Hersey also describes a theological student who had carried with him a bundle of clothes in which he had packed two pairs of leather shoes, but had lost one pair. “It’s funny, but things don’t matter any more. Yesterday, my shoes were my most important possessions. Today, I don’t care. One pair is enough.”

I believe the incident serves as another example of Christian ethics materializing in this devastated city, springing forth from within a character as he manifests a realization of what is truly important in life — and it isn’t shoes.

Hersey and his editors were persuaders. As Ross said about Shawn, it was necessary to “wake people up.” His story, Hiroshima, dramatizes a cataclysmic event. These were real people, not statistics, not buildings, not train stations, highways, or military targets. Hersey’s text enfleshed the people interviewed, and drew his readers, despite their then prejudices against the Japanese, close to them. His writing stands as an example of the power and pathos that can be achieved through the use of language.

Hersey’s text enfleshed the people interviewed, and drew his readers, despite their then prejudices against the Japanese, close to them. His writing stands as an example of the power and pathos that can be achieved through the use of language.

Did he stack the deck? Yes, absolutely. He would later say in the The Yale Review, 1985-86, there “is no such thing as objective reportage. Human life is far too trembling-swift to be reported in the whole; the moment the reporter chooses nine facts out of ten he colors the information he views.”

As a narrative, Hiroshima was effective rhetoric. As rhetoric, it was successful storytelling that helped change the way the American public perceived atomic weapons. It was not “journalism” as commonly defined. It does, however, definitely exemplify New Journalism, even before the term “New Journalism” had been coined by Thomas Wolfe and others some twenty years after the publication of Hiroshima. It is New Journalism because it is narrative shaped with a point of view, one that raises the persuasive text to a masterpiece that should not soon be forgotten because it shows the horrors of nuclear war.