Allen Pietrobon - Norman Cousins: Peacemaker in the Atomic Age

NORMAN COUSINS

Johns Hopkins Nuclear History
and Contemporary Affairs
Martin Sherwin, Series Editor

Peacemaker in the Atomic Age

Allen Pietrobon

Johns Hopkins University Press
Baltimore

2022 Johns Hopkins University Press

All rights reserved. Published 2022

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Pietrobon, Allen, 1984 author.

Title: Norman Cousins : peacemaker in the atomic age / Allen Pietrobon.

Description: Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. | Series: Johns Hopkins nuclear history and contemporary affairs | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021029203 | ISBN 9781421443706 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781421443713 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Cousins, Norman. | Saturday review of literature. | Saturday review (New York, N.Y. : 1952) | Periodical editorsUnited StatesBiography. | PacifistsUnited StatesBiography. | Press and politicsUnited States. | Antinuclear movementUnited StatesHistory. | Nuclear weaponsGovernment policyUnited States. | United StatesForeign relationsSoviet Union. | Soviet UnionForeign relationsUnited States.

Classification: LCC PN4874.C745 P54 2022 | DDC 818/.5409dc23/eng/20211027

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021029203

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

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NORMAN COUSINS

T ail gunner Bob Caron had been counting... Seven, eight, nine... Soaring 26,000 feet above Japan, Caron was crammed into his shoulder-wide compartment, operating a .50 caliber machine gun perched at the rear of the B-29 Superfortress bomber. The twenty-six-year-old was solely responsible for defending the aircraft from enemy fighters aiming to knock them out of the sky.

On any other mission Caron would have had some help. Usually the B-29 was equipped with ten heavy machine guns piercing the fuselage at strategic points to give nearly 360 degrees of defensive coverage against airborne attackers. But on that morning, eight of the ten guns had been stripped off the plane to save weight in order to accommodate the enormous bomb they were carrying... Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three...

The B-29 was well suited to this particular mission. In 1945 it was on the cutting edge of military technology, a marvel of aeronautical engineering. Equipped with the latest technologies, at its full defensive complement five General Electric analog computers onboard the aircraft helped to aim the machine guns remotely. As Popular Mechanics magazine reported at the time, it was because of these electronic brains that a lone B-29 had recently been able to win a four-hour battle with seventy-nine Japanese fighter planes.

None of that was any comfort to Caron, however, because he was manning the only remaining machine gun, located at the rear of the aircraft. If they did encounter Japanese defenders on this mission, they would have little chance of survival... Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine...

The B-29 bombers engines roared, and vibrations pulsed through the aircrafts polished aluminum body. Upon reaching their target, Caron had started his count the moment the bomb left the plane. Despite being confined to his claustrophobic gunners compartment, he knew precisely when this happened because freed of its 9,700-pound bomb, the B-29 shot upward in the sky like a rodeo bull trying to buck its rider... Thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight...

First officer Colonel Paul Tibbets kept a tight grip on the controls and executed the evasive maneuver that was designed to get them as far away from the shock wave the blast would produce as quickly as possible. No one, not even the physicists responsible for creating the worlds first atomic weapon, could be entirely sure how big the blast would be nor what its forces might do to the specially modified plane... Forty, forty-one, forty-two...

Suddenly, a brilliant white light filled the sky. When the eye-stabbing flash seared through the dark goggles intended to shield him, Caron thought he had been blinded. But when the brightness slowly receded, he witnessed what they had just done. In a split second the city of Hiroshima had been decimated. Copilot Robert Lewis, after watching an entire city disappear in an instant, is reported to have said, My god, what have we done? The twelve crew members aboard the Enola Gaynamed after the pilots motherwere the first people in the world to witness a city destroyed by an atomic bomb. They were there at the inception of the atomic age.

Back on the East Coast of the United States, on August 7, 1945, it was around 7:30 a.m. when Norman Cousins, the thirty-year-old editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, came down for breakfast in his home in Connecticut. He picked up that days issue of the New York Times.

The profound effect the events of that August morning had on him would guide his actions for the rest of his life. With the atomic bombing, the purpose of Cousinss life became brilliantly clear to him.

The atomic bomb would consume his thoughts, dominate his writing, and have an immeasurable impact on his family. The dark shadow the bomb cast would follow him until the day he died nearly five decades later. After his passing, his youngest daughter, Sarah, wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle, My father, Norman Cousins, died in 1990. But he was taken away long before that, by the atomic bomb. Neither the world nor Cousins would ever be the same after that August morning.

N orman Cousins (19151990) is probably best known today as the longtime editor of the influential American weekly magazine the Saturday Review. For a time in the 1960s, the Saturday Review was the third most popular news magazine in the country. Cousins was also a leading humanitarian, peacemaker, and anti-nuclear activist who contributed to a wide array of anti-war causes and diplomatic efforts. He stood out among activists during the Cold War because he had a captive audience for his ideas through the Saturday Review. The vast network of far-reaching, high-level personal and political connections he built up over the years allowed him to exert influence in the halls of power across the globe despite being a political outsider.

He never held elected or appointed office (although he was offered a job in the Kennedy White House), but many at the time thought that Cousinss intellect, charm, and growing prominence would one day carry him to the White House as president. Exploratory committees attempted to draft him for presidential campaigns in the 1960s and 1970s. Even though he never became the leader of the free world, his lifelong activities did have an enormous impact on domestic politics and international relations. His contributions to American life and public debate were entered into the Congressional Record.

Because of his prominence in the anti-nuclear and peace movements, Cousins has been mentioned in major academic studies by the historians Lawrence Wittner and Milton Katz, but he has mostly been overlooked by scholars, rarely garnering more than a handful of pages in any academic study. In Japan, the memory of him is more poignant. His anti-nuclear activism and success in securing medical treatment for the victims of the atomic bombings is recorded in stone, with a memorial honoring him in Hiroshimas Peace Park.