This helps explain a lot of the friction surrounding the Enola Gay show. The museum not only decided to use Hiroshima to mark the 50th celebration of the Allied victory, itself a very aggressive and revealing decision. But it also planned to mount the show against a background of sharply hostile staff opinions about air power and Harwit's own strong antinuclear stance. Harwit says his policy was not to tell visitors what to think. But the ideological smog was so thick at Air and Space that disaster was bound to occur.
Similar criticism comes in a new book by a Smithsonian anthropologist.
The point is not that the curators were wrong about the Enola Gay. The obliteration of a nonstrategic city filled mostly with women and children raises some obvious moral problems. But the state and its employees are not supposed to tell us how to think or feel about it. Nothing irritates the citizens more than being propagandized with their own tax money. Given the ideological currents flowing through the museum, this issue will surely come up again and again until the curators get it right.