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Friday, August 6, 2021

Atomic Bomb Scientists Wanted To Make A Cautionary Movie About Nuclear Weaponry. An Interview With Greg Mitchell About How Hollywood Destroyed Those Hopes





Better late than never, right? In July of 2020 The New Press published Greg Mitchell’s The Beginning or the End, which was about a 1947 Hollywood docudrama that portrayed the development of the world’s first atomic bomb. A little more than a year later, this week provides a stellar opportunity to talk with Mitchell about his book. That’s because August 6 is the anniversary of the day when the United States detonated the world’s first atomic bomb over Hiroshima, a Japanese city with a population of about 300,000 people. Three days later on August 9, 1945, an even more powerful bomb was detonated over the city of Nagasaki, which had a population of about 200,000. As acknowledged by the United States government, the number of civilian deaths in Hiroshima (immediate event + radiation sickness) was about 100,000. About 70,000 died in Nagasaki. Appalled nuclear scientists reached out to Hollywood for help informing Americans about the needless deaths their atomic bombs had caused. The movie that Hollywood produced merely fanned patriotic flames and elevated nuclear madness.


Welcome to Los Alamos


The Manhattan Project was the name of the effort sited in Los Alamos, New Mexico, through which atomic bomb technology was developed. Well before the bombs were dropped, seventy scientists from the Project had become aghast at creation. They signed a petition asking asked President Truman not to drop atomic bombs on Japan. Ultimately, of course, Truman disregarded their plea.



In 1945, shorty after the end of the war, some of those same scientists reached out to Metro Goldwyn Mayer’s Louis B. Mayer in hopes that we would make a movie that depicted the horrors that their weaponry had produced and that warned the world about the dangers of a nuclear arms race. They offered to serve as advisors to the movie.



Mayer thrilled at the idea. He imagined a potential blockbuster. The scientists were overjoyed.


Then they weren’t.





Atomic Bombs Are So Conveniently Top Secret, Aren’t They?


Because the scientists who would advise the movie had top-secret information, Mayer gave Truman and General Leslie R. Groves (who led the Manhattan Project for the Army) script approval rights. Unfortunately, Groves’ and Truman’s vanity took over. They didn’t just edit sensitive information out of the script. They used the opportunity of concern about national security to put the script through meat grinders designed to make them sound good and look handsome. Meanwhile, MGM scriptwriters added romances and subplots. What eventually emerged was a hackneyed, over-hyped docudrama that glorified the president and the military and that created astonishing myths about why the use of the bombs had been the right choice for the United States of America and the world.


Author Greg Mitchell is a journalist who knows military history and United States politics well. He is the author of The Tunnels: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall and the Historic Films the JFK White House Tried to Kill; Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady (a New York Times Notable Book); The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair’s Race for Governor of California and The Birth of Media Politics (winner of the Goldsmith Book Prize and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize). He also co-authored with Robert Jay Lifton, Hiroshima in America. Mitchell is the former editor of Nuclear Times magazine and the writer/director of the 2021 documentary, Atomic Coverup.


 For Forbes.com, I talked to Mitchell about his nonfiction examination of the scientists’ motivations in reaching out to Hollywood and about Hollywood’s distortion of their intentions and message. Mitchell’s book is called The Beginning or The End — and that, by the way, is also the title of the MGM movie that so sorely disappointed the scientists involved. I have edited the conversation for length and clarity


The Conversation with Greg Mitchell


Rebecca Coffey: Your book tells the story of scientists who were sickened at the deaths caused by their work at the Manhattan Project. They wanted Hollywood to help them create a movie that would be a cautionary tale. What they got instead from Hollywood was a movie designed to help Americans feel good about the appalling Hiroshima and Nagasaki news. The movie didn’t raise moral questions about scientific matters. It celebrated nuclear weaponry and its “heroes.” Am I right about that?



Greg Mitchell: I think that's a fair assessment. The country had mixed feelings about how the bomb had been used. The scientists had mixed feelings about what they’d created. Truman and Groves had script approval. A movie filled with distortions and outright lies was the result.


RC: I'm surprised at how good a job the movie did in creating lasting distortions. I mentioned to a well-educated, well-read, peace-loving friend the other day that I would be interviewing you and I also said that you had spent a significant portion of your professional life examining moral questions about the use of the bomb. He said, well, what is there to talk about really? Using the bomb was necessary. If we hadn't done it the Soviets were about to do it. I responded that, no, Russia had spies at the Manhattan Project. That’s because they had no bomb. Japan and Germany didn’t have a bomb, either. Apparently, the wool that the government and this movie pulled over the eyes of even educated, peace-loving Americans has held up over the years. It still controls the narrative.


GM: That’s why I wrote this book. It’s what has motivated me for 38 years now. Last year was the 75th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was an opportunity for reassessment. That didn’t happen, perhaps because of COVID-19 headlines and the election. There was a best-selling book by Chris Wallace [and Mitch Weiss] defending the use of the bomb, but it included all sorts of errors. And there was Wallace’s Fox special about the bomb. But there was no impartial assessment 75 years after the fact. I’ve always wanted to promote an honest debate about what happened. I want all of the facts out there. I want Americans to have conversations and examine moral issues.



RC: If I remember correctly, one of the Manhattan Project scientists who had misgivings about the future of nuclear weaponry reached out to a former high school student. She was the actress Donna Reed. She brought her agent husband into the conversation and he sold Louis B. Mayer and MGM on the scientists’ idea about a movie that would warn audiences about the dangers and moral complexities of atomic bombs. Mayer was excited enough to call the movie the “most important story” he’d ever get the chance to tell. But the movie that MGM ended up making was not at all a cautionary tale. Do you know whether Mayer had a personal sense of loss about how the project turned out?


GM: I couldn't find any testimony about that. I think he kind of bowed out. So many MGM movies needed his attention. This one didn’t seem to be a high priority, after all.


RC: The movie is a docudrama, though it's hard for me to understand how any audience member accepted the supposedly nonfiction aspect of it given how predictable and corny the dialog is. Even so, they did. As a documentary-plus-drama, it was a “cross-genre” movie. And in some ways, your book is a cross-genre narrative because it’s about such serious matters but it incorporates lots of dark comedy. The photo on the book jacket’s speaks to gallows humor even more than it does to the book’s important historical information. Do you have any response to that?



GM: I think there is a lot of unintentional comedy in it. There was the absurdity of trying to make a romantic, Hollywood blockbuster about the creation of a horrible, potentially world-destroying weapon. MGM went through all the usual promo processes, and they were oddly out of place. You know, “Here’s a beautiful actress getting her ID checked!” “Here are cool signs that say ‘Top Secret!’” Everything MGM said about the movie was inadvertently tone deaf. A nearly final version of the script had the Japanese receiving instructions on how to build an atomic bomb from Germans who arrived, as Germans apparently often do, by submarine. Having received the instructions, the Japanese took them to their secret atomic bomb factory ... which was supposedly in Hiroshima! There was no factory in Hiroshima. No Germans were crawling out of submarines and bearing instructions for Japanese scientists. The script, the casting, the promotion, and the filmmaking process all were absurd.



RC: In general, Hollywood movies have clear heroes and villains. Your book doesn’t, but let's just talk about its cast of characters. In the whole mess that was the creation and use of the bomb, is there a character who disgusted you most? Is there somebody whom you consider to be the true villain of the atomic bomb story?


 GM: I suppose I'd have to say General Groves. He had his finger in everything. He got the bomb built. He covered up radiation accidents at the Manhattan Project. He helped pick Hiroshima and Nagasaki as targets. He moved up the schedule so the bomb would get used earlier. After the cities were bombed, he covered up the effects of the radiation on the civilian population and later he pushed for building more and bigger weapons. He capped it off by getting a massive amount of money from MGM to advise on the movie. By the way, no one else got paid, even though the scientists were promised money. Then, when questioned, Groves denied taking the money. He ruined the movie that had the potential to bring some truth to millions of Americans. Because he had his finger in everything, he would have to be the villain



RC: What about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the chief scientist at the Manhattan Project? I’ve read several books that portray him as an unreliable, weird, and perhaps overly self-involved figure. He had to give his approval to the movie for MGM to use his name, and his name was so well-known that MGM really had to use it. Why did he give his approval to the script?


GM: One of the subplots of the book is the continual engagement between MGM and the scientists including Oppenheimer, Albert Einstein, and Leo Szilard. [Before the Manhattan Project, Szilard had conceived the nuclear chain reaction upon which atomic bomb technology relied. He’d also patented a nuclear fission reactor design and he’d convinced Einstein to join the Manhattan Project. In 1945 Szilard drafted the petition to Truman asking him not to use the bomb against Japan.] Some of the scientists were very famous and were hesitant about cooperating. Whenever they dragged their feet, MGM got nervous and came up with pseudonyms for them. Even Oppenheimer had a provisional pseudonym. It was “Whittier” — funny because it was WASP-y and he was anything but. I’m not sure why ultimately he gave permission and let the MGM screenwriters use his real name. He was being surveilled by the FBI, but there’s no evidence that he cooperated just to get J. Edgar Hoover off his back. He had gotten some changes made in the script. Maybe that was enough for him. Maybe he knew that he couldn’t stop the movie altogether or solve all of its problems. Maybe he liked the idea of being a character on the big screen. Even Einstein and Szilard approved the script eventually.


RC: Why do you think Einstein and Szilard approved it?



GM: MGM brought Szilard out to the lot for a week or two. That might have been flattering and fun. And Szilard didn’t have a lot to protect. The movie just showed him in the lab early on doing some of the groundbreaking work on nuclear science. He got some changes made to the script. The movie may not have deeply upset him because it doesn’t portray or distort his attempt to stop the use of the bomb.


Einstein, on the other hand, was a little different. In the book, there’s an exchange of letters between Mayer and Einstein. Mayer tried to twist Einstein’s arm. Einstein held firm. Then, a couple of months later, Szilard seems to have told Einstein, “Look, I got some changes made. I think you should sign. No big deal.” Einstein may have thrown up his hands and signed. It seems that, in the end, when scientists believed they were being treated fairly on screen they signed. Maybe they’d just been worn down.



RC: Did the scientists get anything for all of their trouble?


GM: MGM didn’t pay the scientists even though they’d promised to. With their dithering, though, the scientists did succeed in delaying production. By the time the movie was released, the bomb had disappeared from the headlines.


RC: Poetic justice?


GM: Well, if you’re bothered at the idea that the movie that was supposed to be a cautionary tale ended up having a pro-atomic-bomb message, at least you can take some comfort. The scientists succeeded in ruining the audience for the movie. They delayed so long that America had lost interest. Mayer’s “most important story” was a box office flop.


RC: What are your favorite darkly comic moments about the development of the movie?



GM: I like Donna Reed’s involvement because it’s so unexpected and strange. Another favorite of mine is the fact that Truman got the actor playing him fired for not having a sufficiently “military bearing.” The actor then wrote a letter to Truman that appeared to be respectful but, between the lines, was deeply sarcastic. He suggested that Truman should play himself. He said something like, “No doubt you would love to be the person who takes credit for this historic use of the bomb.” Truman wrote a polite letter back, evidently not having caught onto the actor’s mockery.


By and large, I found reams of jaw-dropping stuff in the Motion Picture Academy Library. For example, Groves, who was overweight and not happy about it, ordered MGM to remove from the script a second reference to him liking chocolate. He and Truman allowed incredibly large falsehoods about science to stay in the script but disallowed details that they didn’t make them look good. 


RC: Because for thirty-eight years you have researched this part of history, let me see if I can get you to opine about certain matters. In Einstein's interview with the New York Times Magazine, he said that he believed we didn't have to use the bomb. Do you agree with him about that?


GM: When I started writing about this in the 1980s and went to Hiroshima and Nagasaki for a month, I didn’t have an opinion. I just wanted to delve deeper into the story. Over the many years in which I’ve read more, I've become convinced that it was not necessary to use the bomb in that time period to produce a surrender in very short order. That’s what General Eisenhower and others believed. They could see there were other ways to end the war.


RC: Do you think President Franklin D. Roosevelt would have approved of using the bomb on Japanese cities?


GM: I’ve thought about it but I don’t have a firm opinion. The evidence is not crystal clear. I’m satisfied that I’ve raised some conversation about it. Could he have been bullied the way Truman was by Groves? Maybe not. But, like Truman, he wanted to end the war as soon as possible. He’d ordered the creation of the bomb.


RC: What about impersonating scientists on film? Do you think that getting B-grade actors to fiddle with flashing gadgets while pretending to be world-class scientists does a disservice to science — especially on matters as grave as this?


GM: The scientists who were impersonated in the MGM movie were disturbed by the screenings. Szilard ran out and kind of cowered in a waiting car. It wasn’t just that the movie celebrated the bomb. It was the hokey way scientists were portrayed.


The producers tried to placate the scientists. They pointed out that one major character functioned as a representation of the qualms of some of scientists. It was the character of Tom Drake. He appeared in much of the movie. He was a sympathetic-looking guy. He gave voice to their concerns about civilian casualties and the future of nuclear weaponry. But, of course, in the movie he was a tragic figure and he died, and in the very last scene his ghost came down and talked to his wife and said that the bomb is a great thing. It’s our salvation. God gave it to us.


This gets back to my motivation for writing the book. So many Americans remain ignorant about the history of nuclear weaponry in our country and the ongoing possibility of its use. Unlike many of our allies, we have a “First Use” policy! We reserve the right to use nuclear weapons first. Many Americans don’t know about the First Use policy. That fact is enough to keep me talking about the dangers of the nuclear arms race and inspiring me to write books like The Beginning or the End.


RC: Thank you so much for talking.



Greg Mitchell’s The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood — And America — Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is gripping, surprisingly well-researched and fun storytelling about a devastating topic. Mitchell’s Twitter handle is @gregmitch. His news and politics newsletter is Between a Rock and a Hard Place.






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