Japanese media on Monday put the squeeze on Secretary of State John Kerry to get President Obama to visit a memorial in Hiroshima, but Kerry refused to definitively say that Obama would visit before he leaves office.
Kerry himself was at the memorial on Monday, and became the first sitting secretary of state to do so. He called the Peace Memorial Museum a “stunning” and “gut-wrenching” display that reminded him of the importance of reducing nuclear armaments.
Kerry was then asked several times about whether Obama would make the same visit when Japan hosts the G7 summit in September, a question that Kerry declined to answer directly.
“Everyone should visit Hiroshima, and ‘everyone’ means everyone,” Kerry said in reply to the first question asked by the Japanese press at a briefing in Hiroshima. “So I hope one day, the president of the United States will be among the everyone who is able to come here.”
“Whether or not he can come as president or — I don’t know,” he added. “That is subject to a very, very full and complicated schedule that the president has to plan out way ahead of time.”
The very next question was the same question: “What is the likelihood of President Obama visiting Hiroshima?”
When Kerry said he just answered that, the reporter asked Kerry to estimate what percent chance Obama has of showing up.
“I wish I could give you a percentage,” Kerry said. “I can’t give you a percentage. Not because I won’t, I don’t know.”
Kerry did promise, however, to tell Obama “what I saw here and how important it is at some point to try to get here.”
In a separate interview with TV Asahi, Kerry was again asked the same question.
“I think and hope that the next step will be President Obama’s visit to Hiroshima. Do you think it’s possible?” the reporter asked.
But Kerry largely repeated his answer. “They’re working out his schedule yet,” Kerry said.
The U.S. team couldn’t escape the question in a background briefing given Monday by a senior State Department official.
In that briefing, the official said Obama has said he’d be honored to be the first U.S. president to visit Hiroshima since the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on that city in 1945. But the official added, “That’s different … whether or not he will come,” and said that’s a decision the White House still has to make.
“And it’s a decision that I don’t think has been made,” the official added.
