The American Story

by David M. Rubenstein

  Now, when I started this book, I believed, as I’m sure many of you do who had history teachers as bad as mine, that America First was a midwestern movement started by a bunch of old Republican senators. I learned that it was, in fact, a youth movement started by a half dozen college students, mostly at Yale University in 1940.

  The guys who started it were named Gerald R. Ford, Sargent Shriver, Potter Stewart, Kingman Brewster—who, of course, became president of Yale and ambassador to the United Kingdom—and a man named Bob Stuart, who ran Quaker Oats for many years, as his family had before him. And these five or six students got this movement off the ground.

  Lindbergh had come back from Europe, where he had seen the Luftwaffe building up, and he came back to warn the country, giving up his privacy in order to give speeches. One day these five guys from Yale got in touch with Lindbergh and said, “Would you give speeches for our little group?” which he did.

  Overnight this group mushroomed. We talk in politics about a big tent. This was a big tent. America First included the American Bund movement [the German American Bund or German American Federation] but it also included Norman Thomas, the great Socialist. It covered the entire waterfront of people who weren’t isolationists, as Lindbergh always said he was not.

  He was a noninterventionist. And he felt, until Pearl Harbor, that World War II was the continuation of a European war that had been fought for a thousand years among Russia, France, and Great Britain, and they were just going to keep fighting and fighting and fighting, and it had nothing to do with us.

  DR: After Pearl Harbor, he wasn’t allowed by FDR to get back into the army and to be a pilot in the war. How did he manage during World War II to be of service to the country?

  ASB: The enmity that FDR felt toward Lindbergh was so intense that when on December 8, 1941, Charles Lindbergh volunteered, FDR said to Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, “I’m not going to let him become a hero again.” And that was that. He basically said, “He cannot enlist anywhere.”

  So, said Lindbergh, “I can still be of use in private industry. There are a lot of aircraft companies, a lot of motor companies. I can help the war effort by working for them.”

  He had meetings everywhere. Every company in America wanted to hire Charles Lindbergh. But the callbacks never came, because FDR had sent a message: “Any company that hires Lindbergh does not get a government contract.”

  So nobody would hire Lindbergh. There was one exception. Henry Ford said, “Oh, Ford’s not going to get any contracts? I don’t think so.” He hired Charles Lindbergh as an advisor and a test pilot. Increasingly, Lindbergh got hired by other companies who let him work quietly on the side.

  Lindbergh finally said, “I want to be where the action is.” And they all said, “But you have no uniform. You’re not a member of any of the armed services.” So Lindbergh said, “I’ll just fly there as a private citizen, as a pilot.”

  Lindbergh flew to the South Pacific, where he island-hopped. He would go to airfields and he would teach pilots how to fly more efficiently. People had noticed that Lindbergh would go out on these sorties, and he would come back with much more gasoline than any of the other pilots. The brass would say, “Can you teach our pilots to fly the way you do?” And that’s what he did.

  Finally Douglas MacArthur heard about this, summoned Lindbergh, and said, “Listen, you go anywhere you want. You are under my protection. And if anybody questions you, say, ‘Douglas MacArthur sent me.’ ”

  Lindbergh went on fifty bombing missions without a uniform. This means if he is downed anywhere, he is a man without a country. He’s just dead meat because nobody can claim him. He did it anyway.

  DR: After World War II, his reputation was restored a bit as a result. And he got involved in civil aviation, helped start a number of airlines in the United States, but he also got involved in conservation. Can you explain how that became the latest love of his life?

  ASB: This became the great passion of Lindbergh’s life starting in the late fifties and really in the sixties.

  Lindbergh spent his life working for aviation. He took no real money. He was offered $10 million after his solo transatlantic flight to endorse products. But he took none of those offers.

  Instead, he accepted jobs working for budding aviation companies, which became TWA and Pan American. And he worked for United also. He got a lot of stock.

  He spent the rest of his life flying on behalf of aviation. If any of you has ever been in an airplane and flown from one city to another in this world, chances are the person who first navigated that flight was Charles Lindbergh—not just in America, not just in the Western Hemisphere, but anywhere in the world. As late as the 1970s he was still flying on TWA, taking notes on everything—the service, the quality of the food, the service of the hostesses, of the pilot.

  In making all these flights and independent flights of his own, especially in the fifties, he began to see from ten, twenty, thirty thousand feet how the physiognomy of the earth had changed. He had seen how civilization was encroaching upon wilderness, and this disturbed him, mostly because he felt responsible. He thought, “It is because I helped glamorize aviation that aviation took off as it did,” and he decided to spend the rest of his life trying to fight that.

  Without saying we should fight progress, because he never wanted to do that, he spent the last decade of his life doing everything he could for the preservation of the air, the land, the water, and also indigenous peoples all over the world, whose territories were being encroached upon. He became the first really famous international figure to become a tree hugger, one who totally embraced the environment.

  DR: Part of his tree-hugging was he loved to have houses in exotic places close to nature. The last house he built was a desolate place in Maui, Hawaii. Can you describe the end of his life and where he’s buried?

  ASB: You’ve got to remember that he was human quarry all his life—running from people and running from the press. He just wanted to be alone. He wanted to be as isolated as he could.

  When he learned that he was going to die, he selected as his burial ground a churchyard near his home in Maui, a plot at the edge of a cliff at the edge of the community of Hana. The Hawaiian Islands are as far from anywhere on earth as you can get, and here he is at the edge of a cliff. [Lindbergh died of lymphoma in August 1974, at the age of 72.]

  About three weeks before he died, he had gone to a hospital in New York to have his bloodwork done. He was feeling ill. And the doctor had said, “Charles, I’m afraid this is it. It’s really the end, and we should make arrangements now for your death.”

  Lindbergh said, “That’s fine, but I don’t want to die here in the hospital. I want to go home. I want to be buried in Hawaii. That’s where I want to die.”

  The doctor said, “That’s impossible. Simply can’t be done. No airline will fly you there.” And Lindbergh said, “No airline will fly me? Get me a phone. Let me make a phone call.”

  He called a very good friend at Pan Am, and they put him on a plane. They took the first-class section and decked it out as a hospital room. Lindbergh was able to fly with his wife and with his three sons—his three American sons, I hasten to add—and they flew to Hawaii.

  I mentioned that he made checklists. That’s what got him to Paris. In a similar manner, he had a whole routine of how he wanted to be buried, in what clothes he wanted to be dressed, what he wanted the casket to look like, where it was to be. He even designed the drainage in the burial ground at the end of this churchyard where he was going to be buried.

  This gets biblical at a certain point. He asked his three sons to dig the grave. And he hands everybody the checklists and says, “You must do everything exactly like this.”

  And they did everything. They dug the grave. They put the rocks just the way he said he wanted them—everything done, done, and done… and not until then did he die.

  Before that, he had said, “You will have a few hours. Do not wait a second. As soo
n as I’m gone, put me in the burial clothes, make this phone call, drive me down this road, do this—”

  DR: Because he didn’t want a media circus.

  ASB: They didn’t know what he was talking about. But they followed his specifications precisely. They hastily performed a short service in a little church there that seats twenty people. They buried him, they lowered the coffin, they covered him up.

  The Lindbergh family is driving away from Hana, Maui; and as they are driving down the one road, three television trucks are driving up the other way. Lindbergh knew they had two hours to “clear the wires.”

  DR: After all these years you spent studying him, do you admire him the way you did before you started, and do you have the view that he was a great man or a flawed man?

  ASB: It’s now really twenty years since I wrote the book, and my feelings have only intensified on each side. He makes me crazier than ever in some ways. He was incredibly willful, incredibly stubborn. He was a cold, cold man and—I say this with great love for his children, but I would not have wanted to be one of his children.

  As one of them said to me, “There were two ways of doing things. There was Father’s way and the wrong way.” That’s a tough thing to grow up with or around.

  That said, I can’t think of another human being who has packed as much life into a single lifetime as Charles Lindbergh. And make no mistake about it, this man changed the way we all live to this very day.

  9 JAY WINIK

  on Franklin Delano Roosevelt

  “At Yalta, he had this image of two things that drove him. One was that he wanted to see the war to a close, and he needed to make sure Stalin was in the fight to the bitter end. And he wanted to create something called the United Nations. That was his great dream. And so he was willing to do anything to make that happen.”

  BOOK DISCUSSED:

  1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History (Simon & Schuster, 2015)

  In recent years, Jay Winik has become one of the country’s most respected historians. His best-known book, April 1865: The Month That Saved America, has become a classic on that tumultuous month in American history.

  Winik initially had a career in public service, focusing on international affairs, but he recognized that his real passion is writing (he had been an editor of the Yale Daily News) and history. I was quite pleased that a few years ago he became the inaugural historian-in-residence of the Council on Foreign Relations, for I helped to create that position out of a view that a real understanding of foreign policy requires a knowledge of history.

  This interview covers a book that Winik wrote not about a historic month but a historic year—1944. Perhaps the two most momentous events of 1944 were the epic D-Day invasion of France by the Allied forces, which led to the eventual Allied victory the following year, and the abject failure to take action against the dreaded death camp at Auschwitz—all this while there was the reelection of FDR to an unprecedented fourth term, in spite of health challenges so severe that he would die three months after his inauguration.

  Winik discusses these episodes in the interview, but he also addresses a number of questions about key events related to World War II that occurred before and after 1944. For instance, how did Hitler manage to go from being an out-of-work artist and jailed leader of a failed coup attempt—the Beer Hall Putsch—to chancellor of Germany and leader of the Third Reich? Why was the United States unwilling to enter the war against Hitler in Europe, despite the entreaties of Britain’s Winston Churchill, until it was attacked at Pearl Harbor by the Japanese? What led the leaders of the Third Reich to agree to a Final Solution for the Jews of Germany (and ultimately for the Jews of other European countries), and how was this hidden from the Allies for so many years? Why did FDR, beloved as a well-respected humanitarian, not override his military and diplomatic advisors and pursue efforts to stem the ongoing Final Solution murders? Was FDR so impaired physically and mentally in his last twelve months that he was unable to serve effectively as president, particularly in representing the United States’ interests at the conference with Churchill and the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin at Yalta?

  Jay Winik answers each of these questions frankly in the interview. He’s particularly frank in discussing the near-total failure of FDR and the U.S. government to do anything to thwart the Holocaust, despite their clear capabilities to do so toward the end of the war.

  * * *

  MR. DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): 1944 is an extraordinary book, but before we get into it, I wanted to ask you: Why do you pick years for your titles?

  MR. JAY WINIK (JW): I could say it’s a good marketing technique and marketing tool. If I have a talent or skill, it’s isolating turning points in time that have been gone over by other people dozens or hundreds of times, and I find something new and different about them and I try to say why those turning points are important.

  DR: In my view, there are five key parts of 1944: the rise of Hitler; the Allied response to Hitler; Roosevelt’s health, which was an important issue; the Final Solution; and the American and Western response to the Final Solution. The best thing I’ve ever read about that part of our history is in this book.

  Let’s talk about the first part. How did Hitler, a man who was a corporal in World War I—and not particularly brilliant, people would say—manage to rise so high in German politics?

  JW: It’s a fascinating question. He was really a ne’er-do-well. He was a failed artist, hawking his sketches to whoever would buy them. He was so down-and-out that he was shoveling snow for money, carrying people’s bags at the train station, and yet this was the man who would come to dominate one of the most cultured states in the entirety of the world.

  DR: He didn’t found the Nazi Party, is that correct? He took it over when it was small?

  JW: He was sent as an army corporal to monitor this party called the National Socialists, and he didn’t know much about it. [The German Workers’ Party became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, commonly called the Nazi Party, in 1920.] Rather than monitor it and report back to the state, he actually jumped up on the stage and he gave a speech. Somebody who was there, a member of the party at the time, said, “Good God, this man has talent.” And Hitler quickly joined the party. He was party member 555, and the rest is history.

  DR: What’s with that mustache?

  JW: I think that was his look. The great columnist Walter Lippmann said, when he heard Hitler speak, “We have heard the authentic voice of a great statesman.” Whereas Time magazine compared him to a Charlie Chaplinesque character. Boy, did they get it wrong.

  DR: In 1923, Hitler openly tried to take over the government. He staged a takeover in Munich that failed, and he was thrown in jail.

  JW: It was almost pathetic. It was called the Beer Hall Putsch.

  He went into this beer hall with about twenty compatriots. They fired their pistols in the sky, and about seven of them were killed. Hitler was injured, and he was sent to jail.

  Interestingly enough, though, when he was sent to jail for this, he was not your average prisoner. He was actually regarded as a great celebrity. He was given a beautiful room, a nice desk, a lovely view of the yard.

  Rudolf Hess, who would go on to infamy and notoriety, became a secretary to Hitler, and it was there in jail that this ne’er-do-well, this celebrity, wrote this book called Mein Kampf.

  DR: Where did his virulent anti-Semitism come from? And was there any truth to the story his grandfather was actually Jewish?

  JW: It’s one of those questions that we can never fully answer. Suffice it to say that wherever that virulent anti-Semitism came from—and I think part of it came from kicking around in his younger days in Austria, where it really was quite prevalent, and all the ills of the world were blamed on the Jews—well, what Hitler did was he refined it to an art.

  DR: He was elected to the German parliament, but how did he actually become the chancellor of Germany in 1933?

  JW: At first his party got 2 percen
t of the vote, and then 12 percent of the vote, and before everybody knew it, it was 33 percent of the vote.

  What he did, which was very clever, is Hitler spoke the language of democracy while planning to subvert democracy. Interestingly enough, when he was made chancellor, Goebbels said this was like a fairy tale. A camera actually captured a view of Hitler when he was made chancellor, and they said it was one of pure ecstasy and bliss, the look on his face.

  DR: During World War II, what was Hitler’s mental and physical state? He had some physical issues and mental issues. What were the principal problems that he had?

  JW: After the Soviet Union entered the war on the side of the Allies and America entered the war, it was clear the war was not going well for Germany. It was also clear to the professional generals, who knew better, that Hitler wouldn’t win.

  His physical and mental state sharply deteriorated. His eyes were cloudy. His hands had tremors. He walked with a stoop. He almost certainly had Parkinson’s disease.

  He would assemble all his inner circle, a coterie of quacks and yes-men and lackeys, and, of course, his doctor, and he would go into these dull, rambling monologues for hours. But he was really deeply sick. He couldn’t sleep. He was depressed. He took twenty-eight pills a day. It didn’t work.

  DR: Let’s talk about the Allied response to Hitler’s rise. In 1938 Hitler gets the Sudetenland, part of what was then Czechoslovakia. Then, on September 1, 1939, he invades Poland. Then he invades the Benelux countries—Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Then he invades France. And then he is on his way to England. What stopped him from actually taking over England? In other words, why did he not just continue the bombing of England and invade?