Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  He put out more feelers. His cousin Rear Admiral Emory Scott “Jerry” Land, Chairman of the U. S. Maritime Commission, brokered for him a fifteen-minute meeting with Colonel William A. Donovan, who was about to become Director of the Office of Strategic Services. They discussed the possibilities of Lindbergh’s studying international air transportation, but nothing more came of the meeting. At the same time, Phil Love, his friend since Kelly Field, offered to investigate the possibilities of bringing Lindbergh back into the Air Corps through its Fiftieth Wing, which Love would be commanding. Love’s superior officer dismissed the very notion.

  Then another friend in high aviation circles leapt at the chance of hiring Lindbergh. Over dinner at his house in Hartford, Eugene Wilson, president of United Aircraft, outlined several projects in which he thought Lindbergh could take part, particularly a study of comparative aircraft performances. Ten days later, it came to the public’s attention that United had sold aviation equipment to Japan and Germany before the war; and Wilson now felt that it would be “inadvisable” for Lindbergh to join the company. Lindbergh agreed. “The war is going badly for us,” he noted, “and people will be looking for a scapegoat.”

  Nine months earlier, Major Reuben Fleet—a pioneer airmail pilot who had organized the Consolidated Aircraft Corporation—had tried to lure Lindbergh to his company by offering him an annual salary of $100,000 and a research facility built anywhere in the southwest that Lindbergh pleased. On March 12, 1942, Lindbergh met with Fleet in New York City, hat in hand. He hoped the research and development position was still available, which he would accept only if the salary were not more than $10,000. Fleet was thrilled to present the proposition to his company’s new management board, only to have the embarrassing task, not two weeks later, of withdrawing the offer. As Fleet would later explain, they were simply unwilling to employ him for fear of reprisal from Roosevelt. With billions of dollars in defense contracts waiting to be dispensed, no manufacturing company in America could afford to offend the Administration. Except one.

  Before receiving Reuben Fleet’s regrets, Lindbergh heard from Harry Bennett, director of personnel, labor relations, and plant security for Ford Motor Company. After learning of Lindbergh’s futile attempts at securing a job, Bennett reported, Henry Ford wanted to discuss the possibility of Lindbergh’s working at his bomber factory. On March twenty-third, Lindbergh boarded a seven P.M. train from Boston to Detroit.

  After lunch the next day with Ford and Bennett at the Dearborn plant, they drove a few minutes to the west, where Ford had performed a minor manufacturing miracle. Four miles to the southeast of Ypsilanti, Ford owned acres of forest and farmland, through which trickled a stream called Willow Run. In early 1941, on Ford’s promise to produce one B-24 Liberator bomber—a four-engine, high-wing monoplane—per hour, the government had agreed to spend some $200,000,000 on a plant and equipment. Three square miles were cleared in three weeks; and in a year’s time, the manufactory for the B-24 was built. It included what was called “the most enormous room in the history of man”—an L-shaped structure that ran 3,200 feet before elbowing another 1,279 feet—plus almost five million square feet of hangars and 850 acres of landing field, complete with seven concrete runways. At that, the new operation at Willow Run was but one cog in the gigantic Ford wheel, which included three main plants in the Detroit area and another sixty branches spread across the country. Modifying its ability to produce cars for civilian use toward meeting the demand for engines and planes and tanks and jeeps and staff cars necessary to fight the war, Ford Motor Company adopted a twenty-four-hour/seven-day workweek.

  While driving from Willow Run to the company’s River Rouge plant, Ford and Charles Sorenson, one of his production chiefs, asked Lindbergh if he would “come out to Detroit and help them with their aviation program.” Lindbergh grabbed the offer, though he advised their first clearing it with the War Department. The very suggestion that he should have to ask anyone about what he did in his own factory irritated Ford; but Lindbergh reasoned “that we would have to have much contact with them in the future and that a good start would be of great advantage.” Neither Ford nor Lindbergh feared that this job offer would be rescinded; and, after spending the night with his mother and uncle, Lindbergh returned to Willow Run to acquaint himself with designs, procurement programs, and the layout of the factory. The next day he trained to Washington, where he met with Air Secretary Lovett, who expressed his approval of Lindbergh’s plan to work for Ford.

  Lindbergh proceeded to Martha’s Vineyard for a long weekend, to pack his bags, play with his children, and discuss the immediate future with his wife. She was torn between following her husband and setting up another home or remaining in Martha’s Vineyard with her three children. Having just learned that another baby was on the way, they agreed that Charles should get situated in Detroit and return for visits until he had found a proper place for all of them to live. “Another husband would assume that I would come with him to Detroit,” she wrote in her diary, “but he sees my side too clearly. He wants too much for me. He wants me to live my own life. He wants this so passionately that it angers him when he sees anything frustrating it. Household duties, cooks that can’t cook, nurses that won’t leave me alone. Friends and family obligations which take my time. Depressions which rob me of confidence. I think almost all our quarrels arise from this passionate desire of his to see me freed to fulfill what there is in me.”

  Lindbergh rose at 4:30 on the morning of April 1, 1942, crossed on the 5:45 ferry and just kept driving, stopping only for gasoline and sandwiches, which he ate in the car. Twenty-eight and a half hours later, he arrived at the Dearborn Inn. After bathing, Lindbergh drove to Willow Run and spent most of the day meeting personnel and inspecting the plant—“acres upon acres of machinery and jigs and tarred wood floors and busy workmen…. a sort of Grand Canyon of a mechanized world.” That afternoon he made an hour-long test flight in a B-24C, the Liberator bomber which they would mass-produce and which Lindbergh already saw ways of improving. He spent the next day acquainting himself with the Willow Run and River Rouge plants—“studying production and procurement data, drawings of plane assembly, going through the plane itself, and in general getting to know the Ford organization and its methods.”

  The government’s attempts to stifle Lindbergh’s wartime career increased his desire to prove himself a good soldier. He shifted his high-octane work ethic into an even higher gear, never allowing anybody to accuse him of goldbricking. He usually left for work before daybreak and did not return home until long after dark. He became his own harsh taskmaster, creating assignments for himself when he had exhausted those put before him.

  Lindbergh could have asked Ford for almost any salary he wanted; and he did—$666.66 per month, which he would have earned as a colonel in the Air Corps. Except when work demanded, he never took advantage of his access to priority flights, generally insisting on riding the train or driving himself. Although he had not marched to the beat of anyone else’s drum since leaving the Air Mail in 1926, Lindbergh put on his best face, grateful for even this mundane opportunity to serve. After little more than a week on the job—which had already included a trip to Washington to meet with Merrill Meigs, director of the aircraft section of the War Production Board—Lindbergh told himself that “this change is probably good for me, and there are elements that I enjoy—getting to know the inside of a great industrial organization, for instance.” He kept his nose to the grindstone, avoiding eye contact with the public whenever possible. He refused newspaper interviews.

  Shortly after his new job began, a false rumor circulated that Lindbergh was being hissed and booed when he walked through the aisles of the assembly line. When the University of Michigan’s student newspaper ran an editorial, “People Should Prohibit Lindbergh From Defense,” based on the fiction, Lindbergh chose to ignore it, though others wrote to the editor in his defense. Liberty ran an open letter to Lindbergh in July 1942 entitled “Have You Change
d Your Mind?” challenging him to affirm that he was “publicly and wholeheartedly behind our government and the President in the struggle to win this war!” The editor in chief even sent Lindbergh a suggested outline for his reply.

  Lindbergh handwrote his own response to the article, refusing to retract any of his prewar statements and, in fact, reiterating his belief that the alternative to a negotiated peace in Europe was “either a Hitler victory or a prostrate Europe and possibly a prostrate America as well.” He believed the Roosevelt administration had thus far pursued a course which had “led to a series of failures and disasters almost unparalleled in history.” Upon rereading his reply, Lindbergh chose to ignore the article, retreating to his policy of refusing to deny rumors or answer critics. He politely rejected offers from news services around the world to write similar articles; and he continued to ignore all calls upon him to return medals he had received from Germany, Japan, and other Axis nations. He sent the Missouri Historical Society a check for increased protection at the museum; but, with the rising war hysteria, he instructed the curator to do nothing that “draws unusual attention to the Collection.”

  Suffering more than he expected from the end of the public’s great love affair with him, Lindbergh found himself drawn deeper into his marriage. His immediate family (and friend Jim Newton) remained his emotional spars; his wife became his mainstay. As a result of their separations, which would lengthen as the war continued, Lindbergh had never been so emotionally needy. In his hotel room, when he was not making the most of an unfulfilling job, he lived for Anne’s letters. “You have in your pen a touch of divinity that I cannot describe beyond saying that it is there,” he wrote her in April 1942. “But in your writing you take one above the ordinary levels of the earth. You show not only the best of life but something above life, something better than life. And for ordinary people you form a bridge to that something—a bridge for people who could not otherwise approach it…. In writing and in living, you are the only person I have ever known in whom lies the ability to be in contact with life and with what lies beyond it at the same time—to gain the one you have not found it necessary to turn your back on the other. By what gift or effort you have accomplished this, I do not know, but in your writing you help other people to do what you have done.”

  For the first time, Lindbergh found himself articulating some of his deepest feelings. In June, he told Anne that her letters brought nothing less than “calmness and beauty and spirit to a life in which these elements are hardly known. And in bringing these elements, they carry great strength and encouragement. They create a spiritual horizon that is all too easily lost, and without which life loses more than half its values. Your letters tell me, over and over again, like the ringing of clear bells on a spring evening, that love exists and always will, that there is something to look forward to beyond this war, something far greater, infinitely more worth while.” Some of his replies ran on for more than twenty pages.

  In his spare time that spring, Charles house-hunted in Detroit. Despite the scarcity of large family dwellings for rent, Lindbergh remained as choosy as possible, mindful that his wife “has already spent too much of her time fixing up the many houses we have rented in our nomadic existence…. Anne has books to write, children to take care of, a baby to bear, a move to make,” he told himself. “To refurnish a house now is just too much.”

  The best he could find was a large house in the Bloomfield Hills area, north of the city and a long drive to Willow Run, but literally in the backyard of Detroit’s artistic colony, the Cranbrook Academy of Art. The house was not decorated according to either of their tastes, in golds and greens and various shades of pink, with thick carpets, satin and velvet upholstery, and faux-Impressionist paintings in gilded frames—all set amid manicured lawns and formal hedges. But it came equipped with the most modern conveniences—a sprinkler system for the garden, a water-softening system, a fancooling system, an intercommunication system, even lights on the porch that attracted insects then electrocuted them. Charles thought the house made up in convenience what it lacked in style and would allow Anne to function comfortably, especially during the absences his war work would demand. After living alone for three months on the second floor of the Dearborn Inn, he found the three wooded acres “exceptionally attractive.” He signed a one-year lease, at $300 per month.

  “Very Hollywood!” Anne thought, when she saw the house for the first time in July. The “ersatz elegance” of the place depressed her at first, making her long for the severity of Illiec. But Charles told her it was “mental prostitution” even to dwell on the subject of the house, that she must settle in to these temporary quarters and proceed with life, extinguishing any negative thoughts with “mental discipline.” He stressed that they must “learn to live lightly.” To prove his point, he removed all his clothes from his bureau and put them in a suitcase he kept in the closet.

  Charles was in New York on August 12, 1942—after a trip to Washington, where he had discussed with General Arnold the merits of the B-17 (a Boeing four-engine bomber) over the B-24s Ford was producing—when Anne went into labor. He rushed home to Detroit and was by her side at the Henry Ford Hospital at 5:12 the following morning, when she gave birth to a seven-and-a-half-pound boy.

  It would be four months before they completed his birth certificate. In this instance it was Anne who kept stalling—not just because she was waiting for the “perfect name” to present itself, but also because it marked in her mind the end of an era. “The age of child bearing is over,” she wrote her sister Constance; “& I think I realize with some reluctance that though I have Jon, Land, Anne and (?) Mark, I shall never have Christopher, Michael and Peter; Hylla, Reeve, Ursula and Fidelity will not be my little girls.” Shortly before Christmas, they selected Scott, a name that had passed through the Land family tree for two centuries.

  With the birth of the fifth Lindbergh baby came the death of a family member who had been with them longer than any of the other children. Thor, the great German shepherd Charles had bought to protect his family shortly after the body of young Charlie was found dead, had been faltering from age for weeks. In the dog’s final days, Lindbergh noticed its sole interest in life had been reduced to squiring Anne. “He struggles pitifully to get up and follow her whenever she goes by,” Lindbergh wrote in his journals; “and sometimes he is able to get to his feet and walk along behind her—dragging his rear legs stiffly over the grass—but with an expression of great joy in his eyes at being near her. When he is lying down, his eyes follow her as long as she is in sight.”

  He died quietly under a hickory tree on the lawn in Bloomfield Hills and was buried in a grave Lindbergh dug. “He had no pain, and I think he died as the old should die, not lingering so long that all joy is gone from the living,” Lindbergh wrote in his journal that night. It is among the most moving passages in all his years of diaries, more emotional than anything he ever wrote about a human being. “I think Thor found something worth while in life to the very day he died, and yet I think he was ready and willing to go. But now, for us, there is a great empty, lonely feeling in the places he used to be.” The death reduced Anne to tears. She could not think of Englewood, New York, Long Barn, Illiec, Lloyd Neck, or Martha’s Vineyard without thinking of her brave “wolf” galloping to the family’s protection. “Thor was a symbol of something,” she wrote, “—of devotion and love and family unity. A great unity of my life—the child-bearing years. His going ends a chapter.”

  The Lindberghs settled into suburban life. Charles went to his office or on business trips every weekday, while his wife cared for the house and children; weekends, they visited Charles’s sixty-six-year-old mother, who had recently developed a tremor. Lindbergh would use this early symptom of Parkinson’s disease to persuade her that, after a quarter-century of teaching, she should retire. For the next few months, however, Evangeline Lindbergh would persist in commuting by bus to downtown Detroit, all the while caring for herself, her house,
and her brother, who continued to tinker with new inventions.

  Lindbergh made the move to Detroit complete with one unusual addition. Shortly after mentioning to Harry Bennett at Ford that he was interested in purchasing a trailer, Lindbergh was asked to the company garage in Dearborn to inspect a seven-year-old (but practically unused) trailer Henry Ford himself had bought for his Edison Institute Museum. It was a Stagecoach Model, built by the Ideal Manufacturing Company, a “huge brown elephant” on wheels, outfitted with a divan that doubled as a bed, a combination icebox unit and kitchen sink, a dining area, lavatory, draped windows, electric lamps, and a linoleum floor. Lindbergh wanted to buy it on the spot; but Ford insisted that he simply take it. He explained that he had put the trailer in his museum to “show the future of road transportation, and that since the future was ‘here,’ there was no use keeping it in the Museum any longer. He said that someday they might want to show the past of road transportation, and in that case the trailer would be worth more if it had been used.” A week later, Lindbergh attached the trailer to his car and drove it home, parking it in their back woods. The Lindberghs would use the trailer for its intended purpose on several road trips; but over the next fifteen years it would follow them wherever they moved, its primary function becoming a quiet place for Anne to write, her “room of one’s own.”

  A few months later, Lindbergh sent Ford’s production chief, Charles Sorenson, a confidential letter in which he questioned his own job performance. “I came here in the hope that I might offer suggestions and advice, based on some years of experience in various fields of aviation, which would be of assistance in the Ford Company’s aeronautical activities,” Lindbergh wrote. “I find, however, that the Company’s policies and methods are so different from those I have followed in the past that until I learn to understand them better I must consider myself more a student than an adviser.” Lindbergh’s discontent stemmed from more than his inexperience playing on a large team or from his first encounters with office politics. (One day he witnessed Ford executives Bennett and Sorenson literally come to blows.) Lindbergh’s greater frustration came in seeing Ford mass-producing planes that were inferior to those they should have been producing, simply because it would be too costly to retool the factories. “I feel quite sure that Ford officers did not realize the mediocrity of the B-24 when they set up such elaborate jigs and machinery for its production,” Lindbergh would later tell a Ford Company historian. “However, even if they had shared my personal estimate of the B-24, I am not sure they would have made any change in their procedure—or that they should have. A very high production of bombers was desired at the earliest possible date …”