Dropping the Balm

There will be no apologies and “he will not revisit the decision to use the atomic bomb at the end of World War II.” But President Obama will be the first sitting president to visit Hiroshima.

+ “They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition — a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one streetcar instead of the next — that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time, none of them knew anything.” The New Yorker’s John Hersey, reporting in 1946: Hiroshima.