Head of Air, Space Museum Quits Over Enola Gay Exhibit

The director of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum resigned Tuesday, citing continuing controversy over his role in the canceled Enola Gay exhibit.

Martin O. Harwit, 64, said he was ending his eight-year tenure as director of the world’s most-visited museum “to satisfy the museum’s critics and allow it to move forward.”

His announcement came three months after 81 members of Congress demanded that he resign.

That pressure, along with protests by veterans and others, led the Smithsonian Institution to cancel the planned exhibit on the use of the atomic bomb against Japan.

Robert S. Hoffman, acting provost of the Smithsonian, will temporarily administer the air and space museum.

Sections of the Enola Gay, the airplane that dropped the first atomic bomb in August, 1945, are still scheduled to go on display at the museum next month. But the plane will be shown without any examination of historical controversies surrounding the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

As first planned, the exhibit alluded to those controversies--and that caused problems.

Critics charged that it treated the Japanese as innocent victims of racist and ruthless Americans determined to avenge Pearl Harbor with the first use of nuclear weapons. In response, the plans for the exhibit were repeatedly revised.

“We were interested in doing a historical exhibition that dealt with the end of World War II and the beginning of the nuclear age,” Harwit said.

“I think all of us knew this was an exhibition that would be difficult to carry out.”