>> good evening welcome to today's virtual program will be about the true impact of the atomic bomb we are honored to post tonight speakers author of the new work for joining conversation i am the manager of communications hear

from the historical society and wish we welcome you to welcome you to our physical location i am still honored and have the privilege to welcome you to the virtual programs and to look forward to have you join us for more in the coming week. be referred we get to the next program i want to share about the things we have coming up and more sure programs and we will be hosting anticorruption and expert former new york state attorney general candidate and a conversation exploring the connection between big money and the impact on democracy august 11. the following week will be in a conversation discussing the new book which continues on the exploration of the history

on august 19. we are also proud to partner untitled women and power will be kicking off august night teen of the revocation and then moderator racquel willis for those issues pertaining to throughout time and how they continue to be used despite contention it would look forward to hosting many more as they come together and it just a moment i will be welcoming tonight speakers and of course tomorrow is the 75th anniversary of the job thing one - - shopping of bomb

hiroshima these are events much through the 20th century and now we are discussing those events also talking about the rules of journalism to truly understand with the potential of the atomic warfare reflecting today on pete campbell who is our pleasure hosting a few years ago that it is the work of a journalist so today in the current landscape fake news the potential danger of misinformation and propaganda

meant to cut through that is all the more important. without further ado those that are honored and glad to have them join us and of course we are joined by the author fallout with new york times best-selling author and the wall street journal magazine and l.a. review of books and many more and will be joining conversation and has been writing for the new yorker since 1986 and has written hundreds of personal memoirs through profiles and with that criticism and as the criticism

unfolds on to remind you we will be taking questions can submit them to the q&a box and the subject of tonight's discussion is fallout we have teams if you'd like to learn more you can do so via the link in the chat room so without further ado please welcome wesley and adam can you hear me. >> loud and clear. >> thank you looking forward to the conversation. >> thank you for hosting a thank you for doing this. >> first of all congratulations on this extraordinary book. the hiroshima cover up which when we pronounce it?

i make some up but it should be hiroshima. the editor of the new yorker said i have learned a new way i have to pronounce it and that is an extraordinary book and with that catastrophic event but even more importantly how it turns into words. so with the hiroshima cover up very particular and parochial interest the history of the new yorker and the development so before we get to the new yorker and the internal

dynamics, what do you mean by the cover up when john hersey went off to japan to do the reporting so fills the entire issue of the new yorker the first time it's ever happened. >> the audience sure know you were a sounding board and when they first started researching this project i didn't realize the extent the cover-up plays an entire will in this narrative. i always approach as a journalist covering another journalist it is always been about the outside success but nobody ever was set the story in the first place i started my career on the line is a production coordinator and how it comes down entirely and

whoever controls the ground controls the story. so i started to look at how much general macarthur to realize how impossible that would have been and then to come across any historical accounts and how much he had suppressed the foreign press' and the magnitude of the cover-up but never to the extent that it should have been to be extremely central to the story. >> what were they covering up in a sentence or two? >> interestingly the

government president truman in particular after the bomb that they announced it was 20000 tons of tnt the biggest ever and warfare they release pictures of the mushroom cloud what they were quick to pick up on there was no reporting on the human toll . . . . as wey

times, the new yorker was in transition at that moment when they began reporting for this piece. it changed in the course of four years from 1941 to the onset of the war until the end of the war. more dramatically than perhaps did ever changed and it's now more than 90 year history because as you write beautifully, it's been still essentially, not entirely, but essentially a humor and local reporting magazine noted for its fiction and elegant and stylish reporting, but still very much the initial imprint of the inspiration. then the war broke out and one editor in particular played an outside role taking the magazine to take on a much more ambitious role in its reporting, and that was william.

>> both william and harold were news men in disguise as a way, even the magazine started 20 years earlier. harold never at that point had any aspiration for the magazine to be a news operation. he had been a news man before that and as you said, once pearl harbor happened, that was it. he bemoaned to one of his coeditors that nothing felt funny anymore. >> many of the writers went off to the war and found themselves as writers and artists, i think about the local feature writer who then went off and became aj

levling and there was a whole generation who made that trip. >> they dispatched correspondence all over the world in many theaters of the war, and they had a pretty deep relationship with the war department and the public relations operation -- >> mckelway was actually working for curtis lemay at npr throughout the war, so he was the linchpin of the new yorker's operation. >> there was a lot of overlap like that. not a lot but a handful correspondence and artists in the armed forces and 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,

sometimes even public relations but for the most part, they were in the mix. i always loved the description of william as the hunch man where he would send one of his correspondence into the field, and he didn't know what it would be. he just knew there would be some. >> he trusted and believed in his writers. so, why john hersey. he was not born and bred as a ba new yorker. he came from the organization, but what makes him trust that he could get this story? >> he couldn't have been less from -- he was writing for times

magazine and they hated each other, like voluptuous leg, publicly hated each other. reporting for the times in 1939, he was grooming him to be [inaudible] >> sorry to interrupt, but he had a very timely vibe. of that type. [inaudible] >> he was also from -- when you read the dispatch is that he wrote, they are a far cry from what he was writing before for the new yorker later on.

>> as somebody who cares only about literary style, i think that's a hugely important question. >> you run with it. >> he had written one hugely significant piece, in historical terms, for the new yorker for that in the pacific, right? >> that's how hersey did come to the new yorker. he actually breaks up with louis because he is far too chauvinistic, patriotically chauvinistic for him and he says thanks but no thanks. he is a freelancer in 1945, but 1944 he had managed somehow to do the story that william shawn at the new yorker had wanted to

bring hersey into and he had a story that had been rejected and he brought it to sean and he said come this way. and it was the story of john f. kennedy in the pacific. so, hersey's wife had been the former paramore -- >> large glass, this is a significant class of people. >> they all knew each other. so, hersey is on his way back from the pacific -- i'm sorry, jfk was on his way back from the pacific. he's in new york and one night he's at a nightclub -- some biographers say it's historic, and he runs into hersey and his wife and jfk tells the story of what had happened. jfk had been the head of

[inaudible] and hersey said i want that story. it was significant not just because he was kennedy's son. so he brings it to the new yorker and william shawn is excited to have it. so in many ways, that a story helped make kennedy's political career and for every political campaign he had it also helped make john hersey's career because it provided an end route to the magazine. >> you mentioned also old joe kennedy hated the fact that it appeared in the new yorker. that wasn't a big enough magazine for his taste. >> life would have been great, but the new yorker was just tiny for him.

harold ross having it syndicated in "reader's digest," which was another magazine harold despised. i don't know how kennedy twisted his arm but he got his mass publication of the story after all. >> speaking of "reader's digest," a quick footnote to another thing about the new yorker in those years was the so-called pony addition that appeared in a smaller addition which was available to servicemen. driving up the circulation making it important for those who were coming home and would buy it in 1946 when it came out. so hersey had this relationship with sean bates. so how does he get to japan and how does he break through the wall of the cover-up? >> like i said, one should never assume to the first lesson not

just of journalism, but of life. -- [inaudible] she says never assume. [laughter] >> well, i did. i was initially not a good journalist and i chastise myself publicly for that right now. but because hersey and the hiroshima story does have all the feelings of and expose, i had assumed that it was him getting in and getting out because other reporters had made a run at the story that way and went through crazy lengths for nagasaki. so august, 1945 and the bomb explodes, he has mixed feelings about hiroshima. nagasaki he thinks it is totally criminal action. he knows he's going to cover the bomb capacity but he doesn't

know how just yet. he has lunch with william shawn and they talk about the coverage and realize that there had been stories about the human toll, what happened to the human beings under this mushroom cloud. 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 the foreign and japanese reporters by mccarthy's forces. the journalism community was very close knit in that sense. a lot of hersey's former wartime friends and colleagues were part of the press corps, so they probably knew that the only way in -- he was going to have to get military clearance to get in. so he decides he's going to do a major reporting trip that starts in china, which is the country that he was born and apply for

clearance. he would be credited in china and then having reestablished himself with the military there he would get clearance into tokyo, and it worked. he gets cleared. >> reading your wonderful book, the reporters in this period both have in a certain sense of less freedom, because everyone expects you to conform to the needs of the military as a kind of patriotic reflect. but at the same time, more because the whole business of vietnam and the military wanting to keep reporters as far away as humanly possible, they expected to be traveling with guys that would be writing. >> it was a buddy system throughout the war and that is one of the things that gave hersey a huge advantage when he was cleared to get in because he had been quite a buddy to the military in the war.

he had written glowing profiles of any military figure including jfk. he was a commended war hero. he helped evacuate wounded marines. he was covering a story on the battle between u.s. and japanese forces. most significantly, perhaps, he'd written a glowing biography of general douglas macarthur and his forces, which he later thought was so laudatory that he wanted to take it out of circulation. but that definitely helps the cause to general macarthur coming to the country. so, even though hiroshima and nagasaki were restricted topics and they were betting the journalists coming and going, hersey may have been seen as a relatively innocuous -- >> a liable man.

>> exactly. >> so then he gets to china and japan. when he gets to hiroshima finally, and tell us how he does that -- the extraordinary step is that he talked to people rather than reporting on events. how does he get to find the people that will form this side of the great rights? >> as you say, 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 then especially because what he was proposing to do is humanize japanese victims and enemy number two after the nazis because they attacked us directly. so, with hersey eventually he admitted -- and by the way, he didn't have free reign there just because. he was being monitored by

macarthur's operation, the fbi. [inaudible] but at the same time, you don't want to read too much into it. everybody knew what you ate, what you thought, how many cigarettes you smoked every day. but they gave hersey clearance to go to hiroshima for two weeks which might sound pretty substantial. it included travel which would have been 24 to 36 hours at that time. when he gets there, he has the help of a german priest who had been living there and returned and through this, one other japanese minister who had been educated at emory university and therefore spoke english, these

gentlemen not only gave their own testimony, but they also made enormous introductions for hersey along the black survivors who had been returning to hiroshima to rebuild their lives from the ashes. later on, hersey didn't remember exactly how many he had interviewed. we will just say several dozen is the most accurate. >> and coming back to something that preoccupied me i don't think frivolously, one of the things that makes hiroshima such an important work of journalism and literature is that hersey's will his subject in a novelistic way and even, as you reveal, had a very specific novelistic pattern and template that he was applying to his material. >> right. i mean,, it wasn't just enough that he was going to show the events from the individual point of view.

he decided that he was going to have these individuals whose lives intersected -- and also, the moments that would lead up at that 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 like a neighborhood narrative in a way, and the people whose testimonies and profiles were regular, he was creating empathy for them. the american readers, not all of them were going to be able to fathom how the bomb worked or be able to fathom what the all-out nuclear war looks like, but they would be able to relate to the stories of let's say a young

mother with school-age kids or a young clerk or dr. going about their business, feeding their families, getting on the bus to work and catastrophe strikes. >> i was thinking specifically though, you mentioned wilder's novel emily ray was a kind of organizing principle with a story of how six strangers share a moment of common disaster. >> he literally did have that as his inspiration. he had a horrible flu and was laid up -- >> [inaudible] >> he read that novel while he was recovering and so when he began to try, as we all do, when

we report something with any kind of ambition he saw that is the way that i can tell the story of these intersections. >> absolutely. he gave it a really cohesive structure to tell it and he knew he wanted it to be novelistic. people had real incentives not to read his work. it was going to be graphic and confront people with the fact they had what one person called a fourth of july attitude about the bombing. everybody had every incentive to hot potato it out of their hands. but you know, he could make it novelistic enough and enthralling for people not to want to put it down, he was a trojan horse reporter and this was the material being brought into people's homes and lives. >> coming back one step, what, if anything -- and you talk

about this -- what did the occupying force from mccarthy's army think he was going to be doing in hiroshima in the aftereffects of the bombing? >> there's evidence that there was military police when he was in hiroshima and that he was out and about talking to people but by that point they started letting other reporters in who were not reporting on the aftermath of hiroshima. and a lot of reporters were admitted and they were ostensibly there to do the more fluffy stories -- >> a year old and going into a fluff piece. >> [inaudible] like people are back and not just rebuilding -- [inaudible]

it was coming back after having an atomic bomb dropped on it. >> exactly. >> that is the story that they imagined. i would think you and i have both reported things -- you more ambitious and me on a more new york scale -- but it's hard not to be altered by the people that you meet. do we know hersey's state of mind as the stories, which were still hard to read of people not only losing family, but losing their entire existence in this moment. how did it affect hersey psychologically when he was in the midst of reporting? >> he was a hardened war correspondent. i don't mean bitter or calloused or anything like that, but he's been around. he had reported in europe, let's just say he had seen everything in reporting on the combat and

concentration camps. he had seen tokyo -- someone described, one of the contemporary reporters described it is looking like an ashtray. he is frame of reference, let's 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 to seeing devastation and the worst of human nature and healthy doses, or unhealthy doses rather, but because it was a single bomb that had done this. hiroshima was leveled. i don't want to be graphic on the broadcast -- [inaudible] when he got there, he was so disturbed by what he was finding, and even the fluff stories were not entirely wrong.

i mean,, there was a re- growth, but they had been unnaturally stimulated to grow back. everything was horrible and unnatural and so he wanted to try to get the reporting done as quickly as possible and get out of there because it was so traumatizing for him. >> and he did. where did he actually do his writing? >> very smartly, he and william decided he would do his reporting and bring it back to new york, because even though the wartime censorship had ended in the states in the fall of 1945, japan and america were still at war in the occupation of censorship. so, he got out of hiroshima and came back to new york -- >> this is the kind of detail that only writers relish in, but i do. he had his notebook from the interview. >> okay, so that was another

thing that i was interested in is how did hersey take his notes. his protagonist leader recalled that he had taken notes in little notebooks. his notebooks do not exist in his files, but they remember that. and also, the question that was unanswered, did he do it in shorthand because he learned shorthand from sinclair lewis who he had been an assistant to, so it's possible he did it that way because all of the protagonists had read the account later on and remarked on the accuracy of this memory. and to take notes like that in real time, you have to have some kind of a system. so i don't know what happened to the notebook. i would give anything to know what happened to it, but he did make it from point a to point b with material enough to create

an accurate account. >> also, it's mind boggling but it's appeared before there was any reporting, any tape recordings. >> there was no voice recording or anything like that. >> i know one reporter, alice wilkinson who taught himself shorthand with that idea in mind that he would be able to do that. so, he cuts back and starts the process of writing. and they notice at this point, or sean knows that they want, what would seem to us given the scale of the ambition, very short order. >> originally it would be the first anniversary of the bombing. and to mention he was there in early may and june and so they would only have a couple of weeks to turn it over and so i

don't think that they knew how huge the story was going to be when they started writing it. it ended up being 30, 31,000. but hersey said when he needed to he would, and his books were written that way. he was used to writing under the wartime pressure with a deadline but it wasn't just that. he was doing it under enormous pressure because he knows what he's writing is going to really embarrass the u.s. government and show the truth about their experimental weapons. >> so, he produces this and then submits it to william shawn and then he persuades howard to do something that was very balls a and unparalleled in this ambition and that is to make it an entire issue of the new

yorker. >> yeah, which is what one a former new york editor said was an unprecedented merge. like are you crazy, a year later they had just gotten back. there was a sense of normalcy coming back into the magazine and cartoons. >> it's part of the continuity of their lives to have that. and we have to disrupt that continuity. >> that's the question. again it presents them with a really central question of what is the purpose of this magazine. is it a continuous wartime purpose of fearless reporting or does it revert entirely to something. >> you tell us something which is the way that he finally persuaded himself to do what william shawn admired and trusted him to do was not to think about the future of the magazine but to think about the

magazines past, to think about its very dna. >> he went back and looked at the original statement that he published in 1925 and then also the perspective that he had created in 1924. he was trying to convince them to back the new yorker and one of the extensions he had written himself in a moment of gravitas was that serious purpose despite the nature of levity and that it was going to report without fear of favor which was a really important line. so, harold ross got inspiration from himself and comes back and says i will give you the green light. but william shawn is really the driver on this whole story and in terms of having sent hersey

to champion it and run it full-length in a single issue instead of four installments. >> he lost his essential form not just having them chronologically one after another. >> so the cliffhanger in the story only works if there's one wrong piece. and so he is convinced to do it and it is a hell of a gamble because not only are they about to drop this on the reader and they have no idea that it's coming. they are not accepting a huge wartime atrocity. what albert einstein would say was taking pleasure without having confronted and they were

about to be confronted with the past. >> again because i think it is so vital to what the story is about. i think that the work demonstrates that. .. >> so when you talk about

writing it is pretty pronounced and had a little swagger to it this is strict sound and he said he didn't want to have any outrage it was just entirely about laying out the facts and the people who had given him his own testimony and just let it unravel and he felt that was a story of massive outrage to be more effective it would be and it really worked because by dialing it down to the human vantage point allowed people to put themselves into the shoes of the people through those experiences he was recounting.

>> so he persuades ross that is still astounding considering the quality of the writing of the testimony that comes out and then what happens? >> using the word explosive but it is accurate creating an international bureau it's funny. >> on the cover of the issue is the content. >> so you know better than i do to decide weeks or months in advance so the cover slated for the august 31st issue

was a dream me park landscape horseback riding and playing tennis and the new yorker had no writing on the cover or the table of contents so the editors decided to keep the cover on their as a narrative i couldn't find anything on the record and then to speculate and then a more gruesome interpretation it looks like a clerk described in hiroshima and then becomes a refuge. >> and david made the decision to take out all the cartoons

week after 9/11 so that is where the cover clearly spoke to the event and it comes out. >> like contraband new yorkers. >> but just cutting back to the main line of the story i hate to use the word commercially but it's all anybody talks about. >> one of the contemporary reporter said we guarantee that that's all you will be talking about. and is true. and in dc it was read verbatim. >> i could not get over that it was read verbatim?

>> they had four actors read it no music and those identities were not even revealed until after it had aired so wouldn't detract from it. >> so what was it that people learned that they could not have imagined before? >> what it's like to be a human being to be on the receiving end to be a young mother with the baby in your arms and now your house collapses. >> and i think the point so this was at the end of the most destructive war in human history. germany was in ruins.

and the destruction on the scale and destroying the skin on flesh and then it was transformational that no one had ever imagined before and no one had understood. >> it was truly apocalyptic. and rightly after hiroshima was bombed because humanity finally after many centuries with the worst methods of warfare in the most gruesome way possible.

so it is completely horrific it is a ghoulish reminder that happens to individuals and the casualties that are composed with skin that can be flipped off. >>. >> was he concerned about fallout a year later? >> but interestingly after hiroshima happened and there was a press junket down in mexico to show how they brought a bunch of reporters to show how little radiation and there was that the fact is that the trinity site was far more contaminated with hiroshima and nagasaki one

—-dash nagasaki because one year later because it was on the ground and contaminated but hiroshima it was set a lot of radiation was absorbed back into the atmosphere but there have been reports that the us occupation forces came in there was a spirit of possible residual radiation the fact that they didn't totally understand what they had created at that point. no one has really challenged any testimony. >> and interested in proving

but like truman capote does in cold blood in the basically there on the ground fact checking but in that it was an easy to get into the protagonist with the accuracy of their stories but after occupation, they were international and every year on the anniversary of the bombing reporters word ask them to comment on their stories. and then of them to the best of my knowledge so they had been misquoted or they had been mischaracterize.

>> it is a impeccable piece of an incredibly resistant circumstance. >> to be honest with my career as a researcher there wasn't a way to get in. and the little things but all the other that he later took him to task for after meeting him in person.

and for granular accuracy and or hours after books being called a doorway or doorframe. >> that he never writes anything on this scale. >> but ironically he always felt he could tell stories more effectively so it's ironic he is known for the nonfiction that he has done in rights many novels in the social conscious novels. >> and to be the mentor early on? >> absolutely. if not for the sheer content

there is still good reporting that went into the fictional work but you're right with the headline of his obituary. >> we don't have a lot of time left one of the things we were talking about that he got caught up in the end of his career in a plagiarism and it was the beginning of hyper scrutiny of journalism of all

time on decimal clients to say by the expectations to have a much better license without maniacally accrediting the sources at every moment. >> i wanted the first to be a crack at them if they do emerge but many are there reports scientifically that he referred to when he was writing hiroshima. every once in a while we said this is a description that was very close to how it had ended up at lake the geography to be

during the seven rivers but it was and informational pull and then taking and picking because there is one line in the report that not only did the radiation and not carol but they were stimulated he holds that language. >> directly from the report that he was working at. >>. >> if you are quoting a source. he pulled an additional translators because he wanted absolute accuracy.

pulling from the informational report pulled for reference for experts and journalists. >> we don't have much time but with that process and that when people ask about so still a question that we debate and argue about today, do we do the necessary if not the right thing by dropping the bomb? or was it a war crime or an act of evil? how did he feel about that and how do you with everything about the writing of hiroshima? and then to have complicated feelings about it and then

again what he says it was a total criminal action and later on he thought that memory of what happened at hiroshima kept the world safe from subsequent nuclear weapons for the whether that is true or not we can definitely say it has been a deterrence. is actually a controversial opinion that you didn't have to happen to prevent future hiroshima but it did help so i am still found the then government argument in that area. >> that was oppenheimer as you know.

and then to drop it on the uninhabited area or shipyard. >> and there are press junket's with an international press junket so they have assembled the world and then to be discredited so they had to drop it. and the mortality of warfare

it was inevitable with the firebombing it was more destructive in terms of lives and property loss than the actual bombing of hoosier my people are called out in the hideous logic and it's almost impossible conveyor belt. >> i agree. in tokyo, cannot remember the exact square miles that were destroyed in 19,100,000 lives lost and is grown on - - as gruesome resolution my but that was brought on by one single atomic weapon at the time. and then in one fell swoop in the future. that is the thing that nuclear attacks are apart from conventional attacks. >> we live under that shadow still and we live under and then to come forward but the

story and to spend my adult life at the new yorker so it is rare that you see a book that's in a corner of an idea that you share with friends and then it becomes a major work on its own. congratulations. thank you for being with us. so i can thank you for hosting. if only we were free to be in brooklyn right now