by Gore Vidal
Berg is at his best with the two great news stories of Lindbergh’s life—the 1927 flight to Paris and subsequent fame; and the 1932 kidnapping and killing of his two-year-old son and the chaotic search for the murderer, a German immigrant called Bruno Richard Hauptmann. (These sections read most excitingly, and despite the work of the inevitable revisionists, it seems more than ever clear that Hauptmann was indeed the kidnapper.) Berg dutifully notes that the first question King George V asked Lindbergh after his Atlantic flight was, “How did you pee?” Lindbergh was already used to the question. He had used paper cups. My father, Gene Vidal, his colleague, was more probing. “How did you . . . ?” Lindbergh laughed. “Well,” he said, “I sort of felt sorry for those Frenchmen who were carrying me on their shoulders.”
Neither Berg nor Milton is particularly good on the early days of aviation, a period awaiting its historian. By 1928, Lindbergh and Gene were involved in the first transcontinental airline, which took two days to cross the country (no night flying) by rail and air, landing at Glendale. The company’s name, TAT, was an acronym, according to cynics, for Take A Train. Since Lindbergh virtuously refused to capitalize on his name (he rejected the fortune that William Randolph Hearst offered him to appear in a movie about his life), he settled for being a publicist for commercial aviation in general and TAT in particular.
“But what did he do?” I once asked my father. “He let us use his name. The Lindbergh line we called ourselves. Then he visited all around the country, sometimes checking out sites for landing fields. But then we all . . . those of us who were pilots . . . did that. We’d also taken on Amelia Earhart. We called her Assistant Traffic Manager. But, basically, it was all public relations. Everyone in the world wanted to look at those two. Amelia’s main function for us was to convince women that it was safe to fly.” “You mean you wanted more women pilots?” Gene was amused. “No. We were trying to get the women to let the men—their husbands, relatives, friends—fly. Amelia had such a cool and serene disposition that she really put people at ease, and so made the whole thing look a lot safer than it really was.”
Milton is amusing about the somewhat edgy relations between the god of flight and, as of 1928, the goddess of flight. Much was made of the physical resemblance between Charles and Amelia. Milton seems to think that publisher-publicist George Palmer Putman had “plucked her from obscurity . . . impressed by her striking resemblance to the hero of 1927 and promoted her as ‘Lady Lindy.’ ” It was always my impression that she had plucked herself from obscurity by becoming a flier and that Putman proceeded to commercialize her. Amelia was very much a proto-feminist whose Bible was Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Anne Morrow, Lindbergh’s new wife, was also an enthusiast of Woolf, but Anne disappointed Amelia by insisting that she was not “a modern career woman but rather the wife of a modern man.”
According to Milton, while the two women were first bonding at a kitchen table, the practical joker Slim sneaked up behind his wife and began to dribble water on her silk dress. Amelia was delighted when Anne turned around and threw a glass of buttermilk in his face. But there was always a certain edginess between the Yin and Yang of flight. As Gene once said, tactfully, “Amelia was not a natural seat-of-the-pants flier like Slim.” While Berg tells a joke that I’d not heard before. After Amelia soloed to Ireland in 1932, Lindbergh is supposed to have said, “I hear that Amelia made a good landing—once.”
Berg gives almost equal space to Anne Morrow, as does Milton. Anne was born into the enemy camp. She was the daughter of a wealthy Morgan partner, Dwight Morrow, who was serving as his friend President Coolidge’s ambassador to Mexico, where she first got to know her husband from the sky. Anne had graduated from Smith; published poetry; despite shyness, she enjoyed social life. Farm boy and society girl ought not to have got on at all, and, in a sense, the marriage was unbalanced, but she had wanted to marry a hero, and that meant accommodating herself to a hero’s personality, Swedish division. As it was, she never ceased to admire him, something of a record in any marriage. They were to have six children.
In many ways, the marriage was a successful partnership; he taught her to fly, to be a navigator, while she encouraged him to become a serious writer. It is hard now to realize that, for years, each was one of the most popular writers in the world, a world that they saw from so far above that they were a bit like observant gods, hovering over all our seas and lands and noticing what the earthbound do not, the unity of things. They also raised a family, which their youngest daughter, Reeve, now describes in Under a Wing. The ethereal but tough Anne needed someone perhaps more sensitive to her moods—not to mention, more often at home; Slim was forever in motion. Later, Anne seems to have found a soulmate, first, briefly and intensely, in another poet-flier, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and, later, in her doctor. Interestingly, the twenty-seven-year-old Charles and the twenty-three-year-old Anne appear to have been virgins at the time of their wedding. We learn from Milton that, before the Paris flight, Slim had never attended a dinner party, never learned to dance, never gone out with a girl—because he’d had no time to learn what he regarded as the separate language of women. From the photographs, his love life seems to have involved a series of dogs, by no means an affective deprivation.
In 1933, Gene Vidal became Roosevelt’s Director of Air Commerce, and for four years he systematized commercial aviation, issuing the first pilot’s licenses (thoughtfully giving himself number one); he standardized the national system of airports. He also worked closely with his former colleague at TAT, now a consultant to Juan Trippe’s Pan American Airways. During this period, the Lindberghs moved to Europe—but not before the opening gun in what would prove to be the most significant mano a mano duel of the hero’s life.
It was the not unnatural view of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that in a time of crisis there could not be two heroes in the United States at the same time. As a mere governor, he had asked Slim for an autographed picture. But in 1932, when the mandate of Heaven was bestowed upon FDR, he became the embodiment of a nation’s fears and hopes. He was alone . . . well, almost. Unfortunately, the Lone Eagle could always draw a bigger crowd. Fortunately, for FDR, Lindbergh genuinely hated the limelight, and after the death of his child, he vanished as much as he could within the New York laboratory of Dr. Alexis Carrel, where he worked on the perfusion pump, far from the rabid eyes of the press. With hindsight, one now sees how dramatically inevitable it was that the two largest figures on the national stage must eventually confront each other. To that end, the great dramaturge in the sky carefully set the scene, using Gene, at times, as third character.
The Hoover administration had awarded airmail contracts in a somewhat questionable manner, favoring rich conglomerates over independent airlines. When Gene Vidal’s Ludington airline was passed over in favor of a conglomerate, Gene went public to denounce “Hoover socialism,” something truly new under the sun. Once in office, FDR saw a neat way of scoring points off the Republican Party. He got the postmaster general to accuse his predecessor of “conspiracy and collusion” in the awarding of contracts, then, on February 9, 1934, by executive order, FDR canceled all airmail contracts. The Army had flown the mail in 1918; they would do so again. The Director of Air Commerce objected. Army pilots did not have the wildcat skills of mail pilots. Gene knew. He was an Army pilot. But FDR would not budge. I’ve always suspected that Gene got secretly to Lindbergh, who was both an Army pilot and an ex-mail pilot, and urged him to speak out before things got even worse—if that was possible: by the end of the first week, five Army pilots were dead, six critically injured, eight planes totaled. Meanwhile, airlines without mail contracts faced abrupt ruin.
Lindbergh sent off a 275-word telegram to the President while, simultaneously, releasing a copy to the press. This was lèse majesté. The White House attacked Lindbergh. The Senate called him before one of its committees. The hero was accused of publicity-seeking. This occasioned the only genuine laugh in the whole mess. Privately, G
ene observed that FDR’s state of denial over his blunder now required that Lindbergh be made the villain of the piece. In this the President was aided by another paladin of air, General Billy Mitchell, the apostle of military air power. Mitchell thought FDR should have taken over TWA to fly the mail until new—“honest”—contracts had been awarded. Meanwhile, Mitchell smeared Lindbergh as “a front of the Air Trust” and, worse, identified him as “that son-in-law of Dwight Morrow.” So C.A., enemy for life of the Money Trust and the House of Morgan, now had a son said to be in thrall to the moneyed powers of darkness. Luckily, C.A. had died before his son married Anne Morrow.
As Army pilots kept falling from the skies, Roosevelt backed down. The mail, he declared, would be flown by any commercial airline that had not benefited from the previous regime. The old TAT, now Transcontinental and Western Air, became Trans World Airlines. Lindbergh found this semantic solution “reminiscent of something to be found in Alice in Wonderland.”
The obligatory Schilleresque scene between the antagonists did not take place until April 1939. Lindbergh had been impressed—hoodwinked, some thought—by the German air forces. He had also, for the American military, gone to the Soviet Union, where he was appalled by the general military incompetence; and depressed by the political system. Like so many American conservatives of the day, he feared “Asian” Communism more than he did Nazi efficiency. In any case, after nearly four years of exile, he came home to ask for a military buildup by the United States, just in case; he had also come home to preach against involvement in the approaching European war. On the buildup, as the two heroes were wary allies, they met for the first and last time.
From Lindbergh’s diary:
I went to see the President about 12:45. . . . He was seated at his desk at one end of a large room. There were several model ships around the walls. He leaned forward from his chair to meet me as I entered, and it is only now that I stop to think that he is crippled. I did not notice it and had not thought of it during our meeting. He immediately asked me how Anne was and mentioned the fact that she knew his daughter in school. He is an accomplished, suave, interesting conversationalist. I liked him and feel that I could get along with him well. Acquaintanceship would be pleasant and interesting.
But 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. The airmail situation is past—one of the worst political maneuvers I know of, and unfair in the extreme, to say the least. But nothing constructive will be gained by bringing it up again at this time.
Roosevelt gave me the impression of being a very tired man, but with enough energy left to carry on for a long time. I doubt that he realizes how tired he is. His face has that gray look of an over-worked businessman. And his voice has that even, routine tone that one seemed to get when mind is dulled by too much and too frequent conversation. It has that dull quality that comes to any one of the senses when it is overused: taste, with too much of the same food day after day; hearing, when the music never changes; touch, when one’s hand is never lifted.
Roosevelt judges his man quickly and plays him cleverly. He is mostly politician, and I think we would never get along on many fundamentals. But there are things about him I like, and why worry about the others unless and until they necessitate consideration. It is better to work together as long as we can; yet somehow I have a feeling that it may not be for long.
Thus the great dramaturge keeps the plot aboil. Also, Lindbergh’s impressions are as interesting and “accurate” a take on FDR as anything written by a contemporary. Certainly, it is unique in Lindbergh’s diary because he—who was observed constantly by everyone else—seldom observes anyone, not so much due to lack of interest but of opportunity. Happily, for gossips, he did note how astonishingly boring the Duke of Windsor was at dinner when he discussed at length how much higher the Etoile was than the Place de la Concorde, plainly an all-time room-emptier.
The truce with FDR was short. That summer, Lindbergh worked with the commanding general of the Army Air Force, H. H. Arnold; research and development was the Lindbergh assignment. On September 1, the Germans invaded Poland. The European war had begun. On September 15, Lindbergh took to the airwaves to speak on “America and the European Wars.” Of this, he writes, “An interesting incident relating to the address had occurred earlier in the day.” A colonel had been sent to him to say “the Administration was very much worried by my intention of speaking over the radio and opposing actively this country’s entry into a European war. [He] said that if I did not do this, a secretaryship of air would be created in the Cabinet and given to me! . . . This offer on Roosevelt’s part does not surprise me after what I have learned about his Administration. It does surprise me, though, that he still thinks I might be influenced by such an offer. It is a great mistake for him to let the Army know that he deals in such a way.”
This is very prim indeed, but Lindbergh knew that, from Arnold on down, the President had been told Lindbergh wouldn’t accept. “Regardless of the fact that [FDR] had publicly advocated a policy of neutrality for the United States, it seemed to me apparent that he intended to lead our country into the war. The powers he influenced and controlled were great. Opposing them would require planning, political skill, and organization. For me, this meant entering a new framework of life.”
For nearly three years, the son of C.A. galvanized the country with his speeches and rallies. The first and, thus far, last great debate of the “American Century” was now engaged. Although Lindbergh had many formidable allies, the President had not only great skills and powers, he had, as we now know, the British secret services at work throughout the land, and their first task was the deconstruction of a hero.
To swing American opinion towards war, the British knew that they could count on the wily Roosevelt only up to a point. He had a third term to win in 1940; he also had a country with an isolationist majority, and a Lone Eagle pecking away at him. He could still launch trial balloons like his 1937 “Quarantine the Aggressors” speech, which was, according to Canada’s Governor-General, Lord Tweedsmuir, “the culmination of a long conspiracy between us (this must be kept secret)!” Unfortunately, that balloon burst and FDR retreated, for the moment. He always had the same advice for enthusiasts whose aims he shared but dared not support openly in the absence of a political majority. “You must force me to act,” he would say blithely. When a denunciation of his inaction was being prepared by the interventionists, he suggested “pusillanimous” as a nice word to describe his cautious public policies.
C.A.’s son was now beginning to see, if not the covert hand of the British in our affairs, the overt hand of the House of Morgan, not to mention his own father-in-law, Dwight Morrow. Lindbergh had never much minded the Money Trust that had so incensed his father. He had gone from being a farm boy, to stunt flier, to Army flier and then to world hero. Social injustice seemed never to have concerned him. After all, he had looked after himself and everything had turned out rather more than well. He had allowed himself to be taken up by Dwight Morrow and the Morgan partners who invested his money for him and made him rich without ever commercializing his name. Incidentally, Berg made a gentlemanly treaty with Anne Morrow Lindbergh (still alive in her nineties) to use her diaries and correspondence. One quid for this quo is that Berg never mentions the fact that the brilliant, self-made Morrow was an alcoholic. It is here that Milton is much more interesting than Berg about the family that Lindbergh married into.
One fact of the national condition that can never be dis-cussed with candor is the class system. At the peak of the American pyramid—the one with that awful unblinking eye in it—is the WASP eastern establishment. Mahl notes that C. Wright Mills took considerable flak when
he identified [it] in his book The Power Elite (1956). The United States, wrote Mills, was controlled not by the mass of its citizens as described by democratic theo
ry, but by a wealthy Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite from Ivy League schools. In a flurry of caustic reviews, critics, often Cold War liberals, heatedly denied that there was such an elite. That debate now seems over, as Douglas Little noted in a recent review article in Diplomatic History: “Far from rejecting the idea of a power elite . . . [the books under review] celebrate its short lived Periclean age during the quarter century after 1945. . . .”
The British had never displayed any similar doubts about the existence of an American “power elite.” As early as 1917, Lord Robert Cecil in Cabinet noted that “though the American people are very largely foreign, both in origin and modes of thought, their rulers are almost exclusively Anglo-Saxons, and share our political ideals.”