Author: Greg Mitchell

Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell’s newsletter Oppenheimer: From Hiroshima to Hollywood.

A bizarre, yet revealing, postscript to President Truman re-writing of the first movie about the atomic bomb, from MGM, The Beginning or the End – covered here yesterday – was provided by Roman “Bud” Bohnen, the actor who portrayed the president in the original sequences. Bohnen, a 45-year-old character actor, had appeared in such well-known movies as Of Mice and Men, The Song of Bernadette, and A Bell for Adano (based on the John Hersey novel).  He was also, perhaps more to the point, a former member of the very left-wing Group Theatre.

Learning of the need for a re-take following the White House critiques, Bohnen (see photo below) on December 2 wrote the President a polite, but slyly critical letter.   He noted the President’s concerns about the depiction of his decision to “send the atom bomb thundering into this troubled world,” adding that he could “well imagine the emotional torture you must have experienced in giving that fateful order, torture not only then, but now – perhaps even more so.”  So he could “understand your wish that the scene be re-filmed in order to do fuller justice to your anguished deliberation in that historic moment.”

Continue reading “Truman Got Actor Fired Off First Atomic Film”

Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell’s newsletter Oppenheimer: From Hiroshima to Hollywood.

In late-October 1946, a near-final version of the first Hollywood drama depicting the creation and use of the atomic bomb was screened for an elite audience at the Naval Building auditorium in Washington, D.C., including leading journalists and top aides to President Harry S. Truman.   This was the MGM film, The Beginning or the End.  Truman had ordered the deployment of two atomic bombs over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, killing at least 200,000,  a little more than a year earlier.

The screening came at a sensitive point, amid the sensational response to John Hersey’s article in the New Yorker near the end of that summer (see my post yesterday). Truman’s approval rating in the Gallup Poll, which stood at 82% at the close of the war, had plunged to little more than half of that. So the MGM film was viewed as a possible major factor in aiding, or harming, the future popularity of Truman, and further development of the bomb.

Continue reading “When Truman Re-Wrote the First Movie on the Atomic Bomb”

Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell’s newsletter Oppenheimer: From Hiroshima to Hollywood.

Earlier this week, we looked at the genesis of John Hersey’s famous “Hiroshima” article for The New Yorker (which appeared 77 years ago this week) and book. Now here is the response to the landmark piece, including criticism that it did not go far enough, adapted from my recent book The Beginning or the End.

Columnists and editors, most of whom had expressed strong support for the use of the bomb, nevertheless praised the massive Hersey article, many calling it the strongest reporting of its time. The New York Times declared that every American “who has permitted himself to make jokes about atom bombs, or who has come to regard them as just one sensational development that can now be accepted as part of civilization . . . ought to read Mr. Hersey.” The editorial reminded readers that the “disasters at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were our handiwork,” and that the crucial argument that the bomb reputedly saved more lives than it took might appear unsound after reading Hersey.

Continue reading “Reactions to John Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima’ Shook the Pro-Bomb Narrative”

Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell’s newsletter Oppenheimer: From Hiroshima to Hollywood.

There are hints that perhaps the very welcome media and intertube obsession with serious issues raised by Oppenheimer is drawing to a close. How else to explain that the two most cited related reports yesterday were that: 1) someone named Logan Paul, who apparently is a YouTube influencer and WWE star, walked out of the movie, claiming it was boring, all-talk, no action, “nothing happened,’“ and 2) a woman made her husband close his eyes during the Murphy-Pugh sex scene to help him overcome his addiction to porn and ease her own “betrayal trauma.”

Nevertheless, I shall carry on.

Perhaps the crucial scene in Oppenheimer arrives when the title character arrives at a large gathering of Los Alamos scientists, staffers and wives, to celebrate (there is no other word for it) the “successful” bombing of Hiroshima. Something like this actually did happen. Lately I’ve been analyzing the script by director Christopher Nolan, newly published (here is my report yesterday), so let’s see if it illuminates what we see in that key moment on the movie screen.

Continue reading “That Crucial Scene in Oppenheimer: Only One Bomb Victim, and She is American”

Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell’s newsletter Oppenheimer: From Hiroshima to Hollywood.

As I hinted yesterday, I will now return to offering a few more notes, over several days, on the full script for Oppenheimer just published in paperback and, from the looks of it, selling like hotcakes. But first, if you dare, from The New York Times today: “Nuclear War Could End the World, but What if It’s All in Our Heads?”

As I wrote in my initial post last week, the published screenplay, over 200 pages long, follows very closely the dialogue, voice overs, and scenes in the movie, and only rarely did I find what I thought was a slightly changed, or a missing, line. Of course, I don’t have the movie on a screen in front of me at home to follow along, so I can’t be sure of that, but I would judge that this published screenplay mirrors the movie faithfully, by and large.

Continue reading “More from ‘Oppenheimer’ Script, Now Published: A Fictional Laugh Line – and Missing Victims”

Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell’s newsletter Oppenheimer: From Hiroshima to Hollywood.

I’ll be returning to my notes on the newly-published paperback version of Christopher Nolan’s screenplay for Oppenheimer tomorrow (here was my first report last week). Today, a look at how John Hersey came to write his Hiroshima. But first, you might want to follow this link to an important story in Wired today with the headline “The Dark History Oppenheimer Didn’t Show” and subhed: “Coming from the Congo, I knew where the essential ingredient for the atomic bombs was mined, even if everyone else seemed to ignore it.”

The closer we get to the bomb’s completion [in Oppenheimer], the more marbles go into the bowl. But there’s no mention in the film of where two-thirds of that uranium came from: a mine 24 stories deep, now in Congo’s Katanga, a mineral-rich area in the southeast.

As the marbles steadily filled the bowl onscreen, I kept seeing what was missing: Black miners hauling earth and stone to sort piles of radioactive ore by hand.

Continue reading “77 Years Ago: John Hersey Exposed Hiroshima Truths to the World”