“Michael, You’re Mad”
Michael Rockefeller was in a pickle that all the money in the world couldn’t fix.
He was clinging to an overturned catamaran in roiling waters off the coast of New Guinea, where he had gone on an adventure to collect primitive art. He reckoned he had two choices.
He could hold on to the bobbing hull and hope for an uncertain rescue, or he could swim for shore, roughly five miles away.
The current was against him, and he risked a confrontation with a shark or crocodile.
He decided to swim for it.
He was, after all, a Rockefeller, scion of the fabled family of industrialists, philanthropists and politicians.
Just before he set off, Rockefeller, 23, tried to reassure his catamaran companion, a Dutch anthropologist named Rene Wassink. Wassink, a poor swimmer, had decided to stay with the overturned boat, and he tried to persuade the stubborn Rockefeller against his plan.
Jerry-rigging a life preserver, he emptied two gasoline cans into the Arafura Sea, tightened the lids and bound them together with rope. He stripped down to his underwear and bound his spectacles to his head with twine.
And off he went, paddling toward the forbidding mangrove swamps that lined the southwest coast of the world’s second-largest island.
Wassink watched the swimming figure slowly disappear into the watery horizon.
The Dutchman was rescued just nine hours later, on Nov. 19, 1961.
But Michael Rockefeller was lost, and that was big news around the world. His family was American financial and political royalty. Michael was the great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil Co., and son of New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller.
Gov. Rockefeller and Michael’s twin sister rushed to New Guinea after word of his disappearance reached civilization. They were followed closely by more than 100 journalists.
They searched frantically for 10 days at what the press called the end of the earth, where Stone Age cultures had survived. Finally, Nelson Rockefeller held a press conference to say that he had reached the conclusion that his son had died at sea before reaching shore.
With a stiff upper lip, he boarded a chartered jet back to the U. S., and the story retreated from the front pages.
But over time, the disappearance of the earnest, intelligent and impossibly wealthy young man entered American lore, joining a pantheon of missing persons that includes Ambrose Bierce, Amelia Earhart, Jimmy Hoffa and D. B. Cooper.
As with each of the other lost luminaries, various theories about Michael Rockefeller’s fate have been floated over the years.
Did he simply drown, as his family concluded? Or did he decide to go native and lose himself in the jungles of New Guinea? Was he a meal for a shark or a crocodile? Or, in the most sensational speculative twist, was he a pale human trophy for New Guinean headhunters?
Even today, New Guinea is regarded as one of the last great unexplored places on earth. But it held a special fascination in the first half of last century, after explorers and missionaries came out of its jungles with shocking stories about the headhunting and cannibalism among tribes there.
The Dutch and the English, colonial rulers of New Guinea during much of the 19th and 20 centuries, outlawed headhunting. But remote tribes lived hundreds of miles — through impenetrable jungles — from the nearest police posts, and the practice persisted in those places.
Only rarely were non-natives targets of headhunters. But one case, in 1901, influenced New Guinea’s worldwide reputation for decades.
James Chalmers, a Scottish missionary, had dedicated his life to the Christian conversion of aboriginal people there.
He was posted to New Guinea in 1877 by the London Missionary Society and spent 24 years establishing religious outposts in places where Westerners had never visited.
On April 4, 1901, Chalmers and a young assistant were visiting a New Guinean island when they were clubbed, beheaded and eaten by unfriendly tribesmen. The murders made international headlines and tainted New Guinea as a land of bloodthirsty savages.
Researchers would later learn that most headhunting was not mere bloodlust. It was a ceremonial act meant to intimidate rivals and establish hierarchy.
In battles, certain rivals were decapitated. The trophy heads were hauled back to home villages, where they were cleaved open and the brains consumed.
Some New Guinean headhunters, including a coastal group known as the Asmats, stripped trophy heads to the bone, bleached them in the sun, then covered the skulls with painted depictions of the battle at which the victim fell.
Whatever its purpose, the act of dining on another human being and decorating his remains left a foul taste in the mouth of the rest of the world, and New Guinea was isolated as a result.
The size and climate of the huge island did not help. A tropical rain forest, it has relentless heat and humidity and swarming insects. The coast is lined with mangrove swamps that are difficult to navigate, and the interior jungles are dark and largely impassable.
Of course, any number of Westerners have managed to venture there, beginning nearly 500 years ago.
The island, due north of Australia, got its name from a Spanish explorer who saw a resemblance between the natives there and those of the Guinea, West Africa.
The island, slightly larger than Texas, has been divided in half for nearly 200 years. Holland ruled the western half, which became known as Dutch New Guinea, and England and later Australia ruled the eastern half, known as Papua New Guinea. (It was dubbed by a Portuguese explorer Ilhas dos Papuas, or Island of the Frizzy-Haired People.)
Significant populations of Westerners occupied the cities of Hollandia, in Dutch New Guinea, and Port Moresby, in Papua. But interior sections, particularly along the mile-high mountainous spine of the entire island, and the southwestern coastal mangrove regions were visited only rarely.
The tribes of New Guinea were the subject of numerous anthropological missions after World War II. Many tribes were considered to be unsullied by contact with the modern world, and scientists at the world’s research universities were clamoring to document these Stone Age cultures.
Michael Rockefeller was drawn into one of those projects purely by serendipity. A combination of coincidence, financial wherewithal and personal motivation led him to journey to the other side of the world.
Michael Clark Rockefeller and his twin, Mary, were born in 1938, the last of five children of Nelson and Mary Rockefeller.
His great-grandfather was John D. Rockefeller, who was both a ruthless industrialist and civic-minded philanthropist.
Born near Ithaca, N. Y., in 1839, John D. Rockefeller moved with his family to Cleveland when he was 16. He was a natural businessman. By age 24, Rockefeller was a partner in a small Ohio oil refinery. And just after his 30th birthday, Rockefeller and three partners founded Standard Oil Co.
Through mergers, merciless overpowering of competitors, sweetheart deals with railroads and strict control of distribution, Rockefeller and Standard soon had the oil business in a monopolistic grip.
In his day, Rockefeller’s wealth and domination of an industry was comparable to that of Bill Gates, who made billions in computers, and Sam Walton, who created the Wal-Mart retailing empire.
By the time he retired, in 1911, John D. Rockefeller had amassed more money than he and his heirs could ever hope to spend.
He spent the last 25 years of life giving it away.
Rockefeller founded the University of Chicago, and he donated generously to the YMCA and the Baptist Church. He gave an estimated $500 million to various health, education and child welfare causes, including the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York. ($500 million in 1925 would be equivalent to about $5 billion today, based on the Consumer Price Index.)
Rockefeller’s son and grandsons continued the old man’s philanthropic projects.
John D. Jr. funded construction of Riverside Church, one of New York City’s grand palaces of worship, as well as the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. He donated the property on which the United Nations was built in Manhattan, and he helped created Rockefeller Center in midtown.
John D. Jr.’s son Nelson chose politics over industry.
A liberal-to-moderate Republican, Nelson Rockefeller was elected governor of New York in 1958 and won reelection three times. While governor, he campaigned for the Republican presidential nomination in 1960, ’64 and ’68 but failed each time. In 1974, following the resignation of Richard Nixon, President Gerald Ford named Rockefeller his vice president.
while governor of New York
Nelson’s mother, Abby, was an art enthusiast, and her keen interest rubbed off on her children.
While still in his early 20s, Nelson began amassing his own art collection. He favored primitive and native art, which he judged as underappreciated. He was a trustee of both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, and in 1957 he founded the Museum of Primitive Art in New York, which featured the art of indigenous cultures.
He had a particular interest in the native populations of Oceania, the watery continent of the southern hemisphere that includes Australia, New Zealand and thousands of islands, including Micronesia, Melanesia, Polynesia — and New Guinea.
Michael was raised amid extraordinary privilege — an army of servants, exclusive private schools, first-class European vacations and seasonal trips to any number of Rockefeller mansions around the world, from New England to South America.
Michael attended the Buckley School in Manhattan, then went on to Philips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and Harvard University. Rockefeller, with sandy hair and a thin, medium build, grew up self-assured but a bit nerdy, due in part to the spectacles he wore for the nearsightedness that afflicted his family.
He certainly was not a spoiled brat. He worked hard and was determined to experience life from the bottom up.
He spent part of one summer working as a grocery bagger in Puerto Rico, and he also toiled briefly as a novice vaquero on his family’s cattle ranch in Venezuela.
His uncle, David Rockefeller, would later say, “From his childhood, Michael demonstrated a love of beautiful things and people. Independent in spirit and enthusiastic in all that he did, he was a keen observer, intrigued by the unknown and unexplored.”
At Harvard, Rockefeller was a “legacy,” as the shoo-in children of alums who donate generously are known. But he was not the clichéd wealthy slacker. He earned a reputation as curious, adventurous and sensitive. A Harvard fellowship later established in his honor notes, “Michael had a zest for exploration — for new ideas, places, and people.”
He graduated cum laude with a degree in English in 1960, two years after his father was elected governor of New York.
Being a Rockefeller, he felt no urgency to earn a living. He planned to return to Harvard at some point for a graduate degree, perhaps in the law, but more likely in a science such as anthropology or in the fine arts.
Art and adventure were the muses he chose to pursue after college.
Rockefeller grew up in homes graced with master artworks. His grandmother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, was an avid collector of modern art and founder and benefactor of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His father drew Michael into the art world when he named him to the board of directors of his Museum of Primitive Art.
As his time at Harvard drew to a close, Rockefeller apparently was considering an art-collecting trip to the Andean cultures of South American, following his post-graduation completion of a six-month commitment in the U. S. Army Reserve.
As he later put it, “I have the desire to do something romantic and adventurous at a time when frontiers in the real sense of the word are disappearing.”
But one day he learned from a college roommate, Sam Putnam, that Robert Gardner, a young Harvard professor, was planning a research trip to New Guinea on behalf of the university’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, according to an account by journalist and author Milt Machlin.
Rockefeller made a pitch to go along with Gardner, who specialized in filming primitive cultures. The professor agreed to sign on Michael as sound recorder and still photographer — after Rockefeller agreed to pay his own way.
The Peabody Museum group set out in March 1961, weeks after Rockefeller finished his military duty.
Professor Gardner’s itinerary centered on filming the Ndani tribe that lived in the Baliem Valley, in the mountainous interior of Dutch New Guinea. But en route he stopped in Hollandia, the colonial capital, where Dutch government authorities treated him to an introduction to native handicrafts. He was particularly impressed by a type of carved totem pole, known as a bis, crafted by the Asmat tribe of Dutch New Guinea’s southwest coast.
Gardner and his group went on to film the Ndani. A number of photos from the expedition show a serious and pensive Rockefeller — in full beard, sweat-stained khakis and Red Ball Jets sneakers — beside tribesmen or children — naked except for penises sheathed in tapered gourds.
The Peabody group recorded graphic violence among tribesmen and collected samples of their weapons and tools, including stone axes. Still photographs shot by Rockefeller documented serious injuries from a battle between men of neighboring villages. The researchers were later accused by Dutch authorities of inciting the fight. They denied it.
Meanwhile, Gardner’s enthusiastic descriptions of the Asmat primitive art inspired Rockefeller to arrange a side trip to the southwest coast to see about collecting art from the Asmat, which along with the Ndani were regarded as a Stone Age culture.
Like the Ndani, the Asmat had infrequent contact with the outside world. The Asmat had a reputation as being unfriendly and fierce.
Rockefeller left the Peabody group in late June for his side trip. He was as impressed as Gardner with the quality of the Asmat handicrafts, including the colorful, 30-foot bis poles and the painted heads for which the tribe was known. Bartering with steel axes and tobacco, the most valuable commodities among the Asmats, he bought a few specimens and commissioned others, including a dugout canoe and bis poles, for later pickup.
Asmat tribe
He began daydreaming of an Asmat show at his father’s Museum of Primitive Art.
Rockefeller wrote in his journal, “As remarkable as the art is the fact that the culture which produced it is still intact; some remote areas are still headhunting; and only five years ago, almost the whole area was headhunting.”
Rockefeller apparently encountered no problems with the Asmat during his visit. He rejoined the Harvard expedition on July 10 but vowed to return to collect his commissions and other samples of their handicrafts for the museum.
The Harvard group returned to the United States at the beginning of September. At home, Rockefeller received bad news: His parents planned to divorce.
Michael Rockefeller responded by throwing himself into his fledgling New Guinea art project. At night, he compiled research and edited his journal notes into a formal account of his contact with the Asmats.
During the day, he worked on arrangements for the return trip and his art-collection expedition. There were scores of details to attend to — from bulk purchases and shipment of barter materials to arrangement of a charter flight to carry the Asmat art back to New York.
He planned to visit as many villages as possible, traveling by boat up and down rivers, the only accessible byways in the tangled coastal mangrove swamps. He would store his objects at a base camp in the coastal town of Agats.
He needed government approval for his trip, but that came quickly when his father pressed connections in both the United States government in Washington and the Dutch government in The Hague.
After barely two weeks at home, he returned to New Guinea in late September.
His first stop was in Hollandia, on the northern coast. He had asked the Dutch government to recommend a guide, and colonial officials assigned Rene Wassink, 34, who worked with the Dutch Bureau of Native Affairs. This was an odd choice because Wassink was an anthropologist, not an experienced bushman.
The two traveled to Merauke, on the southern coast, where they arranged to purchase a boat from Rob Eibrink Jansen, a Dutch official there.
It was an odd vessel, a makeshift catamaran adapted from a design used by the local constable for water patrols.
The boat consisted of two 30-foot dugout canoes connected by a bamboo deck that was topped by a hut with a tin roof, to afford protection from rain and sun. To power the craft they bought two 18-horsepower outboard motors, then stowed numerous cans of fuel.
Jansen later told the Dutch press that he warned Rockefeller and Wassink that the vessel was top heavy. It was unsuitable for use in open seas, Janssen told them. He said it was perfectly stable for running up and down rivers — as long as it wasn’t overloaded.
He said he also explicitly warned them that they should avoid the mouth of Eilanden River during tidal surges.
They didn’t listen.
Wassink and Rockefeller set out in mid-October, and within a month they had visited dozens of Asmat villages, often using introductions from the many Dutch Catholic priests who worked as missionaries among the Asmat.
Rockefeller wrote enthusiastic letters home about his efforts in collecting Asmat handicrafts, which he called the “imposing remnants of a marvelous past.” In some villages he bartered on the spot for arts and handicrafts, including painted heads.
A Dutch colonial official later told author Paul Toohey that he worried that Rockefeller was creating a lucrative new market for heads that would lead to bloodshed.
Rockefeller reportedly paid two steel axes and four rolls of tobacco for the canoe he commissioned. Yet he reportedly offered ten axes for a single painted head.
The Dutch official told the author that he warned Rockefeller “he was creating a demand which could not be met without bloodshed.”
If the conversation ever took place, young Rockefeller apparently never mentioned it in his voluminous letters home and journal entries.
He and his partner went methodically about their demanding work.
Rockefeller and Wassink survived on an unchanging diet of Spam, rice and corned beef. They bathed in the river and slept entombed in netting to keep bugs at bay. He hired Asmat teenagers as houseboys and helpers, but they often proved unreliable.
But Rockefeller’s correspondence generally ignored his personal travails while focusing on the boat and his growing Asmat art collection.
“The only difference between Mark Twain and me,” he wrote, “is that his characters used poles all the time, while we use an outboard engine most of the time and poles part of the time.”
On another occasion, he noted the instability of the vessel.
“Strong monsoons sometimes sweep the heavy swell from the Arafura Sea into the estuary, making the crossing a hazardous undertaking in an Asmat dugout canoe, which is not a seagoing craft,” he wrote.
By the second week of November, Rockefeller’s letters indicated he hoped to be home for Christmas, after several more village visits.
He was ever more enthused about his adventure.
He wrote, “My New Guinea experience will not stop in its intensity.”
One of the final journeys was to Atsj, a hub of some 1,500 people located about 35 miles from their base in Agats.
Author Toohey wrote that the trip began auspiciously when police official Henri Watrin declared the boat overloaded, weighed down with axes, machetes, knives, tobacco and fishing line and hooks for bartering, as well as clothing, water, food and fuel.
Watrin told Toohey, “I said to him, ‘Michael, you can’t go with that boat. I forbid you. You have to unload it, you have to lighten it up or you don’t go at all.’
“So he said, ‘Yes, yes, yes, I’ll unload it.'”
But when the constable left, Michael pushed off — with the boat still overloaded — at noon on Saturday, Nov. 18, 1961.
On board were Wassink, Rockefeller and two Asmat teens, Simon and Leo.
Wassink would later say that Simon and Leo urged the westerners to speed the boat along the coast past the mouth of the Eilanden River, with its predictably violent tidal surge.
Yet the boat tarried along.
At 2:15 p.m., as the boat entered the water where the Eilanden flowed into the Arafura Sea, “something terrible happened,” Wassink would later say.
“A following wave came over the stern and side of the boat, stopping the engine and swamping the hulls,” he told the Dutch press. “We sank visibly in the water, and the current continued to push us out to sea. Simon and Leo were afraid and said they would like to swim for shore. We gave our permission, of course. They each took a jerrican, emptied the gasoline out of it and jumped into the sea using the cans as life buoys. As they left us, I asked them to try to get help from someone on shore. They promised they would.”
Rockefeller was a strong, confident swimmer. But Wassink was not, and he announced that he intended to stay with the boat and await rescuers. Rockefeller likely would have joined the Asmat teens in their dash to shore but probably felt obliged to stay with Wassink.
Meanwhile, the low-riding boat continued to drift farther out to sea, pushed by the Eilanden’s tidal flow. Not long before dark, a rogue wave capsized the rig completely, and Rockefeller and Wassink found themselves clinging to the hull. All their food and water gurgled to the bottom of the sea.
“We realized our situation was precarious, but we weren’t panicked,” Wassink said. “We had hopes that Simon and Leo would be able to find help before out situation worsened. But we were soaking wet and very cold as the sun began to go down in the afternoon.”
They spent a sleepless night adrift.
At first light, roughly 5 a.m., they could make out land in the far distance. Wassink estimated the shore to be four to seven miles away. Dutch authorities would later say they were likely about 11 miles out.
The men broke off pieces of wood and tried to paddle the capsized boat, but it was to no avail.
The two then hashed over their options.
Rockefeller argued that they could not be certain that the Asmat teens reached shore, so the prospects for rescue were uncertain at best.
Michael argued that he should swim for it.
Wassink quoted him as saying, “This is our last chance. If we don’t take it, we’ll just float farther and farther out to sea.”
Wassink said, “We had a long discussion, and I tried very hard to talk that plan out of his head. I talked about the dangerous tides and the swift currents. He listened to me, but I knew in advance that he would go ahead. It was always very difficult to make him change his mind… He was a brave man, but also very unreasonable… Bluntly, I said to him, ‘Michael, you are mad.'”
Rockefeller went ahead with his preparation, emptying the two gas cans, stripping down and fastening his eyeglasses with twine.
Wassink said Rockefeller’s last words were: “I think I can make it.”
Simon and Leo came through.
They made it to shore, after five hours of swimming, and ran to the coastal home of a Dutchman, who alerted authorities that Michael Rockefeller had suffered a boating accident.
Within hours, the colonial government had three search planes and 12 boats looking for Rockefeller and Wassink.
Wassink was located and rescued at 4 p.m. by the Royal Netherlands Navy.
Urgent calls to the United States informed Nelson Rockefeller that his son was missing.
Rockefeller and Michael’s twin sister, Mary Strawbridge, immediately flew to Hawaii and then on to New Guinea in a chartered jet, followed closely by a mob of the world’s journalists.
Gov. Rockefeller said, “I have complete confidence in Michael’s stamina and resourcefulness.”
stayed here during the search.
Rockefeller, his daughter and his aides worked closely with Dutch authorities in overseeing the search. The governor took several trips by airplane to the area when his son was last seen, and one day he boarded a small Dutch trawler for a search by water.
Thousands of people — from government, the military and the media — were involved in the search for Michael Rockefeller.
Dutch Gov. P. J. Platteel put every boat and airplane at his disposal to work in the search. Australia added dozens of its own air and watercraft.
One historian called it the “greatest search operation in the island’s history.” But it was hampered by a local lack of modern communications and ground transportation.
Vast swaths of Dutch New Guinea lacked a single road, and fly-over searches by aircraft were nearly useless since most of the island was covered by a thick jungle canopy.
conference
After ten days no one found a single sign of the missing young man, and the pragmatic Nelson Rockefeller decided to give up. He held a press conference and said it was clear his son was lost at sea. He accepted a phone call of condolence from President Kennedy, then left the island, traveling home via the Philippines and Holland.
On the evening of Nov. 30, Gov. Rockefeller stood before a crowd of journalists at Idlewild airport in New York after stepping off the plane from New Guinea. He delivered a sad but touching tribute to his son.
“He was never happier than he has been out there for the past seven or eight months,” Rockefeller said. “He has always loved people and been loved by them. He had tremendous enthusiasm and drive and loved life and beauty in people, in art, in nature.”
Gov. Rockefeller described Michael’s New Guinea adventure as “one of the most exciting experiences of his life.” His voice dropping to a raspy whisper, he added, “Things can happen.”
Rene Wassink believes Michael did not survive the difficult swim.
“I don’t know what happened to him, but I am almost certain that he didn’t get to shore,” Wassink told the Dutch press. The timing of his departure, at 7 a.m., meant he would have been fighting the outgoing tide even if he managed to get near shore.
“He really didn’t have much time to get solid ground under his feet before the outgoing tide would be on him again,” said Wassink. “Even if you are only 30 feet from shore, you don’t stand a chance against that abnormally heavy tide.”
No one blamed Wassink for Rockefeller’s disappearance, but some blamed the Dutch colonial authorities for poor judgment in assigning a novice bushman — and a virtual non-swimmer, to boot — to travel with the headstrong Rockefeller. An experienced guide surely could have been more persuasive in cautioning against the swim for shore.
tribesman in New Guinea
The world press sensationalized the case with wild accounts of the various ways in which Rockefeller might have met his demise — including speculation that he fell victim to a shark or a crocodile.
From time to time, questionable self-proclaimed eyewitnesses have stepped forward to claim that Rockefeller had either “gone native” or was being held by tribesmen in remote corners of New Guinea.
Perhaps most sensational are the claims that the young man was killed and devoured, recounted in several books. Some of these stories originated with an unlikely source: the Rev. Gerald Zegwaard, a Dutch priest who was regarded as the first Catholic missionary to work with the Asmat.
Zegwaard maintained that Rockefeller may have been killed in revenge by an aggrieved band of Asmat tribesmen. In 1958, Dutch police killed five members of the Asmat village of Otsjanep, located not far from where Rockefeller disappeared. Had Michael stumbled into Otsjanep, he likely would have been the victim of a retaliatory murder as a member of the white tribe, the priest said.
Conspiracists whispered that the Dutch government covered up the murder because headhunting, cannibalism and murder of white trekkers meant bad public relations.
However, there is not a shred of evidence that Rockefeller was murdered, and it seems unlikely that a “secret” murder could have been concealed from American authorities.
The best evidence that Rockefeller was lost at sea is the fact that no reliable physical evidence has ever turned up to prove that he made it back to land.
In many regards, Dutch New Guinea is a different place today.
Just two years after the Rockefeller disappearance, the Dutch gave over control of the country to Indonesia.
The country’s name was changed to Irian Jaya, and the capital city of Hollandia became Jayapura. The eastern half of the island, Papua New Guinea, won independence in 1975.
Mapping and census-taking have progressed on both halves of the vast island.
Yet some things haven’t changed. In April 2005, the New Yorker magazine featured a story about a guided tour to Irian Jaya for “first-contact” visits with primitives — even though hundreds of other first contacts have been claimed for 200 years. The story characterized the nation as one of the world’s last unexplored places, just as it was in 1961.
Even today, the name of Michael Rockefeller is inextricably linked to New Guinea — or Irian Jaya — and the Asmat people.
Many of the Asmat artifacts and handicrafts that Rockefeller collected are part of the Michael C. Rockefeller collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, into which the Museum of Primitive Art was incorporated in 1976. A wing of primitive art in memory of young Rockefeller was dedicated in 1982.
After three decades of silence, Rockefeller’s siblings and friends cooperated with British filmmaker Anthony Geffen in a 1995 documentary about the case for the Discovery Channel.
His twin sister, Mary, was still angry about the “terrible questions” the media posed about Michael’s fate. His brother, Rodman, called it “hysterical speculation.”
The sensationalism distracted attention from the young man’s ambitious goals, they said.
“Michael had a very serious purpose,” said Sam Putnam, Rockefeller’s college roommate. His plan, cut short by death, was to “preserve part of that culture before it was lost forever.”
Books
The Asmat of New Guinea: The Journal of Michael Clark Rockefeller, Michael D. Rockefeller, Museum of Primitive Art/New York Graphic Society, 1967
The Search for Michael Rockefeller, Milt Machlin, Putnam, 1972
The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing of the Met: A Father’s Memorial, Nelson Rockefeller, Smithsonian Associates, 1978
Rocky Goes West, Paul Toohey, Duffy & Snellgrove, 1997
Articles
“Governor’s Son Is Missing Off Coast of New Guinea,” by Peter Kihss, New York Times, Nov. 20, 1961
“Jungle Hunt Last Hope for Rockefeller’s Son,” by James Desmond, New York Daily News, Nov. 23, 1961
“Gov. Rockefeller Tells the Story of a Lost Son,” by Keith R. Johnson, New York Herald-Tribune, Nov. 20, 1961
“Michael Rockefeller’s Fate,” by Anatole Broyard, New York Times, Feb. 24, 1972
“The Michael Rockefeller Riddle,” by John Godwin, The People’s Almanac, 1976
“Michael Rockefeller’s Quest: How Did It End?,” by Warren Berger, New York Times, July 30, 1995
“Rockefeller Riddle,” by Margot Pitkin, Sydney, Australia, Daily Telegraph, September 13, 1997
“Heir to Misfortune,” by Paul Toohey, The Weekend Australian, Aug. 30, 1997
“Lost Scion: Was Michael Rockefeller eaten by cannibals?” by Tim Sohn, Outside Magazine, October 2003
“Letter From New Guinea: Strangers in the Forest,” by Lawrence Osborne, The New Yorker, April 18, 2005