That same year, writer Lynne Tillman described the rare experience of seeing Lewis’s notebook in an article published in Art In America magazine: Forbes concerning his collection was played in a videotape loop on a television monitor. In 1988, the Forbes Museum in New York City displayed the log in an exhibition entitled “And If Elected: Two Hundred Years of Presidential Elections: An Exhibition for the 1988 Election Year.” The famous notebook was kept in a small room in the gallery along with Malcolm Forbes’s “most unique and important Presidential acquisitions.” In this space, an interview with Mr. The marketing material from Christie’s also quotes directly from the log, though they omit Lewis’s pejorative for the enemy. The New York Times also quoted from the notebook at the time of the 1971 auction. Of all the books that have been written about Hiroshima, it appears that Laurence’s is the only one that quotes directly from the original source.
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The increasingly high value of Lewis’s original document is understandable-It is the only in-flight, first-hand narrative account of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan.** But why is it that no full transcription or photocopy of the historically significant log exists for scholars to study? CONELRAD has checked with the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Library of Congress and the National Archives and none of these agencies has a copy. He was quoted by New York Times reporter Deirdre Carmody at the time as saying that he decided to sell it because “experts in the field have described it as one of the most historical documents of our era, and I don’t know what else to do with it.” The log would be auctioned off two more times in the ensuing years: In 1978 for $85,000 to publisher Malcolm Forbes and in 2002 for $391,000 to an unknown buyer. Perhaps because of the patriotic fervor of the immediate post-war era, or due to his own timidity, Laurence omitted Lewis’s dramatic follow-on question: “What have we done?”Īt some point, Lewis got his notebook back and, on November 24, 1971, he sold it at auction for $37,000. The most famous words from the log that the author chose to excerpt are from the section revealing the co-pilot’s reaction to the explosion: “My God.”
Laurence eventually quoted a portion of the material in his 1946 book Dawn Over Zero: The Story of the Atomic Bomb. The journalist could not immediately use Lewis’s descriptions due to security restrictions, so he marked the notebook “hold for top secret clearance” and placed it in a safe deposit box. But after several days, during which he performed some additional writing (dated August 10, 1945), the officer honored his commitment and loaned the notebook to Laurence. Upon the Enola Gay’s safe return to the base at Tinian, Lewis was advised during the debriefing to keep his freelance document to himself. Post-atomic debriefing: Lewis is on the right with clipboard & cigarette