The Deadliest Coverup of the 20th Century

Useful Idiots with Katie Halper and Aaron Maté

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Lesley Blume is a journalist. She married a journalist. Her father wrote for Walter Cronkite. Her whole community is journalists.

So, in 2016, when Trump rose to power, her community was suddenly under attack.

“All of a sudden to see your entire community be under assault like that and be designated as enemies of the people was so shocking and demoralizing, and it felt like an all hands on deck moment.”

The best way to fight back, she decided, was to write a book that proved to America just how crucial reporters are in democracy, to “reinstate this idea that journalism at its best serves the common good.”

“And so,” she explains, “when I came across Hersey’s story, which had been shockingly untold, I knew that I had my story.”

John Hersey, a Pulitzer-prize-winning pioneer reporter who saw combat to cover World War II, wrote what some consider the most important work of journalism of the 20th century: Hiroshima.

In her book, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World, Blume uses painstaking research to document how the US government obfuscated its role in the deadliest attack in history and comes to the realization that dropping the bomb was not justified, despite what we’re taught in school.

Plus, future-ex-Governor Cuomo couldn’t take the heat from last week’s Useful Idiots review, how Trump’s big beautiful tax cut actually (surprise) helped the rich, and the world burns from climate change.

It’s all this, and more, on this week’s (gloomy) episode of Useful Idiots. Check it out.

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