Two days after the Hiroshima bomb, the New York Times ran a story about a squadron of B-29 bombers that had hit an industrial area in Japan called Yawata. Alongside the front-page story, the Times ran photos of William Parsons, the pilot of the Enola Gay, a man named Colonel Paul Tibbets, and the crew’s bombardier. As tactical commander of the mission and chief of the Ordnance Division of the bomb project, Parsons was one of the most important people in the development and use of the world’s first nuclear weapon, and far more significant than either of the other two men pictured. However, in the August 8 issue of the New York Times, the paper ran a photo of the wrong William Parsons.
As embarrassing as the photo gaffe might have been for the Times, it came nowhere near the magnitude of the central failure of the Gray Lady in reporting on the nuclear bombing of Japan. Just as Walter Duranty had gained unprecedented access to Stalin, Herbert Matthews got coveted interviews with Fidel Castro, and David Halberstam had private meetings with the American ambassador to Vietnam, the New York Times was able to put its man in the key position once again, this time to report on the development and deployment of the world’s most awesome and terrifying weapon.
The reporter’s name was William L. Laurence. He was born in Lithuania as Leid Siew (he was Jewish, but, characteristically, the Times made no mention of this in its lengthy 1977 obituary of him). Laurence was by all standards a brilliant man, studying at Harvard College, Harvard Law School, and Boston University not long after arriving in the United States as an immigrant. By 1926, Laurence was writing for a New York newspaper, the World, and four years later, he got his science beat at the New York Times, where he demonstrated the incredible gift of being able to recognize a lurking story, crystallize it, and tug the narratives and particulars out in a way that regular readers of the Times found not just understandable and interesting but often fascinating.
On August 7, 1945, the Times ran the story on the front page under the headline, “New Age Ushered.”14 The article commented on President Truman’s morning announcement from which it was evident, the article remarked, that “one of the scientific landmarks of the cen- tury had been passed, and that the age of ‘atomic energy,’ which can be a tremendous force for the advancement of civilization as well as for destruction, was at hand.” That same day, the paper ran an editorial, “Science and the Bomb,” invoking the now-cliché observation that nuclear energy could prove a massive force for both progress and destruction. The piece went on for a few paragraphs to give a brief scientific background on nuclear research, but the conclusion the article came to was definitive:
The potentialities of this first harnessing of atomic energy are unlimited. The main point to be kept in mind is that this world is driven by energy and that out of this war has come the first invention which has made it possible to use, unfortunately for destruction, the energy in stuff that rated only a little higher than dirt.
The following day, the Times ran a story on the nuclear plant at Oak Ridge, where most of the fission work was done. The story repeated the words of the colonel who dealt with reporters, saying the people at Oak Ridge had done a “magnificent job” and that the plant had maintained safety records better than those of most industrial plants. However, among all the early stories of the bomb and atomic research, there was no reporting from William Laurence, the journalist who almost singlehandedly had championed nuclear energy in the 1930s.
There was, however, a small August 7 story not by William Laurence but about him. The headline of the article read, “War Department Called Times Reporter to Explain Intricacies to Public.” The story, just five paragraphs long, told readers that Laurence, the “unassuming New York Times reporter,” was the man behind the “bales of War Department ‘handouts’ designed to enlighten laymen on the working of the atomic bomb that was used for the first time over Japan.” Although the Times article was subtle about it, its admission was shocking: its science writer, William Laurence, had been working for the United States Department of War on its ultra-secret nuclear bomb program.
Finally, on September 9, 1945, William Laurence broke his months- long silence. The first line of the story was jaw-dropping: “We are on the way to bomb the mainland of Japan.” Any regular reader of Laurence’s stories could only have been left wondering what the “unassuming” science writer of the New York Times, who had spent more time in the past five years writing about fungus and cancer than nuclear technology, could have meant by saying “we” were on the way to bomb Japan.18 Laurence was not writing figuratively, as if the United States were collectively on the way to bomb Japan. He meant the statement literally: at the time he wrote the sentence, William Laurence was sitting in one of the three B-29 Superfortress bombers on a mission to drop the second atomic bomb in history. Laurence went on to say, “We have several chosen targets. One of these is the great industrial and shipping center of Nagasaki.”
Gradually, the story of what the Times science report was doing on a B-29 bomber on its way to drop a super-secret mega-weapon began to unravel. Laurence wrote that he was one of only a few people “privileged” to see final assembly of the bomb and the loading of Fat Man, the bomb’s nickname, onto the plane. Like others who had been in close contact with the bomb project, Laurence had been infected with the sense of awe and power that projected aesthetic and even organic traits onto the weapon in their eyes.
