Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  After three years abroad, Lindbergh questioned what further contribution he could make toward improving relations among the countries of Europe. If there was to be a war, he thought, “then my place was back in my own country. I felt I could exercise a constructive influence in America by warning people of the danger of the Soviet Union and by explaining that the destruction of Hitler, even if it could be accomplished through using American resources, would probably result in enhancing the still-greater menace of Stalin.” As one of the few people to have visited the world’s political hot spots, he felt compelled to argue for an American policy of “strength and neutrality, one that would encourage European nations to take the responsibility for their own relationships and destinies. If they prostrated themselves once again in internecine war, then at least one strong Western nation would remain to protect Western civilization.”

  Lindbergh booked passage on the Aquitania. His decision to summon his family to America, he noted in his journal, would depend on “what I may find I may be able to do if I spend the summer there.”

  14

  THE GREAT DEBATE

  “My father had opposed the United States’s entering

  World War I…. I was not old enough to understand

  the war’s basic issues, yet I felt pride in the

  realization that my country was now powerful and

  influential enough to take a major part in world crises.”

  —C.A.L.

  MUCH OF YESTERDAY’S HEARSAY BECAME TODAY’S HISTORY.

  On January 1, 1939, for example, Walter Winchell stretched some comments of Joseph P. Kennedy and told his newspaper and radio audience that it was Lindbergh’s “now famous report on Germany’s power in the air, which was to prove a final factor in Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy at Munich.” An estimated fifty million people received that “information.” More than one historian later quoted Winchell in asserting that the terms at Munich might never have been conceded were it not for Lindbergh’s miscalculations of German strength. Another compounded that error, connecting it with the statement of an eminent British historian who said it had been “very well known” that the Germans had shuttled the same planes from one field to another during Lindbergh’s inspection tours—another piece of gossip. Some went so far as to suggest there might not have been a second World War had Lindbergh never gone to Germany!

  Into 1939, as Hitler expanded his empire, “Munich” and “Chamberlain” entered the lexicon as terms of appeasement and fecklessness. In America, some referred to Lindbergh as a doomsayer, a Nazi dupe, even a “collaborator.”

  After months of conflicting reports about Lindbergh’s travels in Europe, Washington correspondent Arthur Krock tried to set the record straight. With the United States government at last modernizing its flying fleet, the esteemed New York Times commentator explained that it owed much of its new size and efficiency to him, as they were at last responding to his alarm. “[C]riticism of any of his activities—in Germany or elsewhere—” Krock wrote, “is as ignorant as it is unfair.”

  In his column of February 1, 1939, Krock detailed the results of Lindbergh’s missions to Berlin, stressing for his critics that Lindbergh “throughout has been an official American reporter and adviser on aviation,” and that the American government had been the chief beneficiary of his information and technical appraisal. “Colonel Lindbergh is no usual man,” Krock concluded, “and that applied to his temperament and methods. This individualism has earned him some personal unpopularity. But any founded on belief he has not been a patriot, and most valuably one, is ill-founded indeed.” Not everybody read the Times.

  ON SATURDAY, April 8, 1939, Lindbergh bid adieu to his wife and their two children in Paris and trained to Cherbourg, where he boarded the Aquitania and sailed for New York. He confined himself to his stateroom as much as possible during the crossing, working on a new book, another rendering of his flight to Paris. The first night of the crossing he went to the dining room early, hoping to avoid the crowd. He was joined by one other passenger, one of many Jewish refugees on board. She was a pretty Romanian of twenty, and that presented problems of its own. He made polite conversation and enjoyed her company; but he knew he would have to change tables for the rest of the voyage, or else “the newspapers in America will grab her, photograph her, interview her, and then throw her in the gutter according to their usual procedure.” And yet, Lindbergh presumed, in changing tables she would probably think it was on account of her being Jewish.

  In his introduction of Lindbergh’s Wartime Journals, which would be published in 1970, William Jovanovich noted that the entries were printed exactly as written, except in the cases of certain personal references to living people, repetitions or material deemed “not important enough to warrant adding to the length of the work as a whole.” That was, for the most part, true. But there were exceptions, several omissions in the published texts that were substantive in nature. As with the later publication of Anne’s diaries, the bulk of these omissions centered on one subject: the Jews.

  None of the cuts contains any overt denigrations of Jews. In fact, most of the references express Lindbergh’s affinity and admiration for them. But in so writing about a single tribe, he was segregating them in his mind from the rest of the nation; and to that extent he was, like many of his countrymen, anti-Semitic. The following paragraph from Lindbergh’s journal entry of April 10, 1939, for example—after a day or two of rough waters, which kept most of the passengers from leaving their cabins—was never published:

  The steward tells me that most of the Jewish passengers are sick. Imagine the United States taking these Jews in in addition to those we already have. There are too many in places like New York already. A few Jews add strength and character to a country, but too many create chaos. And we are getting too many. This present immigration will have its reaction.

  Lindbergh was not singling Jews out for persecution; indeed, he could just as easily have written the same about any other minority. But it is difficult to imagine his making the same comment about White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

  After more than three years abroad, Lindbergh was convinced that the world was tumbling toward chaos. He only hoped it was not too late to avert a major war—for that would “be more likely to destroy Western civilization than to solve either our problems or those of European nations.” With his return, Lindbergh resolved “to take whatever part I could in preventing a war in Europe, and to campaign against my country taking part if war broke out.”

  America awaited his arrival, especially those with an interest in aviation—including policy-makers in Washington. General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, Chief of the Air Corps, radioed while Lindbergh was in transit, asking him to contact him as soon after arriving as possible.

  Before the Aquitania had even docked, tugboatloads of newspapermen hopped on board. Lindbergh locked himself in his cabin, permitting nobody to enter except three unexpected callers—the Carrels and Jim Newton, who had anticipated the press and had obtained permission to go out on the pilot boat with the customs men, in order to help Lindbergh off the ship. In no time, reporters were pounding on the cabin door. At one point a photographer who had bribed a steward burst into the cabin from an adjoining stateroom, flashed a photograph, and ran. “It is a ridiculous situation when one cannot return to one’s own country without having to go through the rough-housing of photographers and the lies and insults of the press,” Lindbergh mused. “It takes the sweetness from the freedom of democracy and makes one wonder where freedom ends and disorder begins.”

  After the gangway had been let down, two New York police officers came to Lindbergh’s cabin to suggest they form a cordon around him. Lindbergh said he preferred to exit alone if possible, and after all the other passengers had disembarked, he made a run for it. One hundred fifty reporters and photographers lined both sides of the corridor, popping flashbulbs in his eyes as they shoved toward him. “All the way along the deck the photographers
ran in front of us and behind us, jamming the way, being pushed aside by the police yelling, falling over each other on the deck,” Lindbergh wrote of the arrival. He and his escorts crunched across the broken glass of hundreds of discarded flashbulbs. The Morrow chauffeur, waiting at the bottom of the gangplank, whisked him away, along the new Henry Hudson Parkway and across the George Washington Bridge to Englewood. Once at Next Day Hill, Lindbergh telephoned General Arnold.

  The next morning, he borrowed the Morrow De Soto and drove to West Point. There Lindbergh and Arnold discussed the European situation. Acknowledging that Lindbergh had already supplied what Arnold called “the most accurate picture of the Luftwaffe, its equipment leaders, apparent plans, training methods, and present defects” that he had received, the General spoke of a new mission for Lindbergh. Meeting again two days later in Washington, Arnold asked if Lindbergh would go on active duty and “make a study of an attempt to increase the efficiency of American [aeronautical] research organizations.” The next morning Lindbergh accepted the call to active duty, as a Colonel in the Army Air Corps. He wrote Dr. Carrel that he would have to discontinue indefinitely their medical research together; and he cabled Anne in Paris to sail with the children on the next available boat.

  On the morning of April 20, 1939, Lindbergh spent half an hour with Harry Hines Woodring, Secretary of War, discussing military aviation in Europe and America, before arriving at the White House for an appointment with his Commander in Chief. Although the two most famous living Americans had dueled over the airmail in 1934, this was Lindbergh’s first face-to-face encounter with Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  The President was seated at his desk at one end of a large room. “He leaned forward from his chair to meet me as I entered,” Lindbergh would later write in his journal, “and it is only now that I stop to think that he is crippled. I did not notice it and had no thought of it during our meeting.” Roosevelt immediately asked about Anne, who had known his daughter at Miss Chapin’s School. “He is an accomplished, suave, interesting conversationalist,” Lindbergh noted. “I liked him and feel that I could get along with him well. Acquaintanceship would be pleasant and interesting.”

  “But,” he added with equal conviction, “there was something about him I did not trust, something a little too suave, too pleasant, too easy. Still, he is our President, and there is no reason for any antagonism between us in the work I am now doing.” While he found FDR “mostly politician” and felt they “would never get along on many fundamentals,” Lindbergh was pleased to serve him and their country. “It is better to work together as long as we can,” Lindbergh told himself; “yet somehow I have a feeling that it may not be for long.”

  After fifteen minutes with the President, Lindbergh left one pack of press photographers on the White House steps for another at the offices of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Lindbergh told the committee secretary that he would enter the room for their board meeting only after the photographers had finished taking pictures. They said they did not want any pictures without Lindbergh in them. At last the photographers proposed—on their “word of honor”—that they would leave him alone in the future if they could get just one picture of him. “Imagine a press photographer talking about his word of honor!” Lindbergh thought, flashing back seven years to one image from the past he could never shake. “The type of men who broke through the window of the Trenton morgue to open my baby’s casket and photograph its body—they talk to me of honor.” He waited in seclusion until the last photographer had left the room, and only then did the meeting commence.

  That afternoon, Roosevelt told the press corps of his conversation with Lindbergh, asserting that Lindbergh’s figures about German air power “were the same that we knew at the time of Munich.” Furthermore, the President added, he had “corroborated what our people had accepted as fact last September in regard to the construction possibilities.”

  The next day, Lindbergh drove to Bolling Field, where he was assigned a Curtiss P-36A, a single-seater monoplane, the Air Corps’ most modern fighter. He spent a few hours getting the feel of the plane. The next day, he embarked on a three-week inspection tour with twenty-three stops. Through the summer he traveled, visiting laboratories, educational facilities, factories, and airfields from coast to coast. During an overnight detour to Roswell, he saw Robert Goddard and discovered that the rocketeer had “accomplished more this year than during any similar period in the past”—making advancements with lightweight pumps, tube-wound combustion chambers, gyroscopic controls, and moveable vanes. Lindbergh told Goddard of what he had seen in Germany and how his every mention of rockets was quickly deflected. “Yes,” Goddard said, “they must have plans for the rocket. When will our own people in Washington listen to reason?”

  “Obviously, the American potential was tremendous,” Lindbergh would later recall of his survey trip, “but existing factories and research facilities were inadequate in comparison with those existing in Germany.” He devoted the next several months to ameliorating the situation however he could. One way was in chairing a NACA committee formed to coordinate the two dozen separate organizations in America then engaged in aeronautical research. At General Arnold’s request, he also sat on a board charged with revising the Air Corps’ research-and-development program and proposing specifications for military aircraft that could be procured within the next five years. And for the rest of 1939, as Lindbergh later recorded, “I talked to Senators, Congressmen, diplomats, executives, scientists, and engineers about steps necessary for the development of American aviation and, inevitably, about the danger of war in Europe and the attitude America should take.” He excited National Geographic enough about Dr. Goddard to prepare an article about his work in Roswell. As had been his overriding mission for a decade, he pushed America to be the leading air power in the world. Lindbergh accepted only two weeks of pay for his months of government work.

  The President soon recommended that $300,000,000 be budgeted for the expansion of the Army and Navy air forces. And, as Arthur Krock noted, “When the new flying fleet of the United States begins to take the air, among those who will have been responsible for its size, its modernness and its efficiency is Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh.”

  Lindbergh’s new military duties kept him from meeting Anne at the dock when she returned to America at dawn on April 28, 1939. Besides, he suggested to her in a note which reached her on board the Champlain, his presence would only attract greater attention. With customs agents, a police guard of close to one hundred men, and a chauffeur for protection, Anne and the children disembarked with relative ease. When she arrived at Next Day Hill, she found Charles asleep upstairs, having driven from Washington through the night. He immediately awoke; and she delighted in finding her husband so chipper because of his new duties. “It is wonderful to see him like that,” she wrote in her diary, “—absorbed, active, putting his energy into something successfully.”

  On May 27, 1939, the Morrows gathered around the dining table at Next Day Hill for Anne and Charles’s tenth wedding anniversary. “[A]ll went merrily till I asked for more champagne to drink a health,” Betty Morrow wrote in her diary that night. “I didn’t say to whom—but C. shook his head & said—in a low decided voice to me—’No—no—or we’ll never have another anniversary here.’” His mother-in-law suddenly remembered that threatening tone from a decade earlier, when she had started to get a sharper knife to cut their wedding cake. “Of course I didn’t go on with the toast,” she recorded further, “but afterwards in the evening I had a chance to say that I had not meant to go against his known feelings about anniversaries.” Later that night, Charles came into her room and apologized for speaking as he had. It was involuntary, he explained; he had been wrong and he was sorry. “He was very sweet about it,” Mrs. Morrow wrote of his apology, the first from him in her memory. “Oh! How he has changed in ten years!”

  Three days later—between government trips—Charles and Anne went house-hunting. The
y got lucky with the first rental they looked at, a big, white clapboard house on a hill in Lloyd Neck, on the north shore of Long Island. It sat high, overlooking the Sound—a situation reminiscent of Little Falls and Illiec; and Charles appreciated that it was “neither too accessible nor too isolated,” with several airfields close by. They leased it until November first in the name of their secretary, Christine Gawne, for $2,000; and they moved right in—with Miss Gawne and Soeur Lisi, a governess for the children from Switzerland. But it would be almost two months before Charles would be able to spend an entire weekend there.

  Recognizing the seriousness with which Lindbergh was taking his new governmental work, the mainstream press gave him some elbow room in which to perform his duties. Time even wrote a piece sympathetic to his side in his “long dark years of war” with the public and the press. “For twelve years Charles Lindbergh has been a hero, and twelve years is too much,” the article read. “… For the fact is that the relation of Charles Lindbergh to the U. S. people is a tragic failure chalked up against the institution of hero worship…. Either the pursuit of the public will drive him to lead an almost monastic life, abandoning the world which other men enjoy, or perhaps now at last hero worship will die a natural death.” Eating its cake and having it, Time put his picture on their cover.

  Lindbergh paid no attention to the war Time spoke of, only to the saber-rattling along Europe’s borders. Before he had even returned home, Italy had conquered Albania. Days later, Hungary withdrew from the League of Nations and, in its alliance with Germany, instituted anti-Semitic laws. Lindbergh’s fears steadily grew as France, England, and Russia deadlocked in their attempts to form a “peace front” against Germany. He worried even more when the Nazis revoked nonaggression pacts with Poland and a naval agreement with England only to sign a nonaggression pact with the Soviets. Meantime, President Roosevelt hosted King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of England, in an overt display of amity. Shortly after their visit to America, FDR called for a repeal of the arms embargo to belligerents, so that the United States might come to the aid of Britain, and he asked Congress to revise the Neutrality Law. Lindbergh turned all his thoughts to the world situation.