The Story by Judith Miller

he insisted that he was not connected—a lengthy FBI investigation reached a similar conclusion—my father shared the reflexive anticommunism pervasive in such circles. He was conservative and a patriot. His hero was Ronald Reagan, whom he knew and considered America’s greatest president.
    America meant salvation. Had my grandfather not dragged him and his five siblings out of their Russian village near Pinsk, he never tired of reminding us, the Millers would have died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, like so many of his relatives, or lived in the prison of “Communist Russia,” as the Soviet Union was known in my home.
    His childhood was an immigrant cliché. He came to America in 1905, a year old, and helped his poor father at the pushcart twelve hours a day, six days a week. My grandfather would rather die than work on the Sabbath, my father told me proudly. Americanized “Bill” had no such compunctions. He worked every day, but never finished high school.
    My mother, Mary Theresa Connolly, was my father’s polar opposite. The Connollys, my mother’s Irish-Catholic family, had immigrated to America illegally. Though my mother was born in Chicago, her entire family was deported to Canada when she was a toddler. Three years later, my grandfather got a visa to return.
    My mother and father lived the American dream. The Jewish go-getter married the pretty Irish-Catholic showgirl and lived happily ever after—until their marriage ended when I was sixteen. My father’s late nights, talent-scouting trips far from home, and entourage of gorgeous showgirls whose company he seemed to prefer to ours finally drove my mother to drink and despair.
    Until then, my younger sister, Susan, my older half brother, Jimmy, and I knew little but privilege. There were large homes with swimming pools and rose gardens, private schools and lessons of all kinds, two ill-tempered but fiercely protective dachshunds, and a nanny also imported from Germany. I could never fathom why my father, who because of the Holocaust hated all things German, wanted German dogs and hired an austere German spinster to help raise his children. He was a complicated man.
    An hour away from Las Vegas was something else that shaped my life far more than show business. The site was off-limits to most of us at the time, but living under its shadow marked me in ways I understood only later.
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    The dog had melted. The rumor raced through my first-grade class at John S. Park Elementary School in Las Vegas a few days after “Harry” was detonated at dawn at the Nevada Proving Ground, sixty-five miles northwest of my home.
    A family in Indian Springs, twenty-five miles from ground zero, had returned home after the test to find their pet a puddle of blood and bones. The government, we were told, had supposedly suppressed news of the incident.
    There probably never was a dead dog. But there were dead sheep—over four thousand, by some claims; about a quarter of the southern Utah and Nevada herds—as well as dead pigs, rabbits, cattle, and other livestock for miles southeast of the blast. Then the goats turned blue, literally.
    Just before the detonation on May 19, 1953, a strong wind altered the meteorological conditions that the US Atomic Energy Commission had mistakenly anticipated. Radioactive debris of the test spread to St. George,a tiny farming town in neighboring Utah. Rather than evacuation, which might have “alarmed” the local population, according to AEC files declassified nearly three decades later, residents were advised to “shelter in place” with their doors and windows shut until the radioactive danger “passed.” On a major freeway near the site, some forty cars registered low but above-average levels of radioactivity. The AEC instructed car owners to hose down their vehicles and themselves. Neither the unusually rainy weather nor the flu-like symptoms that some residents