by Carl Hoffman
I ALSO HAD been thinking about Michael’s family, wondering what they’d done to find closure, especially as rumors surfaced that he might not have drowned. They had begun the legal steps necessary to declare him dead within months of his disappearance. Through the Museum of Primitive Art, they’d moved quickly to ship everything he’d collected back to New York—some five hundred objects in total, valued by insurance appraisers in August 1962 at $285,520. It was a stunning sum, a quarter of a million dollars in value created via a few fishhooks, fishing line, axes, and lumps of tobacco, off the talents of men who were illiterate and penniless. As the centerpieces today of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, their value in attracting visitors and funding is incalculable, not to mention the priceless cache (and hefty tax deductions) their donation to the museum must have brought Nelson Rockefeller and his family. In 2012 the Met hosted six million visitors, with a recommended voluntary entry fee of $25; if the average visitor paid $15, the Met brought in $90 million in entry fees alone, while the grandson of the man Michael regarded as one of the best artists in all of Asmat, Chinasapitch, the man who carved the lovely canoe that holds prominence in the Met, sweeps the floor of the Asmat museum in Agats in bare feet. Until I told him, he had no idea what had ever happened to that canoe. Had priceless land or millions of dollars’ worth of mineral rights been acquired from illiterate villagers via a few lumps of brown weed and bent wire, cries of injustice might have rung out, with demands that a people unable to understand the deal they’d agreed to be fairly compensated.
In September 1962, not even a year after Michael had swum away from his catamaran, the Museum of Primitive Art mounted a spectacular exhibit in New York in a specially constructed pavilion across from the museum that was meant, read the press release, “to evoke in part the spirit of Asmat life.”
Featured among the artifacts were the bisj poles Michael had collected. “When an Asmat warrior is slain by an enemy villager, a bisj ceremony is called to honor the dead man and to invoke feelings of vengeance.” The details of how that vengeance was supposed to manifest itself were omitted from the program. “After days of ceremony, a bisj pole, over twenty feet high, intricately designed, and studded with human figures, is carved. . . . To the beat of war drums, the singing of songs, and a mock battle dance, the bisj pole is then raised in front of the ceremonial house. Within a few days, the bisj is laid to rest in the sago forests that surround the village. The soft wood soon rots, and according to Asmat tradition, the spirit of the victim thus honored goes into the sago palms, and thence, into the people who eat sago.” The public version had been cleansed of any mention of actual vengeance, reciprocation, killing, or cannibalism.
The exhibition was a resounding success. The museum’s Committee on Membership, Publicity, and Publications reported that by February 1963 stories about the exhibit had appeared in more than six hundred newspapers and magazines “with a combined circulation of 30,000,000 readers. This is as close to national and local saturation as any art story ever had.”
In an effort to identify some of the objects before the exhibition, the museum had even written van Kessel in Pirimapun in May 1962, at the height of van de Waal’s investigation. The letter found, not van Kessel, who had returned to Holland, but Father van de Wouw, who answered in June. It is an eerie correspondence. Patrol officer van de Waal, with van de Wouw’s help, was living in Otsjanep officially investigating the case, but van de Wouw never mentions it. Just as eerie is a letter van Kessel himself wrote to the museum in 1974, in which he requests a copy of The Asmat: The Journal of Michael C. Rockefeller, which the museum published in 1967. He laments Michael’s loss and mentions “sad memories,” but not his certainty that Michael had been killed and eaten; to the Rockefellers, at least, the priests kept their word to never discuss the killing.
But what the Rockefellers privately knew was a mystery. In the archives of the Dutch government are cables and letters from Nelson Rockefeller to various officials, thanking them for their efforts. There is the cable from the Dutch ambassador to the United States asking his superiors about rumors that Michael was killed, and there is Foreign Minister Joseph Luns’s response—that those rumors had been fully investigated and found to be untrue. There are letters between Rockefeller’s lawyers and the Netherlands asking for a recap of the search effort, in order for a US court to declare Michael legally dead by drowning, which the court finally did on February 1, 1964, valuing his estate at $660,000. Those letters, too, are surreal, since they were sent during the very months when letters were flying back and forth between the Dutch government and van Kessel, von Peij, and the Church, all while van de Waal was in Otsjanep investigating. In one letter, between the law offices of Milbank, Tweed, Hope and Hadley and the Dutch consul general in New York, Rockefeller attorney William Jackson writes: “It would be of great assistance if we could be provided with duly authenticated copies of any reports made by or to any official of the Netherlands Government with respect to the nature, extent and results of the various searches made in New Guinea in the effort to find Michael Rockefeller.” But there is no trace of any correspondence between the Dutch and the Rockefellers or their lawyers that mentions or addresses his killing by Otsjanep or the official investigation happening at that very moment. The Dutch government and the Catholic Church appear to have kept silent, both in public and in private, even as they were actively communicating with Michael’s family. At least through the 1960s there may have been no reason for Nelson to doubt that Michael had drowned.
In 1974, Milt Machlin, a magazine editor in New York, published The Search for Michael Rockefeller. The book is mostly the tale of a wild-goose chase: a mysterious Australian appeared in Machlin’s office one day in the late ’60s, claimed he was a smuggler who’d been working in the remote islands of Oceania, and said he had spotted Michael alive, held hostage by a tribe in the Trobriand Islands, a thousand miles away from Asmat. Most of the story details Machlin’s fruitless search, which he began in 1969, but toward the book’s end Machlin chases down the original rumors leaked to the press in early 1962 and finds van Kessel in the Netherlands, who tells him his tale. He then dispatches an unnamed assistant, who travels to Asmat and interviews a number of others. Whether it was still too early and too close to the events, or whether Machlin just didn’t look, he never saw any of the supporting documents from the Dutch government or Catholic Church; he never saw Lapré’s reports; he never found von Peij or van de Waal; and it appears he never even saw van Kessel’s original memos. The theory that Michael made it to shore and was killed comes off as all wild speculation by a rogue priest, and Machlin’s book has so few details and so little documentation that it feels unbelievable. Nevertheless, it was a beginning, and he had explained his findings in a letter to the Rockefellers, whose lawyers sent Machlin a boilerplate response thanking him and saying nothing further.
Shortly after Nelson Rockefeller became vice president, during a meeting at the White House with the prime minister of Australia, Gough Whitlam, he publicly thanked Australia for its help in the search for Michael. “When Mr. Whitlam remarked that the disappearance had never been solved,” reported the New York Times, “the Vice President said: ‘I believe there is no question—you can’t swim 12 miles against the current.’ ”
Then there’s the story of Frank Monte. An Australian private investigator, Monte claimed in his memoir, The Spying Game, that shortly after Nelson’s death in 1979 he was contracted by Michael’s mother, Mary Todhunter Clark Rockefeller, to investigate rumors that Michael had been killed, after being prevented from doing so for years by her ex-husband. The fame-seeking, celebrity name–dropping private eye seems like the last person any Rockefeller would hire. His account reads, at best, like a hyped-up blend of fact and fiction. That he may have looked into the case seems possible—he cites enough detail about the rescue of Wassing to have found some documents or news reports—but searching for the most important papers, he wrote, “I dis
covered something odd. The records had vanished. Through his vast and powerful connections . . . Rockefeller had actually had anything written or published about his missing son destroyed. He’d employed people to go through files everywhere removing anything relating to the disappearance.”
That, of course, was untrue; I was able to find hundreds of pages of cables and memos.
Monte then relates the story of a wild trip to the village that killed Michael with a gang of bloodthirsty Indonesian army commandos who leave a trail of dead bodies in a weeks-long, Kurtz-like voyage far inland, with a guide from Otsjanep. None of it makes sense. He mixes up the names of rivers and geography, describes villagers wearing penis sheaths (which the Asmat don’t wear), writes about dragging rubber rafts for days across the swamps—these details indicative, if he went anywhere near the area, not of the Asmat but of the Korowai, who produce little art, live far upriver, and never received a visit from Michael. Monte’s conclusion—that Michael was killed after being caught trying to steal a sacred “totem pole” decorated with skulls (which bisj poles do not have), in the dead of night with the son of the chief, with whom he was having a homosexual relationship, and that Wassing and the overturned catamaran were just a fabrication to hide the truth—is absurd. As is his claim that he brought three skulls home to Mary, was paid $100,000, and was later told by the mysterious Rockefeller go-between that one of them was positively identified as Michael’s.
After my first trip to Asmat, I’d made an effort to contact Mary Rockefeller Morgan (formerly Mary Rockefeller Strawbridge), Michael’s twin sister. Through a friend, I began a correspondence with a woman married high in the clan in the hope that she might introduce me to Mary, and the woman agreed to have lunch with me in New York. Though enthusiastic in our initial writings, by the time we met she’d had a long conversation with her husband and couldn’t help in any way; it was something the family didn’t speak of, at least not publicly. In May 2012, Mary self-published a memoir, Beginning with the End: A Memoir of Twin Loss and Healing, which is a sad and gracefully written account of her long efforts to heal from her twin brother’s death. As the title suggests, Michael’s disappearance in Asmat is but the beginning of the book. She writes: “Rumors and stories of Michael’s having made it to shore—of his having been found, captured and killed by headhunting Asmat villagers—have persisted for over forty plus years. Even today, those rumors fuel the imagination and help to line the pockets of storytellers, playwrights, filmmakers, and the high-adventure tourist trade. This speculation has never been substantiated by any concrete evidence. Since 1954, the Dutch government had enforced a ban forbidding tribal warfare and the resulting headhunting that would avenge the death of an important tribal figure. In 1961, we were told that tribal warfare and headhunting had not been entirely eradicated but were rare. All the evidence, based on the strong offshore currents, the high seasonal tides, and the turbulent outgoing waters, as well as the calculations that Michael was approximately ten miles from shore when he began to swim, supports the prevailing theory that he drowned before he was able to reach land.”
My letter to Mary, in which I offered to share all of my research with her, went unanswered. The writer Peter Matthiessen, who remains close to Mary and wrote a blurb for her book, told me, “The family refuses to believe any version of the story beyond his drowning.”
The documents I had were public; if I had found them, so could the Rockefellers, or anyone working on their behalf. That said, I knew they’d never talked to either von Peij or van de Waal. It hadn’t been hard for me to track them down, but the Rockefellers had never tried.
Either Mary and her family knew something and refused to acknowledge it in public, or she and her father had left Merauke and never looked back, clinging to a version of events that was tragic, but neat and clean—if unlikely. Whatever the case, I knew they had never undertaken the one thing I would have done if my child or sibling had disappeared amid rumors of murder, the thing that might lead to some clearer understanding: to learn the language, go there, and personally investigate the crime scene. It was ironic that a family of enormous wealth and resources sneered at the efforts to solve Michael’s death and accused anyone who did so of exploiting the family name for profit, but it was the family’s own failure to address the rumors and reports that forced others to do the investigating for them. The more I knew about Asmat, the more I couldn’t stop imagining Michael in the Asmat cosmos: that he was like one of those men whose spirits his people had not done enough to push on to Safan, to the land beyond the sea. All the speculation continued because his family had failed to fully seek closure and no one else had managed to gather the essential information. That no Rockefeller had ever been to Asmat, except for a few hours in an official Dutch delegation via PBY Catalina, surrounded by phalanxes of officials, boggled my mind.
WITH SO MANY nagging questions, I knew I had to go back again. My first trip to Asmat had taken two months, but much of it had been spent in transit, or waiting in Agats to set things up, or cruising the rivers so I could see the place, grasp it, as a whole. I had been to Otsjanep and Pirien twice, but the first visit had been for twenty-four hours and the second for just four days. Amates had then brought Kokai out to Agats, but that had been a tense, forced conversation. Beatus Usain, the man who with Kokai had finally told me the story of Pep’s killing Michael, had been Pep’s nephew. His father, Pep’s younger brother, had married a woman from Biwar Laut, where Usain had grown up. He had been able to tell the story because he wasn’t from Otsjanep—but that meant I still didn’t have any sort of confession from anyone in the village.
And throughout I had been totally surrounded by and dependent on an entourage—Amates or Hennah for translation, Wilem and his assistants for food and logistics and sleeping arrangements. They had all been filters, and I’d never known what was actually being said, what I didn’t hear, what I wasn’t privy to, or if my questions were even being translated as I’d asked them. I’d been guilty of the same sins for which I was critical of Michael and the Rockefellers themselves—passing through Asmat too quickly, assuming that I was so important that I could pepper them with questions and out would pour their deepest secrets, not heading back after new questions had been raised. After all, the story of Michael Rockefeller wasn’t just another story. It was the tale of a murder, a heinous, bloody crime that ended not just with death but with the most egregious taboo—cannibalism—a practice the Asmat knew was inconceivably wrong in our eyes, a practice that had unleashed more ships and airplanes and helicopters and policemen in their world than they’d ever seen before, a practice that they now, fifty years later, knew was viewed as shameful by the pastors and priests of their now Catholic religion. If they’d done it, it was a secret held as deep as a secret could be. The sons of the men accused were afraid. Afraid of the spirits. Afraid of God. Afraid of the Indonesian military and police. Afraid of America. Afraid of the Rockefeller family, who had an obligation, in their minds, to avenge his death.
If I wanted to solve the mystery of Michael Rockefeller, I had to get to know them. Without filters, translators, guides, cooks. I had to speak their language. I had to have a much deeper understanding of Asmat life than I could ever get from a few weeks on the river or a few days in the village or than I could ever get from books or theses on Asmat culture.
My plan was to go to either Otsjanep or Pirien and find a family to stay with for a month—ideally, with one of the sons of the men named by van Kessel, someone older and powerful. Maybe Tapep, son of Pep, in Otsjanep, though he had been especially reluctant to speak and the others had always clammed up when he appeared. Or maybe Kokai, who had been alive when Michael disappeared, who had witnessed Lapré’s raid and been willing to talk about it, who Amates said had been a village chief and was related to Dombai, the man van Kessel’s report had named as having the glasses. In my wildest dreams, I hoped that in a few weeks they’d just confess everything to me, take me into the jungle and show me the skull�
�that it would all become completely clear. But if not that, I at least wanted to have a much better understanding of the village structure: who was who, how they were related, who the men Lapré had killed were, and how they were related to the men named in van Kessel’s and von Peij’s reports. I wanted to hear their stories and songs, understand more clearly the importance of snakes and crocodiles and sharks in their cosmology. And from the archives of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, I had copies of photos Michael had taken on his first trip to Otsjanep. They were beautiful black-and-white portraits of naked men draped in dog and pig teeth, posing with carvings and the magnificent bisj poles Michael had bought, paddling in huge groups and drumming in their houses. Had Michael met the men who killed him? Had he photographed them? I hoped to show the photos to men in the village and for them to identify the men named in van Kessel’s reports, and perhaps even to find out who the poles had been carved for.
I needed to know if the story fell apart or grew stronger.
NOW I WAS BACK. As the ship bumped against the dock, Wilem grabbed my bag and pulled me through the crowd, down the gangplank, and over to his longboat. I could already tell things were different. Wilem spoke about ten words of English, and on my last trip I had spoken about the same number of words in Bahasa Indonesian, which was rapidly replacing the native Asmat language. Despite all the time we’d spent together, Wilem and I had been limited to our few common words and a pantomime of hand and facial gestures. But at home in Washington, DC, I’d found an Indonesian teacher whom I’d met with three times a week. I’d never worked so hard at a language—and as languages go, Indonesian was relatively easy. By the time I left for Asmat, I was far from fluent, but I was surprised at how much I knew. Wilem and I had been texting for three days, and as he gunned the engine and we sped toward the main part of town, we were chitchatting like old friends—without a translator. It was as if a heavy veil had been lifted.
