Bidding ^‘Farewell to Bikini^
27
a history-making cruise. What an abyss—what centuries of
scientific development—lie between him and me!*
Ideology and imagery came together closely in the pages of National
Geographic, but not always in obvious ways. Howard Abramson has noted that
National Geographic
“articles seem to be written by nice, albeit dull, second cousins
who manage to travel a lot and send an unending stream of
pretty, envy producing postcards, with nary a mention of
unpleasant happenings.. . a nice homespun organization that
publishes that distinctive yellow-bordered magazine that adorn
doctors’ offices everywhere and features those trademark
hannless photographs of all those memorable brown beasts”
(Abramson, 4).
Behind the “dull second cousins” and their seemingly innocuous postcard essays
was editor Gilbert Grosvenor. Under his leadership, the National Geographic
Society cooperated with the U.S. war effort in both the first and second World
Wars (despite Grosvemor’s dislike for FDR’s liberal politics). The Society
supplied maps, for example, to Allied leaders. This collaboration with the
American military, initiated in the first war and forged in the second, continued
into the Cold War (Abramson, 175-188). This explains both the obvious
cooperation with the military (most of Geographic's articles on the nuclear
Navy were written by Navy officials) and the conservative, but sometimes
reactionary, tone of much of the reportage.
“Farewell to Bikini/’ 1946
The centerpiece of National Geographic's coverage of the atomic
testing at Bikini is a July 1946 essay entitled “Far ]