O'Donnell, Joe, 1922-2007

Photographer. For over twenty years he was the official White House photographer. He served during the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. O'Donnell was one of the first photographers to capture the devastation after atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in September 1945. His many historic images included, the meeting of President Truman and General Douglas MacArthur on Wake Island during the Korean War, John F. Kennedy's funeral procession. His best selling book, "Japan 1945: A U.S. Marine's Photographs From Ground Zero" was published in 1995.

<p>Joseph "Joe" Roger O'Donnell (May 7, 1922 – August 9, 2007) was an American documentarian, photojournalist and a photographer for the United States Information Agency.</p>

<p>Born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, his most famous work was documenting photographically the immediate aftermath of the atomic bomb explosions at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945 and 1946 as a Marine photographer.</p>

<p>A controversy followed the printing of his obituary in the press. Some of the photographs that had been attributed to O'Donnell were actually shot by other photographers. A photograph of a saluting John F. Kennedy Jr. during the funeral for his father in 1963 was taken by Stan Stearns for United Press International, not by O'Donnell. O'Donnell also claimed credit for a photograph showing Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill during a wartime meeting in Tehran, Iran, in 1943, but O'Donnell is not known to have been in Tehran at the time.</p>

<p>O'Donnell's son Tyge O'Donnell attributes some of the instances of his father's taking credit for others' work to the onset of dementia in the 1990s.</p>

<p>He died in Nashville, Tennessee.</p>

<p>LEWIS LORD lit his daily cigar and settled in with The New York Times on his deck in Falls Church, Va. As he went through the newspaper, his eye fell on a familiar photograph — 3-year-old John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father’s coffin. The image accompanied the obituary of Joe O’Donnell, “a longtime White House photographer” who supposedly took that and other famous pictures.</p>

<p>Lord, 70, thought something was wrong. Only a day or two before, he had been sorting through the memorabilia of a 52-year career in journalism and had come across an old United Press International sales brochure from November 1963, depicting U.P.I.’s accomplishments in covering the assassination and funeral of President Kennedy. The brochure featured a U.P.I. photo by Stanley Stearns — the same picture Lord was now looking at in The Times.</p>

<p>He went upstairs and fired off e-mail to Gary Haynes of Oregon, Ill., a fellow U.P.I. alumnus and a former picture editor at The Times. Haynes contacted Tom Bodkin, an assistant managing editor at The Times, and said the newspaper might have taken the wrong picture from its files to illustrate O’Donnell’s obit.</p>

<p>The truth was worse and much more painful. The Times — like the Associated Press, Time magazine, CBS News, The Tennessean in O’Donnell’s hometown of Nashville and other news organizations — had been taken in by a man who for years had inflated his life story.</p>