Q: What do you think Byrd's legacy was? What do you think his major
accomplishments were?
JH: Well, I think you can just go run right down the line. He had a heck of
a life prior to any of his exploration work or record-establishing flights.
His trip as a kid to the east and so on. He was just a remarkable young man.
I think he had great visions of what he wanted to do from a very early age.
And was a magnificent planner, and he just had a way of accomplishing his ends.
I think he was a very sensitive man. He was a very loyal man. In one of his
books he said about his planning. I believe he said something to the effect
that he let planning take the place of worry, advance planning would take the
place of worry. And I think the evidence of all of his expeditions, all of his
trips and so on proved that point.
Q: What do you think the legacy of the expedition that you were on with Byrd
was?
JH: Looking back after these many years we all have to wonder whether or not
the contribution was as great as we thought it was at the time. But I think it
speaks well to the fact that of the many scientists that we had, almost every
one of them went on in life and became an eminent scientist in his field. The
Al Lindsay's and so on, just great scientists in their own right. Take the
advance base case alone, probably in judging that, I'm not sure what the
psychiatrists and the psychologists and the so forth would judge with respect
to his experiences, maybe not much now. I'm not sure that the weather
observations and the astronomical observations and the aurora australius
observations really amounted to much in hindsight. At the time though they
really did. And remember that we were the first, he was a great visionary. He
was the first that set up an expedition to study a large unexplored area from
many scientific viewpoints. It was not a stunt in any sense. It was simply
that way. It was to open up new territory and to study the flora, the fauna
and so on. It was his visionary work, his vision for that kind of work bore
fruit in what you see down at the Antarctic today, of the many, many bases
manned by many scientists doing work around the clock and around the calendar.
So I guess you can say that was our legacy because we were the first expedition
that really took a group of scientists down there to do that job.
Q: There's a wide range of opinion about Byrd. Some people loved him and
were with him from the North Pole flight. How do you account for the fact that
many people adored him and found him a man of great integrity and others
didn't?
JH: I've thought of that some. I don't know why anybody would dislike him,
other than he did make the final decisions. Under certain circumstances that I
wouldn't even know about, I don't know why any individual would not like him,
but, I guess most all of us at one time or another incur a little enmity in
someone. And I can't answer the question as to why some people so violently
disagreed with him over some of his things.
back to Interview Transcripts | next
|
