First Take: Hiroshima and Obama's sense of history

WASHINGTON — As he approaches the end of his presidency, President Obama is trying to write his own chapter in world history as the president who redefined America's role in the world.

But to do that, he's also delicately and self-consciously trying to turn the page on the chapters written by his predecessors.

That effort led him Friday to the Japanese city where 140,000 people died so that the United States could end what seemed to be an endless war seven decades and 11 presidents ago.

Hiroshima.

Laying a wreath at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, Obama attempted to draw lessons from the first wartime use of the atomic bomb without second-guessing President Truman's decision to drop it. "The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well," he said. "We have a shared responsibility to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again."

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Since 1945, six sitting presidents have visited Japan, but none of them visited Hiroshima. Obama — always cognizant of opportunities to set new precedents — is the first. Why now?

"The dropping of the atomic bomb, the ushering in of nuclear weapons was an inflection point in modern history. It is something that all of us have had to deal with in one way or another," the historian-in-chief told reporters Thursday. "But the backdrop of a nuclear event remains something that I think presses on the back of our imaginations."

The Hiroshima visit also exemplifies a pattern of confronting uncomfortable historical truths during Obama's "farewell tour."

In March, he became the first president to go to Cuba since the revolution that brought the Marxist Castro regime to power — "the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas," Obama said. Then, in a less-heralded visit to Argentina, he acknowledged the U.S. role in human rights violations in South America in the 1960s and '70s.

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"I have spent a lot of time, both before I was president and since I've been president, studying the history of U.S. foreign policy," Obama said in Argentina in March. "And like the history of any country's foreign policy, there are moments of great success and glory, and there are moments that were counterproductive or contrary to what I believe America should stand for."

In Vietnam this week, Obama tried to reframe the Vietnam War as one painful chapter in a longer history of friendship and cooperation that is "too often overlooked."

"I am not the first American president to come to Vietnam in recent times. But I am the first, like so many of you, who came of age after the war between our countries," he said. "I come here mindful of the past, mindful of our difficult history, but focused on the future."

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If it was President George H.W. Bush who presided over the end of the Cold War, Obama is the president who has sought to give it a proper funeral. "Obama seems to be working against the romantic myth — Reaganism, maybe — to suggest we need to confront questionable actions from the past," said John Bodnar, a professor of history at Indiana University and the author of The "Good War" in American Memory. 

Bodnar said the president is not revisiting history for the sake of history. "Obama not only wants to move on, but he may be trying to temper our reliance of romantic myths of who we are in our policies for the future," Bodnar said.

On Friday, Obama memorialized the destruction wrought on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atom-splitting weapons, but also called for nations — including the United States — to "have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them."

"The world was forever changed here, but today the children of this city will go through their day in peace," Obama said in Hiroshima. "That is a future we can choose, a future in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known not as the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening."