Going the distance with explorer Richard Byrd

Richard E. Byrd (pictured in 1938) explored the Arctic and Antarctic during the '20s and '30s.

Explorer: The Life of Richard E. Byrd
By Lisle A. Rose
University of Missouri Press,
544 pp., illustrated, $34.95

In February 1957, Admiral Arleigh Burke, the "31-knot Burke" of the war in the Pacific, flew to Boston to present Richard E. Byrd, the Antarctic explorer, with the Medal of Freedom.

Byrd was only 68, but in failing health with a heart ailment and confined to his house on Brimmer Street, and the medal's award was being pushed through as something to cheer him up.

Burke and his party, which included Byrd's brother Harry, the Virginia senator, arrived at the appointed hour and were asked to wait until Byrd got dressed.

The process required frequent applications of oxygen, but when it was completed, and the party was ushered into the upstairs office, they found Byrd a shrunken figure, but in the full dress uniform of a rear admiral.

It was the last assertion of a carefully honed image, for he died just two weeks later.

Byrd, writes Lisle A. Rose in his biography, "Explorer," "loved not only heroic adventure, but also power, politics, and influence." He dabbled in right-wing politics in the 1930s, but received visits from Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt at his summer retreat on Maine's Blue Hill Bay.

Rose's unsparing and fully sourced account tracks those "heroic adventures" - exploring the Arctic by air in 1926 - and probably reaching the North Pole - and marooning himself for three solitary months in the frozen Antarctic in 1934. But ultimately, he writes, Byrd "oversold himself and his always uncertain profession."

Byrd's exploits came in the era of ticker-tape parades down New York's Fifth Avenue -- he was a contemporary and rival of Colonel Charles Lindbergh, losing out to him in the race to fly the Atlantic nonstop.

But, Rose comments, the "hero-celebrity [has] to constantly deliver" -- and "what the hero-celebrity was supposed to deliver was always a matter of slippery concern."

Rose, who went to the Antarctic himself as a seaman in 1956-57, provides a critical account of Byrd's solitary experience in a chapter that he chillingly titles "Breakdown."

"We were bound for the unknown," Byrd had announced as the expedition headed south. While there was some suggestion that the expedition would lay the groundwork for American territory claims on the continent, Byrd was "[planning] to pull off the greatest polar coup of all," as Rose puts it, by living alone "amid the dark, howling, frigid South Polar wasteland . . . for the four or six months of its dreadful winter."

In his own, 1938 best-selling account, "Alone," Byrd described the adventure in near-mystic terms. In the stillness, he sensed "a gentle rhythm, the strain of a perfect chord, the music of the spheres, perhaps. . . . It was a feeling that transcended reason; that went to the heart of a man's despair and found it groundless . . ."

Byrd was taking daily weather observations of some scientific value, but he was being "slowly worn down" and had to call for rescue. And when the rescue team arrived from Little America, the base camp some 123 miles away, it was two months before "he was in shape" to be brought back.

There would be two more expeditions to the Antarctic after the war, but Byrd had "tarnished his reputation," Rose writes, with forays into anti-communist politics and, driven by a constant need for money, into a bizarre 1951 Fashion Panorama at Madison Square Garden at which Byrd, in dress uniform, appeared surrounded by mink-clad models.

By the time Byrd died, the era of the great explorers of the unknown was long over - with the unknown, whether Everest or the Antarctic, becoming all too known - and the charismatic leader of a sled team replaced by the technical support crew of space exploration.

Rose suspects that for anyone who grew up in the 1950s and afterward, Byrd "[will] always remain unknowable." His fine biography ventures deep into that unknown.

Michael Kenney is a freelance writer living in Cambridge.