by Lynne Olson
Anne Morrow Lindbergh with her newborn son, Charles Jr., who was kidnapped and killed in March 1932.
As a result, the Lindberghs lived under constant siege at their secluded home, set in several acres of woods near Hopewell, New Jersey. Tabloid reporters went through the Lindberghs’ garbage, pilfered their mail, and offered bribes to their servants for tidbits about their private lives. One journalist even applied for a servant’s job with the couple, presenting them with forged references.
Then, on the evening of March 1, 1932, harassment gave way to tragedy: the Lindberghs’ twenty-month-old son, Charles Jr.—known as Charlie—was kidnapped from his nursery while his parents were having dinner downstairs. Two months later, the toddler’s body was found in the woods near the Lindberghs’ home. H. L. Mencken called the kidnapping the biggest story “since the Resurrection,” and the extraordinary media frenzy that followed seemed to prove his point.
The grieving Lindberghs were convinced that the excesses of the press were responsible for their son’s abduction and murder. “If it were not for the publicity that surrounds us, we might still have him,” Anne bitterly wrote in her diary. Even before the tragedy, Lindbergh had come to hate the mass-circulation newspapers, viewing them as “a personification of malice, which deliberately urged on the crazy mob.” That conviction was only strengthened when two news photographers broke into the morgue where his son’s body lay, opened the casket, and took pictures of Charlie’s remains.
The media circus surrounding the kidnapping continued for another four years, with millions of words and photos devoted to the lengthy investigation of the crime, the arrest, trial, and conviction of a German-born carpenter named Bruno Richard Hauptmann, and Hauptmann’s eventual execution in April 1936. For much of that period, the Lindberghs took refuge at the Englewood, New Jersey, estate of Anne’s widowed mother, Elizabeth Morrow.
Five months after Charlie’s death, the couple’s second son, Jon, was born. When Hauptmann was convicted, the Lindberghs received so many letters threatening Jon’s life that armed guards were hired to keep a twenty-four-hour watch outside the Morrow home. Several intruders, including an escaped mental patient, were caught approaching the house at various times.
A few months after the Hauptmann trial, three-year-old Jon, accompanied by a teacher, was on his way home from preschool when the car in which he was riding was forced off the road by another vehicle. Several men holding press cameras jumped out of it and ran toward the car containing Jon, taking flash photos of the terrified little boy as they came near.
After this latest press outrage, Charles Lindbergh decided that he and his family had no alternative but to leave America. “Between the … tabloid press and the criminal, a condition exists which is intolerable for us,” he wrote his mother. A few days before his departure, Lindbergh told a close friend that “we Americans are a primitive people. We do not have discipline. Our moral standards are low.… It shows in the newspapers, the morbid curiosity over crimes and murder trials. Americans seem to have little respect for law, or the rights of others.” It was not the first time—or the last—that he would equate his personal situation with the current state of American democracy.
The murder of his son, along with the disgraceful behavior of the media, left Lindbergh with a psychological wound that would never heal. Reeve Lindbergh, who was born thirteen years after the death of her eldest brother, recalled that her father never talked about him. The pain, she believed, was too overwhelming. “I can imagine how much this baby must have meant to my father, who had been raised as an only child … this Charles, this namesake,” she wrote. “I know that the loss was immeasurable and unspeakable.”
One day, after piloting a small plane through a violent thunderstorm, Lindbergh turned with a smile to his shaken wife, who had been in the plane with him, and said: “You should have faith in me.” Then the smile faded. “I have faith in you,” he said. “I just don’t have any more faith in life.”
Shortly before midnight on December 21, 1935, the Lindberghs were driven to a deserted dock in Manhattan and spirited aboard an American freighter bound for England. Before leaving, Lindbergh gave an interview to a reporter for The New York Times, one of the few news outlets he still respected. The day after the Lindberghs’ departure, the Times, in a story that took up much of the front page, described for its readers how “the man who eight years ago was hailed as an international hero … is taking his wife and son to establish, if he can, a secure haven for them in a foreign land.”
In the English countryside, the Lindberghs did indeed find the privacy they craved. For slightly more than two years, they rented Long Barn, a rambling old half-timbered house in Kent owned by Harold Nicolson—a member of Parliament, ex-diplomat, and author, who had written a biography of Anne’s father, Dwight Morrow—and Nicolson’s wife, the novelist Vita Sackville-West. During that time, the Lindberghs’ third son, Land, was born.
In her diary, Anne observed that the years spent at Long Barn were among the happiest of her life. For the most part, the English press and public left the Lindberghs alone. Jon could play in Long Barn’s extensive terraced gardens and roam the meadows beyond without an armed guard shadowing him. Anne and Charles, meanwhile, could take a drive through the countryside with “a wonderful feeling of freedom, [knowing] that we can stop anywhere, that we will not be followed or noticed.”
In the summer of 1938, the Lindberghs moved from Long Barn to an old stone manor house on the tiny, windswept island of Illiec, off the coast of Brittany. “I have never seen a place where I wanted to live so much,” Lindbergh confided to his journal. Considerably more isolated than Kent, Illiec proved to be another refuge for him and his wife.
WHILE BRITAIN AND FRANCE might have been havens of safety for the Lindberghs, those countries’ own security was in the gravest peril during that time. Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were on the march, and the threat of another war drew relentlessly closer. Two months before the Lindberghs sailed for England, Italian forces invaded the East African country of Abyssinia. Five months after that, Germany occupied the demilitarized Rhineland—a flagrant violation of the Versailles Treaty and a defiant challenge to Britain and France, its chief European adversaries in World War I. Neither country lifted a finger to stop the incursions, nor did the League of Nations, which from its creation in 1919 had consistently failed to confront aggressors and keep the peace. How could it be otherwise, considering that the United States had refused to join the League, Germany withdrew after Hitler came to power, and Britain, the League’s leading member, had slashed its armed forces and armaments as soon as the war was over?
When Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938 and thousands of Austrian Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps, the British and French governments once again turned a blind eye. France was not quite so accommodating, however, when it came to the Führer’s next target, Czechoslovakia: the French were bound by treaty to come to Czechoslovakia’s aid in the event of a confrontation with Germany.
But the British had no such treaty obligations. Knowing how pathetically small his armed forces were, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain was determined to remain on good terms with Hitler and find a peaceful solution to the Czech problem. After four years of half-hearted rearmament (consisting mostly of the development and production of fighter planes), Britain still had no army worthy of the name, no modern bombers in production, and virtually no stockpiling of essential supplies and raw materials. “It would be murder to send our forces overseas to fight against a first-class power,” the chief of the Imperial General Staff informed the prime minister.
In late September 1938, Chamberlain and French president Édouard Daladier, at a meeting with Hitler in Munich, surrendered to the German leader a huge chunk of Czechoslovakia—the Sudetenland—along with its vital fortifications and major centers of industry. Enraged by the sellout, Winston Churchill, the leading foe of Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, called it “the grossest ac
t of bullying treachery since Benedict Arnold.”
NOTWITHSTANDING CHARLES LINDBERGH’S longing for privacy, he began to play an increasingly public role during this period. He was invited by officials in Britain, France, and Germany to inspect their aircraft factories and other aviation facilities. What he saw convinced him that neither Britain nor France had the spirit or capability to fight a modern war against the Germans. And by underscoring British and French deficiencies in airpower and exaggerating German achievements, he unwittingly helped to encourage the capitulation to Hitler at Munich.
As Lindbergh observed, France’s government and people were riven by feuds and factions, and its cities were in disrepair. Political corruption and labor unrest were endemic, as was a strong streak of apathy and cynicism. The British, for their part, were passé, Lindbergh thought: they “had never adjusted themselves to the tempo of this modern era. Their minds were still attuned to the speed of sail rather than to that of aircraft.” He wrote in his journal: “I cannot see the future for this country.… Aviation has largely destroyed the security of the Channel, and [Britain’s] superiority of manufacture is a thing of the past.”
Although grateful to Britain for providing a haven for his family, he was exasperated by what he saw as its mediocrity, inefficiency, and complacency. Even the British penchant for drinking tea drew his ire. “The whole idea seems a little effeminate to me,” he noted shortly after arriving in England. “It is hard to explain why, except that I grew up with that idea. I thought tea was only for society women and ‘Eastern dudes.’ ” Later he would write: “It is necessary to realize that England is a country composed of a great mass of slow, somewhat stupid and indifferent people, and a small group of geniuses. It is the latter to whom the empire and its reputation are due.”
Lindbergh, however, made these pronouncements without really knowing the British. Indeed, for most of their lives, Charles and Anne Lindbergh had very few dealings with ordinary people, a situation that Anne lamented in later years. Sequestered as they were at Long Barn in the mid-1930s, they made the acquaintance of only a small number of Britons. When they did socialize, it was usually with those in upper-crust social and political circles—aristocrats, higher-ups in Chamberlain’s government, the royal family, and prominent businessmen—most of whom were appeasement-minded and pro-German. These Britons believed that the Germans had been badly treated by the Allies after World War I and that a strong Germany, Nazi or not, was necessary as a counterweight to the Communist Soviet Union. (One person with whom Lindbergh definitely did not fraternize was Winston Churchill, who would later declare about his countrymen: “The British have always been the biggest damn fools in the world. They are too easygoing to prepare [for war]. Then at the last minute, they hurry around and scrape together and fight like hell.”)
While convinced that Britain’s glory days were over, Lindbergh was sure that Germany’s had just begun. At the invitation of Colonel Truman Smith, the American military attaché in Berlin, he had spent considerable time in that country from 1936 to 1938, gathering information about the German air force.
Charles Lindbergh with German officials in Berlin. On the right is Colonel Truman Smith, the U.S. military attaché in Germany.
A Yale graduate who spoke fluent German, Smith was considered one of the U.S. Army’s foremost experts on Germany. During an earlier posting there in the early 1920s, he had been the first American official to interview Adolf Hitler, then an obscure political agitator in Munich. While most foreign observers at the time regarded Hitler as an inconsequential rabble-rouser, Smith believed that the future Führer, whom he described as “fanatical” and “a marvelous demagogue,” had struck a chord with the German people, still bitter and resentful after their country’s defeat in the Great War. Smith was convinced, he told his superiors, that Hitler and his newly formed National Socialist Party were “already a potential if not immediate danger to the German republic.”
Reassigned to Berlin in 1935, Smith kept close tabs on Germany’s explosive military expansion, which was in direct contravention of the Versailles Treaty. But while he was able to collect relatively up-to-date facts and figures about the German army’s size, armaments, and commanders, he knew little about aviation matters and lacked good intelligence about the equally massive buildup of the Luftwaffe.
Smith figured that Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering would leap at the chance to show off his prized air force to the world-famous Charles Lindbergh. That turned out to be true. When Smith, on behalf of Goering, asked Lindbergh to come to Germany in 1936, he sweetened the invitation with the promise that “the strictest censorship would be imposed by the German Air Ministry with respect to your visit.” (The pledge was not strictly kept; reporters and photographers were allowed to photograph Lindbergh and attend his public events in Germany but were not permitted to interview him.)
During that trip, as well as on several subsequent visits, Goering and his subordinates gave Lindbergh an effusive welcome, unveiling their latest-model bombers and fighters, taking him on tours of bustling aircraft plants around the country, and staging demonstrations of aerial diving and precision bombing. As the Germans hoped, Lindbergh was thoroughly impressed by what he considered the Reich’s overwhelming airpower. Many years later, Anne Lindbergh would acknowledge: “There is no doubt that Goering did ‘use’ [my husband] to show off his air production, anticipating that stories of its strength would spread abroad and delay opposition to Hitler’s aggressive program.”
Charles and Anne Lindbergh with Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering in Berlin.
In his reports, which were passed on to the U.S., British, and French governments, Lindbergh concluded that German military aircraft were greatly superior in both quality and quantity to those of any other European country, or, for that matter, the United States. Furthermore, he warned, “Germany now has the means of destroying London, Paris and Prague if she wishes to do so. England and France together have not enough modern war planes for effective defense or counter-attack.”
But there were serious flaws in Lindbergh’s findings, as Truman Smith would later acknowledge. Lindbergh did not know—and as a result, the reports failed to mention—that the superiority of the Luftwaffe in the late 1930s lay solely in its ability to support German ground forces in attacks confined to the European continent. It had not yet developed a long-range bomber fleet with the capacity to launch raids on London (or any other distant target) from Germany. Indeed, Goering had been informed by his subordinates in late 1937 that none of the Luftwaffe’s bombers or fighters could “operate meaningfully” over England. “Given our present means,” Goering was told, “we can hope at best for a nuisance effect.… A war of annihilation against Britain appears to be out of the question.”
Lindbergh’s omission of that key point served to support the conviction—and fear—of the British government and people that “the bomber will always get through.” For years, the country’s top leaders had been warning their compatriots that in any future war, massive bombing attacks would decimate the nation in a matter of days.
While the American’s gloomy findings were not a major factor in Chamberlain’s decision to appease Hitler at Munich, they certainly bolstered the British leader’s belief that Germany’s air strength was prohibitively strong and that it was far better to give Hitler what he wanted in Czechoslovakia than to be pitchforked into a war Britain was not ready for. The French, more strongly influenced by Lindbergh’s assessment, came to the same conclusion. Shortly before the Munich conference, the deputy chief of the French general staff declared that if the Sudetenland were not surrendered to Hitler, “French cities would be laid in ruins, [with] no means of defense.”
The British military attaché in Paris, who was clearly skeptical of Lindbergh’s report, wrote his superiors: “The Fuhrer has found a most convenient ambassador in Colonel Lindbergh, who appears to have given the French an impression of [German] might and preparedness which they did not have before.” In th
e view of Group Captain John Slessor, director of plans for the British air staff, Lindbergh, while “extremely likable” and “transparently honest and sincere,” was “a striking example of the effect of German propaganda.” The American airman had told him, Slessor noted in his journal, that “our only sound policy [was] to avoid war now at almost any cost.”
Lindbergh’s impressions of Germany’s military strength were undoubtedly colored by his personal affinity for the Germans, an attitude in sharp contrast to his feelings about the British and French. “All his life he had had to depend on absolute accuracy and complete expertise; nothing could be left to chance,” a friend once noted. “Everything in his view of life had to be calculated and tidy. He could neither tolerate nor understand an amateur approach to anything.” As Lindbergh viewed the situation in the late 1930s, the British and French were amateurs in aviation and other military matters, while the Germans were experts whose efficiency and perfectionist attitude rivaled his own. “I cannot help liking the Germans,” he wrote in his journal in March 1938. “They are like [Americans]. We should be working with them and not constantly crossing swords. If we fight, our countries will only lose their best men. We can gain nothing.… It must not happen.”
Both he and Anne, who accompanied him on his trips to Germany, greatly admired what they saw as the vitality of the country, its youth and vigor, its “refusal to admit that anything was impossible or that any obstacle was too much to be overcome”—so different from the spirit in France and Britain. Germany seemed prosperous, orderly, and bustling, with “a sense of festivity” and “no sense of poverty.”
What Lindbergh valued most about his visits, however, was the Germans’ respect for his privacy. “For twelve years I found little freedom in [America], the country which is supposed to exemplify freedom,” he mused in his journal. “I did not find real freedom until I came to Europe. The strange thing is that of all the European countries, I found the most personal freedom in Germany, with England next, and then France.” There was seemingly little consideration of the fact that in a dictatorship like the Third Reich, which had extinguished all dissent and crushed all opposition, no German would have been foolish enough to violate the privacy of an official guest of the state. Lindbergh’s freedom, in other words, had come at the expense of the liberty of others.
