Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  Lindbergh’s longtime friend Jim Newton unwittingly set some of his new pursuits into motion. During the late spring of 1961, while the Lindberghs were in the mountains above Vevey, Newton was just across the valley in Caux-sur-Montreux, at the international conference center of Moral Re-Armament. A devout adherent of the movement, Newton invited Lindbergh to a number of its meetings, plays, and panel discussions. After attending several MRA functions, Lindbergh found himself in utter disagreement with what he considered a fanatical ideology and got in a long, unresolved argument with Newton saying as much—a healthy debate that only deepened their respect for each other. “But sometimes,” Newton would later note, “the Almighty works in unusual ways.”

  While Lindbergh had no interest in any future MRA events, a meeting on Sunday, June eleventh, at Caux, affected him deeply. Delegates from Africa were on the platform that day—businessmen, white planters, a leader of forty thousand Mau Mau, and a striking ebony-colored member of the Legislative Council in Kenya, dressed in a business suit, who belonged to a tribe whose “admission to manhood” required killing a lion with a spear. Newton introduced Lindbergh to the delegate, Jilin ole “John” Konchellah, a warrior of the Masai tribe. The following Thursday evening, in the salon of the hotel in Caux, Lindbergh met alone with the imposing African—with his black moustache and beard and enlarged, contorted ear lobes, which were pierced for disc ornaments. Konchellah had never heard of Lindbergh before Newton briefed him.

  Lindbergh wanted to learn everything he could about civilization’s impact on Konchellah’s semi-nomadic tribe, which roamed the Rift Valley along the Kenya-Tanzania border, in the shadow of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Konchellah said civilization had brought his “pastoral” tribe of three hundred thousand medicine, wheels, and literacy, which allowed them to read history and send letters to each other; but he emphasized that there had been education before the white man came. He knew, for example, the different kinds of trees and their uses, the rivers, animals, trails, and jungles. “That,” said Konchellah, who had been taught in African mission schools and from correspondence courses, “is education.” A modern primitive, Konchellah—thirty-two and the father of five—became secretary of the Masai United Front and a member of Kenya’s parliament.

  Konchellah told Lindbergh that the Masai prayed to their own god, (which did not have human form), worshiped the mountains, and sang to the sun and moon. Warriors rose at dawn to thank God for the light. These young men of the tribe were meant to protect the others from animals and human enemies, who often raided for oxen. When Lindbergh asked if he thought the promise of future products of civilization would make life better, Konchellah hesitated, then replied that he thought the traditional tribal way of life was best. He invited “the great white flyer” to visit him in Kenya, where Lindbergh had never been.

  At the end of 1962, Lindbergh cleared enough time to make such a trek worthwhile. He had no intention of going on an organized safari, but of renting a car and driving himself. As this promised to be the most exotic location he had ever visited, Lindbergh was grateful for a friend’s letter of introduction to Major Ian Grimwood, the Chief Game Warden in Kenya. “I like to travel quietly so I can see, think, and write,” he wrote Grimwood. “I can shoot fairly well, but I don’t like to kill things. I hate tourist procedures and first-class hotels. I can live on most any kind of food, and enjoy sleeping on the ground.”

  Grimwood permitted Lindbergh to make rounds with Denis Zaphiro, the warden in the Southern Game Preserve in the Kajiado District. Flying and camping together for close to two weeks at the end of 1962, they traveled most of the Kenya-Tanzania border, inspecting parks from Mara in the west to Lake Amboseli.

  Lindbergh’s greatest thrill, however, came when he drove into Tanzania and arrived at a Masai boma as the guest of John Konchellah. For several days he lived as one of the tribe. According to custom, he was assigned to the small thatched hut of the oldest woman, who entertained him at night, singing and dancing, shaking her necklaces. He did not figure out how far her favors extended; but he charmed her by fashioning earrings for her out of paper clips. The gray-haired woman prepared his meals, which included a kind of yoghurt—milk and blood from the same cow mixed in a gourd that had been rinsed with its urine, which served as a coagulant; the concoction was placed near a wood fire, from which it drew a smoky flavor. For days, Lindbergh joined a Masai cowherd, several men and boys with dark-red blankets slung over their naked bodies, carrying long-bladed spears. Another day he drove John Konchellah to a political meeting in a clearing a few miles north of Mount Kilimanjaro, where he was the only white man standing among several hundred blacks, their spears planted in the ground while they conducted tribal business in Swahili and Masai. After only two weeks in Africa, Lindbergh found it difficult to leave.

  In parting, Konchellah presented Lindbergh with a shield he had specially made for him. Although they had known each other a short time, Konchellah had discerned the basic elements of Lindbergh’s character; and, accordingly, he had the shield painted with a design reserved for the bravest Masai warriors. “A man carrying such a shield could never turn back in battle,” Konchellah informed him, “regardless of the odds against him.” Lindbergh treasured the gift.

  He returned to Nairobi in February 1964, again alone. During this visit, Ian Grimwood guided him in his Land Rover through Masai country near Selengai. While driving one day, they passed another Land Rover with a flat tire, which turned out to belong to Dr. Louis S. B. Leakey, the British archaeologist and anthropologist. They loaned Leakey their spare; and the grateful scientist suggested that he and Lindbergh arrange a more proper meeting. Days later, Lindbergh arrived at Leakey’s Centre for Prehistory and Palaeontology in Nairobi, where he spoke of his recent excavations in the Olduvai Gorge. He showed Lindbergh a cast of the skull of a “pre-man” two and a half million years old, which he had recently discovered and was about to make public. That week Leakey’s wife, Mary, guided Lindbergh through their Tanganyikan excavations; and two months later the Leakeys visited the Lindberghs in Connecticut. Having difficulty raising funds for the many projects they supervised— which included work in India and Israel as well as research in primate behavior by Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey—Leakey hoped to enlist Lindbergh’s support in encouraging Pan American to promote travel to Africa, where the Leakeys were organizing “caravan trips.” Lindbergh urged Juan Trippe to make Nairobi one of their gateways.

  One year later, Lindbergh heard the call of the wild again. By this, his third, trip to East Africa, he felt capable of serving as guide to his wife. He and Anne met in Paris, where Charles attended a conference on jet-powered civil aircraft, then escorted her to a formal dinner worthy of Louis XVI. From there they flew to Nairobi, rented a four-wheel-drive Land Rover and drove into Masai country. They pitched their tent that first night between acacia trees near the edge of a ten-foot cliff, while elephants across the dry riverbed watched. Animal noises—howling hyenas, galloping zebra, clomping rhinos, and roaring lions—filled the air. “That night,” Lindbergh would write afterward, “we became a part of the jungle, living as primitive man lived in ages past. I felt as separate from my civilization as I had felt from East African animals at the formal Paris dinner a few days before.” The next morning, the night-prowlers had been replaced by a docile herd of cattle at the nearby water hole, tended by Masai spearmen wearing only their red shoulder blankets. The Lindberghs spent close to two weeks alone in this animal kingdom. Then Charles lingered in Europe for two weeks of business before joining his wife back in America.

  When he returned to Darien on April 3, 1965, he found his wife running a 105-degree fever. He rushed Anne to Harkness Pavilion in New York and put her in the hands of Dr. Atchley, who diagnosed that she was suffering from viral pneumonia. During her hospitalization, Charles read to her each evening; and after three weeks he drove her home, where he served her breakfast in bed. His attentiveness surprised Anne and underscored a great lesson she had extracted from t
he last few months. “This Spring is one of the first times in my life that I have been able to live next to C.A.L. and not get drawn into his rhythm or feel guilty about staying outside of it,” she wrote in her diary. Then she made an admission that was thirty-five years in coming: “The illness and convalescence gave me the excuse to stay in my own rhythm and live at my own pace (for the most part). And I must preserve this integrity of rhythm in health—for though I will—I hope—be able to do more than I can today—I will never be able to keep up to his rhythm again—in fact, I never really was able to—but I tried.”

  In October 1965, Lindbergh invited each of his children and their spouses to join him for several weeks camping in southern Kenya. He and Anne offered to cover most of the costs. Lindbergh flew ahead, on the new weekly Pan American flight from New York to Nairobi, arriving on December eleventh. Over the next few weeks, Jon and his wife, Barbara, left their five children behind on Bainbridge Island, Washington, where they had settled; Anne and Julien Feydy flew down from Paris with Scott, who had transferred to Cambridge University; and Anne arrived with Reeve, a student at Radcliffe. Only Land—with his wife and two children on their four-thousand-acre ranch on the Blackfoot River in Montana—politely declined the offer, anticipating several strained weeks marching to the relentless beat of his father’s drum. “I’m not going,” he told his wife, “—too many people and too tight a schedule.”

  The “patriarchal safari” was as rigorous as it was wondrous. For a month, the Lindberghs lived out of their two Land Rovers, meticulously packed with four tents, forty gallons of drinking water, and enough preserved food to last ten days at a time. After leaving Nairobi, they spent two nights on the Dry Selengai, a week in the Kimana swamp area, and two days in the Shimba Hills, where Denis Zaphiro joined them. They traveled as far east as the Indian Ocean, where they spent three sweltering days on a beach north of Mombasa. With special permission from John Owen, the Director of the Tanzania National Parks, the Lindberghs spent some of their nights at Lake Manyara, in the Ngorongoro Crater, and on the Serengeti—where they drove twenty miles across the plains right through the heart of the great animal migration. “It was so strenuous,” a weary Anne later reported to her friend Lucia Valentine, “that we all lost weight but Charles who seems to be impervious to heat, flies, dust, bad roads, long hours, canned food, ticks, and lack of washing water!”

  Charles exulted in all the challenges, becoming physically and mentally stimulated by the powerful forces of nature he saw at work. The struggles for survival he witnessed in East Africa would provide him with more material for his next decade of autobiographical writing than anything else he experienced. “For me, in East Africa, more than any other place on earth,” he would later write, “the strange and the familiar interweave. Nowhere else do I gain a comparable perspective on evolution, time, and space.”

  In September 1962, Lindbergh had received a form letter from a board member of the recently established World Wildlife Fund in Washington, which articulated many of his current feelings. “Too few people realize that hundreds of species of living creatures are in danger of extermination,” it read. “Modern processes are destroying the natural habitat of many birds and mammals. Wildlife is menaced through the development of towns and cities which cover the land, through the multiplication of roads and industrial installations, through the pollution of streams due to industrial and human wastes, and through the destruction of wetlands.” It spoke of two hundred species already extinct because of man and another two hundred fifty on the “Danger List”—including the American whooping crane, the Asian rhinoceros, and the Arabian oryx.

  Lindbergh met with the head of its parent organization, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN)—which oversaw some two hundred sixty organizations in more than sixty countries—at their offices in Morges, on Lac Leman, not fifty miles upshore from the Lindberghs’ chalet. During subsequent visits to Switzerland, Lindbergh offered his services to the organization’s leadership, volunteering to bird-dog endangered species during his global rovings. Circling the world as many as six times a year, Lindbergh found new purpose in all his travels, a reason to penetrate each country. Less than a year after the World Wildlife Fund’s initial solicitation, Lindbergh was sending reports to the IUCN, cataloguing each country’s exotic fauna and the names of people in the government who were sympathetic to the cause of protecting it. By the following year, ecological matters consumed practically all his reading and writing time.

  Lindbergh debuted as an advocate for conservation in July 1964 with an article he wrote for Reader’s Digest called “Is Civilization Progress?” With the Atlantic’s having been crossed tens of thousands of times since 1927, Lindbergh asserted that flying no longer represented adventure to him, only progress. Now he questioned the very yardsticks—such as speed—by which he had long measured progress. He could offer “no proof whatever that the five or six thousand years of civilization, here and there on earth, have improved man’s fundamental qualities, or that in his essence civilized man is a being superior to primitive man.” He came to believe certain fundamental truths, “facts that man should never overlook: that the construction of an airplane, for instance, is simple when compared to the evolutionary achievement of a bird; that airplanes depend upon an advanced civilization; and that where civilization is most advanced, few birds exist. I realized that if I had to choose,” he proclaimed, “I would rather have birds than airplanes.”

  Over the next few years, Lindbergh’s involvement with the IUCN and the World Wildlife Fund intensified. Even more than his and Anne’s generous contributions—five-figure donations each year and all the earnings from his writings on conservation—Lindbergh lent his name. He wrote his own solicitation letters, targeting people who could “exercise an influence on conservation activities” as well as write checks. In 1965, he suggested sending a letter to every federal and state legislator, every governor, several dozen foundations, and several hundred selected individuals. Although he knew the number of letters could run as high as ten thousand, the man who refused to give autographs to strangers intended to sign each one personally.

  Some, particularly Jews, found Lindbergh’s newfound passion disconcerting, especially when he flung around such phrases as, “I don’t want history to record my generation as being responsible for the extermination of any form of life.” Longtime editorial writer Max Lerner, for one, wondered, “Where the hell was he when Hitler was trying to exterminate an entire race of human beings?”

  Lindbergh immersed himself in the movement. He accepted membership on the WWF board; he presented “sales talks” on behalf of the cause; and he used his pull to get articles published by like-minded authors. With access to transportation—anywhere Pan American flew—and powerful people, Lindbergh became the conservation movement’s most effective roving ambassador. Dealing with heads of state or birdwatchers trying to save their local woodpecker, Lindbergh also became ombudsman for the movement, the one name to whom even complete strangers felt they could turn.

  Whales were the first animals Lindbergh helped save. Upon learning in 1964 that only a few hundred great blue whales remained in the earth’s oceans, and that there were not many more great finbacks, Lindbergh began fighting this “depressing example of man’s destructiveness.” He engaged the interest of the editors of Reader’s Digest in the gigantic mammals; he attended meetings of the International Whaling Commission as the official representative of IUCN; and he wrote Prime Ministor Eisaku Sato of Japan and President Fernando Belaunde Terry of Peru, warning them that even one more season of harpooning could result in extinction. He wrote ambassadors and cabinet members urging the United States government to apply pressure on these countries, encouraging a ban until such a time as the whales had a chance to reproduce in sufficient numbers. In order to get publicity for the cause, he even permitted a photographer from Life to accompany him and his son Jon on a two-week, gray-whale-watching voyage along the
coasts of Baja California.

  When he learned that the company killing blue and humpback whales off the Peruvian coast was actually owned by Archer Daniels Midland, headquartered in Minneapolis, he fired off a letter to Erwin A. Olson, the chairman of the ADM board. Lindbergh’s argument was economic as well as ecological; and Olson issued a ban against catching the endangered species for two years.

  Other animals and their habitats soon commanded his attention. When Lindbergh learned that the island of Aldabra—one of the great breeding grounds in the Indian Ocean of such rare species as the giant land tortoise, the green turtle, and the flightless rail—was being considered as a site for an air base, he wrote the Secretary of Defense, urging an alternate location. Upon hearing that American soldiers in Vietnam were sending ivory and animal skins back to the United States, Lindbergh telephoned the Army Chief of Staff, who told him that General Westmoreland was issuing orders that “no wild game was to be shot.” So impressed was High Chief Tufele-Faiaoga with Lindbergh’s concern for his island of Ta’u in Samoa, he bestowed upon him the ancient supreme title TUIAANA-TAMA-a-le-LAGI, “a Son of Heaven.”

  The wider he traveled, the deeper Lindbergh delved into primitive life. Accordingly, no place intrigued Lindbergh more than Indonesia. His passion for the developing island nation drew him there three times in 1967 alone. While in Jakarta in February, Lindbergh met with members of the Indonesian government and found they failed to realize the significance of the Udjung Kulon, an extraordinary game-filled peninsula on the southwestern tip of Java. Returning in May on Pan American business, Lindbergh met with Presidium Minister of Political Affairs Adam Malik, who arranged for Lindbergh to visit the area along with the Indonesian directors of forestry, nature conservation, and wildlife management. All the way down the coast, Lindbergh spoke of the importance of conservation in Indonesia in general and in the Udjung Kulon in particular, where the last two dozen Javan rhinoceroses remained. Before the boat turned around for its return on Sunday evening, Lindbergh swam ashore to Peutjang Island to talk to a Swiss professor and his physician wife doing research there. They invited him to stay with them.