most beloved image celebrating the joyous end of World War II ? It's the Alfred Eisenstaedt photo of the sailor and the nurse embracing in Times Square. Even now, more than 60 years later, that photo makes people weep with glad emotion, makes them grin with across-the-generations exultation. That photo, it is often declared, says it all. But there would be no photo of the sailor and the nurse were it not for scenes no one likes to see in photographs: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that brought the awful years of war to a close. It is perfectly explicable that we much prefer bathing ourselves in exuberant images of the first hours of peace, rather than the gruesome images of the last hours of war. One person who was in fact present during those last hours of World War II was Paul Tibbets. During the many days and evenings I spent with him during the final years of his life, there were occasions when the conversation would turn to that photo of the sailor and the nurse. Sometimes, when we were traveling together and he would be attending a military reunion, someone would approach him with a copy of the photo. Paul would never say anything. He 'd look over at me and merely raise his eyebrows, almost imperceptibly. He was n't the photographer, but Eisenstaedt would have had nothing to photograph were it not for him. He was the man -- the military aviator -- assigned