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A Foreword of Forewarning
This is not a biography of Amelia Earhart. This is, in its way, a biography of the mystery of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance. Biography is not “my thing.” Learning how the lives of individuals came and clashed together and influenced, whether intentionally or by accident, the great events of their time is enjoyable and fascinating, and we would be foolish not to study them in relation to the events with which they were crucial. But a 3 inch thick “life of Napoleon” would kill me, and I think for those who follow Amelia Earhart’s life another thick biography is not necessary.
Mystery is my thing. To pursue and crack a captivating thriller! Thus the disappearance of Amelia Earhart rather than her life has drawn me to the case.
The life of AE, as she liked to be called, insofar as she influenced aviation and insofar as she rose to unique fame in her time, must be presented first for that which follows to make any sense. Her charisma and daring captivated a world and made her a fascinating symbol of progress. The sudden and unexpected snuffing out of such a luminary created much speculation and theory about exactly what happened to her. It is not tragedy that holds our attention today. It is mystery. Disappearance is different than destruction. It is to enter limbo, to forever remain alive but unapproachable. Her freckled, tomboyish face did not age before the camera. Her voice did not become shaky and quiver. She remains with us today, fresh, alive, frozen in her final smile and wave to those who adored her.
Perhaps I am the best one qualified to encapsulate the life of AE as it leads up to and motivates her final flight. You see, I’m an agnostic. I am neither a critic nor a fan of Amelia Earhart. I am not going to see her through rose-tinted spectacles. Nor do I have the need to denigrate an icon.
Today it is said frequently that Amelia Earhart was a second rate pilot who owed all she had to the machinations of the first true über-promotor, her publishing magnate husband George Palmer Putnam. She was thus just an early “reality star,” a fizzy lemonade, all belch and no body.
On the contrary, no mystery can hold us in and of itself; that Amelia Earhart’s disappearance is still one of the greatest riddles in the annals of the 20th century tells us how this individual stands apart. Legends do not develop from the mundane. Folklore does not sprout from daily routines. AE was unique. She entered the public eye as a symbol. The actual AE the nation did not see, and probably would not have even if it had been apparent. Even male members of her lecture audiences seemed to handily tune out her feminist messages and enjoy a spunky, adventurous “tomboy.” She did things for “Fun!” A struggling nation wasn’t envious. It was enthralled.
Depression held the nation in its grip. With her blushing smile and unassuming manner Amelia Earhart was in her way an adult Shirley Temple. Mix with this the witty, self-effacing humor of Will Rogers, her image as a pioneer in an era that sought heroes, and her unmistakable resemblance to Charles Lindbergh— a powerful combination. AE projected qualities of innocence, adventure, humility— a “good girl” with “Modern” ideas. This was refreshing compared to the dissolute “flappers” of the time who comprised the “Moderns.” The sudden disappearance of such a person like this, on July 2, 1937, while on a much publicized ’round the world flight, was shocking.
Then and now no one could believe that the disappearance of such a pilot could be chalked up to running out of gas and going down at sea. Shortwave enthusiasts picked up messages days after she vanished. The nation believed she had initially survived on a desert island. Then the search was called off. The messages were declared a hoax. She faded from the front page with a question mark rather than a period.
Despite all of AE’s fame, it was not up to the events that followed— World War II, the atomic bomb, the bleak reality of the Cold War and potential global destruction. Amelia Earhart’s freckled cheeks and quest for “Fun!” must have seemed horribly naïve, even obsolete. AE’s memory essentially faded away for 20 years.
When her image returned, it was more than past glory that held us to her memory. It was more than mystery. Both were essential, but there was something more. Josephine Akiyama had just gained national notoriety for claiming that as a child on Saipan she had seen a white woman pilot executed by the occupying Japanese. She insisted it had been back in 1937, the year in which Earhart had vanished.
Captain Paul Briand, of the Air Force Academy, was the first to write a biography of Earhart (Daughter of the Sky, 1959). It was a largely glorifying work that he then capped off with the sensational finish provided by Akiyama’s story.
The nation was intrigued by the new scenario. AE’s past glory had ended with an heroic death. This scenario also included the formal execution of her navigator, Fred Noonan, who was the only crew on her famous last flight. In a very real sense, both were promoted as the very first American victims of World War II.
After Briand there were many who searched for the truth of Earhart’s fate. The Air Force even had an unofficial Operation Earhart. Each encountered something that Briand knew well existed but avoided mentioning in his book. A “conspiracy of silence” surrounded AE amongst her closest surviving friends and family. None would speak. None would clarify anything. Instead snippets of hearsay came from many quarters. We’ve heard stories of a secret government spy mission, of things gone terribly awry in flight, of Japanese internment; cover up, of course; conspiracy, a must. But those who championed the new cause misinterpreted that intriguing “conspiracy of silence.”
Soon after AE’s disappearance, rumors had quickly spread throughout Washington politicos that Earhart had been raped and brutalized by 4 Gilbertese island natives. As this was happening, Fred Noonan’s leg was being roasted over a pit. Her end was the same— “Long Pig.” The story had surfaced one month after she had vanished and it originated with Wilbur Rothar, a man who claimed to have been a sailor who witnessed it when his ship passed the desert island. He tried to extort $2,000 dollars out of GP Putnam, Amelia’s husband, under the pretense he had rescued Amelia and had her stashed in Jersey. GP, as he was always called, quickly helped the FBI bait Rothar into a meeting where he was captured. The newspapers quickly declared it had been a hoax. It wasn’t long before Rothar was declared insane by the Court of General Sessions Lunacy Commission in New York.
Yet behind the scenes versions of the story continued to circulate and influence. Henry Morgenthau, Secretary of the Treasury (which oversaw the Coast Guard that had searched for AE), believed there was some truth to it and even hesitantly told the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, Amelia’s friend and admirer.
It is understandable that none of AE’s friends should wish the story to become known. But the question is, how long did any of them, including FDR, the President, and the First Lady, believe it? This depends on how much they were told as opposed to how much I was able to uncover.
However, it is undeniable that for years many believed there was truth behind the Rothar story. This belief is captured in one rare moment during a meeting in May 1938 between Henry Morgenthau and members of his Treasury cabinet. The official meeting minutes continued to be taken while Morgenthau responded to a telephone call on behalf of Eleanor Roosevelt, requesting the report on Amelia Earhart’s disappearance for Paul Mantz, Earhart’s close friend. Morgenthau balked. He didn’t want to do it. There were a lot of reasons, but then he came down to it. “And we have the report of all those wireless messages and everything else, what that woman – happened to her the last few minutes. I hope I’ve just got to never make it public . . . I mean what happened. It isn’t a very nice story.” He later turned to Gibbons (another member present). “You know the story, don’t you?” Gibbons replied: “We have evidence that the thing is all over, sure. Terrible. It would be awful to make it public.”
Several reasons existed for contemporaries in-the-know to have believed in parts of the lurid story. How did madman Rothar know that AE wore athletic shorts? The question comes from nowhere unless you are familiar with two significant points in the convoluted story. And, fortunately, the report of athletic shorts was one point that the public did have. Even the New York Times reported that the crew of Rothar’s ship sighted Earhart on an island wearing only “athletic shorts.” The other point is that no one but Gene Vidal, close friend of GP and AE, knew that Earhart wore his jockey shorts. This proves a curious snippet for a stranger to have. It was also something that wasn’t public knowledge for decades.
So far as it had been contemporarily known, GP had been intimately involved in helping the FBI bait Rothar to come out of hiding. This resulted in his arrest, charge with extortion, and his ensconcing in an insane asylum without trial. Consequently, it is safe to assume that GP knew far more than anybody else about the details of Rothar’s story, most of which never appeared in the newspapers. As a proficient promotor, he no doubt released only what he wanted to AE’s circle of friends. Why would he not have laid this story completely to rest? Had he found out about a possible dalliance between AE and Gene Vidal and never clarified anything to Vidal thereafter, leaving him to believe AE suffered a terrible fate at the hands of libidinous Gilbertese? Morgenthau and many others in Washington were undoubtedly aware of the Rothar story through Vidal, Director of Air Commerce, or his associates. “Now, I’ve been given a verbal report,” declared Morgenthau to The First Lady’s secretary. “If we’re going to release this, it’s just going to smear the whole reputation of Amelia Earhart . . .”
There it ended, so it seemed, and so perhaps many wished that it would.
Then over 20 years later, rummaging for what would become his groundbreaking book, Captain Briand would encounter the “conspiracy of silence,” as he himself would then refer to it in confidence to Major Joe Gervais, a founding member of Operation Earhart. It was most noticeable in AE’s closest circle of still-surviving friends— her sister Muriel Morrissey, her mother Amy Otis, Paul Mantz, Jackie Cochran, Floyd Odlum, and Clyde Holly. Silence over what? Briand didn’t know. By 1959 Rothar and his story were long forgotten footnotes. Briand knew nothing of the rumors of infidelity or Gilbertese lust. He only worried that there might be something terrible. Yet it wasn’t about her fate. Briand’s fears were of Earhart’s life; that his heroine had actually had “feet of clay.”
Briand was, of course, the first to probe into AE’s life in the 20 years she had been missing. Perhaps this was enough to take her inner circle aback. But there seems to have been more, more than some shadowy dalliance with Vidal, perhaps even more than Rothar’s obscene tale.
It is certain that GP Putnam went dangerously out of his way during World War II to make it to a radio station in order to listen to Tokyo Rose’s broadcast to determine if it really was his late wife’s voice. Had he proof of AE’s death, why would he have bothered?
GP Putnam’s actions reflect yet another theory— that AE was captured by the Japanese and taken to Tokyo. GP certainly knew Rothar didn’t have Amelia on his gun-running tramp steamer in Hoboken, as he claimed. But there was that description of “athletic shorts.” How much had the madman truly seen? In 1943 already, information had been coming back through military intelligence that said Japanese officers had claimed Earhart was in Tokyo. GP could have put it together and believed part of Rothar’s story. Had Rothar only seen Amelia’s ravages from afar? Had she not died by the hands of Gilbertese natives but had she later been rescued by the Japanese? There had to be reasons why as late as 1945 GP believed AE could have survived and been taken to Tokyo.
GP most certainly didn’t tell Amy Otis and Muriel, Amelia’s mother and sister, the truth of these encounters. Muriel would write of the Rothar affair, but only vaguely and quite obviously only from what George Putnam had told her. Her account of it is ludicrous, and GP is vainly self-glorifying in it compared to the actual events. Muriel also couldn’t seem to put it together why GP would deem it credible that he should listen to Tokyo Rose to see if it was Amelia.
George Putnam did, in fact, believe that AE could have survived. But it wasn’t until the snippets started coming back through military intelligence that he would have been able to put together how it might have happened. Some of the more perplexing clues that had surfaced soon after she had vanished could now be fitted perfectly.
Unbeknownst to all those who have searched for Amelia Earhart in the last 50 years, the conspiracy of silence had nothing to do with what they sought. Yet it has held sway until now.
AE was with us for only a short 9 years as a national hero. Men and women have spent decades of their lives trying to find out what happened to her in the last few hours of her life. It was not because she was a famous woman flyer or even because she vanished. It was because it was Amelia. Lasting fame like this is not the product of PR, S&M, or folklore. Many things came together to give her a late start into the adventurous life she had so craved. Together they gave us in appearance a freckle-face, humble, unassuming yet fearless figure. The quantitative value of a few hours of her life has been worth a lifetime of others’ lives as their obsession to find her has shown.
AE has been condemned today as a “dabbler” who wandered in and out of subjects. This is true. She craved adventure, and didn’t do well at any profession for long at all. But after she found that the life of flying, fame and fortune could intertwine she was hooked. She reconciled herself to the dangers of this world flight. She even said she had to give up “stunt flying” like this.
Then came the dawn.
After that final dawn over the Pacific Ocean the fame of Amelia Earhart has been passive to those who have searched for her. Legends have arisen that have intrigued us. Uncovered documents have contained statements that have shocked us.
Intuition is not the product of logic. It is not the end result of deduction. It is the product of synthesis. Several clues have come together to give many people the instinctive feeling that there must be more to AE’s disappearance than simply running out of fuel and crashing. It is time to finally weigh all of these concisely; to find their origins and to follow through to see which have merit and which do not. Thus the majority of this volume is devoted to that final dawn, and this final dawn can have little meaning without the life of Amelia Earhart having flown into it and having never returned.
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