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After this, there was no stopping the "professional exaggerators," as Huie calls them. NBC televised a show in which Eatherly was made out to be a football star. A Hollywood script was written in which Eatherly repents of Hiroshima at his dying mother's bedside. (Robert Ryan or Audie Murphy was considered for the part of Eatherly.) A prominent German pacifist, Gunther Anders, corresponded with Eatherly, then had the letters published in European newspapers. Communists chimed in with their own fulsome praise of this "prisoner" of the capitalists.
The Hero & The Villain. Eatherly began to enjoy the fuss that people were at last making over him, and he embellished the legend: he had passed the Texas bar; he took part in the raid on Nagasaki; the Air Force had pressured him to stop propagandizing against the atom bomb. "All over the world, I'm the Hiroshima pilot now," he told Huie in a moment of hubris. "A hundred years from now I'll be the only American anybody thinks of in connection with Hiroshima. Maybe they'll remember Truman too. Eatherly and Truman. The hero and the villain."
Huie deserves credit for destroying the Eatherly myth. But he enjoys making the kill a little too much. He browbeats poor Eatherly throughout most of the book, insinuates that Eatherly is an artful con-man who planned the whole hoax from the start. Actually, Eatherly seems more used than using. He fell into fame by chance and was exploited. Today he lives in gratifying notoriety in Galveston. Without Hiroshima, he would undoubtedly have been just one more anonymous neurotic, wishing somebody somewhere cared.