The most famous photographer you never heard of dies at 85
Go to original by Greg Mitchell, Editor & Publisher He took some of the most famous news photos of our time but, as White House photographer from Truman to Johnson, his name was usually not attached to them and he was never widely known. But when Joe O’Donnell passed away six days ago in Nashville at the age of 85, he earned obit mention. He never worked for a newspaper, but thousands of them carried his iconic photos (to name just two) of FDR, Stalin and Churchill at Yalta, and John-John Kennedy saluting his father’s casket.
O’Donnell was one of the first military photographers into Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bombings and, still haunted, he had dug out some of his old images out of storage and was using them to make an antinuclear statement. I interviewed him for the book I was writing with Robert Jay Lifton, “Hiroshima in America.”
O’Donnell told me flatly that he had long suffered from horrific medical effects that some doctors tied to radiation exposure in 1945. He described tumors, two 18” rods in his back, 12 feet of colon removed.
