The Most Famous Photographer You Never Heard Of -- Who Harbored a Horrific 'Secret' -- Dies at 85

[babylonsister]

The Most Famous Photographer You Never Heard Of -- Who Harbored a Horrific 'Secret' -- Dies at 85
AP Photo/The Tennessean, Sam Parrish, File
Joe O'Donnell


By Greg Mitchell

Published: August 15, 2007 11:40 AM ET

NEW YORK He took some of the most famous news photos of our time but, as White House photographer from Truman to Johnson, his name was usually not attached to them and he was never widely known. But when Joe O’Donnell passed away six days ago in Nashville at the age of 85, he earned obit mention. He never worked for a newspaper, but thousands of them carried his iconic photos (to name just two) of FDR, Stalin and Churchill at Yalta, and John-John Kennedy saluting his father’s casket.

But I came to know him, about a dozen years ago, in a quite different context.

It had just emerged that O’Donnell was one of the first military photographers into Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bombings and, still haunted, he had dug out some of his old images out of storage and was using them to make an antinuclear statement. I interviewed him for the book I was writing with Robert Jay Lifton, “Hiroshima in America.”

O’Donnell told me flatly that he had long suffered from horrific medical effects that some doctors tied to radiation exposure in 1945. He described tumors, two 18” rods in his back, 12 feet of colon removed.

Another thing: O’Donnell gave me something of a scoop, mentioned in our book and widely published since.

It has long been said that President Truman always claimed that he had no second thoughts about ordering the use of the atomic bomb on two cities, killing about 250,000 people, 90% of them civilians. For our book, we researched the matter anew, and found that this was mainly, though not completely, true.

more...

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003625949

[Hell Hath No Fury]

1. An amazing photographer..

who snapped some truly iconic images. When I studied photography, his work came up often when discussing photojournalism. I would love to see more of his Hiroshima images.

[EST]

2. I, Too, have questioned the value, been all over the map, actually,

as to the justification for trying out the nuclear bombs on Japan. Then I read about the 225,000 us soldiers they were holding as POWs; that they were going to kill if the US invaded Japan.
At present, I am of the opinion that there would have been millions more dead in that war than actually happened, therefore the bomb, not a good thing, was very possibly not as bad a thing as could and likely would have happened.

[jobycom]

9. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that Japan surrendered for other reasons.

I'm sure you've heard this. There were constant negotiations with Japan near the end. Many in Japan wanted to end the conflict on a high note (like Bush in Iraq), others just wanted to end the war. A major point of contention was the Emperor--the West refused to exempt him from charges of war crimes, and the Japanese continually claimed they would not surrender unless the west allowed the emperor to remain in power.

After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both times, the US demanded surrender, and the Japanese refused. When the Soviets invaded Manchuria and seemed on the verge of invading Japan, Japan still refused to surrender. They knew it was all lost, but they believed that if they could win one more battle, they could negotiate a better settlement that allowed them to keep some of their conquests.

The US, however, was terrified of the Soviets getting Japan, and it looked like they were on the verge of doing so. So the US backed down, and agreed to allow the emperor to remain in power, free from war crimes charges. Only then did Japan surrender.

It's clear Japan knew it had lost, and were simply fighting for the best exit strategy. It would have been possible to come up with settlement that ended the violence with far fewer lost lives. The question, though, is where that settlement would have been. If we had allowed Japan to remain a strong power, the conflict may have flared again in a generation, as WW I flared into WW II.

If Japan did not execute the POWs after Hiroshima or Nagasaki, as a way to punish us and show defiance, they probably wouldn't have done it for any other reasons. They were working on their own nuclear bombs, so they knew how unlikely it was that we had more than two. They wanted a final victory to negotiate a better settlement--not simple revenge.

We'll never know. It's an impossible question, in a different world with very different rules. It's like trying to determine whether Lincoln had to fight the Confederacy. All we can really know for sure are the results.

[EST]

11. Yes, thanks, now that you have mentioned it, I have read the

reports and conjectures you describe. Nothing is ever simple, but it would be a hell of a lot easier if we had a government that was not so obsessed with secrecy and the notion of being on top when the world melds into one state, which, it seems, most of the "powers that be" subscribe to.

And all the participants have their own axes to grind. Sometimes it seems too much like being an uninformed, uninterested dolt is almost preferable to trying to make a difference in the world.

[wicket]

3. K & R

:kick:

[demobabe]

4. Interesting part in the article

How O'Donnell took about 100 photos for personal use at nagasaki and hiroshima and smuggled them back... then when he tried to get them published decades later, no US publisher would print them.

[orleans]

13. yes, i read that paragraph a second time. dozens of u.s. publishers

turned him down. damn this liberal media!

[hootinholler]

5. Kicking n/r

[trof]

6. I've often wondered why we didn't just blockade Japan.

Starve them into surrender.
But then there were the POWs.
I dunno.

[babylonsister]

7. Kick. nt

[nashville_brook]

8. his Kenney photo hung/hangs in Pro Photo -- a service bureau for professional photographers

i was told his story many time over and could never quite get my brain around it. so cool that such and important photographer blended into the background in Nashville so... blendy-like. Unpretentious. Hiding out, it seemed.

[LiberalAndProud]

10. “I recognize Pearl Harbor,” he told me,

“but I regret we took it out on civilians."

Amen and Amen.

[LearnedHand]

12. I just read "Hiroshima in America" this summer

It's absolutely stunning -- well worth reading -- and it describes this photographer's venture into Japan after the bombs. It's a must-read book.