.

             Another Congress member, Rep., Sam Johnson, feels that patriotism is a necessity of the Smithsonian. "We've got to get patriotism back into the Smithsonian. We want the Smithsonian to reflect real America and not something that a historian dreamed up". This statement suggests that historians dreamt up the part of the Enola Gay exhibit that dealt with the suffering of the Japanese citizens when the bomb was dropped. Rep. Johnson seems to have no interest in the other people who suffered during World War II.

             On the other side of the spectrum from hagiography is presentism. It is the tendency to misunderstand events in the past because current values and beliefs are used to evaluate those events. Many of the historians tried to tell the whole story of World War II by showing more than just the Enola Gay. David Thelen believes: "Our presentations must evoke an exhausted American marine looking forward after the crushing battle of Okinawa. But they must also evoke a mother searching the rubble of Hiroshima for her daughter and finding a lunch box with carbonized peas and rice, the only remains of her vaporized child.". While this seems like a fair representation of what "really" happened, it would seem that fifty years ago we, as Americans, would not have thought of the Japanese as victims. .

             To question the use of the bomb could also be considered presentism. The "commonly accepted viewpoint", (until recently), was that the use of the bomb was a necessity. Many felt that it ended the war and saved many American lives. According to Richard H. Kohn, the purpose of the Enola Gay exhibit was: "not simply to present a historical investigation of what happened, why, and what it meant, but to revisit the American decision to use the bomb in 1945, to ask whether the bomb was needed or justified, and to suggest 'an uncertain, potentially dangerous future for all of civilization'. To use the beliefs and values of today to reevaluate the decision to drop the bomb, does not change the fact that it was dropped.