by Bryson, Bill
Upon his return to America, Lindbergh almost at once was summoned to heroic action again. An airplane flown from Ireland by two Germans and an Irishman had crash-landed in eastern Canada on a remote dot of land called Greenly Island off the coast of Labrador. It was the first successful east–west crossing of the Atlantic by plane, but now the airmen were stranded. To their aid flew Floyd Bennett and Bernt Balchen. Bennett, it may be remembered, was the flier who had nearly been killed in the crash of Richard Byrd’s America on its maiden flight almost exactly a year earlier. Bennett was either extraordinarily unlucky or not fully recovered, because upon reaching Canada he collapsed with pneumonia. At news of this, Lindbergh rushed to the Rockefeller Institute to fetch a vial of serum, and flew with it through blizzard and gale to bring it to Bennett’s bedside. Alas, it turned out that the serum was the wrong kind, and Bennett died. He was thirty-seven years old.
Through his exposure to the Rockefeller Institute, Lindbergh met Alexis Carrel, who would provide him with an enduring friendship and years of bad advice. “Nobody in Charles Lindbergh’s adulthood affected his thinking more deeply than Alexis Carrel,” wrote A. Scott Berg in his acclaimed 1998 biography of Lindbergh. A native of Lyon, Carrel was one of the most gifted surgeons of his day. As a medical student in France, he became celebrated for extraordinary feats of dexterity—tying two pieces of catgut together with the use of just two fingers or sewing five hundred stitches into a single sheet of cigarette paper. These were more than just amusing stunts, for his abilities with needle and thread led Carrel to devise helpful new methods for suturing. He invented a way of splicing arteries that kept the interior surface smooth and therefore clot-free, and in so doing saved countless lives. In 1906, he took up a position at the Rockefeller Institute, and six years later was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine—the first person in America to be so honored. In the course of a long career, Carrel also performed the first coronary bypass operation (on a dog) and did pioneering work that helped pave the way for organ transplants and tissue grafts later.
He proved, however, to be a bundle of odd notions. He was convinced that sunlight was a bad thing, and maintained that the world’s most backward civilizations were always where the tropical glare was brightest. He insisted that everything in his operating theaters, from gowns to dressings, be black. He flatly refused to engage with anyone who didn’t please him at first glance. Carrel became especially noted for his chilling views on eugenics. He believed that people who were defective or backward should be “euthenistically disposed of in gas chambers.” Such people, in his view, should be prepared to give up their lives for the greater good of humanity. “The concept of sacrifice, of its absolute social necessity, must be introduced into the mind of modern man,” Carrel maintained.
Carrel outlined his views bluntly, if not always entirely coherently, in a bestselling book of 1935 called Man the Unknown. There he asked: “Why do we preserve these useless and harmful beings? Those who have murdered, robbed while armed with automatic pistol or machine gun, kidnapped children, despoiled the poor of their savings, misled the public in important matters, should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gases. A similar treatment could be advantageously applied to the insane, guilty of criminal acts.”
The solution to the earth’s problems, Carrel maintained, was to create a “High Council of Doctors” (which, he made clear, he stood ready to lead) whose chief role would be to ensure that the planet’s affairs always remained in the control of “the dominant white races.”
Carrel’s views for a time enjoyed a surprisingly respectful following. When he spoke at the New York Academy of Medicine, five thousand people jammed into a lecture hall designed to hold seven hundred. Lindbergh was particularly enthralled. “There seemed to be no limit to the breadth and penetration of his thought,” he marveled.
Through Carrel, Lindbergh became interested in trying to make a machine that could keep organs alive artificially during surgery, and at length devised an instrument called a perfusion pump—“a spirally coiled glass tube, resembling a hot water heater,” as Time magazine described it. It was basically a kind of sophisticated filter. Carrel reveled in the publicity that Lindbergh’s involvement brought—it coincided very conveniently with the publication of Man the Unknown—and persuaded journalists that the pump represented a historic breakthrough in medical science. Time featured the two men on its cover, with the apparatus proudly displayed between them. Lindbergh’s perfusion pump was unquestionably a nifty device, but it is fair to say that it would never have attracted the attention it did if it had been invented by anyone else. In practice, it had few useful applications and no role in surgery. Although several perfusion pumps were built, it is believed that none were still in use by 1940.
In the wider world, Lindbergh was still mobbed almost everywhere he went. In the spring of 1928, he took a plane up for a spin from Curtiss Field on a Sunday, a day when sightseers now turned out in large numbers. When news spread through the crowd that Lindbergh was coming in to land, two thousand people swarmed onto the runway in what the Times described as a frenzied stampede. Two women were injured, several children were separated from their parents, and many people were bruised or had clothing torn. Lindbergh was trapped in his plane for fifteen minutes. This was now his life. Even when he and Carrel traveled to Copenhagen to demonstrate the perfusion pump at a scientific conference, police had to erect barricades to keep back the crowds.
Finding privacy became an impossible quest. Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow were married in May 1929, and for their honeymoon went sailing off the Maine coast on a borrowed thirty-eight-foot yacht. On their second day out, they were infuriated to find an airplane buzzing them while a photographer snapped pictures. Soon after that, a boat full of reporters and photographers began a relentless pursuit. “For eight straight hours [they] circled about our boat,” Lindbergh recalled later with undimmed bitterness.
The Lindberghs steadfastly tried to live as normal a life as they could. Charles took positions with Transcontinental Air Transport (a forerunner of TWA) and Pan Am, and was on course to become a leading figure in the aviation industry when his and Anne’s lives were disrupted in the most devastating possible manner. In early 1932, an intruder climbed through an upstairs window in their house near Hopewell, New Jersey, and kidnapped their infant child, Charles Augustus Junior. Though they paid a $50,000 ransom, two months later the child was found murdered.
Through all their worry and grief, the Lindberghs were immersed in the most grotesque media circus. Low-flying airplanes carrying sightseers at $2.50 a trip constantly flew over their house and made it impossible for them to go outside. Two photographers somehow got into the morgue in Trenton and took pictures of the dead baby. The pictures were much too horrible to be published, but they circulated privately and could be purchased for $5. When Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German immigrant, went on trial for the murder in the little town of Flemington, New Jersey, one hundred thousand people turned up on the first day. In February 1935, Hauptmann was found guilty and sent for execution. His executioner was Robert G. Elliott.
By this time, Charles and Anne had had enough. They moved to Europe, first to Kent in England, then to a house on a tiny island off the north coast of Brittany. On a neighboring island was the summer home of Alexis Carrel and his wife. The Lindberghs traveled around Europe a great deal, too, and developed an undisguised fondness for Germany. In 1936, Charles attended the Olympics in Berlin as a guest of the Nazis and clearly enjoyed himself immensely. Afterward he wrote home to a friend that the Germans had “a sense of decency and values which is way ahead of our own”—rather an extraordinary thing to write of Nazi Germany.
In 1938, Lindbergh accepted a medal from Hermann Göring, which many found offensive. Anne noted bitterly, and with justification, that the presentation was made at a dinner at the U.S. embassy in Berlin, that Göring was a guest of the American government, that Lindbe
rgh did not know he was to be honored, and that he did not want to cause a scene at a formal event. All this was so. On the other hand, even after Germany and America went to war, Lindbergh never returned the medal.
There is no evidence to suggest that Charles Lindbergh would ever have countenanced atrocities, but equally when a person speaks of the world as having too many of one kind of person, he is within hailing distance of those who do. What is certainly true is that both he and Anne were unapologetic admirers of Adolf Hitler. Anne described Hitler as “a visionary who really wants the best for his country.” Lindbergh thought Hitler was “undoubtedly a great man.” He acknowledged that the Nazis tended to be a little fanatical, but maintained, in a spirit of fairness, that “many of Hitler’s accomplishments would have been impossible without some fanaticism.”
The Lindberghs gave serious thought to moving to Germany. At the very moment that they were doing so, Germany underwent the notorious outburst known as Kristallnacht, when citizens across the nation attacked Jewish shops and property. (Kristallnacht, or “night of glass,” refers to the broken glass left behind.) Kristallnacht has an almost festive sound, as if it were a night of lighthearted pranks and merriment. In fact, it was state-countenanced terror. In his book Hitlerland, Andrew Nagorski recounts one incident in which a young boy was flung from an upstairs window into the street below. As the injured boy tried to crawl away, members of the crowd took turns kicking him. He was saved by a passing American. Kristallnacht horrified the world.
The Lindberghs were shocked, to be sure, but in their own peculiar way. Anne wrote in her diary: “You just get to feeling you can understand and work with these people when they do something stupid and brutal and undisciplined like that. I am shocked and very upset. How can we go there to live?” Two things are pretty astonishing here. First, though Anne was clearly troubled by this particular outburst (“something stupid and brutal and undisciplined”), she betrayed no discomfort with the general German attitude to Jews. Second, in her own words, Kristallnacht didn’t make living in Germany an intolerable proposition, but simply a challenging one.
For the first time, people began to wonder if Charles Lindbergh was really a suitable hero for the nation. Much worse was to come.
The Lindberghs, it was said, were offered a house in Berlin confiscated from Jews, but in the end they elected to come home. Charles became closely involved with an organization called America First, which was formed to oppose American involvement in another European war. In September 1941, he traveled to Des Moines, Iowa, to deliver a speech, to be carried on national radio, explaining why he believed that war with Germany was wrong. A crowd of eight thousand jammed into the Des Moines Coliseum that evening. Lindbergh’s speech was not scheduled to begin until 9:30 p.m., so that the audience could first hear a national radio address from the White House by Franklin Roosevelt. It is a forgotten fact, but America was already close to war by September 1941. German U-boats had recently sunk three American freighters and attacked a naval ship, the USS Greer. Many America First supporters maintained that the American ships had deliberately provoked the attacks, an assertion that many others found outrageous. All this meant that there was a good deal of tension in the air when Lindbergh rose at the conclusion of Roosevelt’s broadcast and moved to a lectern at center stage. In a voice often described as reedy, Lindbergh declared that three specific forces—the British, the Jews, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt—were leading America to war by willfully distorting the truth. “I am speaking here only of war agitators, not of those sincere but misguided men and women who, confused by misinformation and frightened by propaganda, follow the lead of the war agitators,” he said.
Lindbergh’s remarks were met by boos and applause in roughly equal measure. At each interruption he paused till the noise subsided. Not once did he look at the audience or take his eyes from his prepared text. The Jews, he went on, were a particularly malign influence because of their ownership and domination of “our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.” He conceded that Jews were right to be upset by the persecution of their race in Germany, but maintained that a pro-war policy had dangers not only for “us” but also for “them.” He didn’t elaborate on why he thought that.
Britain, he said, was “not strong enough to win the war that she declared against Germany.” Finally, he dropped in a piece of weird Carrelesque idealism. “Rather than go to war with Germany,” he suggested, “America should join with her and England to form a mighty ‘Western wall’ of race and arms which can hold back either a Genghis Khan or the infiltration of inferior blood.” It was an extraordinary speech, and it finished him as an American hero.
An editorial in the next morning’s Des Moines Register tried to strike a judicious tone. “It may have been courageous for Col. Lindbergh to say what was in his mind,” the Register wrote, “but it was so lacking in appreciation for consequences—putting the best interpretation on it—that it disqualifies him for any pretensions of leadership in this republic in policy-making.”
Later that day came news that Germany had torpedoed the 1,700-ton freighter Montana off Greenland. All over America, people disowned Charles Lindbergh. Wendell Willkie, soon to be the Republican Party’s choice for president, called Lindbergh’s speech “the most un-American talk made in my time by any person of national repute.” Lindbergh’s name came off streets and schools and airports. Lindbergh Peak became Lone Eagle Peak. In Chicago, the Lindbergh Beacon became the Palmolive Beacon. TWA stopped calling itself “the Lindbergh Line.” Even Little Falls, his hometown, painted out Lindbergh’s name on its water tower. President Roosevelt said privately: “I am absolutely convinced that Lindbergh is a Nazi.” Three months later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and America was at war.
Once America entered the war, Lindbergh supported the American cause wholeheartedly, but it was too late. His reputation would never recover. After the war, he became a devoted conservationist and did huge amounts of good work all over the planet, but without regaining the public’s affection. A 1957 movie about his flight to Paris, starring Jimmy Stewart, was a failure at the box office. As the years passed, Lindbergh largely withdrew from public life. He died of cancer at his home on Maui in Hawaii at the age of seventy-two in 1974. He was so organized that he even had his own death certificate filled out in readiness. Only the time of death was left blank. He never retracted any part of the Des Moines speech.
Almost thirty years after his death, in 2003, it emerged that Lindbergh had had a far more complicated private life than previously thought. Between 1957 and his death, Lindbergh had conducted a secret long-distance relationship with a German milliner, Brigitte Hesshaimer of Munich, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. The children told reporters that Lindbergh had been “a mystery visitor who would turn up once or twice a year.” They knew he was their father, but thought his name was Careu Kent.
According to further reports, Lindbergh also had simultaneous relationships with Brigitte Hesshaimer’s sister, Marietta, by whom he had two more children, and with a German secretary, identified only as Valeska, with whom he had yet two more children. All this extraordinary bonding was managed with such remarkable discretion that neither Lindbergh’s American family nor his biographer A. Scott Berg had the least notion of it. Quite how Lindbergh managed it all is a story waiting to be told.
What can be said in the meanwhile is that the greatest hero of the twentieth century was infinitely more of an enigma and considerably less of a hero than anyone had ever supposed.
All this makes the subsequent lives of the other main figures in this story seem a little tame and anticlimactic, but here, in necessarily compressed form and approximately chronological order, is what became of them after the long summer of 1927.
Charles Nungesser and François Coli, the French airmen who started it all, were never seen again, but they were by no means forgotten. In November 1927 it was reported with some embarrassment that $30,000 that New York mayor Jimm
y Walker was supposed to present to Madame Nungesser in Paris had disappeared and could not be found. This was the Roxy Fund—the money that had been collected at the benefit concert at the Roxy Theatre that Lindbergh had briefly attended in June. Now nobody knew where the money was. Some $70,000 collected from elsewhere in America did turn up, but the New York City portion seems to have gone permanently astray.
Today, on a windy clifftop above the small and pleasant coastal resort of Étretat, in Normandy, there stands a white concrete memorial that looks rather like a giant pen nib thrust into the earth. Pointing toward America, it marks the spot where the heroic French airmen took their leave of their native soil for the last time. It is the only memorial anywhere to that summer of remarkable flights.
A few miles to the west lies the village of Ver-sur-Mer, where Commander Richard Byrd and his team ditched in the sea. A small municipal museum contains the few surviving relics of that night, including a small piece of the airplane’s fabric covering—all that remains of it now.
Byrd followed the Atlantic flight with two long expeditions to Antarctica—one of them generously, and a bit surprisingly, sponsored by Jacob Ruppert of the Yankees—and on the first of them flew (indisputably) over the South Pole. Byrd was promoted to rear admiral and spent the rest of his life comfortably basking in the role of hero. He died in 1957 at the age of sixty-eight.