In the wake of that decision I resigned as the museum's director and left the Smithsonian. Michael Heyman, in office only four months at the time, scrapped the exhibit as requested, and promised to personally oversee a new display devoid of any historic context. The Institution's chief executive, Smithsonian Secretary I. The Smithsonian tnstitution, of which the National Air and Space Museum is a part, is heavily dependent on congressional funding. Fifty years later, the National Air and Space Museum was in the final stages of preparing an exhibition on the Enola Gay's historic mission when eighty-one members of Congress angrily demanded cancellation of the planned display and the resignation or dismissal of the museum's director. Tibbets died at his Columbus home, said Gerry Newhouse, a longtime friend. He was 92 and insisted almost to his dying day that he had no regrets about the mission and slept just fine at night. World War II was over and a nuclear arms race had begun. COLUMBUS, Ohio - Paul Tibbets, who piloted the B-29 bomber Enola Gay that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, died Thursday. His mother, the former Enola Gay Haggard, grew up on an Iowa farm and. No war had ever seen such instant devastation. His father was a salesman in a family grocery business. There it exploded, destroying Hiroshima and eighty thousand of her citizens. For forty three seconds, the world's first atomic bomb plunged through six miles of clear air to its preset detonation altitude. At 8:15 A.M., August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay released her load.
