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Reading Hiroshima in the Age of Vietnam: John Hersey at the White House Festival of the Arts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Brian Hurley
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Abstract

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At the White House Festival of the Arts in 1965, the American novelist John Hersey read excerpts from his noted non-fiction work Hiroshima (1946) as an act of protest against President Lyndon Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam War. As Hersey linked Harry Truman's bombing of Hiroshima and Johnson's bombing of Vietnam within the same spectrum of American military interventions in Asia, he earned the ire of the First Family and raised questions about freedom of speech in the White House itself. Drawing on archival documents in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and the Library of Congress, this article argues that Hersey's literary protest revealed how the premises of cultural freedom that lay at the heart of Cold War American liberalism stirred far more controversy in practice than their placid articulation in theory would have ever suggested.

Keywords

HiroshimaCold WarVietnamprotestcultural freedom
Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , March 2024 , e2
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2024

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