The American Story

by David M. Rubenstein

  DR: He gets the plane, takes it from San Diego to St. Louis. And then from St. Louis he goes to New York. Where does he decide to take off from?

  ASB: He arrives in New York after he’s done this great transcontinental flight, which was magnificent in its own right. Meantime, that very week that he’s flying to the East Coast in May 1927, two Frenchmen—Charles Nungesser and François Coli, veterans of the French air force—have left Paris. It looks as though they are going to collect the prize. Lindbergh has got to get to New York City in time to start the race.

  The Spirit of St. Louis was built in San Diego to Lindbergh’s specifications. From there he flew the plane to New York, the jumping-off point for his successful solo transatlantic flight.

  And Nungesser and Coli, these two Frenchmen—well, we’re still waiting to hear from them. Their plane still hasn’t come in.

  Lindbergh lands, in the middle of May, in Long Island, where there are three airfields, including Roosevelt Field, all adjacent to each other. And Lindbergh and two other planes sit on the runway and wait to take off.

  The two others are bigger planes with seasoned teams of pilots, and here’s our little Spirit of St. Louis. You wouldn’t enter this plane in the Soap Box Derby. This plane was built out of aluminum tubing, canvas, and piano wire.

  DR: And was there any window to look out? How did Lindbergh see where he was going?

  ASB: There is no forward outlook on the plane because Lindbergh realized, “What I need most of all to make it to Paris is gasoline. I need enough fuel.” So every inch that he could fill with gasoline, he did. That included a huge tank in front of the instrument panel.

  The only way Charles Lindbergh could see where he was going—well, he had two options. He was sitting in a porch chair—

  DR: It wasn’t an airplane seat?

  ASB: It was a wicker chair from somebody’s porch. And if he wanted to see ahead, he could do two things from that chair. He could go like this out this side or he could do this out that side. That’s it.

  DR: To look out, he has to have windows. Did he have glass there to look out?

  ASB: It was Plexiglas, actually, a new product that was coming out of DuPont Chemical. And he could pull these windows out. He always went to the left window. And there was a sunroof.

  DR: Let’s go to the night he takes off.

  ASB: Bad weather descended upon New York and its environs for ten days. There was just fog that nobody could get through.

  And on the night of May 19, 1927, Lindbergh and his mechanics went into the city just to kill time. They were going to see a Broadway musical called Rio Rita. I could sing its title song for you, but I won’t.

  Before proceeding to the theater, Lindbergh said, “You know what? There’s the Weather Bureau. Let’s just pop in and get the latest report.”

  And a guy at the Weather Bureau said, “The weather’s terrible for the next few days, except tomorrow morning between about 7 and 9 a.m. there’s going to be a break in the fog and the clouds. It’s still going to be rough flying for the first hour or two, but maybe a good airmail pilot could get through.”

  Lindbergh went back to the hotel hoping to grab five or six hours of sleep before he was going to begin what would be thirty-three and a half hours in flight. But he got back and found chaos at the Garden City Hotel on Long Island, where he was staying, what with reporters’ typewriters clattering down below and people knocking on his door. He got no sleep.

  And now it’s four or five in the morning and he thinks, “You know what, the window of decent weather is coming pretty soon. I’d better get down to the plane. We’d better gas this thing up. We’d better see if we can make it.”

  And that’s what he did. He went out to Roosevelt Field.

  DR: He gets out in the field. Is it clear that he can take off? Is the runway long enough? Is it concrete or is it grass or what?

  ASB: The runway is mud because it’s been raining for ten days. It would have been grass if the summer grass had grown in yet, but it hadn’t. It’s just mud.

  And it’s still foggy. It’s still wet. The plane is sweating with precipitation. There’s a mile-long runway, and at the end of that runway are some telegraph poles with wires. Lindbergh has one mile to get five thousand pounds of airplane, fully loaded with fuel, off the ground. He’s never flown the plane with that much fuel because he’s never had to go 3,500 miles. He starts the plane.

  The film footage is breathtaking, because you see this plane go down this muddy runway, and it’s glue. The plane just can’t lift off. And the air is so thick. You see the plane start to get off, and it bounces down. And then it bounces down again. And it bounces down again. And Lindbergh is just pulling back on the stick, and finally he clears the telegraph wires by twenty feet.

  DR: What did he take with him? Did he have a lot of food?

  ASB: Lindbergh understood this flight was largely a problem about weight. First of all, he benefited from the fact that his nickname was Slim. He was six feet, two and a half inches, and he didn’t weigh 170 pounds. That helped.

  He trimmed the maps he traveled with, cutting their quarter-inch borders off every map. Everything got shaved down to its minimum. He took a canteen of water and a half dozen sandwiches. And that was it.

  There was no radio on the plane because the radio would have weighed too much. Somebody asked what he’d do if he found himself in trouble. He said, “If I’m in trouble over the Atlantic and I get on my radio, who am I talking to? Nobody can hear me, and nobody can rescue me. So what’s the difference?” And that was that.

  DR: When he did later meet King George V of England, the king says to him, “By the way, how did you pee?” What’s the answer to that?

  ASB: The regal question. Nobody knew how Lindbergh peed during the flight. It wasn’t until I went through the flight checklist, where he had checked everything three times on what he had brought on this trip, that I realized—and remember that he’s counting every half ounce—he had packed a paper cup. And I thought, “There’s only one reason for a paper cup.” It’s not as if he was pouring from his canteen into a cup—cheers! So he used the paper cup to pee in and then—shweet!—out the left side window.

  DR: He takes off. He clears the telegraph lines. How does he navigate? He’s got instruments, or is he doing it just by looking at the stars?

  ASB: He has rudimentary instruments. Did he have certain gifts? He certainly had a good sense of direction. He had a compass, but he did navigate by the stars.

  When you consider how rudimentary all this was in 1927—you know, when he charted his trip back in San Diego in the spring of 1927, the people building the plane said, “How far is it exactly?” And he said, “I don’t know exactly. I’d better find out.” And he went to the library in San Diego, where there was a gigantic globe, and he pulled out a piece of string and he measured his route on the globe.

  Then he began to chart the flight, figuring how much gasoline was required for every hundred miles. That is how he navigated.

  During the flight, he encountered every obstacle a pilot could imagine, including a magnetic storm that turned the plane around, he figured, at least three times. And the compass, the needle is just spinning around. And yet he pulls through all this and, some twenty-five or twenty-six hours later, he begins to recognize where he is, because the first bits of land are starting to appear.

  DR: He saw a mirage—he thought he saw land, then he didn’t see it.

  ASB: Halfway across the ocean, around hour fifteen or sixteen, he started to hallucinate. He sees land where none existed. He later admitted, when he wrote his own book about the flight—The Spirit of St. Louis, a book that won the Pulitzer Prize—Lindbergh said that there was a moment where ghosts actually entered the plane. And the ghosts, he claimed, carried him through.

  DR: At some point, he’s falling asleep because he’s been up for fifty-some hours. How does he keep awake?

  ASB: He does everything he possibly can, including not eating
, because he thought if he started to eat that would make him tired.

  This is one of the most amazing things. There were times when to get over clouds and storms, he had to fly as high as ten thousand feet in this rickety plane. And there were times where he got so tired, he would fly ten feet above the Atlantic. He would pull out the window, and the spray of the ocean would come into the cockpit to wake him up. Because there were several times he really did nod off. We will never know how many times.

  DR: He finally sees Ireland. He realizes he could land there and live. But he wouldn’t get the $25,000 prize, so he keeps going. How does he actually find Paris?

  ASB: His sighting of Ireland is one of my favorite moments in the flight. He’s now been flying for twenty-eight to twenty-nine hours, and he starts to see porpoises, he starts to see birds, and finally he looks out the window and he sees a fishing boat, and he sees a fisherman on the deck of the boat. This isn’t a mirage. This is for real.

  And now he circles the boat. He flies lower and lower and lower, pulls out the window, leans out, yells to the man on the boat, “Which way is Ireland?”

  After all that, he was less than ten miles off the original course. And the next thing you know, there he is and there’s Dingle Bay, just the way the map has it. And then it’s just another hour to England and then another hour across the Channel.

  And now he’s over France. The French countryside is dark, but it starts to get brighter and brighter and brighter. And suddenly the lights of Paris come up. He can see the Eiffel Tower, and he’s made it! It’s fantastic! We’re here!

  Problem is he can’t find where to put the plane down. He knows where Le Bourget Field is—the airfield where he’s meant to land—but it’s now ten-thirty at night in Paris, and the lights don’t make sense. Here are all the lights of the great City of Lights, but then there’s just one string of lights and then it goes black. And he can’t figure it out.

  He circles lower and lower and lower. And he realizes the one string of lights is the one road from Paris to Le Bourget Field. Every automobile that could fit on that street was out there with its headlamps on, creating a runway for Charles Lindbergh. And he landed at Le Bourget Field at ten-thirty-three that night.

  He expected there might be a half dozen mechanics out there at the field. What he didn’t realize was that the minute his plane had been sighted over Ireland, word spread through France.

  Lindbergh brought it down, and 150,000 people were waiting for him. They rushed past the gendarmes and ran toward him—pulling at him, pulling his plane apart.

  And that’s the moment that Charles Lindbergh becomes the first modern media superstar. I have often said, “Twenty years ago now, there was an English princess who was chased through the streets of Paris and was killed. That car chase began the night Lindbergh landed in Paris.”

  DR: Lindbergh lands. He’s pulled out by a number of people. The American ambassador ultimately gets possession of him and takes him to the American Embassy. Within the next day or two or three, he has a torrent of mail and calls. Could he believe what was happening to him?

  ASB: Lindbergh, as I said, thought there would be six people at the airfield. He was going to spend the next couple of weeks flying around Europe, maybe go to Brussels, maybe go to Germany. He hadn’t thought it through yet. But for the next few days, the next few weeks, the next few months, he became the property of the world.

  And with his new modern-media superstardom, the city of Paris and the country of France spent the next three or four days heaping every honor they could on him. Wherever he went, hundreds of thousands, if not a million, people waited for him. Everywhere.

  DR: How does the Spirit of St. Louis get back to the United States, and how does he get back?

  ASB: After France, he went to England, where he met the aforementioned king with his urinary interest. And then he does come home. Lindbergh was planning some flights around Europe when he got a telegram from Calvin Coolidge, then president of the United States. It said, “It’s time to come home, thank you very much.”

  And he thought, “Great, I’ll fly home.” Oh, no, no, no, that is not going to happen. Calvin Coolidge sent a battleship. They took the plane apart and put it in two boxes; and with the plane, he sailed home. And then he came to Washington, D.C.

  There never has been, there never will be a reception in this country like the one that fell upon Charles Lindbergh. The United States of America bestowed upon him every medal they could. They made up a new medal for him, in fact. And by the time he got to New York City a few days later, four million people turned out for the parade.

  DR: Biggest crowd anybody had ever had.

  ASB: Ever. They shut down the United States government. Wall Street closed that day. Every bank closed. Every school closed. Every business in the country closed—because Lindbergh came home.

  He flew on a goodwill tour of the nation, at least flying over every state. He stopped in almost every state. An estimated quarter of the country saw Charles Lindbergh at some point during that tour.

  Lindbergh’s dashing good looks helped cement his status as an international celebrity after his New York-to-Paris flight.

  DR: On one of his trips, he goes to Mexico, and the U.S. ambassador there, Dwight Morrow, is a former senior partner at J.P. Morgan. Morrow has several daughters, whom Lindbergh meets.

  ASB: One daughter was very sophisticated, very elegant, and quite wonderful. Then there was a younger daughter who was a zippy little thing—kind of a sprite, fluttering all over the place.

  And then there was the middle daughter, Anne, the shyest creature who ever lived. And wouldn’t you know, the two shyest people on earth—because Lindbergh was also very shy—met and instantaneously fell in love. After the third date, he proposed marriage, and by the fourth, she accepted. They were—if I may say this in the Library of Congress—both virgins on their wedding night.

  They got married in a very secret wedding ceremony. You think you understand what the press is like now—what fame is like now. Lindbergh had become its first human quarry. He and Anne were chased everywhere they went, and not by a reporter or two, but by hordes, by armies. So they really had to pull off this wedding in intense secrecy, which they did.

  DR: Anne Morrow Lindbergh had an extraordinary career herself as a writer. And putting up with him was not easy, right?

  ASB: It was no picnic for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes Lindbergh would say to his wife, “I’m going out for a while,” and then three weeks later a postcard would arrive, because he had gone to Samoa or someplace. He really marched to the beat of his own drum.

  What was also difficult for Anne Morrow Lindbergh—who is one of the most celebrated American writers, one of the great diarists of the twentieth century, among other things, but also a novelist and an essayist—at a certain point in the late forties and early fifties, Charles decided to sit down and write a book, which he does. It became a huge best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize. [The Spirit of St. Louis won the 1954 Pulitzer Prize in Biography.]

  And here’s this poet, Anne, who’s been writing beautifully all her life, and suddenly even literarily she is eclipsed by this pilot. It’s one of the sad ironies. It was tough being married to Charles Lindbergh.

  DR: After he died, and after you wrote your book, it came out publicly that he had seven children with three German women that his wife apparently didn’t know about and that none of his legitimate children in the United States knew about. How did this come out and how did he hide it for so long?

  ASB: None of this is in my book because the book prompted this story. It came out, and a German woman living in Paris read it and said, “I know I promised my mother I would never say a word about this, but I must now go public. I am Charles Lindbergh’s daughter. And I will not rest until I meet Scott Berg and he looks me in the eye and says, ‘Yes. You are Charles Lindbergh’s daughter.’ ”

  About a month after she had this epiphany, I heard from a reporter from a newspa
per in Europe who said, “This woman would like to meet you. Can you verify this story? Because we’re about to run it in the newspaper.”

  And I said, “Well, I’ve met so many ‘Lindbergh babies’…”

  “No, no, this isn’t a Lindbergh baby. This isn’t somebody claiming to be the dead baby.”

  This woman said she had letters from Charles Lindbergh to her mother, which she faxed to me. Remember fax machines? As soon as the letters came off the fax machine, I said, “Oh my God! These are real.”

  I flew over to meet her in Paris. And as she walked toward me, I said, “That’s Reeve Lindbergh, Charles Lindbergh’s youngest daughter, twenty years earlier.” I didn’t need the DNA. These were Lindberghs walking toward me. [The woman had also brought her brothers to the meeting.]

  Reeve Lindbergh, Charles Lindbergh’s youngest American child, used to say, “You know, there used to be signs all over America, ‘George Washington slept here.’ Well, there should be signs all over Europe, ‘Charles Lindbergh slept here, and here, and here, oh, and there.’ ” Anne Morrow Lindbergh and the Lindbergh children in America had not a clue that any of this happened.

  DR: After the famous flight and his marriage to Anne, and before World War II broke out, Lindbergh became an ardent America First person. What was that about?

  ASB: This is an important subject that you should all know about—it’s very timely now—and that’s the movement called America First. It’s a much-misunderstood movement.

  In 1940, before Pearl Harbor, this country was having one of the four or five great debates in its history, including what kind of constitution would we have, would there be a civil war, and Vietnam.

  There was also a great debate about our entry into the Second World War. Most of this country, as late as September of ’41, was against our entering the war, and Lindbergh was the great spokesman for that point of view.