The Most Influential ’Embedded’ Reporter Ever

By Greg Mitchell

This week, leading up to the 59th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, I am writing a special daily column to mark the event. In part II today: a look at the most influential "embedded reporter" ever. All of these columns are adapted from my book "Hiroshima in America," co-authored by Robert Jay Lifton.

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On the morning of Aug. 7, 1945, with reports of death and destruction in Hiroshima still thin, newspapers around the country carried, in full or part, most of the 14 press releases provided by the government the day before.

The official releases, which appeared under headlines such as "Basic Force of Universe Unleashed," disclosed, among other amazing things, the story of the first atomic chain reaction, the existence of dozens of secret bomb sites, and the test of the new weapon at the Trinity site in July.

Each of these events would have dominated the news for days had they been reported when they actually occurred. Now they were all emerging at the same moment, from the same office at the Pentagon, and with a rich cast of unfamiliar names, such as Oppenheimer and Tibbets. Taken together, they chronicled, according to the Pentagon, a "fabulous achievement" and the means to "save thousands of American lives," which would come to be the key official rationale for taking the lives of so many civilians in Japan.

Photographs, however, were still at a premium, so several of the Hearst papers printed a cartoon showing Uncle Sam blasting a buck-toothed "Jap" with the "Sun’s Power" of an atomic bomb. Hearst also distributed a picture of a small hydroelectric power station in Hiroshima which it claimed "may have been the primary target of the new atomic bombers." As it happened, the power plant, on the outskirts of Hiroshima, was untouched by the bomb, which exploded over the center of the city, but journalists could not have known that. They had to rely completely on information from the military. Press coverage amounted to little more than rewrites of War Department documents.

In orchestrating the official story of Hiroshima, as in so many aspects of the bomb, General Leslie Groves, military director of the Manhattan Project, played a central role.

Back in March 1945 he had made a bold decision: to hire a "suitable newspaperman" to insert in the Manhattan Project. Reporters near the atomic bomb plants were starting to poke around, and Groves feared "serious breaks" after the first test of the bomb in the New Mexico desert that summer.

Even if secrecy held, the frightening new weapon would have to be sold to the public after it was used, both to justify dropping it over heavily populated cities, and to build more of them after the war. In an internal memo, Groves warned that once the secret was out, "the project will be subject to harassing investigation, official inquiries ... and all the miscellany of crackpots, columnists, commentators, political aspirants, would-be authors and worldsavers."

To combat this, Groves proposed that officials "control the situation by the issuance of carefully written press releases." Indeed, from that moment on, control of nuclear commentary would be the government’s goal for decades.

The Manhattan Project already had a public-relations staff, but Groves sought a respected journalist who would supply a "more objective touch" and add authority to the press releases. An associate recommended a brilliant choice: William L. Laurence, Putlizer Prize-winning science reporter for The New York Times.

Meeting secretly at the Times, Groves found Laurence eager to take the "embedded reporter" job.

Laurence brought to any project what top Times editor Turner Catledge once called an "unquenchable, boyish enthusiasm." Told about the bomb project, Laurence considered it the discovery of the century and believed that no greater honor could come to any newspaperman than creating the War Department’s press releases.

In the weeks ahead, he would visit bomb plants around the country. Writing to Groves he promised an "Eyewitness account of the test in New Mexico ... provided eyewitness survives." But he asked: "You’re going to waste an atomic bomb on American soil? If you have a bomb, why not drop it on Japan right off and end the war? What’s the sense of wasting a good bomb?"

After Laurence completed his stories, they were stamped Top Secret, and locked in a vault, awaiting the end of the war or the use of the bomb, whichever came first.

The material would emerge on the morning of Aug. 7. One story likened the Trinity test to "the moment of creation when God said: ’Let there be light.’" The only thing Laurence missed was the bomb run over Hiroshima.

The official releases would indeed "control the situation," as Groves had hoped, thanks in no small part to the celebratory yet highly credible quality of Laurence’s writing. In one of these documents, Laurence would coin the expression "the Atomic Age," and it was he, perhaps more than anyone, who set the tone for the entire era.

Where was Bill Laurence on Aug. 7, 1945, when his official stories made front pages around the country? On an island in the Pacific, with the second bomb, getting ready to observe the obliteration of another Japanese city.

Greg Mitchell (gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com) is the editor of E&P and co-author (with Robert Jay Lifton) of "Hiroshima in America." He also served as adviser to the new documentary, "Original Child Bomb," which in June shared the grand prize at the Silverdocs film festival.

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