by Lynne Olson
The Lindberghs’ knowledge and understanding of Germany were, to put it mildly, superficial. They had no chance to observe what was really going on in the country; they saw what the Nazis wanted them to see. Neither spoke or read German. Almost all their dealings were with German officials and military men. They didn’t mix with ordinary Germans, and they certainly were given no opportunity to witness firsthand the regime’s increasingly vicious persecution of Jews.
A dispassionate man who simplified virtually every problem he faced and who never gave much thought to the complexities of human nature, Lindbergh resolutely shut his eyes to what columnist Walter Lippmann called “the ice-cold evil” of Hitler’s dictatorship. Lindbergh would later write: “I shared the repulsion that democratic peoples felt in viewing the demagoguery of Hitler, the controlled elections, the secret police. Yet I felt that I was seeing in Germany, despite the crudeness of its form, the inevitable alternative to decline.” To a friend, he observed that while the Führer was clearly a fanatic, he was also “undoubtedly a great man, and I believe has done much for the German people.… [He] has accomplished results (good in addition to bad), which could hardly have been accomplished without some fanaticism.”
Described by one journalist as a “hypersensitive man who was insensitive to others,” Lindbergh was similarly detached in his response to reports of the Nazis’ mounting savagery to the Jews. When he learned about Kristallnacht, the brutal Gestapo-led pogrom in November 1938 that resulted in the murder of hundreds of German Jews and the vandalizing and burning of countless synagogues, homes, and businesses, all he did was question Nazi stupidity. “I do not understand these riots on the part of the Germans,” he wrote. “It seems so contrary to their sense of order and intelligence in other ways. They have undoubtedly had a difficult Jewish problem, but why is it necessary to handle it so unreasonably? My admiration for the Germans is constantly being dashed against some rock such as this.” Speculating about the reasons for Lindbergh’s lack of empathy for Hitler’s victims, an acquaintance commented: “Perhaps it is because he has been cut off for so long from common people, that he is incapable of being outraged by their degradation under fascism.”
Uninterested in moral questions, Lindbergh believed that France and England had no choice but to come to terms with Germany, no matter how distasteful those terms might be. “If England and Germany enter another major war on opposite sides,” he declared, “Western civilization may fall as a result,” leaving the door open for incursions by the Soviet Union and Communism.
In the United States, meanwhile, news of Lindbergh’s visits to the Reich had begun to erode the sympathy and admiration still felt for him by much of the American public. The playwright and literary critic Wolcott Gibbs acidly wrote in The New Yorker that Lindbergh “has, if any man ever had, a reason to hate democracy and admire a system that can protect privacy just as efficiently as it can destroy life and hope.”
When Goering presented Lindbergh with a medal on October 18, 1938, just three weeks after the Munich agreement, the attacks back home grew sharper. The medal ceremony had taken place at a reception preceding a stag dinner hosted by Hugh Wilson, the U.S. ambassador to Germany, at the American embassy in Berlin. Neither Lindbergh nor Wilson had been told in advance about the medal—the Service Cross of the German Eagle—which, according to Goering, was meant to honor the aviator’s services to world aviation and to commemorate his 1927 flight. Although Lindbergh was surprised by the decoration (a young U.S. Army officer standing next to him that night described him as “flabbergasted”), he thought little about it. His wife, however, had a far different reaction. When Lindbergh and Truman Smith, who was also at the dinner, showed the medal to Anne later that night, she looked at it and flatly dubbed it “the albatross.”
Indeed it was. The medal presentation had occurred just days before the Kristallnacht outrages, which deeply shocked the U.S. public. Not since World War I had Americans shown such open animosity toward Germany, reported the German consul general in Los Angeles. Hans Dieckhoff, the German ambassador in Washington, cabled Berlin: “A hurricane is blowing here.” As a sign of his displeasure with the Nazis, President Roosevelt recalled Hugh Wilson from Germany, whereupon Hitler ordered Dieckhoff back from Washington.
Considering the strong anti-German feeling in the United States, it was not surprising that news of Lindbergh’s medal aroused considerable controversy. At this point, the flier’s open contempt for the U.S. press came back to haunt him. Long resentful of his scornful attitude toward them, journalists not only played up the medal story but, in some instances, invented details that further tarred his reputation. Liberty magazine, for example, wrote that he had flown to Berlin for the sole purpose of accepting the decoration. Even The New York Times, so sympathetic to him in the past, incorrectly reported that he had proudly worn the medal for the entire evening of the dinner. In fact, he never put it on.
“We know Charles never denies anything the newspapers print, and we know too that some outrageous things have been printed about him. But this thing seems to us to be different,” a distant relative of Anne wrote to her. “For the first time, it actually puts Charles on a side, it allies him with something this country believes is wrong and bad, and it may give impetus and encouragement to some weaker men who lean to the wrong side.”
Ignoring appeals from his friends to set the record straight, Lindbergh repeatedly declined to give his version of what had happened that night. As Life magazine pointed out, “His refusal to talk about the medal has magnified its importance out of all proportion.” Astonishingly, Lindbergh insisted for the rest of his life that his acceptance of the medal had never been a problem for him. In 1955, he wrote Truman Smith that he always regarded “the fuss about it as a tempest [in a] teapot.”
That statement simply underscored Lindbergh’s political myopia. In fact, from late 1938 on, the medal incident was used by his critics as a cudgel with which to bludgeon him. Chief among his foes was Harold Ickes, the hard-nosed, cantankerous secretary of the interior, who was widely known for his slashing invective against those he considered his and FDR’s adversaries. “I cannot be tolerant of fools,” Ickes once remarked to Roosevelt, “and there are altogether too many fools everywhere.” According to T. H. Watkins, Ickes’s biographer, “a world without something in it to make him angry would have been incomprehensible to him.”
A disgruntled Republican senator who had been the target of one of Ickes’s verbal assaults called him “a common scold puffed up by high office.” To one cabinet colleague, Ickes was “Washington’s tough guy.” To another, he was the “president’s attack dog.” Encountering the pudgy, bespectacled Ickes at a dinner at the British embassy, the assistant secretary of state Adolf Berle refused to shake hands with him, later describing the interior secretary in his diary as “fundamentally, a louse.”
Ferociously combative, Ickes was also a stalwart champion of civil rights and liberties. As a young lawyer in Chicago, he had been president of that city’s branch of the NAACP. As secretary of the interior, he had banned all segregation in his department and was responsible for arranging Marian Anderson’s 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial after the black singer was barred from performing at Washington’s Constitution Hall. Following Hitler’s rise to power, Ickes was outspoken in his criticism of Germany and its treatment of the Jews.
Lindbergh’s acceptance of the German medal put him high on Ickes’s already crowded enemies list. Shortly after Kristallnacht, during a speech to a Jewish group in Cleveland, the cabinet secretary blasted Lindbergh for accepting “a decoration at the hand of a brutal dictator, who with that same hand is robbing and torturing thousands of fellow human beings.” Anyone who took a medal from Germany, he added, “automatically forswears his American birthright.” From then on, Ickes boasted that he had been “the first man in public life to utter a criticism of Lindbergh.”
In letters and cables, friends and family members informed the Lindberghs that movi
e audiences in New York and other cities were now hissing whenever images of Charles appeared in newsreels. Lindbergh, according to his brother-in-law, Aubrey Morgan, had become a “convenient channel” into which the American public could pour its increasing anger over what was happening in Germany. “You have become the scapegoat,” Morgan wrote Lindbergh. “The press certainly went out of their way to make you the real villain and Machiavellian intriguer behind the European scenes.”
Anne was greatly shaken by the attacks on her husband, believing they were deeply unfair. Lindbergh, by contrast, exhibited what his wife called “his immobile, tolerant unconcern.” In her diary, she noted: “Their scorn does not touch him any more than their praise once did.” Indeed, in early April 1939, just a few months after the medal incident, he abruptly decided that he and his family should return to the United States, giving up their privacy and plunging back into the maelstrom of celebrity from which they had escaped more than three years before.
His decision came after Hitler’s seizure of all of Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939. A short time later, Neville Chamberlain, finally realizing the futility of his appeasement policy, announced to the House of Commons one of the most dramatic reversals of foreign policy in modern British history. Britain, he declared, would go to the aid of Poland, widely reported to be Hitler’s next victim, if it were invaded. France made a similar pledge.
Realizing that Europe was on the verge of war, Lindbergh concluded there was nothing more he could do on the Continent to ward off the conflict. His place, he thought, was back home. “I felt I could exercise a constructive influence in America, trying to convince its citizens of the need for strict neutrality in the event of war,” he wrote in his journal. “[T]hen at least one strong Western nation would remain to protect Western civilization.”
CHAPTER 2
“WE WERE FOOLS”
When the ocean liner Aquitania docked in New York on April 14, 1939, dozens of reporters and photographers laid siege to Charles Lindbergh’s cabin, camping out in the hallway and on the stairs leading down to the deck. Unfazed by Lindbergh’s refusal to meet them, one photographer broke through the cabin door, snapped a quick photo of the startled flier, and ran. A few minutes later, Lindbergh, whose wife and children would arrive on a later ship, strode swiftly down the gangplank, surrounded by a horde of uniformed policemen. Journalists swarmed ahead and behind the entourage, falling over one another in their frantic attempts to get a photo or comment from the man in its center. “There must have been over a hundred of them,” Lindbergh wrote in his journal, “and the planks were covered with the broken glass of the flashlight bulbs they threw away. I have never seen as many at one time before, even in 1927, I think. It was a barbaric entry to a civilized country.”
Several days before, as the Aquitania steamed across the Atlantic, Lindbergh had exchanged radiograms with General Henry “Hap” Arnold, who wanted to arrange a meeting with him as soon as possible. The day after Lindbergh’s arrival, the two men met secretly at West Point. The furtiveness of their encounter was as much Arnold’s doing as it was Lindbergh’s: the general, noted Arnold biographer Murray Green, was “walking on eggshells because Lindbergh by that time had become a dirty word at the White House.”
General Henry “Hap” Arnold, chief of the U.S. Army Air Corps.
For three hours, they talked over lunch at a nearby hotel, whose dining room, at Arnold’s request, had been cleared of other guests. When the dining room closed so the staff could prepare for dinner, Lindbergh and Arnold continued their discussion in the grandstand at a West Point baseball game, surrounded by rooting cadets.
The head of the Air Corps could not have cared less about the controversy surrounding Lindbergh. Nor was he bothered by the political ramifications of the aviator’s visits to Germany. A man who “seemed to seek out trouble” and who, like Lindbergh, thrived on danger and adventure, the fifty-two-year-old Arnold had often been severely reprimanded for his own iconoclasm. He was a headstrong, tactless maverick with a penchant for criticizing his superiors and going outside the chain of command to get what he wanted. Indeed, earlier in his military career, he had been threatened with court-martial for secretly lobbying members of Congress in support of legislation he favored.
As for Lindbergh, all Arnold cared about was that he had provided the Air Corps with badly needed information about the size and strength of the Luftwaffe—information that Arnold himself had asked him to gather, “as a great personal favor and act of patriotism.” Even more important, Lindbergh’s dramatic reports of German airpower had helped influence President Roosevelt’s decision to order a massive increase in U.S. aircraft production just five months before. For Arnold, who was determined to build the most powerful air force in the world, FDR’s proposal was nothing less than a military Magna Carta.
A pioneer and visionary, the stocky, broad-shouldered Arnold had big dreams about the future of aviation, which at that point was still relatively new. Only thirty-five years had elapsed since Orville and Wilbur Wright first flew over the sandy beaches of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The Wright brothers had taught Arnold how to fly, and he had gone on to become one of America’s first four military pilots. When he took charge of the Air Corps in 1938, it was in pitiful shape—a pale shadow of the mighty Luftwaffe or Britain’s Royal Air Force. Arnold himself called his service “practically nonexistent.” Ranked twentieth in size among the world’s air forces and still under Army control, it had a few hundred combat planes, many of them obsolete, and fewer than nineteen thousand officers and enlisted men.
From the time he assumed command, Arnold was obsessed with the idea of proving that airpower was superior to any other type of armed force. He was brusque and impatient with the many top government officials in Washington who failed to share his unswerving faith in the Air Corps’ future dominance and who thought that “we damned airmen were too cocky, too big for our boots.”
Among the skeptics was Franklin Roosevelt, a sea-loving man who once had been assistant secretary of the Navy and had always favored that service. In the aftermath of the Munich agreement, however, the president’s advisers persuaded him that Germany’s supposedly overwhelming aerial strength posed a major threat not only to the security of Europe but to America and the rest of the world. Although the reports of the Luftwaffe’s might, including those made by Lindbergh, proved to be highly exaggerated, they convinced Roosevelt “for the first time,” in the words of a War Department memo, “that American airplane production should be greatly stimulated with all possible speed.”
On November 14, 1938, the president ordered the Army to draw up a two-year plan for the production of ten thousand new aircraft, most of them bombers. He was captivated by the idea of waging war from the air, telling his cabinet that it “would cost less money, would mean comparatively few casualties, and would be more likely to succeed than a traditional war.” And if he sold a large percentage of the new planes to Britain and France, thus enabling them to defend themselves against Germany, maybe America could avoid being sucked into the conflict now threatening Europe. For Arnold, the idea of shipping off aircraft desperately needed by his own Air Corps was anathema; over the next three years, he would do all he could to oppose it, even to the point of insubordination.
In his quest for the biggest and best air force possible, Arnold was determined to utilize the star power of Lindbergh. At their West Point meeting, he asked the flier to lead an effort to speed up the development of faster and more sophisticated U.S. warplanes. Acceding to Arnold’s request, Lindbergh, a colonel in the Army Reserve, returned to active duty a few days after his return to America. Although an outspoken advocate of U.S. neutrality, he was also firmly convinced that America had to build up its military strength as quickly as possible in order to be able to defend itself properly. After several weeks of touring the country’s aircraft factories and aeronautical research centers, he concluded that their potential was “tremendous” but that in their current state, they
were far inferior to those in Germany. Again at Arnold’s bidding, he served on a board that, after a brief study, made strongly worded recommendations for a greatly accelerated and expanded program of aeronautical research, development, and manufacture.
For a cause like this, Lindbergh—as Arnold had hoped—was not averse to using his celebrity. He became the Air Corps’ point man, involving himself in countless discussions with members of Congress, bureaucrats, diplomats, business executives, scientists, and engineers about what needed to be done—and spent—to make America No. 1 in airpower.
LINDBERGH, WHO HAD SPENT a year in an Army flying school in the early 1920s, loved being back on active military duty. He was given an office across the hall from Arnold’s in the Munitions Building, a huge structure on Washington’s National Mall that housed Army and Air Corps personnel. At the end of each day, to avoid any photographers and reporters who might be hovering near the front entrance, Arnold’s aide escorted Lindbergh out of the building through a back exit to a waiting taxi.
After just a few days in Washington, Lindbergh realized that many others shared his feelings of alienation from the outside world. His associates in the Munitions Building and elsewhere in the armed services were an embattled, demoralized band, who were treated as pariahs by their profoundly antiwar, antimilitary countrymen. No longer did the American public want to “make the world safe for democracy,” as President Woodrow Wilson had promised in 1917, when the United States entered World War I. In the words of the historians William Langer and S. Everett Gleason, “Americans, having once believed, erroneously, that war would settle everything, were now disposed to endorse the reverse fallacy that war could settle nothing.”
