In the end, history is a writer's story. The cigarettes, the coffee, and the sleepless nights had all produced a manuscript. The story had been told, and it was a writer who would end the standoff between Orville Wright and the Smithsonian. Fred Kelly lit another cigarette and leaned back in his chair. He had been working day and night. His office looked like a tornado had passed through. Eggs were shellacked to plates. Coffee cups were lined up like soldiers. Ashtrays were full. Packs of cigarettes lay crumpled beneath his chair. But he was finished. Books lay all over the floor. He literally walked on them to get to his chair. This was it. He was finished. Kelly leaned back and blew the smoke out tiredly. He looked at the stacked manuscript to the right of his typewriter. The story of the Wright brothers had been told and, more than all that, he now had Orville Wright in his debt—and that meant his book would be published.

Kelly had just gotten off the phone. Abbott did not want the story out there and had agreed to Orville's demands to publish a retraction on the Smithsonian's claims that the Langley plane had been capable of flight first. Abbott had no stomach for seeing a book come out that made the Smithsonian look even worse. Kelly knew this would kill two birds with one stone. Orville would be forever in his debt, and the 1903 Flyer could return. Orville would get his version of history published and he, Fred Kelly, would be the sole authorized biographer of the Wright brothers. History was served in the end.

It would take years for later historians to connect the dots on Fred Kelly's maneuvers to get his manuscript published. As Tom Crouch wrote in The Bishop's Boys, “Kelly sought to guarantee Orville's continued cooperation and eventual permission to publish the book as an authorized biography. The answer was to put Orville in his debt. There was an obvious way to accomplish that. Kelly wrote to Charles Abbott, suggesting that he would be willing to assist in resolving the long-standing dispute with the Smithsonian by negotiating a statement that would satisfy Orville Wright.”1

That got Orville back on board with the biography, and it woke up the Smithsonian as well. Kelly had resumed the interviews with Orville, and now it looked like the whole twenty-year controversy would be coming to an end. Nobody could break the standoff; even Lindbergh had given up, citing in his dairy the fault of the Smithsonian people, but also recognizing Orville's stubbornness. The Wright Flyer remained in London, and it took a writer to break the impasse. Fred Kelly had a tough client in Orville Wright. Not only did Orville want to go over every page he wrote, but he also held up the threat that he might kill the whole authorized biography and be done with it. But Kelly persevered past the crisis point when Orville wanted to scrap the book.

“Fred Kelly had triumphed. Perhaps because of his assistance in settling the Smithsonian dispute, perhaps simply out of friendship.”² The Wright Flyer had been in London for fifteen years. It was now in deep storage in the small town of Corsham. There was a fear that the 1903 Flyer might not survive the war, and Abbott had grown weary. Kelly said he would get the Flyer back. Just give him a statement that contained both a list of differences between the 1903 aerodrome and the 1914 machine flown at Hammondsport and a disavowal of the 1914 Zahm report. The statement appeared October 24, 1942, in Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections. An explanatory message preceded the statement:

This paper has been submitted to Orville Wright and under the date of October 8, 1942, he states that the paper as now prepared will be acceptable to him if given adequate publication.³

The fight was over. The Smithsonian had recognized that only one plane was capable of flying in 1903, and that was the Flyer that had left the sands of Kill Devil Hills. Orville quietly took steps to ensure that the plane would come back to the United States. In his new will, he wrote a letter in which he stated: “I give and bequeath to the U.S. National Museum of Washington DC; for exhibition in the national capitol only, the Wright airplane (now in the Science Museum, London, England) which flew at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on the 17th of December 1903.”⁴ Then he gave the letter to Mabel Beck.

Kelly looked at his typewriter. He and Orville had known each other for almost thirty years now, and it was time to get this book out there. He just had a few more questions for him. He wanted to make sure Orville came across as important as Wilbur did, and that was tricky. Wilbur was the power player and Orville was the little brother. He would never say that to Orville, of course. The man had done very well and was wealthy and respected worldwide. He was the Wright brothers. Wilbur had been dead for thirty years, so it had to be that Orville invented the plane as much as did Wilbur. It was fortuitous for the surviving brother. They were fifty-fifty on the invention of flight. Kelly knew there was no one around to say otherwise, and his book would set the record straight for all time. Orville was very smart, and he had a lot of inventions to his name, but this plane business was something else altogether.

Somebody had to have a vision, a drive that came from something other than sheer brilliance. No, this was not just some inventor who cracked flight. This was a man charged with destiny who saw things other men had not. Kelly had not seen the letters between Wilbur and Chanute. But he knew Wilbur was way beyond most people. But he was gone and, somehow, Kelly had to get Orville right in the middle of the whole thing.

Kelly wondered if there was something down at Kitty Hawk that had happened. Maybe some sort of epiphany, something only Orville could claim. Something to do with Kitty Hawk where the plane was invented. Something like: he woke up and, bam, he saw the light. That would make a good scene and would put him on equal footing with his brother. Orville did say something about the tail or rudder or whatever it was…he would ask him about that later.

Orville Wright finally approved Fred Kelly's manuscript. As Tom Crouch says in The Bishop's Boys, “It was not what Wilbur hoped for but it did tell the story in a relatively straightforward fashion.”5 On May 13, 1943, The Wright Brothers: A Biography Authorized by Orville Wright was released.⁶