During his tour of duty, he saw the first H-bomb drop from an airplane (at Bikini) and many other atomic blasts. Ironically, he says he "flunked out for having no talent for science," and was immediately drafted into the Army's Chemical Corps for the Korean War. There he learned the basics of cooking, including the lesson "that you don't have to wash vegetables with soap."Īfter graduation, he spent a year as an assistant for the undergrad labs at Amherst College before going to grad school in physics at the University of Michigan. He also enjoyed Pyle Inn, Oberlin's first co-op, of which he was a founding member. "It was a fairly traumatic four years, and I just didn't do very well."ĭespite those difficulties, Harwit says he had a good group of friends and enjoyed the swim team and going to concerts. He also had to live within a tight budget, and he was experiencing his first coeducational school. He was still adjusting to America, and, at 16, was younger than most of the stu-dents, many of whom had recently returned from World War II. from Turkey in the spring of 1946, only a year and a half before starting at Oberlin. Born in Czechoslovakia, he had immigrated to the U.S. "Being on the swimming team, I had strong lungs, and so I tried to see what the minimum number of breaths was that I could take in an hour of these classes, and that was what kept me from falling asleep," he recalls.ĭifferential equations aside, Harwit worked hard at Oberlin, although the effort did not show in his grades, largely because of difficulties outside the classroom. Although he eventually became an accomplished astrophysicist and museum director, his Oberlin differential equations classes were tough. Harwit was not Oberlin's best physics student. In a recent interview at his southwest Washington townhouse, Harwit shared his thoughts on the Enola Gay affair, his recently published book on the exhibit, An Exhibit Denied: Lobbying the History of Enola Gay (Copernicus/Springer-Verlag), and his path from Oberlin to the museum. The exhibit was canceled in January 1995 after months of controversy, and Harwit left his post four months later. He was head of the National Air and Space Museum during the contentious fight over a planned exhibition of the newly restored Enola Gay, the airplane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Martin Harwit '51 has gained more fame in the past few years than most astrophysicists get in a lifetime.
Dream Job That Became A Nightnare The Dream Job That Became A Nightmare Martin Harwit And The Enola Gay Exhibit by David Ehrenstein '88