Jane Mayer on John Hersey’s “Hiroshima”

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.”

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August 31, 1946

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