Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  As though demonstrating loyalty to his marriage, Lindbergh insisted on naming their houses—in honor of the shells in Gift from the Sea. The house in Darien became “Tellina,” the genus of the Double Sunrise; and the Swiss chalet was christened “Planorbe,” the French word for the snail-like Moon Shell. Touched by Charles’s gesture, Anne went along with the plan, suggesting that the “Argonauta”—a mother who leaves her shell and starts another life—be affixed to the new house in Hawaii.

  Charles assured Anne that she would come to care for Hawaii once Argonauta was completed and that he intended to spend more time with his wife there. He misled her on both counts. It rained steadily the first week in January 1971, when they returned to Hawaii to move into their newly completed house; and they quickly discovered that the roof leaked. Worse than that, despite Charles’s admonitions, the architect and contractor had failed to create proper drainage for the house. A torrential downpour awakened them their first night; and muddy streams, just as Charles had foretold, sluiced through the house. They spent the next few hours out in the storm, he digging channels with a bucket while she built a mud dam. The house had not even dried out when they were invaded by armies of ants, spiders, cockroaches, lizards, rats, even a mongoose. And then Lindbergh was summoned to an emergency meeting of the Pan American board in New York.

  Anne was, as she scratched in her diary, “furious to be left at this point in this place in this state. A place which is not of my choosing. I do not have friends, family, or interests here. It is not a place I would normally choose to live in alone. I only come for him—because he loves it & said he expected to be here with me. I am angry not only at him but at myself for hoping that he would at least stay here.” Argonauta did not even have a telephone, and the nearest people were ten minutes away through the mud. Propane gas motors generated electricity—one for lights, the other for appliances; but, she wrote Lucia Valentine, she would gladly trade her few modern conveniences for a little company. What she found most discouraging was “the pattern of being left” and—after all her years of weeping to her therapist and wailing in her diary—her own inability to walk away from such unacceptable behavior.

  She lay awake at night in silent fury, trying to plot the remainder of her marriage. “First,” she realized, “I must harden my heart—not because I don’t love him but because I do. I must harden my heart against him, against being vulnerable to him & his leaving, against being dependent on him. I must plan out my life alone. I must learn to cope with things alone here not only physically but emotionally.” She spent the next few weeks readying the house for his return—mopping up, sweeping out dead animals, burning garbage, washing all their clothes. Through it all, it never dawned on Anne to pack her bags and go to a hotel … or to one of her other houses.

  By the following year, Anne had made her peace with Argonauta. She routinely wrote up her shopping lists to Hasegawa’s General Store, an impossibly cluttered emporium back in town—including such items as rat poison, animal traps, and a machete to hack at the wild bamboo that was overtaking many of the fruit trees they had planted—without batting an eye. “I have convinced your father that we will have to spray the walls with something strong (Ecology or no ecology) to get [the ants] out,” she wrote Ansy. “It’s either them or me!” But she could not convince Charles to fire up their second generator, the one that ran the lights—“because your father likes to use kerosene lamps.” Yet again, Anne was “very disappointed” when her husband had to leave on business and cancel his return to Hawaii; but she was hardly surprised.

  The night after she drove him to the airport she turned on the second generator and the lights. “It’s OK to cook supper & eat by kerosene light if your husband is with you,” she wrote Ansy, “but alone in the dark—NO!” The next morning she completely sprayed the outside of the house with more insecticide than Charles would ever have permitted. Anne’s life in Hawaii would always be a struggle against the temperamental water and electrical systems and the vermin; but over the next few weeks, she surrendered to the intoxicating charms of Hana, enjoying its beauty and taking advantage of her isolation by reading through her diaries.

  Lindbergh made a point of visiting Hawaii with increasing frequency, ultimately spending as much as two months a year there. He lobbied its senators to designate its Leeward chain as Wilderness Areas and Diamond Head as a national monument. In his efforts to preserve as much of the Hana coast as possible, he became active with The Nature Conservancy, an organization that obtained lands of exceptional natural beauty and conveyed their ownership to the United States Park Service. Both Anne and Charles contributed thousands of dollars toward the purchase of land in the Valley of the Seven Sacred Pools in the Kipahulu Valley, which would allow the existing Haleakala National Park to extend more than four thousand acres from the inland crater to the sea. As he had with the World Wildlife Fund, Lindbergh solicited money by writing letters and addressing small groups. (Anne endorsed the organization as well, deeding them Big Garden Island, off the coast of Maine, which her parents had given her as a wedding present in 1929.) The Nature Conservancy would not hesitate to call upon Lindbergh whenever they needed help raising money for difficult acquisitions—from the Lubrecht Forest in Montana to the Four Hole Swamp in South Carolina. This new cause gave him still more excuses to travel.

  Richard M. Nixon also called upon his services, as his new administration proved eager to include him in their environmental policy-making. With Secretary of the Interior Walter Hickel informing Lindbergh that he was placing the eight species of great whales on America’s Endangered Species List, and Secretary of State William P. Rogers encouraging him to “outline ways in which the field of conservation might be used to the advantage of diplomatic relationships,” Lindbergh accepted the President’s invitation to serve on The Citizen’s Advisory Committee on Environmental Quality, chaired by Laurence S. Rockefeller. Through this committee, Lindbergh often provided language for an administration eager to show how “Green” it was. Nixon used Lindbergh as much as possible in “photo-opportunities,” attaching his face to the Republicans’ environmental protection activities.

  Similarly, Lindbergh allowed himself to be publicly associated with the space program. In December 1968, the Lindberghs had accepted the invitation of the Lyndon Johnsons to one of their last official dinners, this one honoring the Apollo astronauts and James Webb, head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Two weeks later they went to Cape Kennedy to watch the launch of Apollo VIII. At the request of astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders, the Lindberghs joined them for lunch the day before their flight, their last meal on earth before blasting off on man’s first voyage to the moon. Lindbergh inspired his hosts with tales of early aviation and of Robert Goddard, who had spoken to him forty years earlier of a multi-stage rocket that could one day reach the moon.

  The next morning, the Lindberghs observed the launching from a special area reserved for astronauts and their families. “I have never experienced such a sense of power,” he wrote one of the NASA directors afterward, having calculated that in its first second lifting off, the “thirty-six-story” rocket burned more than ten times the fuel Lindbergh had used flying from New York to Paris. After following the mission on television that Christmas at their son Land’s ranch in Montana, Lindbergh called it “the greatest feat of teamwork in the history of the world.” He and Anne sent the astronauts a congratulatory telegram, noting, “YOU HAVE TURNED INTO REALITY THE DREAM OF ROBERT GODDARD.”

  Only six months later, Lindbergh accepted an invitation from Neil A. Armstrong to attend the launch of Apollo XI, the mission that hoped to put the first man on the moon. The major television networks asked Lindbergh to appear on their news programs to provide commentary on the journey, particularly as it might compare to his own epochal flight. He refused all such offers, quietly attending the event with his son Jon. After what Lindbergh himself called a “fascinating, extraordinary, and beautifully
executed mission,” many drew parallels between the two shy, young Galahads of the sky. Television journalist David Brinkley, for one, could not help observing how the astronauts themselves “stood in the utmost respect, and even awe, of a man who had flown to Paris.” Armstrong would later remind others that Lindbergh had flown solo with only a small team of technical backers, while he had been part of a three-man crew backed by a team of hundreds of thousands. And, Armstrong added, “Slim flew through miserable weather and stretched the science and art of navigation to find Le Bourget. We could see our destination throughout our entire voyage.” Lindbergh heartily congratulated Armstrong afterward, adding in a postscript to his letter, “I wonder if you felt on the moon’s surface as I did after landing at Paris in 1927—that I would like to have had more chance to look around.”

  In truth, the Apollo XI crewman with whom Lindbergh most empathized was Michael Collins, who circled alone in space while Armstrong and “Buzz” Aldrin walked on the moon’s surface. “Of course I feel sure that your sense of aloneness was regularly broken into by Mission Control at Houston,” Lindbergh wrote him, “but there must have been intervals in between—I hope enough of them. In my flying, years ago, I didn’t have the problem of coping with radio communication.”

  President Nixon invited Lindbergh to accompany him by helicopter to the U.S.S. Hornet to receive the returning astronauts. He refused. “My declining was based on the fact that I spent close to a quarter century, after my flight from New York to Paris, in 1927, reachieving a position in which I could live, work, and travel under normal circumstances,” Lindbergh explained. He felt that the splashdown of the astronauts would, quite properly, “attract the greatest concentration of publicity in the history of the world, and that I could not avoid involvement because of my 1927 flight.” This, Lindbergh added, “would, of course, tend to take me back into a press relationship and way of life I am most anxious not to re-enter.”

  Lindbergh would disappoint Nixon again just a few months later, when he went public with his opposition to the administration’s billion-dollar support of the supersonic transport. Having long considered the SST a costly, noisy, impractical polluter, he concluded in a 1972 Op-Ed piece in The New York Times: “the regular operation of SST’s in their present state of development will be disadvantageous both to aviation and to the peoples of the world. I believe we should prohibit their scheduled operation on or above United States territory as long as their effect on our over-all environment remains unsatisfactory.”

  During the span of the Apollo XI mission, Lindbergh hopscotched from Tellina to Argonauta, with stops in San Francisco and Seattle. It was a typical week of travel for him. As Anne had feared, the building of a third house encouraged her husband’s travels rather than curtailed them. Whatever time they scheduled to be together invariably got cut in half by some environmental emergency. In 1969, he circled the globe five times, stopping wherever he felt he could do good.

  That October, he went to Minnesota, where he helped establish the Voyageurs National Park on the Kabetogama peninsula at the Canadian border. For two days he explored the rugged region by air, boat, and on foot with Elmer L. Andersen, the former governor, and Russell W. Fridley, director of the Minnesota Historical Society, publicly pronouncing it “an extraordinary place” and telling the press it would be “tragic” not to make it a national park. Before leaving the state, Lindbergh visited his childhood home in Little Falls, then being restored as a museum. He enjoyed a reunion there with his seventy-seven-year-old half-sister, Eva Christie, whom he had hardly seen since their father’s death forty-five years earlier. After little more than an hour together, he was gone.

  Obsessive about remaining active, affixing purpose to every action, Lindbergh became the conservation movement’s most tireless freelance. No person or place on earth was off-limits to him; no time was wasted. When a canceled flight to New York in the winter of 1969 left him stranded in Los Angeles for a few hours, he rented a Volkswagen and drove to Santa Barbara, to inspect the site of a recent oil spill. He followed up a five-day survey trip through Baja California in 1968 with a mission to Mexico City in 1972, voicing his concerns about the gray whale and the need to protect a dozen areas in Baja because of its extraordinary flora and fauna. Upon learning in 1970 that Akihoto wanted to see the Tingmissartoq, which was on display in Osaka for the World’s Fair, he squeezed in a trip to Japan because he thought he could promote conservation firsthand with the Crown Prince. At several meetings in 1972 he successfully encouraged His Majesty King Taufa-ahau Tupou IV of Tonga to establish parks on his exotic islands. And in a handwritten note to Prince Philip of Great Britain, he suggested that a word from him to the Chief Minister of the Fiji Islands would go a long way in the marine conservation efforts there. In his efforts to see Brazil make the Reserve Forestal do Tumucumaque a national park, Lindbergh flew to Rio de Janeiro and met with a cadre of ambassadors, government ministers, and newspaper owners; he also flew to Brasilia, where he delivered a written appeal from the WWF to President Costa e Silva and appeared before the Senate.

  In late 1968, Lindbergh traveled to the northern frontier of Brazil, near the Surinam border, where he lived for several days among the Indians in the Tumucumaque region. Members of the tribe subsisted primarily on the meat of wild pigs, birds, and monkeys killed by bows and arrows. Not completely unaccustomed to visitors, the tribesmen amused themselves by serving the flesh of wild animals to their civilized guests, delighting in watching their reactions. Most visitors, Lindbergh was told, passed up the bowl of stewed monkey; but he treated himself to three helpings. “Do you really like it?” one of the natives asked through a Catholic monk who translated. “Yes,” Lindbergh replied with a straight face, “it’s almost as good as human flesh.”

  As the fine line separating primitive man from the rest of the animal kingdom increasingly fascinated him, Lindbergh’s conservation work kept drawing him to the Philippines. His love affair with this island nation began with the tamaraw, a wild buffalo just forty inches tall, which was indigenous to Mindoro, the fifth-largest island in the Philippines. By 1966, when Lindbergh first learned of the animal at IUCN headquarters in Switzerland, an estimated one hundred remained on earth, all prey to hunters, disease, and other elements of civilization.

  In January 1969, Lindbergh arrived in the Philippines, without advance notice and with only the names of a few contacts. One was Thomas Harrisson, an English anthropologist whose work was partially funded by the IUCN. Upon their meeting, Harrisson observed how Lindbergh “lent his whole influence and energy” to conservation efforts for ten days. Harrisson arranged for Lindbergh to meet Dr. Sixto Roxas, one of the country’s leading bankers and an economic adviser to President Ferdinand Marcos, who in turn scheduled a meeting between Lindbergh and Marcos himself. Lindbergh—staying at the Embassy as a guest of Ambassador G. Mennen Williams—expected ten minutes of pleasantries with the President and his wife. But he found them both “sincerely interested in conservation,” and they kept him at Malacañang Palace for two hours. Lindbergh returned to the palace later in the week for a luncheon with Marcos’s cabinet. He also visited the national legislature and met with the press.

  Lindbergh made friends everywhere, especially on the wild, mountainous Mindoro, which he surveyed on foot and by helicopter. There, Professor Harrisson observed, “Lindbergh very effectively spoke to the crowds assembled to see him and enormously impressed them with the visible fact that a man of such world status could be interested enough to visit them for this conservation purpose.” When Lindbergh returned to the Philippines in June, he learned that Marcos had ordered a seventy-five-thousand-hectare preserve around the principal tamaraw area and assigned thirty guards to protect it. Within two years, the tamaraw’s numbers were increasing.

  During these visits, Lindbergh also learned of the plight of the monkey-eating eagle, the largest eagle in the world, indigenous to Mindanao. In August 1969, Lindbergh rallied local support there by addressing a radio aud
ience for the first time in twenty years. He even allowed a newspaper reporter—Alden Whitman of The New York Times—to accompany him on his travels, sending dispatches of his missionary work around the world. When Lindbergh returned to the Philippines that October, Marcos presented him with a Presidential Plaque of Appreciation “for inspiring and spurring action to save the country’s prized fauna … from extinction; and for his pace-setting advancement of the cause of wildlife conservation throughout the world.”

  While in the Philippines, Lindbergh learned of sixty tribal groups that still inhabited its islands, many subsisting at prehistoric cultural levels. President Marcos expressed interest in protecting his country’s heritage by appointing an adviser on national minorities, a controversial young man named Manuel Elizalde, Jr. “Manda,” as he was known to his friends, was an heir to one of the largest conglomerates in the country—interests that extended from sugar to steel. A Harvard-educated, hard-drinking playboy, he turned his life around once exposed to the losing struggle the tribal peoples were waging against land developers. He established an organization called Panamin—an acronym for Private Association for National Minorities—the goal of which was to ensure the welfare of these people forgotten by time.