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Tue Jun 5, 2007 1:40 pm (PST)
Copyright Boston Globe Newspaper Feb 1, 1987
Quoted material is excerpted from Alone, by Richard Byrd.
Copyright (C) 1938 by Richard E. Byrd, renewed (C) 1966 by Marie A. Byrd. Used by permission of Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc., Los Angeles.
For more than a year, researchers at Ohio State University's Institute of Polar Studies have been patiently sifting through 500 boxes of records, documents, correspondence, memorabilia, scrapbooks, photographs, and trash that make up a remarkable scholarly treasure trove. They are looking, these devoted academics, for a lost explorer. They are searching for Rear Adm. Richard Evelyn Byrd, pioneer aviator and polar pathfinder, Virginia aristocrat and adopted Boston Brahmin, household name and private man. Half-forgotten today, 30 years after his death, Byrd in his lifetime was widely known as "the admiral of the ends of the Earth," the first person to fly over both the South and North poles, one of the most famous and lauded men in America. But even at the height of his fame, roughly from the mid-1920s through the 1940s, when only Charles Lindbergh surpassed him in popular appeal, Byrd was an elusive figure, hugely visible but with most of his feelings and motivations well hidden. Familiar to millions, he was truly known by very few.
Byrd was capable of inspiring both admiration and hatred. To all appearances an honorable and selfless officer and a dedicated scientific pioneer, he seemed the epitome of noblesse oblige. But some who knew him well charge that he was an egotistical and ruthless man who took credit for the achievements of others and used fraud and deception to further his ends. The most serious of these allegations is that his historic first flight over the North Pole, in 1926, the feat that made him an instant national hero and launched his career as an explorer, was faked. According to his detractors, Byrd knowingly turned back well short of the pole.
Because of disagreements within Byrd's family over the final disposition of the estate, for nearly 30 years his papers gathered dust or moldered in the scattered attics, warehouses, bank vaults, and basements where they had been stored. Over the decades many documents were lost or mislaid, others were damaged by dampness or mishandling. Protective of his memory, family members denied would-be biographers access to Byrd's journals, personal papers, and expedition records -- the scholarly materials needed to flesh out the skeleton of his historical reputation.
The result was that few books and articles were written about Byrd in the years immediately following his death, when they would have had the largest and most eager readership. What was written, with a few controversial exceptions, was based on published material, shed little light on the man or his career, and attracted little attention. One biographer, Edwin P. Hoyt, author of The Last Explorer: The Adventures of Admiral Byrd, published in 1968, acknowledged in his preface, "This book was written from the public record by and large, and it shares the faults of all books so prepared: it cannot be definitive as to individual decisions because not all the facts are known." He wrote that Byrd's "immense reserve and the care he took in public relations have left us with something of a stick figure with which to conjure."
One of the admiral's ancestors founded Richmond, Virginia, and the Byrds are still among the state's oldest and most influential families. The family has long been powerful politically. Harry Byrd, Richard's brother, and Harry's son, Harry Jr., were both US senators from the Old Dominion. Harry Byrd Sr. was one of the most powerful men in the US Senate in the 1930s and '40s and was for many years chairman of the Armed Services Appropriations Committee -- a position in which he could be of considerable assistance to his brother.
Richard E. Byrd was born in Winchester, Virginia, on October 25, 1888, and went to the Shenandoah Valley Military Academy, the University of Virginia, and Annapolis. He was adventurous even as a boy, traveling unaccompanied around the world to visit family friends in the Philippines at the age of 12. In 1915, while still an ensign, Byrd married Marie Ames, a descendant of two Mayflower passengers and a member of the well-to-do and influential Ames family of Massachusetts. They adopted Boston as their permanent home. The couple had four children, a son and three daughters. The son, Richard E. Byrd Jr., followed his father into the Navy for a time, rising to the rank of commander, and took part in one post-World War II Antarctic expedition. He later married a daughter of Leverett Saltonstall, the longtime Republican senator from Massachusetts.
In 1916, only four years after he graduated from Annapolis, Richard Byrd retired from the Navy because of a leg injury he had received at sea that made it impossible for him to stand watch. However, he went on and off active duty pretty much at will for most of his life. He became a naval aviator in World War I and began his polar career as commander of the small aviation detachment of Cmdr. Donald MacMillan's 1924 Arctic expedition. Because he was a retired officer, all of his promotions from lieutenant to rear admiral required an act of Congress.
Like his famous flights and expeditions, Adm. Byrd's departure from life seemed almost deliberately timed to attract maximum publicity, but it was also dignified. He died at the age of 68 on March 11, 1957, in his Beacon Hill townhouse, shortly after being awarded the Medal of Freedom, virtually the only national honor he had not already received. By graceful coincidence, the day the history-making aviator died was the same day that a jet airliner flew nonstop coast-to-coast for the first time.
The obituaries and editorials that followed Byrd's death were uniformly laudatory, none even hinting at the whispered rumors and charges that clouded his final years. The New York Times, which like the Globe and virtually all other US newspapers announced Byrd's death on the front page, did go so far as to suggest to its readers that Byrd might have been a more complex figure than the smiling man in a fur parka whom newspaper photos, magazine articles, newsreels, radio programs, and the lecture platform had made almost boringly familiar to two generations of Americans.
"Such men are not easy characters," the Times observed. "They burn with a bright flame. They go their way alone, partly because they stand on a narrow summit. They do not belong to friends or even, in a certain sense, to their families. They are men of the world, the sort of men who carry the world forward, who open horizons . . . who make a mark on history's page that cannot be erased. Richard Evelyn Byrd was such a man."
A few memorials were erected after Byrd's death, including a statue in Washington, D.C., and a cairn in Christchurch, New Zealand, the jumping-off point of his Antarctic expeditions. But a museum to enshrine his memory and perhaps guarantee his place in the pantheon of American heroes, a tribute one would have expected almost automatically, did not materialize.
In 1966, eight years before her own death, Byrd's wife, Marie, established the Admiral Byrd Foundation and willed to it the Byrd home at 9 Brimmer Street, on the fashionable "flat" of Beacon Hill, apparently intending the house to be used as a museum or foundation headquarters. However, she made no clear distinction between the admiral's personal papers and the family's papers, and she established only a modest trust fund, reportedly about $30,000, to finance the foundation.
Her will stipulated that the estate was to be divided in equal shares among her four children. But the Byrd heirs were unable to agree on what constituted an equitable distribution, resulting in what one family friend called "a legal quagmire." More than 12 years after Marie Byrd's death, her estate is still unsettled.
The admiral's son, Richard Jr., served as head of the foundation until 1979, when at the behest of the state attorney general's office the Board of Trustees was expanded to include three nonfamily members, and one of them became chairman. Described as frail and reclusive by those who know him, Richard Jr. is reportedly completely devoted to keeping alive the memory of his father, whom he always refers to as "the admiral." Until the Brimmer Street house, which physically deteriorated after Marie Byrd's death, was sold by the new foundation board in 1984, Richard Byrd Jr. lived alone in it, surrounded by an ever-increasing accumulation of papers and memorabilia. When the property changed hands, many of these records and documents were put in temporary storage or were given to family friends for safekeeping. Some were mislaid or lost.
The legal logjam was finally broken in 1985, when the trustees voted to sell all the papers in the foundation's possession to the Institute of Polar Studies at Ohio State University, for the sum of $155,000. The institute, which was founded in 1960, is the only US study center devoted to interdisciplinary research on both polar and polarlike regions. It will eventually house the papers in a polar research center, which is to be named for Byrd and which will include a museum devoted to his polar explorations. Proceeds from the sale of the papers, along with existing assets of the foundation ($417,000, largely derived from the sale of the Brimmer Street home), were given to Ohio State to establish a research fellowship at the institute as a living memorial to the admiral and his wife.
Adm. Byrd himself was fastidious, so it is ironic that many of the most useful scholarly clues to the mysteries of his life -- that is, the most personal and revealing documents such as journals and letters -- were among the moldering contents of several plastic garbage bags, part of the material widely dispersed when the Brimmer Street house was sold.
Peter Anderson, assistant director of the Institute of Polar Studies, calls the acquisition of the Byrd papers "a real coup." Says Anderson, "Byrd is like a grandfather for us doing polar research now. It is a shame that the country hasn't had a suitable memorial to him." The most valuable documents in the Byrd collection, Anderson says, were found in the basement of a Newton house, where they were about to be thrown out as trash.
"The stuff in the trash bags was really gold," agrees Kenneth Rendell, a documents dealer who appraised the Byrd papers for the foundation. "Most of the other material was mechanical files with no sense of the man. Everything personal was literally in trash bags or Star Market bags. It was badly damp- stained -- it couldn't have been much worse if it was kept underwater. A couple of more years, and it probably would have been lost."
With the help of this new material, it is now possible to begin to assess Adm. Byrd's true importance. Although he cultivated a traditional appearance and was often photographed in a fur suit and with sled dogs, he was a transitional figure, the first winged explorer who linked the heroic age of private polar exploration with the highly institutionalized one of modern-day space exploration.
One of the last explorers to make use of sled dogs, he is also considered the father of the Antarctic Treaty, under which 12 nations conduct scientific research in a demilitarized Antarctic. (This agreement is considered the likely model for a future space treaty, if one is developed.) "The American presence in Antarctica is probably Byrd's greatest achievement, " Anderson says. "If it wasn't for him, we might not be there now."
When not on an expedition or publicity tour, Byrd lived quietly but rather grandly. He had two townhouses on Brimmer Street, one a family residence, the other used as an office and planning center not only for his expeditions but for the massive fund-raising campaigns required to finance them. "When he was at home, he was a family man," recalls his daughter Katharine Byrd Breyer, who now lives in Los Angeles. "He didn't talk much about his exploring and adventures," she says. "He was a wonderful father and made life fun and interesting and exciting for us. . . . He greatly enjoyed going on picnics and hikes in Maine and being by ourselves and not hassled by anyone. . . . Of course, people didn't think of Adm. Byrd as having fun."
When at home, Byrd kept a yacht in the Charles River, and the family summered at its 1,300-acre estate, called Wickyup, on Tunk Lake in Sullivan, Maine. "That was mother and father's hideaway," says Breyer. "They felt that they could be themselves there."
With considerable assistance from ghost writers, Byrd wrote four books in the Wickyup lodge library. They were Skyward (1928), an account of the early flights over both the North and South poles and across the Atlantic that first made him a national hero; Little America (1930), a description of his first Antarctic expedition; Discovery (1935), about the second expedition; and Alone (1938). All the books were popular, but Alone, the story of the five harrowing months he spent in 1934 as sole occupant of an isolated weather station -- a 12-by-9-foot wooden hut buried beneath the snows of the Antarctic ice cap -- was a bestseller, a classic personal adventure narrative that remains in print.
The feat was controversial for an expedition leader, and dangerous; Byrd had several brushes with death. In Alone, he described the time he was caught in the open during a blizzard, when the door of the hatch leading to his hut jammed. "Panic took me then, I must confess. Reason fled. I clawed at the three-foot square of timber like a madman. I beat on it with my fists trying to shake the snow loose; and when that did no good, I lay flat on my belly and pulled until my hands went weak from cold and weariness. Then I crooked my elbow, put my face down and said over and over again: You damn fool, you damn fool. . . . Just two feet below was sanctuary -- warmth, food and all the means of survival. All these things were an arm's length away, but I was powerless to reach them. . . ." Byrd was finally able to force the hatch.
Byrd had an instinctive feeling for public relations and was a shrewd self- promoter as well as an inspired fund-raiser. Like Lindbergh, he had a matinee idol's good looks, but unlike the "Lone Eagle," Byrd did not shun the limelight. His ability to raise millions of dollars to finance his expeditions in the middle of the Depression -- not only from wealthy friends such as Edsel Ford, Col. Jacob Ruppert, and John D. Rockefeller, but also from thousands of ordinary, financially hard-pressed Americans -- was regarded with awe by his contemporaries.
Sometimes his fund-raising astonished America, as when he did Grape Nuts breakfast cereal commercials in radio broadcasts from Little America, his Antarctic base. The impact was similar to the sensation Neil Armstrong would have created if he had done a Special K commercial from the moon. The announcer for the Grape Nuts programs was Charles J. V.Murphy, a CBS broadcaster and associate of Byrd. Murphy, who later became an editor of Fortune magazine, was the ghost writer for Little America, Discovery, and Alone and was also the author of an admiring, almost hagiographical biography called Struggle: The Life and Exploits of Commander Richard E. Byrd.
Byrd also sold the right to report on his early expeditions. The New York Times, for instance, paid $175,000 for exclusive coverage of the first Antarctic expedition, in 1928-29. On that expedition, Byrd and his party became the first to fly over the South Pole, and he named a vast Antarctic region Marie Byrd Land, in honor of his wife. Byrd personally edited the dispatches of New York Times reporter Russell Owens, blue-penciling things he didn't like, rewriting paragraphs, and inserting new material. Not surprisingly, the picture of Byrd that emerged from the accounts of the expedition published in the Times was as warm, likable, unselfish, and heroic as that projected by his books and Murphy's biography.
In fact, Byrd was a remarkable organizer and an able leader, but some subordinates also found him arbitrary and insensitive to their feelings. These are not especially surprising qualities in a heavily burdened commander of upper-class and career-naval background, but they were at odds with the public perception of Byrd as "Dicky Byrd," the unpretentious all-American hero.
Byrd was not a hands-on explorer. Although he pioneered the use of new navigational instruments such as the bubble sextant, he seems to have been an indifferent navigator, and on all his record-breaking flights someone else did the actual flying. Although athletic in his youth, Byrd was also not much of an outdoorsman: He couldn't ski and never drove a dog sled, facts that dismayed and even outraged some of his fellow polar explorers.
"I had expected to find a rugged outdoors man, the type who would eat raw meat, drink seal blood and sleep in an igloo," Finn Ronne, a dog handler in Byrd's 1934 Antarctic expedition, wrote later. "I was soon disillusioned. Well-mannered, nattily dressed in naval aviator's green uniform with leather leggings, smooth shaven and with manicured fingernails, Byrd was a man of slight build with Erroll Flynn looks."
A tough Norwegian, Ronne went on to become a US Navy captain and to lead the last private expedition to Antarctica in 1946. He was associated with Byrd in various Antarctic ventures for more than 20 years and both envied and disliked him. Ronne's rather ill-natured autobiography, Antarctica, My Destiny, in which he evened a number of scores with fellow explorers (grievances born and nurtured in the long Antarctic night), contains many anecdotes meant to demonstrate Byrd's insensitivity and highhandedness.
Ronne was convinced that Byrd did not fly over the North Pole in 1926. He claimed that Isaiah Bowman, director of the New York Geographical Society, had told him -- after extracting a promise of secrecy -- that the admiral once broke down and confessed that he had missed the pole by 150 miles.
Bernt Balchen, another Norwegian long associated with Byrd (he was pilot on both Byrd's 1927 trans-Atlantic flight and the South Pole flight of 1929), also thought Byrd failed to reach the North Pole. Balchen's doubts, however, were based on firsthand observations and information.
A Norwegian naval air force officer at the time, Balchen was also present at Kings Bay, on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, when Byrd and Floyd Bennett, the former US Navy petty officer who actually piloted the plane, took off for the North Pole on May 9, 1926. They flew a Dutch-built Fokker trimotor named the Josephine Ford, after Edsel Ford's daughter. According to the manufacturer, the plane was capable of speeds of more than 102 m.p.h.
Fifteen-and- a-half hours after takeoff, Byrd returned to Spitsbergen and announced triumphantly that for the first time the North Pole had been reached by air. His claim was unquestioned, and he and Bennett were given a tremendous reception when they returned to the United States. Shortly afterward they were awarded the Medal of Honor by Congress. (Bennett's citation described him as Byrd's mechanic.)
The following year, Bennett and Balchen, who had become a Fokker company test pilot, flew the Josephine Ford on a promotional circuit of the United States. Based on the performance data acquired during the 8,000-mile tour, Balchen concluded that on the North Pole flight the Josephine Ford -- which had carried a maximum fuel load, was equipped with fixed skis that would have slowed it down considerably, and had developed an in-flight oil leak -- couldn't have averaged a speed of much more than 75 m.p.h. This being true, it would have been impossible for the plane to make the 1,550-mile round-trip flight between Kings Bay and the North Pole in only 15 1/2 hours.
According to Balchen, Bennett -- a self-effacing man in awe of Byrd -- finally acknowledged that the Josephine Ford failed to reach the Pole. In the original version of his autobiography, Balchen recalled Bennett's saying, "We were just north of Spitsbergen when the commander discovered that oil leak. . . .
We flew back and forth for a while and the leak stopped . . . but he finally ordered me to fly back and forth and this is what we did until he told me to return to Kings Bay. We flew back and forth for 14 hours." Balchen claimed Bennett would volunteer no more information, and Bennett died two years after the North Pole flight.
Peter Anderson of the Institute of Polar Studies has been working on a biography of Byrd for the past 14 years, a task that for so long was hampered by lack of access to Byrd's personal papers. Anderson thinks it unlikely that Byrd faked the polar flight. "I don't know if he actually reached the North Pole," Anderson says, "and I don't know if he knew. Finding one spot in the Arctic is extremely difficult. But I put no credence in the charge that he just stooged around in the air -- that would be completely inconsistent with his character." Anderson doesn't deny that there are questions about the flight. The institute, he says, is "trying to see if there is a paper trail that will answer them."
After Bennett died of pneumonia in 1928, the plane used in Byrd's South Pole flight was named for him. Balchen did not make Bennett's confession nor his own flight data public during Byrd's lifetime, nor did he confront Byrd, but he did tell associates about the confession and the data. The rumor that Byrd's conquest of the North Pole was a fraud was quickly picked up by the pilots' and explorers' grapevines.
During World War II, as a US Air Force colonel, Balchen became a near- legend for his many rescues of downed air crews from the Greenland ice cap. He was six times proposed for promotion to general but was always turned down and was also denied the Medal of Honor, rejections he attributed to the influence of Sen. Harry Byrd Sr.
Balchen's autobiography, Come North with Me, published in 1958, was to have contained his opinion of the North Pole flight, a description of Bennett's confession, and a number of discrediting recollections about Byrd. Among the latter, Balchen alleged that Byrd was drunk during the South Pole flight and that he had faked a navigational chart in order to take credit for the discovery of Marie Byrd Land, which, Balchen wrote, had actually been found by two Navy pilots attached to the expedition on a routine reconnaissance flight.
According to one writer, publication of the book was halted after 4,000 copies had been printed, because of objections by the Byrd family. It was eventually republished in an expurgated version that contained only mild criticism of the admiral. However, the censored portions were later printed in full as an appendix to Oceans, Poles and Airmen, an account of the first oceanic and polar flights, written by Richard Montague, a veteran newspaperman who had covered many of the flights, including some by Byrd. Montague wrote admiringly of Balchen, whom he had interviewed extensively, and critically of Byrd. In his book he concluded, "That Byrd's claim to have reached the Pole was a fraud seems clear beyond any reasonable doubt. In fact, it seems to have been the most successful fraud in the history of polar exploration. "
Montague's charge attracted considerable attention, although it did not create the sensation it would have even a decade earlier. The luster of Byrd's reputation noticeably dimmed. His Encyclopaedia Britannica entry, for instance, was rewritten to include the fact that now "grave doubts were cast" on his claim to have reached the North Pole. Others have since mustered additional scientific and technical evidence supporting Balchen's allegation and Montague's conclusion.
Byrd also has his supporters, such as Anderson, who acknowledge that he was an aloof and sometimes difficult person but point out that he was also extremely courageous. They note that he was cited by the Navy 20 times for bravery and outstanding conduct, and they say Byrd's keen sense of family and personal honor made him incapable of deception or dishonorable conduct. "I knew Bernt Balchen, and he never told me that Dick Byrd didn't fly to the North Pole," says Bradford Washburn, honorary director of the Boston Museum of Science and a trustee of the Byrd Foundation. "I plain just don't know if he reached the pole or not. The navigation is complex," says Washburn, "but there is no question in my mind that Adm. Byrd thought that he got to it."
The Polar Institute researchers are also looking for clues to perhaps the most puzzling of the Byrd mysteries: Why he chose to abandon his post as leader of the second Antarctic expedition in 1934, in violation of standing naval practice and polar exploration tradition, to man an advance weather base, the experience he later described in Alone. Staying at the weather station was the sort of humble job normally assigned to a junior expedition member, and while the public regarded the feat as heroic, Byrd's explorer peers considered it a shockingly irresponsible publicity stunt.
Charles Murphy, Byrd's former ghost writer and a close associate on the 1934 expedition who is now 82 and living in Vermont, says the explanation is simple. "He wanted the experience," recalls Murphy. "There was no more South Pole to fly over for the first time. . . . There was a scientific justification, but it was fairly shallow. Principally, it was the experience."
At the station, Byrd was sickened nearly to death by carbon monoxide leaking from a faulty stove, and he was rescued by a team sent out from Little America when expedition members were alarmed by his incoherent radio messages. His health problems were apparently compounded by malnourishment: It was apparent that the admiral, who had been waited on by servants and Navy stewards all his life, couldn't cook. (When word of this got out, Oscar of the Waldorf, then the most famous chef in America, cabled instructions on scrambling eggs.)
"He failed pathetically at roughing it," wrote Ronne, one of the expedition members who came to Byrd's aid. Nonetheless, Alone is a gripping, very personal book. Although Murphy helped write Alone, it was largely based on Byrd diaries. "This is the book with the most 'him' in it," says Anderson. "He tried to cut down on Murphy's style and use his own."
While Byrd was in absolute command of the first two privately funded expeditions to Antarctica in 1928 and 1934, he was only nominally the commander of the three later expeditions to the Little America base in 1939, 1946, and 1955. Far larger and more ambitious than the first two expeditions, the later ones were run by the Navy: The age of private exploration was ending. After World War II, in which Byrd served as an aviation adviser, he was the largely honorary head of Operation High Jump -- the mapping of Antarctica -- and was designated senior officer in charge of Antarctic programs.
But in fact, Byrd's influence over Antarctic operations waned gradually, and his role became increasingly advisory. He never fully recovered physically from his experience on the ice cap. "It was a sad life after the winter of 1934, and it seemed to run steadily downhill," biographer Hoyt wrote. The rumors about the North Pole flight had circulated widely in Navy circles, as had the charge that Byrd stole credit for the discovery of Marie Byrd Land from other naval officers. Men who had once chafed under his command rose to become the new generation of polar explorers.
In 1955 one of the new breed, the captain of the ship carrying Byrd on the fifth expedition to Little America -- of which as director of US polar expeditions he was supposedly in overall command -- pointedly ignored rank and assigned him to a cramped cabin usually given to the most junior officer on board.
Surprisingly, Byrd did not complain about this insulting violation of naval protocol. This seemingly uncharacteristic tolerance may have been the result of a revelation produced by his lonely polar ordeal. "So, I say in conclusion: A man doesn't attain wisdom until he realizes that he is not indispensable, " Byrd wrote in Alone. Two years after the shipboard snub, Byrd was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery.
Fashions in heroes have changed, as has our practice of having heroes, or at least revering them, a result perhaps of World War II, when heroism became a tragically common commodity. The immensity of Byrd's fame and personal popularity and the role he played in defining our national self-image become harder to comprehend each year. Polar explorers such as Robert E. Peary, Roald Amundsen, Fridtjof Nansen, Robert F. Scott, and Byrd were the celebrities of their day. Today our astronauts are also celebrities, but they are essentially organization men and women.
The great explorers were much more: larger-than- life individualists who seemed to exemplify the best of national virtues. Their pedestals are empty now; it's doubtful that they will ever be filled again. Byrd may or may not have been "The Last Explorer," as biographer Hoyt claimed, but in a profound sense he was probably one of the last American heroes.
