Covering the First Atomic Bombs

This week, President Obama will become the first sitting US president to visit Hiroshima. To mark the occasion, we're revisiting two segments we produced in 2005 relating to the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan. First, author and journalist Greg Mitchell discusses the case of George Weller, the first reporter on the scene after the bombings, whose first-hand accounts of the aftermath, and the mysterious illness that followed, were never published, only to be discovered in 2005. Then, David Goodman, co-author of "Exception to the Rulers," tells the story of New York Times reporter William L. Laurence, who witnessed the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki and won a Pulitzer for his heavily pro-bombing reporting -- only for it to be revealed that he was working for the US War Department all along. 

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