by Lynne Olson
In late September 1944, Willkie told an acquaintance, “If I could write my own epitaph and if I had to choose between saying, ‘Here lies an unimportant President,’ or ‘Here lies one who contributed to saving freedom at a moment of great peril,’ I would prefer the latter.” A few days later, Willkie, whose appetites for smoking, drinking, and eating were as prodigal as his idealism, died of a heart attack. He was fifty-two.
According to The New York Times, Willkie’s death plunged the country “into deep mourning.” In an editorial, the Times declared: “His party and his country owe this man a debt which the years will not discharge.… Sorrow that his work is done will be felt wherever people cherish freedom. We salute a great American.” Roosevelt lauded Willkie for his “tremendous courage—his dominating trait.” Echoing that view, a young black leader named Channing Tobias declared: “As a Negro, I grieve the loss of the most courageously outspoken champion of the rights of my people since Lincoln.” According to Harry Bridges, the leftist head of the West Coast longshoremen’s union, “Wendell Willkie was the only man in America who has proved that he would rather be right than president.”
WHILE WILLKIE HAD STAYED clear of government employment, carving out, as always, a path of his own, many of his interventionist colleagues did join the administration. The Century Group’s Elmer Davis became head of the Office of War Information, the propaganda arm of America’s war effort. Robert Sherwood was named director of the OWI’s overseas branch, where he helped create the Voice of America, a U.S. government radio network that to this day broadcasts international news to countries around the world. Herbert Agar, meanwhile, joined the staff of U.S. ambassador John Gilbert Winant in London, then moved on to head the OWI’s London office. Agar divorced his wife to marry an Englishwoman and remained in Britain for the rest of his life.
In 1941, Henry Luce, who forswore government service to remain firmly in charge of his magazine empire, designated the twentieth century as the “American Century,” in which the United States would finally fulfill its destiny as leader of the world. His was a sentiment that combined internationalism with ardent nationalism and even imperialism that would increasingly resonate with ordinary Americans, as well as those fashioning U.S. foreign policy.
The architects of America’s overarching role in the postwar world would include the Century Group’s Dean Acheson and advisers to Henry Stimson and Frank Knox before and during the war—John McCloy, Robert Lovett, James Forrestal, and Robert Patterson. These “Wise Men,” as they came to be known, were determined to create a Pax Americana, a vision of their country’s future that, in the words of their biographers Walter Isaacson and Even Thomas, demanded “the reshaping of America’s traditional role … and a restructuring of the global balance of power.” It was a reshaping that would lead to the Vietnam and Iraq wars, among other future conflicts.
WHILE THEIR PREWAR FOES worked to extend America’s influence after World War II, the country’s most prominent isolationists were engaged in a far different struggle. They were fighting to rebuild their reputations, an effort that many would lose. As Geoffrey Perret has noted of the isolationists, “Collectively, they would generally be regarded for years to come as stupid, vicious, pro-Nazi reactionaries, or at least as people blind to the realities of a new day and a menace to their country’s safety.”
In 1944, Senators Gerald Nye and Bennett Champ Clark, along with FDR nemesis Rep. Hamilton Fish, lost their bids for reelection. Two years later, Senator Burton Wheeler was also defeated. Senator Robert Taft would make two more attempts to capture the Republican presidential nomination; his failure was attributed in large part to his isolationism.
Yet some prewar isolationists, such as the advertising genius Chester Bowles, did manage to put their pasts behind them. Despite his active participation in America First, Bowles, a liberal Democrat, became, in short order, wartime head of the Office of Price Administration, governor of Connecticut, a member of the House of Representatives, U.S. ambassador to India and Nepal, and finally undersecretary of state in the Kennedy administration. Where America First was concerned, Bowles seemed to have suffered a kind of amnesia. He did not mention his membership in his memoirs, nor was it brought up during his confirmation hearings. None of the many letters he exchanged with Robert Wood, Robert Stuart, and other America First leaders are in his papers at Yale.
In his autobiography, Gerald Ford, while acknowledging a flirtation with isolationism at Yale, also failed to note his involvement with America First; it never became an issue in his subsequent political career. Likewise, Kingman Brewster didn’t suffer any long-term consequences from his role as a founder of America First—a role that went unmentioned in his 1988 New York Times obituary.
Sargent Shriver was one of the few people associated with America First who had no qualms about publicly discussing his prewar isolationism. “Yes, I did belong to America First,” he replied to a letter writer demanding to know the extent of his involvement. “I joined it because I believed at the time we could better help to secure a just settlement of the war in Europe by staying out of it. History proved that my judgment was wrong, neither for the first time nor the last. None of the people I knew in the organization expressed any views within my hearing that were either pro-German or anti-Semitic. I can see how people with such views might have supported America First, just as people with pro-Russian or Communist views might have supported an interventionist organization at that time.” Later, Shriver would tell a journalist: “I wanted to spare American lives. If that’s an ignoble motive, then I’m perfectly willing to be convicted.”
Robert Stuart, who after the war rose through the ranks of the Quaker Oats Company to become chief executive officer and chairman of the board, was once asked if he had ever organized a reunion of those participating in America First. “No,” he replied. “We may be a little sensitive to the fact that the world still thinks we’re the bad guys.”
LESS THAN A MONTH before the end of the war in Europe, Franklin D. Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Warm Springs, Georgia. The president’s death, Lindbergh biographer A. Scott Berg noted, “did not affect Washington’s official attitude toward Lindbergh overnight. It took a week.”
In late April 1945, Charles Lindbergh officially emerged from political purdah. Summoned to Washington, he was asked to join a Navy-sponsored mission to Europe to study German developments in high-speed aircraft. With Roosevelt’s passing, he observed, “the vindictiveness in Washington practically disappeared as far as I was concerned.” He would later tell an interviewer that it was like the sun finally emerging from behind the clouds.
Throughout the late 1940s and into the 1950s, Lindbergh served as a special adviser to the U.S. Air Force (as the U.S. Army Air Forces was rechristened in 1947) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, working on a multitude of projects, several of them focusing on rocketry, missiles, and the space program. As a consultant and director of Pan American Airways, he also made frequent business trips to Europe, Asia, and South America.
In 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower reinstated Lindbergh in the Air Force Reserve, with the rank of brigadier general. Eisenhower’s successor as president, John F. Kennedy, was another Lindbergh admirer. Like Kingman Brewster and Robert Stuart, Kennedy had idolized the flier since childhood; an isolationist himself in college, he also had admired Lindbergh’s antiwar stand. In addition, he and Lindbergh shared a high literary distinction. They both had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for biography—Lindbergh in 1954 for Spirit of St. Louis, an autobiographical account of his flight to Paris, and Kennedy in 1957 for Profiles in Courage.
So it was not surprising that when Jacqueline Kennedy began planning one of the most glittering state dinners ever staged at the White House—a dinner in honor of French cultural minister André Malraux in April 1962—her husband insisted that Charles and Anne Lindbergh be the first ones invited. Lindbergh was the guest whom “President Kennedy was most anxious to have attend the dinner,” his wife l
ater said, “because of his lifelong admiration for him and for Mrs. Lindbergh.” Knowing that the reclusive Lindberghs were loath to attend public functions, the Kennedys invited them to spend the night at the White House so that they would not be bothered by journalists. In a thank-you note to Kennedy after the event, Lindbergh wrote: “We left with a deep feeling of gratitude and—even more—encouragement.”
Yet for all the honors and feting of Lindbergh, he never was entirely able to put his problematic prewar past behind him. He told friends, for example, that he felt “very constrained” whenever he visited Britain. “Even after all these years,” said one Englishman who had met him, “he fears someone will attack him … over his behavior toward England in World War II.”
Unquestionably, Lindbergh himself was responsible for much of the controversy that arose in the postwar years over his isolationism. To the end of his life, he never admitted he was wrong about anything he had said or done. Unlike Anne, who acknowledged that “we were both very blind, especially in the beginning, to the worst evils of the Nazi system,” he uttered no word of remorse or apology for his uncritical attitude toward the horrors of Hitler’s regime. When his wartime journals were published in 1970, Lindbergh defiantly equated the Nazis’ wholesale murder of Jews with other war crimes, including the brutality of some American troops toward Japanese prisoners of war. He still insisted that the United States had made a mistake in entering the war.
“Like many civilized people in this country and abroad, he could not comprehend the radical evil of Nazism,” The New York Times wrote about Lindbergh and his journals. “Even in the retrospect of a quarter-century, he is unable to grasp it.… [T]here is simply no comparison between individual misdeeds of American soldiers toward dead or captured Japanese and the coldly planned, systematically executed German government policy of murdering or enslaving Jews, Slavs, and other ‘inferior’ people.… The world is admittedly not what Americans—or anyone else—would like, but it is decidedly better than it would have been if the United States had not helped to defeat German and Japanese militarism.… If any war can be said to be worth fighting and winning, it was World War II.”
Yet although Lindbergh shared the views of anti-Communist conservatives that “in order to defeat Germany and Japan, we supported the still greater menaces of Russia and China,” he never became involved in Senator Joseph McCarthy’s crusade against Communists in government, as did Burton Wheeler, Robert Wood, Albert Wedemeyer, and Truman Smith. All of them, with the exception of Lindbergh, were also prominent in other right-wing causes in the 1950s and 1960s; Wedemeyer, for example, served as an adviser to the editors of a magazine published by the John Birch Society. In contrast, at the height of McCarthyism in 1952, Lindbergh, stubbornly independent and unpredictable as usual, voted for a liberal Democrat, Adlai Stevenson, for president.
As Lindbergh aged, he shed many of his previous interests, including his focus on modern technology, especially as it related to aviation. In 1928, when he had first begun courting Anne, he told her that his most cherished dream was to “break up the prejudices between nations by linking them up through aviation.” In later years, even though aircraft had indeed brought the peoples of the world closer together in a technical sense, “they have more than counteracted this accomplishment through their ruthless bombardments in war,” he would write. Both militarily and ecologically, he added, “I have seen the science I worshiped and the aircraft I loved destroying the civilization I expected them to serve.”
In the last decade of his life, he committed himself to the cause of halting man’s despoliation of nature, throwing himself into campaigns to save whales, water buffalo, eagles, and other endangered species. “If I had to choose,” he said shortly before he died, “I’d rather have birds than airplanes.”
WHEN LINDBERGH CAME BACK from his wartime adventures in the Pacific, he, like many returning servicemen, found his wife very much changed. Forced to cope on her own during the long separations of the previous three years, Anne Lindbergh had become stronger and considerably more self-reliant.
In Detroit, she had managed to carve out, for the first time in years, a satisfying life for herself. She took painting and sculpting lessons at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, an artists’ colony just outside the city, and became close to many of its members, among them the Finnish architect Eero Saarinen and the Swedish sculptor Carl Milles. Virtually all her new friends, she noted, were Europeans, with whom she identified, emotionally and intellectually, far more than she did with most Americans.
Finally emerging from Lindbergh’s shadow, Anne had found a community of her own, one to which she could “give my true self,” she observed in her diary, “as I have never done to a group of people before.… Certainly not in my marriage, because the groups we have entered have never been my people. In political groups, aviation groups, quite naturally everyone looked to C. But here I am perpetually my own self—and they like me!”
Less than a year before the end of the war, the Lindberghs moved back east, to a rented house in Westport, Connecticut, where they began to lead increasingly divergent lives. Occupied with her five children (Reeve, the youngest, was born in October 1945), Anne no longer took part in Lindbergh’s nomadic wanderings. Just as in Detroit, she built her own circle of friends—“artists, writers, dancers, sometimes psychologists or teachers,” Reeve remembered, “but not so often businesspeople or aviators.”
Lindbergh, for his part, traveled incessantly. While on the road, he rarely communicated with his family, often not letting them know where he was or when he would return. “He liked to be mysterious,” one of his children recalled. In a letter to a friend after the war, Anne wrote: “Charles only touches base now and then. He is, I think, on his fourth or fifth trip around the world this year.” He frequently missed Christmas and other family celebrations; after one holiday season, Anne wrote to him that on New Year’s Day, she and the children “played a game [in which] we all guessed where you were.”
When he did return home, he brought a sense of excitement and energy but also, his mother-in-law observed, a “terrible” tension. In her diary, Elizabeth Morrow noted, “He must control everything, every act in the house.” A loving but demanding father, Lindbergh spent considerable time with his children, playing with them but also lecturing and disciplining them. Annoyed by Anne’s blossoming independence, he found fault with her as well. When the time came for him to leave again on his travels, Reeve Lindbergh wrote, there was “a sense of release, an exhalation of long-held family breath, and a noticeable relaxation in discipline.”
Struggling with the disappointments and conflicts of her marriage, Anne began seeing a psychotherapist. She also became close to her New York internist, who encouraged her to talk about the depression, anger, and grief she had bottled up for so many years. During this period of self-examination, she spent considerable time mulling over the battle she had waged most of her life—how to maintain her own identity while fulfilling her duties as a daughter, wife, and mother.
In the late 1940s, Anne had begun taking an annual sabbatical from family duties, renting a rustic cottage on Captiva Island, off the west Florida coast, where she strolled the beaches for hours searching for shells. In the course of her wanderings, the outlines of a book took shape in her mind. She had stayed away from book writing since her traumatic wartime experiences with The Wave of the Future and The Steep Ascent. “I was very upset,” she later acknowledged. “So upset that I did not want to go on writing. I can understand why [The Wave of the Future] was misinterpreted.… But my reaction was that if I expressed myself so poorly, I should not continue writing.”
But the book she now had in mind had nothing to do with the war or isolationism. It would focus on the issues facing her and the many other women like her who, in the midst of juggling their various roles, were trying to figure out “how to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life; how to remain balanced, no matter what centrifugal forces tend to pull
one off center; how to remain strong.”
A series of lyrical meditations about youth, age, love, marriage, friendship, and the need to take care of oneself, Gift from the Sea was published in 1955 and quickly became one of the biggest successes in U.S. publishing history. It was on the New York Times bestseller list for two years, the first year as No. 1. It sold more than five million copies in its first twenty years in print; today, more than fifty years after it was first published, it is still selling well.
In Gift from the Sea, Anne argued that women must periodically take time away from their myriad responsibilities—“the circus act we women perform every day of our lives”—to seek solitude in order to recharge their creative energies and nourish themselves spiritually. “If it is woman’s function to give, she must be replenished too.”
Emphasizing the importance of women developing mutually nurturing relationships with others, she provided an example of one such relationship in her own life—not with her husband, but with her sister Con. During one stay in Florida, Anne noted in her book, her sister came to stay with her for a week. In describing the way she and Con undertook daily household chores together, Anne underscored the strength and comfort of their bond: “We work easily and instinctively together, not bumping into each other as we go back and forth about our task. We talk as we sweep, as we dry, as we put away, discussing a person or a poem or a memory.… We have moved through our day like dancers, not needing to touch more than lightly because we were instinctively moving to the same rhythm.”
