American History, in the First Person Singular

By Bravetta Hassell

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 17, 2006; Page C01

Gen. George Washington's words, written in his own hand, speculate on British germ warfare in 1775.

Photographs of an American Red Cross worker interned by the Japanese during World War II tell a story of endurance -- and hunger.

And here is the voice of Lady Bird Johnson, recounting the day a president was slain, and how what she remembers is the pinkness of it all, the color of a wife's suit as she throws herself across the body of her fatally wounded husband.

There is nothing that equals being present at a historic moment, having seen it, heard it, felt it. But they are the rarest of moments and it is the recounting by others upon which we depend. Bearing witness has a power all its own.

The exhibit, "Eyewitness: American Originals From the National Archives," which opened Friday in its Lawrence F. O'Brien Gallery, makes this point again and again with its firsthand accounts of well-known American historic moments by those who watched them unfold. The sorrow, the bravery, the urgency is transmitted through their voices, photographs and handwritten letters, be it from a president or the "anonymous" runaway slave or a World War II nurse.

"They're all snapshots from a very particular moment from a very particular view," says Stacey Bredhoff, the show's curator. "We know so much about President Lincoln's assassination, one of the most landmark milestone events, but we've never heard from the doctors who were at his bedside throughout the night.

"Unlike reading about it in the history book, this is a very personal account," she says.

And what happens when one comes face to face with that historic and personal past?

When Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) saw the exhibit's life-size photograph "Two Minute Warning," he nearly cried, he told Michael L. Jackson, designer of "Eyewitness." Lewis was on hand last week as organizers previewed the show, which will run in Washington until January then travel the country.

The black-and-white stand-alone picture from Selma's 1965 "Bloody Sunday" captures the moments before Alabama state troopers attacked more than 600 civil rights protesters, including Lewis, who was severely beaten and nearly killed.

"I thought I was so dead," said Lewis, standing in front of the picture in which white officers, armed with gas masks and batons, are poised to charge the protesters, who are standing two by two. Activist Hosea Williams, pinching his nose, stands next to Lewis.

Lewis recalled how at that very moment Williams was saying to him that they were about to be gassed. "The way he said it, I knew it was not good."

American Red Cross worker Marie Adams was not present to narrate what she endured from 1941 to 1945 in an internment camp in the Philippines. Two photographs are left to tell her story. In the first picture, from 1941, she stands erect in her nurse's uniform, strong, sturdy and smiling. Four years later, the contrast is disturbingly stark. The sleeve of her uniform hangs loosely around her skeletal arm as she helps a fellow prisoner prepare a message.

"We were hungry; we were starved," Adams would write later in a report on the conditions at the Santo Thomas camp. "When I went to bed at night, I felt just on the verge of screaming. I ached to the ends of my fingers and toes, with the most horrible ache that I have ever experienced."

Collected from troves of historical documents from the National Archives, presidential libraries and regional archives, "Eyewitness" offers perspectives on more than 20 historic moments.

In the first entry of an audio diary Lady Bird Johnson began keeping after witnessing the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, she recounts that fateful day in Dallas when she was riding in the president's motorcade.

"I cast one last look over my shoulder and saw in the president's car, a bundle of pink, just like a drift of blossoms, lying on the back seat. I think it was Mrs. Kennedy lying over the president's body," Johnson says, her voice activated with the push of a button. It is steady and eloquent, and seems to haunt the photographs of the Kennedys on display, including the one of them getting off the plane at Love Field in Dallas.

But the written word also carries its own power and poignancy across time.

Gen. Washington's 1775 letter to John Hancock discussing the rumors of British germ warfare: "there is one part of the information that I Can hardly give Credit to," he wrote. "A Sailor Says that a number of these Comeing out have been innoculated, with design of Spreading the Smallpox thro' this Country & Camp."

Though it was never known if germ warfare was conducted, Washington was especially vigilant about protecting his troops against smallpox outbreaks, including inoculating many of his men. He'd survived his own bout with the disease in his youth.

The Archives, which was shut down by the heavy rains that flooded downtown Washington on June 25-26, reopened for visitors July 15.