Here, under wraps, was the imposing fuselage of the Enola Gay, the famed B-29 Superfortress that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The tube was the front half of the plane that carried the bomb that killed thousands of Japanese on August 6, 1945.

A flatbed truck carried a huge tube more than fifty feet long, wrapped in what seemed to be white plastic. At about a quarter to one, under a cloud-covered moon, the reporter began, four police cars cruised down Independence Avenue, escorting what looked almost like a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. On November 23, 1994, National Public Radio’s Morning Edition informed its listeners that one of the iconic artifacts of World War II had arrived at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C.