Thirty years after this magazine published John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” I sat in his classroom at Yale, hoping to learn how to write with even a fraction of his power. When “Hiroshima” appeared, in the August 31, 1946, issue, it was the scoop of the century—the first unvarnished account by an American reporter of the nuclear blast that obliterated the city. Hersey’s prose was spare, allowing the horror to emerge word by word. A man tried to lift a woman out of a sandpit, “but her skin slipped off in huge, glove-like pieces.” The detonation buried a woman and her infant alive: “When she had dug herself free, she had discovered that the baby was choking, its mouth full of dirt. With her little finger, she had carefully cleaned out the infant’s mouth, and for a time the child had breathed normally and seemed all right; then suddenly it had died.”
Hersey’s candor had a seismic impact: the magazine sold out, and a book version of the article sold millions of copies. Stephanie Hinnershitz, a military historian, told me that Hersey’s reporting “didn’t just change the public debate about nuclear weapons—it created the debate.” Until then, she explained, President Harry Truman had celebrated the attack as a strategic masterstroke, “without addressing the human cost.” Officials shamelessly downplayed the effects of radiation; one called it a “very pleasant way to die.” Hinnershitz said, “Hersey broke that censorship.” He alerted the world to what the U.S. government had hidden.
Soon after “Hiroshima” was published, the influential Saturday Review ran an editorial condemning “the crime of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” America’s military establishment tried to quell the outrage with a piece in Harper’s by Henry Stimson, a retired Secretary of War. The article—ghostwritten by McGeorge Bundy, a future national-security adviser—claimed that dropping nuclear bombs on Japan had averted further war, saving more than a million American lives. Kai Bird, a co-author of “American Prometheus,” the definitive biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, told me that this pushback was specious: “Bundy later admitted to me that there was no documentary evidence for this ‘million’ casualty figure. He just pulled it out of thin air.”
Hersey’s report helped transform The New Yorker. Although the magazine had published dispatches from brilliant war correspondents, including Janet Flanner, it was still widely considered a weightless amusement. “Hiroshima” marked a new, more serious era. It also changed journalism. For many reporters of my generation, “Hiroshima” was a model of what might be called the ethical exposé. It was built on rigorous reporting and meticulously observed details, and, through its quiet, almost affectless voice, the reader became another eyewitness. Hersey’s narrative approach was deceptively simple. Threading together the stories of six survivors, he described the destruction from their perspective, which implicitly made the point that nuclear warfare posed an unconscionable threat to humanity. People usually think of investigative reporting as relying on obscure documents and dry financial data. But Hersey, whose 1944 novel, “A Bell for Adano,” won a Pulitzer, showed that to truly affect readers such reporting must be paired with literary craft and be propelled by a sense of urgency.
Hersey, the secular son of high-Wasp missionaries to China, transferred an almost stern sense of morality to his work. As a professor, he was priestly, soft-spoken, and intimidating. His reverence for journalism as a sacred duty could be self-righteous, but it set a standard for conscientiousness that I still try to meet. His seminar Form and Style in Non-Fiction Writing required students to analyze and emulate the techniques of great writers from Homer to Thornton Wilder. In fact, “The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” Wilder’s 1927 novel, which unfurls the personal stories of characters who die at the bridge, had inspired the form of “Hiroshima,” and Hersey hoped to teach us through such examples. Private tutorials were equally inspiring and mortifying. Some of my Yale classmates still burn with embarrassment when recalling them. One remembers Hersey pulling out a copy of Fowler’s “Dictionary of Modern English Usage” and asking, “Are you familiar with this?” Another will never forget Hersey, who marked comments in pencil, noting that she’d misspelled “masturbation.” A third says that Hersey, a stickler for accuracy, criticized a description of fingernails “bitten to half the normal length” as hyperbolic. After making each point, Hersey erased his notes. The message was clear: now we were on our own. ♦
