Popular Culture Review Vol. 18, No. 1, Winter 2007 | Page 31

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 ]