My piece at
The Nation explores this amazing episode, which began almost exactly 67 years ago this month. Oddly, what got it going was a letter from actress Donna Reed. I uncovered it for
my recent book Atomic Cover-up. Here's the opening: "One of the great tales of Hollywood censorship remains little known
today, more than sixty-five years after it transpired. And who was
right at the center of it? None other than President Harry S. Truman. He
even got rid of the actor playing him in the MGM movie.
"The 1947 MGM film,
The Beginning or the End, deserves special review, however, as its filming overlapped with
the suppression of the only film footage
shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US military and the Japanese and
other moves to hide key evidence of what happened there. Indeed, the MGM
film emerged, after many revisions as a Hollywood version of the
official Hiroshima narrative: the bomb was absolutely necessary to end
the war and save American lives."
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