The Most Famous Photographer You Never Heard Of -- Who Harbored a Horrific 'Secret' -- Dies at 85

[babylonsister]

The Most Famous Photographer You Never Heard Of -- Who Harbored a Horrific 'Secret' -- Dies at 85
AP Photo/The Tennessean, Sam Parrish, File
Joe O'Donnell


By Greg Mitchell

Published: August 15, 2007 11:40 AM ET

NEW YORK He took some of the most famous news photos of our time but, as White House photographer from Truman to Johnson, his name was usually not attached to them and he was never widely known. But when Joe O’Donnell passed away six days ago in Nashville at the age of 85, he earned obit mention. He never worked for a newspaper, but thousands of them carried his iconic photos (to name just two) of FDR, Stalin and Churchill at Yalta, and John-John Kennedy saluting his father’s casket.

But I came to know him, about a dozen years ago, in a quite different context.

It had just emerged that O’Donnell was one of the first military photographers into Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bombings and, still haunted, he had dug out some of his old images out of storage and was using them to make an antinuclear statement. I interviewed him for the book I was writing with Robert Jay Lifton, “Hiroshima in America.”

O’Donnell told me flatly that he had long suffered from horrific medical effects that some doctors tied to radiation exposure in 1945. He described tumors, two 18” rods in his back, 12 feet of colon removed.

Another thing: O’Donnell gave me something of a scoop, mentioned in our book and widely published since.

It has long been said that President Truman always claimed that he had no second thoughts about ordering the use of the atomic bomb on two cities, killing about 250,000 people, 90% of them civilians. For our book, we researched the matter anew, and found that this was mainly, though not completely, true.

more...

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003625949