Joseph O'Donnell; captured images of Hiroshima, 5 presidencies
NEW YORK -- Joseph R. O'Donnell, who took some of the first disturbing pictures after the nuclear bombings of Japan and also captured lastingly famous scenes as a longtime White House photographer, died Thursday in Nashville, where he made his home. He was 85.
The cause was complications of a stroke, said his wife, Kimiko Sakai. She said that he had had more than 50 operations, among them surgery on his colon and his heart, and that he had attributed his poor health to radiation exposure resulting from his time in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
As a presidential photographer, Mr. O'Donnell caught images of Harry S. Truman and General Douglas MacArthur shaking hands at their meeting on Wake Island during the Korean War; Vice President Richard M. Nixon in his kitchen debate with Soviet leader, Nikita S. Khrushchev; and President Kennedy deciding whether to go ahead with the Bay of Pigs invasion.
And Mr. O'Donnell's photograph of John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father's coffin became the most reproduced version of that memorable scene.
Because he was on the government payroll, Mr. O'Donnell got no personal credit for those photos, although he signed and sold copies of them after his retirement from the White House in 1968.
Mr. O'Donnell was a 23-year-old Marine sergeant when he was assigned to document the effects of bombings and spent seven months photographing the devastation in Japan. His first subject was Nagasaki, much of which had been destroyed by an atomic bomb on Aug. 9, 1945, three days after Hiroshima was similarly hit.
One was of a boy carrying his dead brother to a crematorium. Another showed a classroom of children sitting at their desks, all burned to cinders. In others, faces were ripped away.
Mr. O'Donnell also ventured to Hiroshima and to cities bombed with conventional weapons. He carried two cameras. With one, he took pictures for the military. With the other, he took pictures for himself. When he returned home, he put the negatives of his own photos in a trunk and locked it, emotionally unable to look at them.
When he finally could, nearly a half-century later, he was so repulsed that he began protesting nuclear arms. In 1995, he published in Japan a book of many of those photos and, a decade later, one in the United States.
Mr. O'Donnell's work was caught up in controversy in 1995, before the National Air and Space Museum exhibited the Enola Gay, the B-29 that had bombed Hiroshima. His images were supposed to demonstrate the bombs' horrific effects, but veterans objected that the photos and the words others had written to accompany them gave an unbalanced view that neglected both Japan's aggression and the bombs' role in ending the war.
The photographs were stricken from curators' plans, as were other features that offended veterans. In an interview that year with National Public Radio, Mr. O'Donnell contended that, given what he had seen immediately after the war, Japan could have been defeated with conventional arms and without the hundreds of thousands of American casualties that an invasion had been expected to entail.
Joseph Roger O'Donnell was born in Johnstown, Pa. After high school, he joined the Marines and was sent to photography school. On Aug. 28, 1945, his unit was among the first to enter Japan. The unit was sent to a position about 10 miles from Nagasaki, he said in an article he wrote for American Heritage magazine in 2005.
Access to the bombed cities was limited, so Mr. O'Donnell walked to Nagasaki to take pictures that a superior had ordered. He noticed the putrid smell, then the absence of things: "No bird, no wind blowing, nothing to make you think there had once been a real city here."
Once in Nagasaki, he bartered 20 packs of cigarettes for a horse he named Boy. He lived in an abandoned house with the horse, which he used to navigate the rubble, and gave chocolate to children who posed for him.
Many years afterward, in the late 1980s, he attended a religious retreat in Kentucky, where he saw a nun's sculpture of a flame-scarred Christ on the cross, a work meant to evoke Hiroshima. He bought the statue, opened his long-locked trunk, and began protesting.
One of Mr. O'Donnell's pleasures as White House photographer was the intimacy that he shared with presidents.
In the National Public Radio interview he gave 12 years ago, he told of having summoned his courage to ask Truman, while walking on a Wake Island beach in 1950, whether he had ever had second thoughts before the bombings of Japan.
"Hell, yes!" he recalled Truman responding. "And I've had a lot of misgivings afterwards."
Mr. O'Donnell was too shy to ask for clarification. "I don't know what he meant," he said.
In addition to his wife, Mr. O'Donnell leaves three sons, Roger of Florida, Richard of West Virginia, and Tyge of Las Vegas; and a daughter, Jennifer of Nashville.
Correction: Because of incorrect information provided to The 