There are many accounts of those distinctive images and situations that are associated with the atomic bombing that ended the Pacific War in World War II. Very well told is Ian Toll’s “The Twilight of the Gods” in that he covers everything, including whether a diplomatic tweak on the part of the Americans might have ended the war without requiring the A-bombs to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Toll does not provide anything new but he is well balanced. There is the Oppenheimer operation in Los Alamos, a city of young scientists doing with limited comforts. Then the first A blast in the New Mexico desert, the sun rising twice, as has often been said, and toll’s retelling of the green ferrous oxide that was all that was left at the original site of the blast.Then the shift to the politicians when the scientists turn their weapon to the decision makers. Then the hordes of B-29 fleets pulverizing the Japanese homeland and then delivering the bombs themselves, and then the stunned aftermath where the agonizing decision was made for the Japanese to surrender, and then the start of the occupation, Americans startled that the Japanese people who greeted them when they arrived as conquerors in their home territories were grateful and joyous rather than sullen or dejected.
So we get the range of events, but not a satisfactory way to explain how to integrate them. Maybe history is more complex than faction and so is always left clumpy and without a clear set of causal relations. There is, in Toll, one episode after another because that is what happens if you organize the telling of a story as its sequence of events, most histories so different than Herodotus (and Hume, I think), who dramatize both subsidiary and major stories so that each of these stories can explain itself, to see how morals and personalities intersect. The major questions about the Pacific War remain unresolved. Would starving the Japanese have gotten them defeated or would it have been necessary to have half a million Allied casualties if there had been an allied invasion? Could the scientists have been more persistent in pressing for not dropping the bombs? Impenetrable questions that are not answered by full length studies such as Richard Rhodes’ “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”, or through political analysts who apply concepts about how to end wars, and flattening the enemy is one of them, even though that is rare,not warranting the remark by Tacitus “They make a desert and call it peace.” It was not even true in World War II where the physical structures in Germany and Japan had been leveled but that these two resilient peoples had each within a generation to become successful again.
Here is another approach. Deliberately dramatize history because seeing how to portray events and situations as a three act or a five act play, complete with sub plots and crises and resolutions, will point out what was the crux of the matter, what was the pivotal event, when more scientific forms of analysis are unable to sort out which one or another force predominates. I am thinking of a performance I saw a few years ago at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre where ”Hamlet”, that muddied and many faceted play, full of faints and asides and subplots, resolved itself for me because the director made it about the death of Polonius, before which Hamlet was an irritant and a scold, and afterwards a danger, to be killed, and returning back to Elsinore after having escaped to England only perhaps because he was ready to die. So as I peruse the events and situations of the A Bomb, rather than thinking of the sequence of events, I think about what is its dramatic crux.
My answer to that question is that it was the Japanese Prime Minister Admiral Suzuki, brought on in June of 1945, a decrepit old man, sort of like Hindenburg dealing with Hitler, had with a number of other people tried to negotiate through Russia with vague plan to end the war, hoping to hold onto some of its territories, very much like those who planned to assassinate Hiltler also thought that there would be a negotiated peace whereby Germany might still retain some of its conquered territories and prerogatives. But that was too late when total defeat was inescapable, as had been the case since Pearl Harbor in that the Japanese victory unleashed the American nation. Some other person could have been used to represent the peace faction in a way dramatically more straightforward than it was. Even if courting assassination, the job for the protagonist would have been to panic and make peace as soon as possible rather than dicker about the terms. That could prevent starvation and even more destruction and an armed invasion of their homeland, though I would guess that the United States, if it had been at the edge of defeat, might also have tried to look aside from the inevitable. That would provide the drama of an endgame.
I could see an Expressionist stage director using the Foreign Minister or some other figure as a marionette whose strings were no longer connected to those they would manipulate but acting as if they could. That revealed to an audience that the other parties in place--Tibbets in the “Enola Gay”, Le May in charge of all the B-29’s, Truman saying enough though not eloquently about what was going to happen and disregarded by the Japanese-- were doing their preassigned roles while the Japanese were free to surrender. Yes, the political analyst points out that the British, the Americans and the Germans had a united defense structure while the Japanese were never able to unify the Army and Navy, but it is also the case that the Prime Minister or some other figure had enough moral depth or imagination to do anything other than keep on being just a diplomat.
Here is another war whose end can be dramatized so as to get its dynamics clear. There are no end of images and situations concerning the Vietnam War. There is the naked child who was napalmed and a picture of it was on every front page. There were the tunnels and trails and jungle through which the Americans fought, landing from helicopters and maybe extricated that way too. There were jungle growths shriven by Agent Orange that, years later, cost the loss of American veterans who contracted cancer. And there was the final image, people lining up at the top of the American embassy so as to get on the last helicopter from Saigon. But that was a jumble and some other roof and helicopter could also symbolize the end of a war without explaining how it happened. I also see the dramatic crux as having to do with diplomacy, as I suggested was the crux in the end of the Pacific War. (Mind you, diplomacy is not the crucial point for all wars. Germany had died not only because Hitler had killed himself. It was because every last inch of Germany had been captured by the Allies.) I can see Henry Kissinger spotlighted in a box at the right of the theatre watching the enactment of the fall of Saigon and saying nothing or perhaps only muttering “It doesn’t matter; it doesn’t matter.” because Kissinger had accomplished what he wanted to do, which was for South Vietnam to collapse after the Americans had withdrawn after having arranged with a truce with the North Vietnamese so that the Americans could no longer be blamed for what happened and the American government could have been blamed if the Americans were still in the war and so were somehow betrayed by some theory of them being stabbed in the back by their own leaders which had happened after the First World War and had sparked, in part, the rise of Naziism. What Kissinger had to avoid. The rest of the war was just incidental.
That is very different from the scenario offered by Francis Ford Coppola in “Apocalypse Now”. He imagines the drama unfolding from Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”. The action moves from the civilized quarters where the officer offers steak to the man he wants “to terminate with extreme prejudice” the man assigned to kill Col. Kurtz. He moves on to a helicopter squadron that destroys a village and then further to the interior where fighting forces are in disarray until finding Col. Kurtz enclosure where pagan rituals prevail. That disorder is at the heart of darkness. It is an interesting and well organized conceit whereby warfare is reduced from organization and civilization to anarchy and barbarism, but it is an inaccurate depiction, as dramatizations can be, in that the devastation through Agent Orange, about as barbaric a performance as the Americans could do, was in the Mekong Delta, not very far from Saigon, while the hinterlands were very well organized by the enemy along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and that the Tet Offensive took place in its major cities. Drama overcame actuality.
Not just wars follow procedures and can be recognized for their significant incidents and situations. The same is true of political campaigns in that they move from announcing candidacies, to the primaries, then conventions, and then the general campaigns. But that sequence of jumbled events are not explanatory, however detailed the descriptions. There has to be an added sharpness which makes an audience see in astonishment that something crucial has changed about the people involved in their play. “Lucky” by two journalists, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, provide the melange of meetings and announcements and events they can get in their post-mortem interviews with the participants and that leaves a reader baffled that anyone could make sense of the helter skelter of campaigning or that any of the participants, candidates and staffs, could be taken seriously, all devoted to short term advantage and a few platitudes rather than the candidates and their long time aides nested in what they are as people who offer themselves as the pillars of the nation and those who hold they themselves up, thinking that this was the right time when personhood and demographics and interests would mesh to give one of them the crown. The authors have a theory of Biden which they summarized by the title. Biden was lucky. He was not likely to win the nomination much less beat Trump, who was energetic and angry and pointed in his comments. Biden was superannuated. He looked old and he was not eloquent and he was mired in the issues of the Seventies, such as the distinction between de jure and de facto school segregation. He had always been a centrist even if that meant between the segregationists and the integrationists. The party had moved left. He got the nomination because the two progressive figures split the same base and the centrists couldn’t get an edge so as to clear the field. The party settled with Biden and he won a close one, probably, as I think was the case, because the pandemic had shown Trump weak on managing the issue. But for that, four more years of Trump.
In the view of the authors of “Lucky”, the centrists decided each on their own that there was no path to the nomination and so folded so as to run again in some future Presidential contest, while Warren had peaked early and that the electorate was not interested in a Socialist nominee, and so that left the field to Biden. I think otherwise and dramatizing the race makes what happened clear. Imagine there had been a meeting of all the major Democratic contenders after the South Carolina primary where Biden had a major victory thanks to Representative Clybourn, the king maker who had recommended that Biden not run in 2016 and so had not, thus following good advice and authority. The Democratic candidates might have dickered with one another, each one expressing their personalities and points of view, some lively exchange between them, until deciding on Biden as the inevitable view because all the moderates were fearful of what had happened in the Republican primaries in 2016 when each one of them hang on hoping that lightning would strike one of them when Trump lost his lustre, as inevitably he must because he was so clearly unqualified to be President, but who's following was not to be offended so that it would come to the successor. Never happened. The Democrats knew it could happen again so they had to join together sooner rather than later to back a party nominee and it was clear that Biden was popular even if there was the risk that he would engage in one of his gaffes and doom the party to defeat. So within a very short time after the South Carolina primary and before Super Tuesday, within a few days, all the centrists went for Biden and there was no chance for the progressives to do otherwise. In other words, Biden wasn’t lucky in that the party was indeed centrist rather than progressive, as the midterms the year before had shown, and that Biden’s seriousness of purpose and gravamen was in sharp contrast to Trump and so they all followed David Axelrod’s dictum that the next president is someone who is the opposite of the predecessor, though that doesn’t seem right to me as a rule with a single example because from George H. W. Bush through Clinton and Obama and even with Chaney as substitute President, what prevailed was being cool and steady. Biden was a return to that.
The journalistic chronicle of the election process does not lend itself to dramatization and so the decision of the other democratic candidates to quickly switch to supporting Biden seems quizzical, a surprise, a matter of converging self interests rather than an act of statesmanship, anyway to be quickly followed by the general campaign, even if that few days was the key lever, the climax of the campaign, moving to its conclusion with an realization by the actors as well as the audience that the outcome was inevitable, always aware in politics that whatever is inevitable is whatever it is that the key actors think is inevitable, whether to fight or end a war or to contest or fold an election campaign. Politics are inevitable until it happens otherwise. That is the essential drama of war and of politics.