SESSIONII 65 treatment, and so forth. the press. EISENBUD: DUNHAM: But this was the way it was played up in I got samples of urine and blood, for example. Surely. EISENBUD: Well, we made a considerable amount of progress in the first week. [had set up a sort of formal organization for investigating this. There was a Japanese committee established and Moston and I were invited to all the meetings, and then something happened which was heartbreaking and which is a matter of public record, Of course, the American press at that time was very much involwed, There was a furor at home. So, it was decided that the President woula go on television and make a statement to the public. He did this with Admiral Strauss and there were two things in that statement which were very offensive to the Japanese and that causvd things to deteriorate so far as Morton and myself were concerned, One was the statement that the burns that the men had—if I'm not giving this in correct context, Chuck, say so—were not due to radiation but were due to lye produced when the coral was calcined in the fireball and then fell out on the fishermen. DUNHAM: I can remember when this hitus. We were at Kwajalein, I could see the expression on Cronkite's* face when he read this. EISENBUD: edge... Yes. FREMONT-SMITH: EISENBUD: thought it did. This hit the Japanese papers with the full knowl- Where did the idea coms from’ It certainly didn't come from me, but everybodyelse CONARD: The faliout material was indeed caustic, though this did not cause the “beta burns" that later developec, FREMONT-SMITH: You just made a nice excuse. * Commander Eugene P. Cronkite, of the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, was in charge of the medical team. ,