japan you could live there forever. the fact is that the trinity site was probably far more contaminated than resume of nagasaki were year later because of this point of detonation, the period on on the mound and the ground was contaminated. oshima generally said a lot of the radiation was sort of backup is the that said, there have been reports that when the us occupation force came in they did rolloff areas around the possible residual radiation. 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 hiroshima was published no one has challenged any of its testimony or of his factual basis epics. >> that was another thing that i was interested in proving when i was doing research is that anybody try to discredit hershey or discredit the testimonies. again they wereembarrassing to the us . even truman completed in cold blood. these were reporters they tried to cover this up. >> they were on the ground fact checking in but several things first of all , the occupation lasted several more years after hershey was on the ground and it was to interview these protagonists check what their feelings were then after occupation lifted, they were international. every year on the anniversary

of the bombing reporters would contact hershey's protagonist and ask them to comment on their stories none of them to the best of my knowledge came for and said they had been misquoted and nobody ever misquoted or had their experiences mischaracterized. and again to the best of my knowledge, no reporters ever seemed to find inaccuracies . >> it seems to be a completely impeccable piece of reporting on an incredibly difficult and incredibly resistant circumstance. >> 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 fact checking. in the way that we do today, there wasn't a way to get in fact checked every , to go back and verify everything that all the reporting they had brought little things like for instance, yamamoto

was one of percy's main protagonists, the profiles him and his wife and their daughter at her she characterizes her as an infant son instead ofan infant girl which she later took him to task for and . >> but is really little things like that and otherwise harold roth and william sean were maniacs for granular accuracy so they would fight for hours over whether something should be called a doorway or a doorframe . >> that's something that still goes on. percy, after hiroshima his career goes on but you never write anything quiet on this scaleor of this evidence again . >> ironically, he always felt that he could tell stories more effectively in fiction and nonfiction so he's best

known for this work of immortal nonfiction that he's done. he writes many novels after hiroshima and a lot of them were interesting and social conscience novels and i have a feeling. >> very much in the creation ofsinclair lewis . >> none of that, and i feel like percy is going to be rediscovered . for the sheer content of his interest alone. he was interested in race relations and there's still good reporting that went into even his fictional work again, you're right. he's never as noted, whenever you see john hershey, the headline of his injury was john hershey, author of hiroshima. >> we don't have a lot of time left and if i could launch off subject indefinitely 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 but a rebuttal of the kind that i actually was witness to. i was already a young editor at the magazine when that place . it was the beginning of a new kind of hyper scrutiny being given to journalism all kinds . it's very much a part of the moment we're living innow . he would say to me what part of the expectations of journalism and hershey's time was that you had a much broader license to take things from many places without maniacally crediting sources at every moment. >> even though hershey's notesfrom his interviews no longer exist , the dialogue only exists among papers. i mean, if they emerge i want to be the first to get a crack at them but they do include many of the reports

the scientific reports that he referred to when he was writing hiroshima when my researchers look through them once in a while we were like this is an awfully good description that was very close to how it had ended up in your oshima but for instance a report description of the geography of your oshima being fan shaped with seven rivers and but it was an informational poll so you can imagine this reporter whose writing on deadline who has a fan of material picking and picking. there was a report that he had on 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, it stimulated them so you see the word stimulated people that language for his own .

>> the likely from the report he was looking at. >> its accuracy, 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 terms, he wanted accuracy so there's a question of whether something like that is plagiarism when it's being pulled from an informational report that is therefore the reference of the public and for experts and for journalists. >> we don't have much time but i want to now make a radical turn from this point i guess i would say and it's one many peopleare asking about . how did hershey fill in is a question we argue about today . should we do the necessary if not the right thing by dropping the bomb or was it a war crime. an active evil western mark how did hershey feel about that after he's written how

did you feel about having everything about the writing of it. >> in the immediate aftermath he felt that your oshima, he, gated feelings about the horrible death toll was inevitable. it portended for humanity but nagasaki he thought was again, he thought it was a total criminal action and i think later on , he thought that the memory of what happened at your oshima is what has kept the world safe from nuclear weapons. whether that was true or not i think we can say it had been an element of deterrence so it's actually a controversial opinion . that your oshima had to happen to prevent future your oshima's and did help.

my 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 unethical. >> was and oppenheimer as you know. that was oppenheimer's desire for his announced desire after the fact that they should have dropped it on at least on an uninhabited area. shipyard work a purely text zone. >> had pressed some kids at bikini. it could have international restaurants dropped it on an uninhabited area but one of the arguments that the government made in the retort actually to hershey was they had assembled the world in light of the same, it was the one that didn't work. was usually discredited so

therefore they had to drop onto city with a large civilian population . >> i guess 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 where fair made it seem if not palatable at least inevitable. after all as you point out the bombing, the firebombing of tokyo as you are talking about was actually more disruptive in terms of lives and property lost the bombing of hiroshima. people get caught up in the insidious logic of destruction and if you come to this possible impossible conveyor . >> i agree at their ghoulish and different ways. tokyo, i can't remember the exact square mileage that was destroyed in one night, it was 100,000 lives lost as gruesome as your oshima but again your oshima was brought on by one single primitive atomic weapon at the time and

what portended for our ability to wipe out, every accomplishment, everything in life in one fell swoop, that's one of the things that that nuclear attack apart from more conventional attacks. >> we live under that shadow still and we have lived under it and it seems to recede and then come forward and it never really disappears but hershey's story is permanent. it makes me proud to have spent my adult life at the new yorker to know that that was a key moment in our history. you've written an extraordinary book about. congratulations to you and it's rare that you see a book begin as a tiny acorn of an idea. you share with friends and say you think there's anything in that then a major work on its own. congratulations, thank you so much. >> and thank you all for

being with us. >> thank you so much. thank you for the brooklyn historical society. >> if only we were free to be in brooklyn right now. >> weeknights this month we feature book tv programs to preview what's available every weekend on c-span2. tonight as part of our 20/20 year in review we focus on books about us history. first, historian hw brand provides the dual biography of abolitionist john brown and abraham lincoln in the zealot in the emancipator. then historian neil joseph talks about the lives of malcom xmartin luther king jr. with his book the sword and shield . later journalist or injured and looks at her family's history through the lens of the great migration with the watering in strange lands. it all starts at 8 pm eastern . enjoy the book tv this week

and every weekend on c-span2. >> every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors book tv on c-span2, created by america'scable television company. today brought you his television company to provide the tv to viewers as a public service . >> stay with "after words" for our continuing coverage of the transition of power as president-elect july and moves closer to the presidency. with the electoral college votes cast from states across the country join us on january 6 live at 1 pm eastern with the joint session of congress to count votes and clear the winner for president and vice president and finally on january 20, the inauguration of the 46th president of the united