Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  In the past, Lindbergh had allowed misquotations to go unchallenged, at the cost of further inflaming the national debate and injuring his personal reputation. But now he felt, “These times are too critical and too dangerous to justifying unnecessary division of opinion among Americans on vital international policies.” He telephoned the Associated Press and read them a statement he had handwritten. “I have not changed my belief that World War II could have been avoided,” he said, “but the issue between so-called Interventionists and Isolationists is past except from an academic standpoint. We fought the war together and we face the future together as Americans—a future that is more fraught with danger than the war itself.” With that in mind, Lindbergh emphasized his second point: “In an era which has developed the Atomic bomb, and which will develop trans-oceanic rockets capable of carrying atomic bombs, the necessity for world organization for the control of destructive forces is imperative. The only alternative is constant fear and eventual chaos.” He advocated a world organization backed by military power, “an organization led by the western peoples who developed modern science with its aviation and its atomic bomb.”

  One month later, Lindbergh further expounded upon some of his ideas. Invited to address the Forty-second Aviation Anniversary Dinner of the Aero Club of Washington, he thought at first that he might discuss such subjects as turbo jet transports, high-altitude rocket flights, and landing on other planets. But as he composed his thoughts, “such questions became dwarfed by the basic problem of how to keep aircraft from destroying the civilization which creates them.”

  “The developments of science, improperly guided, can result in more evil than they bring good. What peaceful men take a thousand years to build, fools can now destroy in few seconds,” he said in the admonitory tones the public had come to expect from him. For the rest of his speech, Lindbergh was less doctrinaire than he had been in the past. “[P]ower alone has limited life,” he said. “History is full of its misuse. There is no better example than Nazi Germany. Power without a moral force to guide it invariably ends in the destruction of the people who wield it. Power, to be ultimately successful, must be backed by morality, just as morality, must be backed by power.” Lindbergh concluded by saying, “We are a Christian people. The ideals we profess are high. We have all the necessary elements to lead the world through this period of crisis.” But, he asked, “can we combine these elements in our daily policies and lives? Whether our civilization is facing new heights of human accomplishment or whether it is doomed to extinction depends not as much on technical progress as on the answer we make to this question.”

  The following summer, Lindbergh was asked to join a committee charged with addressing some of the new questions of the nuclear age. As part of the fallout after the atomic bombing of Japan, the Ordnance Department of the United States Army initiated a secret project at the University of Chicago—Chicago Ordnance Research, acronymed CHORE—under the direction of Walter Bartky, Dean of the Department of Applied Mathematics. CHORE’s activities consisted largely of evaluating weapons—machines guns, missiles, and bombs—and their uses. The work was so confidential Bartky hand-delivered his invitation to Lindbergh to become a consultant to the panel. Even CHORE’s name was kept secret … until somebody pointed out that it was printed on the guarded door of its windowless offices on the Chicago campus. Believing “the United States should remain dominant in weapons development,” Lindbergh accepted the offer.

  Over the next several years, Lindbergh traveled constantly, gathering information and testing equipment, investigating “potential staging bases for our strategic bombers,” remaining at the vanguard of aviation development. He even flew a Lockheed P-80 jet fighter, the first American jet to enter squadron service.

  In the CHORE briefing room, the likes of Fermi, Szilard, and Urey scribbled formulae across the chalkboard walls. “There,” Lindbergh later summed up, “I listened to a mathematics of combat effectiveness and destruction that seemed to leave the human being devoid of his senses. I studied graphs showing the value of ‘scatter effect’ for machine guns, and others indicating probabilities of kill for existing and for improved weapons. There, hour after hour, we discussed calibers, explosives, muzzle velocities, measures of aggression, defense, counterdefense, and counter-counterdefense.” They played war games in which “[m]athematical calculations informed us that future jet-powered warplanes would fly too fast for bullet interception, that pilots of supersonic fighters would not have time to aim and fire in a head-on pass and still avoid colliding with each other, that guns would become obsolete for airplanes and have to be replaced by ‘homing’ missiles, that human eyes and muscles and cognition were too slow for the reaction times essential to success—concepts startling to the experience of a World War II combat pilot. In the next major conflict, electronic devices would be set loose in combat with each other. They would be maintained and monitored by men who would have no sense of wielding weapons, whose very existence would be preserved or snuffed out by the result of the competing intelligence of the synthetic brains to which the human brain would relinquish control of its destiny. In mathematical war games, men were already referred to as ‘bodies,’ and were moved like chessmen according to directions issued by analog computers.”

  The mathematics at these colloquiums often went over Lindbergh’s head; but he was riveted by the level of thinking, the extrapolations upon extrapolations. Lindbergh felt his major contribution to the discussions lay in his trying to maintain “a connection between mathematical theory and practical fact.” He would periodically interrupt to say, “Let’s get a check in the field.” Often bringing the most humanistic perspective into the room, one whose actual war experience remained fresh in his memory, Lindbergh argued “that even military aviators are human, that when a bullet hits your airplane some emotional effect takes place, that a coefficient relating to the senses must be included in some combat-effectiveness formulas.”

  Lindbergh appreciated both the humor and horror of a story one of the CHORE scientists told at dinner one night about testing the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo. Just before setting off the blast, Enrico Fermi had said, “Now when I press this button, there is a chance in ten thousand it will be the end of the world.”

  After the war, the American military engaged in a contentious battle of “unification,” from which a single Department of Defense emerged with a new branch. The Air Force—no longer part of the Army—was eager to secure adequate government funding; and its first secretary, W. Stuart Symington, had hardly moved into his new office before soliciting Lindbergh’s advice.

  Lindbergh became a consultant to Secretary Symington and his successor, Harold Talbott, often reporting through Generals Hoyt Vandenberg and Lauris Norstad. His primary mission was to assist in the reorganization of the Strategic Air Command. In his first few months on the job, for which he insisted on neither pay nor publicity, he spent weeks inspecting and conferring with personnel at Andrews, MacDill, Carswell, Walker, Davis-Monthan, and McChord Bases; and he flew one hundred hours in Strategic Air Command bombers. Afterwards, he wrote in his first report to General Vandenberg, it was obvious to him that “the standards of performance, experience, and skill which were satisfactory for the ‘mass’ air forces of World War II are inadequate for the specialized atomic forces we have today. Since a single atomic bomber has destructive power comparable to a battle fleet, a ground army, or an air force in the past, its crew should represent the best in experience, character, and skill that the United States can furnish.”

  Lindbergh “believed it essential for SAC to have enough power to win an atomic war,” he later wrote. “Still more important, it should prevent one.” That goal in mind, he refused no Air Force assignment. As each mission paved the way for the next, he was constantly crossing the country or circling the world—sometimes as part of a committee, often alone. He was authorized to fly as a passenger in any Air Force aircraft and to pilot any such plane in which he could demonstrate p
roficiency; he was granted access to all classified data, up to and including TOP SECRET. His recommendations that “SAC be given top priority in the selection of its officers and crews, that its personnel receive improved terms of tenure, that the construction of air-refueling tankers be accelerated to increase practical bombing ranges, that monthly periods of flight training in emergency procedures be inaugurated to cut down accident rates, and that every SAC pilot fly a basic trainer on occasion in order to maintain proficiency in the ABCs of flying technique” were all adopted, save the last.

  Lindbergh flew with the 509th Atomic Bomb Group out of Walker Air Force Base, New Mexico, on simulated bombing missions over Canada, Greenland, the North Magnetic Pole, and various cities in the United States. SAC work combined with a general mission on Air Force morale and proficiency, brought him to Alaska, Guam, Tokyo, Nagoya, Manila, Germany, France, and England, flying P-80s and P-51s.

  On January 5, 1948, Lindbergh flew in an Air Force transport plane, a C-47 Dakota, to Japan. At three thousand feet, he circled Hiroshima and marveled at its tranquil beauty, settled between plum-tinted mountain ranges and the inland sea. Lindbergh found it difficult to imagine the hellfire that had devastated it. “There is no sign,” he recorded, “to mark the gigantic mushroom cloud that once towered in the sky, no sign, except, when I look more carefully, the shades on earth below…. the blasted, radiated, and heat-shriveled earth of Hiroshima.” He tried to imagine eighty thousand people inside the gray saucer who perished in the blast and as many again burned and mangled. The visit “forced” Lindbergh, as he wrote his wife, to four conclusions:

  1. I do not see how civilization can survive a major atomic war.

  2. If Russia continues unchecked, there is almost certain to be one.

  3. We must find some way to prevent a second atomic power rising.

  4. That this can be prevented by peaceful means is improbable.

  Within a few years, Lindbergh would be attending secret meetings in a briefing room at Strategic Air Command headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Nebraska, looking at large-scale maps of major cities, on which a general would place tinted plastic discs and calmly describe the level of obliteration they represented.

  “If Soviet armies overrun Europe,” Lindbergh reported to Secretary Symington in November 1949, “much more of Western civilization will be destroyed, and the American military position greatly weakened.” For that reason he felt it was essential to help rebuild Germany, which he considered “the best and possibly the only source from which a major increase in European fighting strength can be obtained quickly.” He further defended his position by pointing out: “her geographical position makes her the natural buffer against a Soviet invasion. Her people understand better than any others the terror of Soviet occupation. Her Communist vote is relatively low. Most of her men above 22 years of age are trained soldiers. Given the opportunity, they would fight bitterly to protect their homes if Soviet armies attempt to move farther westward.”

  Lindbergh issued a public statement supporting the anti-Communist Truman Doctrine. As opposed to his prewar stance, Lindbergh now “advocated continued American participation in international affairs, with a consistent foreign policy involving economic aid and the use of military force, if necessary to safeguard peace.” He maintained that the policy he had formerly advocated—“that England, France, and America build their strength but refrain from war while Nazi Germany and Communist Russia fought out their totalitarian ideas”—was sound, and that he had correctly predicted the outcome of the war—“with Western civilization greatly weakened in a world full of famine, hatred and despair,” with a “strengthened Communist Russia, behind whose ‘iron curtain’ lies a record of bloodshed and oppression never equaled.”

  Lindbergh’s copious letters home during his Air Force, CHORE, and Pan American inspection flights revealed another change in his attitudes, a diminishing thrill from aviation. “I can’t get used to the ease with which one covers the world today,” he wrote Anne after another polar crossing. “It’s no longer an effort—Pole—equator—oceans—continents—it’s just a question of which way you point the nose of your plane.” Planes flew people, not the other way around. In fact, Lindbergh observed, “The pure joy of flight as an art has given way to the pure efficiency of flight as a science…. Science is insulating man from life—separating his mind from his senses. The worst of it is that it soon anaesthetises his senses so that he doesn’t know what he’s missing.” Hardly a letter to Anne failed to mention how much he missed her, especially when he revisited places they had been the first to survey.

  ALONG WITH much of postwar America—then experiencing a baby boom and a move to the suburbs—the still-expanding Lindbergh family settled down for the first time. On October 2, 1945—after a long labor—Anne Lindbergh gave birth to her sixth child, a girl, at Doctors Hospital in New York. Charles was, as with all her previous deliveries, at her side. Anne had been considering non-family names for the baby, born on her sister Ansy’s birthday; but after two months of deliberation, she acceded to Charles’s desire to delineate his children’s background. She was named Reeve, the middle name of both her deceased aunt, Elisabeth, and her Morrow grandmother.

  While still renting the Tompkins house in Westport, the Lindberghs decided to make Connecticut their “permanent” home. Just a few miles closer to the city than their present location, the Lindberghs spent $25,000 on a parcel of land and water at the east side of Scott’s Cove, near Darien. The two and one-half acres of undeveloped property, screened from the nearest house by pine, spruce, and hemlock, also included three small islands, connected to each other and to the mainland at low tide by a sandbar. While looking for an interim house to rent, they found an ideal property for sale.

  In an area called Tokeneke, on a four-and-one-half-acre promontory jutting into Scott’s Cove, sat a large but unpretentious three-story, Tudor- influenced house. Looking down on the island-dotted coast, the rambling seven-bedroom structure was reminiscent of Illiec. Complete with a foyer opening into a large living room with a fireplace and picture window, a den, library, and sewing room, a screened sleeping porch off the master bedroom, an ample servants’ wing, and a toolhouse, the property was theirs for $41,250.

  Lindbergh hired an architect, Charles DuBose, to make alterations, adding a heavy slate roof, fieldstone siding, and a playroom on the second floor. For privacy as much as aesthetics, the Lindberghs paid special attention to the landscaping, planting tall trees, spreading yews, and banks of rhododendrons around the house and its circular drive. Charles transplanted cuttings from his mother’s lilac bushes in Detroit, which had come from her parents’ house at 64 West Elizabeth Street. He parked Anne’s office-trailer deep into their woods.

  In Charles’s mind, he and Anne were entering the best years of their lives. With five healthy children and a beautiful house to accommodate them all, they could settle down to their various pursuits. Unfortunately, Charles and Anne’s notions of a home were at odds with one another. “We were ‘nesters,’” Anne’s sister Constance said of the Morrows; “we found our places, and we returned to them year after year, generation after generation.” Charles, on the other hand, commented another family intimate, “was only interested in houses so that he’d have a place to ‘park’ Anne and the children. Once he felt they were safely parked, he felt it was all right for him to fly the coop.”

  “C. will always move!” noted Betty Morrow; and that transience kept her daughter unsettled, always wondering in the back of her mind when her husband would, without warning, pack them all up again. Ironic as it was predictable, once the Lindberghs had a place in which to settle down, he absented himself more than ever.

  “Take off your coat—are you going to stay?” little Ansy asked her father on one of his returns. Fifty years later, that same daughter commented, “We never really knew whether Father was coming or going; and it didn’t really matter, because whether he was there or not, he always made hi
s presence felt.”

  He was in many ways a model father. When he was home, Lindbergh read to his children every night, and he encouraged those old enough to write stories and poems—which he typed and kept. He invented games; and he paid rewards for work he assigned and challenges he issued. The house at Darien was a summer camp unto itself. He taught the children to fish, sail, swim, and hike (with candies “left by elves” along the trail for the younger children to follow). He even rigged up a trapeze. He told his older boys, “Don’t you let me catch either of you coming back [from school] perfect in deportment!” Every Sunday night all the children queued up by the telephone to talk to their ailing grandmother in Detroit, whom they called “Farmor,” Swedish for “father’s mother.”

  All that said, he imposed a deliberateness to the playtime, which often depleted much of its joy. Everything required a purpose. He provided little understanding when challenges went unmet, and he would not listen to excuses for work left undone. The creative writing exercises became nagging assignments. As his father had with him, Lindbergh often teased his children to tears. There were hugs but no kisses. And, remembered Ansy of the endless lists of chores and rules left for everybody in the household to fulfill and follow, “There were only two ways of doing things—Father’s way and the wrong way.”

  For Anne there were no loud demands, only quiet expectations and complaints when they were not fulfilled. Her duties included keeping precise household books, accounting for the pettiest cash expenditures. It was not strictly a question of being cheap. Indeed, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, with her healthy trust fund, enjoyed shopping for new clothes; and, on occasions, her husband was not above buying her a piece of jewelry from Tiffany’s. It was just that her purchase of a $300 black Karakul coat had to be entered in the small notebooks alongside the thirty-five cents spent on shoe repair, fifteen cents on rubber bands, or the twenty cents on tinsel for the Christmas tree. Each month the accounts were tallied and typed along with the amounts spent on food and domestic wages, then transferred to larger balance sheets, on which they were categorized for grand totaling at the end of the year. Because they had lived in so many different houses, Anne was periodically required to compile household inventories, listing every article of clothing, item of furniture, book title, blanket, and piece of silver they possessed. Their kitchen inventory was always kept up-to-date, down to the tea strainer and the “8 glasses with black design”—which had been cottage-cheese containers.