Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  The Lindberghs flew down the Tyrrhenian coast, over the ruins of Pompeii. Charles looked at the skeleton of the magnificent Grecian temple of Jupiter at Segesta in Sicily and could not help feeling “that a people who had hewn such mystic beauty from the material of stone could have risen above the morbidity of war and human quarreling. Yet,” he realized, “the Greek city-states were in constant disagreement, and the civilization they had developed gave way to the centralized power of Rome.”

  Flying over what had once been a Roman triumphal arch in Carthage, the remnants of ancient Alexandria and Cairo, an old wall from Biblical Jerusalem, and the site of Babylon, Lindbergh saw reminders of once glorious civilizations, all fitting together in his mind like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

  Into March, they crossed India just above its mid-section, from Gwadar to Calcutta, stopping in Karachi, Jodhpur, Udaipur, Bombay, Nagpur, and Raipur. They would have toured the country from Kashmir in the north to Ceylon in the south as well, had an engine part not failed, grounding their plane for more than two weeks. They spent most of that time in Calcutta, which had been Lindbergh’s ultimate destination anyway. His purpose in traveling this distance was in part to advance aviation—“On the one hand,” he would later write, “it was time to establish air routes around the entire earth and I wanted to gain first-hand experience in the area lying between eastern Europe and China.”

  On the other, he was interested in Indian mystical phenomena. In London libraries Lindbergh had read medical reports of yogis “who controlled their pulse and breath, of an Indian who drank sulphuric acid and still lived, of others who had themselves buried alive for days or walked uninjured over beds of glowing coals. There were publications from more doubtful sources which described miracles of levitation and clairvoyance.” In India he hoped to “learn secrets as yet undiscovered by Western science … even find bridges between the physical and spiritual worlds. After all, radio was unknown not many years before. Why mightn’t there be some way of recording emanations from the human spirit?”

  Lindbergh also hoped to meet up with one of his English neighbors, Sir Francis Younghusband—a British soldier, explorer, author, and mystic—who had led the British expedition into the forbidden city of Lhasa in 1904 and who was attending a Parliament of Religions organized in honor of the Eastern saint and mystic Ramakrishna.

  During several sessions the Lindberghs sat in the front row of a Calcutta auditorium, before a large picture of Ramakrishna. Charles listened intently to Sir Francis “advocate the unity of faiths under a brotherhood of man,” the audience “striving hard to break down the religious barriers between them.” Anne could barely keep a straight face, seeing her agnostic husband in front of banners declaring “Religion is the highest expression of man,” as he sat among “crowds of barefoot Indian monks, holy men, students, and a few stray, wispy people from Pasadena, London, Boston, following an Indian swami in an orange turban.” She had to bite her lip when the alarm on Charles’s wristwatch alarm sounded in the middle of a prayer. At another session an Indian poetess noticed the famous visitor from the West and compared him to “Buddha, Galileo, and other spiritual figures of the world.” Lindbergh’s embarrassment was visible. “What other man on earth today could have his blush reported on five continents?” The New York Times asked in an editorial. “Not STALIN, MUSSOLINI, nor HITLER. They are past the blushing stage.”

  Lindbergh also got to explore Calcutta, observing its poverty, filth, and disease. He could hardly believe this same country had “once produced a civilization of art and architecture and religion—or that conditions were in fact worse before the British government took over.” On March 18, 1937, the Lindberghs flew their repaired plane over Fatehpur Sikri, the former capital of Akbar, descendant of the Mogul khans. “These were once great buildings,” Lindbergh noted, “now a mass of ruins.”

  They arrived in Athens at the start of April. Wandering among the broken columns of the Acropolis after having seen the remains of a dozen other civilizations, Lindbergh reached an epiphany. “In these ruins,” he realized, “lay a timeless warning. At the same moment, one sensed the heights of Western achievement and the depths of Western failure. One realized how easily strength was perverted to decay, how human wisdom was more essential to a temple’s walls than the rock on which it stood.” Lindbergh thought of Athens and Sparta warring with each other until all of Greece collapsed. Now he thought of England and Germany assuming those same positions. “War! War!” he would later write. “What useless conflicts there had been through those intervening centuries!” Seeing that cycle gearing up anew, Lindbergh became consumed with the idea of stopping it.

  Anne and Charles returned to Long Barn on April 9, 1937. His travels had led him to see England in a new light. The impending coronation of George VI, who had ascended to the throne upon the abdication of Edward VIII the preceding December, depressed him. “The life of the monarch should be an example to his subjects,” Lindbergh wrote. “A good king must either have great strength or a good reputation.” He felt the monarchy had lost much of its prestige as a result of the whole affair: “There is no example of true romance, and no clear principle has been established—unless it be that the King of England may have his mistresses, but must not marry a twice divorced woman. However, the majority of the Empire carries on with cowlike placidity and satisfaction in the knowledge that they now have a king who will do the proper thing.”

  Lindbergh appreciated all that England had offered him and his family. He and his family had lived “without worry from politics, press, or fanaticism,” he wrote Colonel Schwarzkopf back in New Jersey. And yet, England now struck him as a backward nation, another crumbling empire. “It was as though the Englishman’s accomplishments, century after century, had become a cumulative burden on his shoulders until his traditions, his possessions, and his pride overweighed his buoyancy of spirit,” he would later write. “I felt that England, aged, saw not the future but the past and had resigned herself to the gardens of her greatness year by year. She was satisfied with her empire and a legal status quo enforced by her warships’ guns. It was as though her desires blocked out the knowledge of her mind that life is not stabilized for long by conquest, and that wings fly over land and sea and gun batteries.” It troubled Lindbergh that the best propeller he could get for his Miles Mohawk in England was of the type he had used on the St. Louis-Chicago airmail in 1926, one already obsolete in America by the time the Spirit of St. Louis had been built.

  The night of May 11, 1937—Coronation Eve—Charles drove Anne into the city. She had felt labor pains for two days, and she suffered more in the car, just as they found Oxford Street blocked off for the next day’s procession. Pulling out of a huge traffic jam on Wigmore Street, Lindbergh was asked if he had a permit to drive through. “I have something better than a pass,” he told the constable. “I have my wife, who is going to have a baby.” They registered Anne in The London Clinic as “Mrs. Charles,” and she lay there quietly through another night and day. Doctors and nurses agreed the baby would not be arriving on Coronation Day; but around eleven that night, Anne went into labor. Charles, gowned and masked, was present for the birth, forty-five minutes later. “A Coronation baby, after all!” Anne would record in her diary. He had blue eyes, what Anne called the Morrow “pug,” and the unmistakable Lindbergh cleft in his chin.

  Because public attention had been diverted, it was several days before the press caught wind of the birth. One night while reporters staked out the main entrance of the clinic, Charles slipped Anne and their new son out the doctors’ entrance and into a waiting car. They enjoyed another several days of quiet at Long Barn before the press discovered them there. Charles had arranged to bypass normal governmental regulations on the registering of births; and it was May twenty-fourth before he submitted a press release of the event to the American Embassy. Not until June twenty-first did Lindbergh register his son’s name—Land, Evangeline Lindbergh’s maiden name.

  All that s
pring, several joyous Morrow events made Anne feel the gentle tug of her family. Her mother received an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Smith College; her sister Constance, upon turning twenty-one, married Aubrey Morgan, their late sister Elisabeth’s widower; and her brother, Dwight Jr., after many years of treatment for mental disorders, was well enough to marry Margot Loines, a friend of Constance. But Anne knew it would be the worst time for Charles to return to New York, for that May twentieth to the twenty-first would mark the tenth anniversary of his flight. A committee of college presidents, ambassadors, military leaders, and captains of industry, headed by General Pershing, Governor Lehman, Mayor LaGuardia, and Orville Wright joined forces for the occasion. “I am embarrassed to think of your being asked to devote your time and energy to preparing a speech for the anniversary of my flight to Paris,” Lindbergh wrote Morgan partner Thomas W. Lamont. “I believe that the past should not be turned into an obligation for the future; and ceremonies for celebrating past events almost invariably become an obligation for those taking part in them. It seems to me that the past should be used to simplify rather than to complicate our lives. At this time, especially, there are too many serious problems which require concentrated attention to justify our spending very much time celebrating the accomplishments of another period.”

  The guest of honor’s absence notwithstanding, a day of encomiastic ceremonies and intercontinental broadcasts took place in both New York and Paris, culminating in a banquet for hundreds at the Waldorf-Astoria. The New York Times noted in its editorial that day that “When this age is viewed in retrospect the monument to Colonel LINDBERGH … will more probably be for his impetus and continuing contribution in bringing about the air transport era than even for his heroic deed of May 20–21, 1927.” Indeed, in St. Louis alone—where 165,000 people turned out for a three-day air meet celebrating the 1927 flight—airline and airmail service had doubled in the last eighteen months.

  Lindbergh spent the day quietly in England, refusing all invitations to speak to reporters or over the radio. He acknowledged the anniversary only by placing an order with Tiffany & Company in London for eight silver boxes—the lids engraved with maps showing the route of his famous plane—one for each of his St. Louis backers.

  The Lindberghs continued to explore Europe, making two trips that summer to the Carrels’ private island off the Brittany coast; and in October they accepted a second invitation from Germany, officially to attend the Lilienthal Aeronautical Society Congress in Munich and unofficially to gather more intelligence about the Luftwaffe for the United States Army.

  “What a life you have had!” Ambassador Dodd wrote Lindbergh in advance of his visit. “There is not a match for it in all our history; but what dangerous plans lie ahead for poor old Europe. I hope you may render some service in the direction of peace.” Lindbergh could not help feeling the same, that he was singularly able to visit any country in the world and collect information about its air forces. Such information, he believed, was crucial for the avoidance of war, for, as he wrote the Ambassador, “It is not sufficient for people to desire peace. It is necessary to be able to enforce peace, and to do away with the advantages which may be obtained by war.” To Lindbergh, that meant “preparing” for it.

  Charles and Anne flew their Miles Mohawk to Munich on October 11, 1937, and spent the next five days in and around the city. During the Lilienthal Congress the Lindberghs were lodged in a thirteenth-century castle nestled in the Bavarian Alps as guests of an anti-Nazi baron. Lindbergh met no leaders of the Third Reich this trip; and he left Germany even more impressed than he had the last time. “Hitler is apparently more popular than ever in Germany,” Lindbergh wrote Dr. Carrel, “and, much as I disagree with some of the things which have been done, I can understand his popularity. He has done much for Germany.” Charles wrote Anne’s friend Amey Aldrich that he saw “youth, hope and vigor in Germany today—and a strength … based on one of the strongest of foundations—defeat.”

  As before, Lindbergh visited factories and airfields. Even more impressive than the array of shiny planes he saw was the large decentralized system of small factories ready to mint many more of them. Lindbergh was the first American to visit the Focke-Wulf factory in Bremen, where the Germans demonstrated a model of a flying machine that landed and took off vertically and was able to hover without any apparent movement; it could also fly backward or forward with good maneuverability in turning. “I have never seen a more successful demonstration of an experimental machine,” he would write of the helicopter.

  Most important, Ernst Udet of the Luftwaffe was authorized to show Lindbergh alone the Rechlin air testing station in Pomerania. “This,” Truman Smith commented, “was one of the most secret establishments in Germany, and so far as was then known, foreign attachés were barred.” Lindbergh thus became the first American to examine in detail the Messerschmitt (ME) 109, the Luftwaffe’s leading single-engine fighter, as well as the Dornier (DO) 17, its latest light bomber-reconnaissance airplane. From his visits, he gathered that the Luftwaffe was developing a Messerschmitt 110, a twin-engined fighter with 1200 h.p. Daimler-Benz engines—which turned out to be the case. Before Lindbergh’s departure, he helped Truman Smith prepare Report no. 15540, “General Estimate (of Germany’s Air Power) of November 1, 1937.”

  “Germany is once more a world power in the air,” announced the four-page survey. “Her air force and her air industry have emerged from the kindergarten stage. Full manhood will still not be reached for three years.” The report detailed the planes Lindbergh had seen and estimated the strength of the entire air force which he had not seen. He said that Germany had already outdistanced France in its technical development and had all but closed the gap on Great Britain. “A highly competent observer,” Truman wrote in conclusion, referring to Lindbergh, estimated that “if the present progress curves of [America and Germany] should continue as they have in the past two years, Germany should obtain technical parity with the USA by 1941 or 1942.” At the end of the year, Truman Smith returned to America on leave and discovered his report had been photostatted and circulated widely. He was, therefore, disappointed to see Congress cut rather than increase War Department requests for appropriations for the Army Air Corps.

  Other American embassies wrote Lindbergh, inviting him to inspect air bases in their countries. But at the end of 1937, he was most anxious to see what strides America was making in aviation. So mindful was Lindbergh of his position in these obviously historical times, he began to keep a journal. For the first time in his life, he would write daily entries for more than a few weeks; in fact, he would maintain the habit for most of the next seven years.

  The Lindberghs celebrated a quiet—and early—Christmas at Long Barn, with their two children, on the twenty-fifth of November. Charles and Anne were sailing on the S. S. President Harding on the twenty-seventh, and they planned to be gone several months. Charles had clearly developed a pattern of embarking on a long trip after the birth of each child, as though weaning his wife from their children.

  They stuck to themselves during the crossing, mostly writing. Anne progressed on Listen! The Wind, her account of their Africa-to-America journey; and Charles prepared chapters of a medical book he was cowriting with Dr. Carrel, The Culture of Organs. Before their ship had docked, the Lindberghs learned that reporters had flocked to meet them. Charles took Anne to the third-class gangplank and down a freight elevator, thereby evading the army of photographers and journalists waiting at the foot of the first-class gangplank. The newsmen ran after them, but they escaped to Mrs. Morrow’s waiting car.

  No sooner had they reached Next Day Hill than the press cars had returned to wait outside the gate. A sentry had to be put on duty, which the media soon exaggerated, reporting twelve policemen on guard, as well as a direct telephone wire to the state police headquarters. “Suppose we will have constant trouble with press now,” Lindbergh wrote in his new journal. “Rumors, lies & all the sensation of American journal
ism at its worst.”

  “Let’s leave Colonel Lindbergh alone,” Frank E. Gannett urged the editors of the papers that comprised his chain. “I believe firmly that it is a newspaper’s duty to print the news, but I am utterly opposed to the invasion of the privacy of a citizen.” Other major media announced a similar policy, in an effort to prove that the Lindberghs’ fleeing America had taught them a lesson. But within days, the press coverage was as bad as ever.

  Most of the Lindberghs’ trip was spent catching up with old friends and business associates. Other than sitting for Robert Brackman, who painted oil portraits of both Charles and Anne, the most consequential encounter was with a good-looking, bespectacled thirty-two-year-old named James Newton. An entrepreneurial real-estate developer from Fort Myers, Florida—and a friend of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford—Newton moved on to a strenuous career working for Harvey Firestone, until he collapsed from overwork. Then he found himself attracted to the Oxford Group, “an informal association of men and women, started by an American, Frank Buchman, who were committeed to creating sound homes, teamwork in industry, and unity within and between nations, based on moral and spiritual change.” Introduced by Dr. Carrel, Newton—a powerful personality with a gentle soul—would become Lindbergh’s most constant friend for the rest of his life. Lindbergh did not get to survey American developments in aviation on this trip, as he had hoped; but what little he saw convinced him, as he wrote Major General Frank Ross McCoy, “that Germany is rapidly surpassing us in air strength.”

  On February 20, 1938, Hitler spoke to the Reichstag of the ten million Germans living just beyond his borders, suggesting his vision of an Anschluss. By the time the Lindberghs boarded the England-bound Bremen, less than three weeks later, the Nazis had marched into Austria. Lindbergh was already dreading the possibility that America and Germany might end up crossing swords. “If we fight, our countries will only lose their best men,” Lindbergh noted, echoing his late father’s sentiments. “We can gain nothing…. It must not happen.”