Lindbergh

by Noel Behn

  John F. Condon’s account came out in a 1936 book, Jafsie Tells All, which was serialized by Liberty under the same title, beginning on January 18, 1936. In Questioned Document Problems, published in 1940, handwriting expert Albert D. Osborn detailed his part in the case. Special Agent Frank J. Wilson provided a personal version of events in his 1965 book, Special Agent. Anne Morrow Lindbergh mentioned the period in two of the books containing extracts from her diaries and journals: Hour Of Gold, Hour Of Lead, published in 1973 and Locked Rooms and Open Doors, which reached print in 1974.

  Secrecy had become a durable thread in the weave of Charles Lindbergh. He had conducted his early courtship of Anne in a clandestine fashion, had been downright covert regarding their wedding, was furtive as ever while taking charge of the investigation of his missing son, and, assuming there was a plot to make the child’s death appear to be a kidnapping-murder, implemented it with exquisite deceit. The secrecy was to persist long after Hauptmann’s execution. In addition to Jon, who was born in 1932, Charles and Anne were to have four more children: two sons, Land and Scott, and two daughters, Reeve and Anne Spencer. In certain respects the family was close. But there were “forbidden subjects.”10 According to the writer Joyce Milton, a primary taboo was the kidnapping of baby Charles, which Lindbergh never discussed even with Anne, let alone with his children and their spouses. Their daughter Anne found out she once had an older brother as a result of a confrontation with a man who claimed he was Charles Lindbergh, Jr. Milton writes that Scott was ten years old before he learned about the crime and, ergo, about Charles Jr., from a book.11

  That there were limits on his purposes and powers never occurred to thirty-year-old Charles Lindbergh. What he thought was right, what he did was best, and that was that to the most famous young man on the planet Earth. By now he was also a very prosperous one as well, allowing him even more self-assurance. When he disagreed with a president, as in the case of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s assignment of airmail routes to the U.S. Army Air Force, he attacked publicly. There was one matter over which Lindy admitted being indecisive: whether to continue on in the advancement and promotion of aviation or go into politics—that was to say, run for the presidency himself. Events in New Jersey led to a different decision. Governor Harold Hoffman unexpectedly reopened the investigation into the kidnapping-murder of the Eaglet—and Charles Lindbergh fled America, fled, as was often the case when he traveled, in secrecy. His fall from grace had begun, but the world didn’t know it yet. He never would.

  The Lone Eagle chose self-imposed exile in England, where he arrived with Anne and their second son, Jon, on December 31, 1935. Jon’s safety was another reason given by the family for the rejection of their homeland. Lindbergh’s highest self-proclaimed priority was no longer aviation or politics but anonymity, to live life unnoticed. He went about it in a curious fashion.

  After two months in a London hotel, Lindbergh installed his family in a rented house in Kent and soon, by word as well as action, half-convinced the rapacious English press to respect his privacy. When it appeared that the London media had lost interest in him, Lindbergh and Anne burst from seclusion to take tea with England’s new king, Edward VIII. It was early May of 1936. Later in the month they were among the illustrious guests attending the bachelor monarch’s first dinner party.12 Solitude behind them, the Lindberghs toured the Continent and beyond, hobnobbing with royalty and the likes of Italo Balbo. In India it was dinner with the viceroy. Germany was a different matter.

  A U.S. military attaché in Berlin felt that Charles Lindbergh, whom the Germans admired, might be just the man to determine the actual strength and power of the Nazi Third Reich’s vaunted Luftwaffe. The attaché managed to have the German air minister, Hermann Göring, the second most powerful man in Adolf Hitler’s regime, invite Lindbergh to visit Germany. Lindbergh flew there with Anne on July 22, 1936, for a nine-day stay.

  The Nazis rolled out the welcome mat and knew exactly how to stroke, coddle, and impress the American Eagle. He was not shown concentration camps or anything else that dealt with repressive measures against groups and organizations considered undesirable or enemies of national socialism. Not only did the Germans seduce the Lone Eagle into thinking their existing air strength and production of new war planes was far greater than actually was the case, but they inspired the usually taciturn Lindbergh to make a speech that both lauded Nazi air power and cautioned against bombing defenseless civilians. The following day he gave another talk. Hitler’s propaganda mill, whose scare tactics had been frightening neighbors into believing the government’s war machine was invincible, never did a more effective job than in exploiting what Lindbergh said. Lindy seemed not to mind. He had become an unabashed fan of Germany’s air force.

  Charles Lindbergh, long disenchanted with the promise of his native America, also became an unabashed fan of Germany per se. His admiration for its energy, virility, spirit, organization, planning, and accomplishments convinced the Lone Eagle that the future belonged to the Teutons. He also expressed a partiality toward Herr Hitler, as he referred to the Führer. Anne Lindbergh perceived certain troubling aspects about the totalitarian Third Reich; her husband did not. Always the pragmatist, he tended to view those who were anti-Nazi as disliking Germans.

  The Lindberghs returned to Germany on October 10, 1938, where Charles was to be the guest of honor at the Lilienthal Aeronautical Congress in Munich. Lindbergh’s host was Germany’s World War I ace Ernst Udet, who Anne believed was an anti-Nazi. Udet arranged for the Lone Eagle to fly a new Messerschmitt 109. He also boasted of technical and numerical superiority in the construction of aircraft and cited inflated production figures. To back up his claims, he took Lindbergh around the country, showing off new planes, airfields, and factories. Udet and other German officials who talked with Lindbergh were part of a detailed strategy worked out by Hermann Göring intended to convince Lindbergh that the Luftwaffe’s fleet of bombers had the capability of destroying whatever nations went to war with Germany.

  Possibly because he believed that his oversolicitous hosts would not dare lie to him, Charles Lindbergh took what they said as dictum. So did the U.S. military attaché in Berlin, who reported back to General H. H. (“Hap”) Arnold, the chief of the U.S. Army Air Corps, that the Nazi Luftwaffe had ten thousand planes, an armada that could wipe out the combined air forces of England, France, and Russia. In truth, the Germans had half that number of planes, many of which were flawed or simply not airworthy, but Lindbergh’s exaggerated estimates were more often believed than not. He had become the crier of German invincibility.

  Exactly when Anne and Charles Lindbergh’s dalliance with Lady Astor and the infamously pro-Hitler Cliveden set began is debatable, but America’s golden couple was to become a familiar decoration for the table of the outspoken peeress, who had been born Nancy Langhorne in Virginia. Added to Lindbergh’s Germanophile views, his Cliveden association began to draw criticism. So did his friendship with Dr. Alexis Carrel, a French doctor who had been awarded a Nobel Prize for his contribution to surgery.

  Carrel had written a best-selling book that championed racial superiority and suggested that the superior genetic types—there was none higher than the Scandinavian—be protected from inferior and defective strains via euthanasia, specifically by gassing. Though more a pro-German than an anti-Semite—he counted Albert Einstein among his closest friends—Carrell was perceived as pro-Nazi. Lindbergh considered the doctor a genius and a confidant. Before abandoning America, Lindbergh had worked with Carrel at New York City’s Rockefeller Institute in developing a mechanical heart. During the summer of 1938, the Lindberghs gave up their country home in England and moved to an isle off the Brittany coast of France called Illiec, on which there were three houses and a chapel. Illiec had been bought for the Lindberghs by Dr. Carrel, who lived on a neighboring isle.

  On October 18, 1938, Lindbergh was back in Berlin, attending a stag dinner at the American embassy. Hermann Göring was the last t
o arrive and, to the surprise of the U.S. ambassador and Lindbergh, presented the Lone Eagle with the Service Cross of the German Eagle, the highest decoration the Third Reich could award a civilian. The medal was ostensibly given for Lindbergh’s previous contribution to aviation. Anne, who viewed it as an albatross that would forever haunt her husband, urged him to give it back. He saw no harm in keeping the decoration, and did. Anne’s prescience would prove correct.

  Ten days after receiving the medal, Lindbergh decided to move his family—he and Anne now had two children, Jon and Land—to a house near Wannsee, on the outskirts of Berlin, pending the terms of the lease. An even better offer was made: Albert Speer, the city planner for Berlin, would build the Lindberghs a house anywhere they wished. Anne and Charles returned to Illiec to consider their options. On November 9–10 in Germany, an eighteen-hour anti-Semitic reign of terror erupted—the Night of Glass, or Kristallnacht. Anne was shocked. Lindbergh was “surprised and skeptical” of the reports on Jewish persecution by the Nazis.13 Even so, he canceled plans to move to Germany.

  Charles Lindbergh never perceived the struggle between the Allies and Nazi Germany for what it was: a primal conflict between good and evil. Back on his native soil in the spring of 1939, the man who had made the world a smaller place by flying the Atlantic Ocean now proclaimed that that same body of water would protect the United States from the very Nazi air might he had so greatly admired and dynamically championed. He was still a national hero and quickly became the leading spokesman for the country’s isolationist movement. He proclaimed that these foreign wars were of no consequence or peril to America. Lindy told the listening nation that the Führer himself had assured him of this. Though he continued to condemn the effeteness of France and England and to speak glowingly of Nazi air might, the Lone Eagle stubbornly maintained he was not pro-German, merely anti-war. Asked which side he wanted to win after France and England finally tried to stop Hitler, he answered simply, “Neither.” With France conquered and London being reduced to rubble under the massive Luftwaffe bombing raids known as the Battle of Britain, Lindbergh proclaimed that England was lost and demanded the United States cut off whatever aid it was providing.

  Charles Lindbergh knowingly took on the main proponent of aiding England and stopping Hitler, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was certain Lindy was a Nazi. The Lone Eagle, with his typically sublime tunnel vision, did not cotton to FDR’s style of oratory and therefore did not consider him much of a speaker. He termed the president in no uncertain terms a warmonger. When FDR accused the Lone Eagle of being a “defeatist,” Lindbergh, in a huff, resigned his commission in the Army Air Force Reserve. Lindbergh’s popularity was gaining among the right wing and isolationist segments of the population. But more and more of his former friends were dropping him. His and Anne’s had been an enlightened circle. Now he was aligning himself with some of the foremost bigots and hate merchants in the nation. The criticism caused by his views reached into the Morrow household itself where Anne’s mother and sister both publicly disavowed him. His own mother, who was pro-Ally, stopped talking to him.

  The isolationist view was extremely popular among average Americans, who were more against war than against the Nazis. Lindbergh fared worse with the literary establishment, which was overwhelmingly anti-Hitler and had never cared all that much about Lindy to begin with. In 1940, James Thurber wrote a scathing spoof on Lindbergh entitled THE GREATEST MAN IN THE WORLD. One of the Lone Eagle’s most fervent detractors was the acerbic columnist Dorothy Thompson. At the time of the kidnapping, she and her then husband, Sinclair Lewis, voiced the opinion that Lindbergh himself had killed the child. Her comments about his pro-Nazi stand were far more fervent and widely quoted.

  Lindbergh was piously racist in an America that itself was blatantly racist. The peril for him and for tens of millions of his fellow citizens were the blacks, yellows, and browns, not to mention the Communists. The only hope for civilization, in Lindbergh’s view, was the propagation of the white race. This was not at issue in the pending European conflict, and he cited it as another reason for the United States to stay out of the conflict.

  Though stung by accusations of anti-Semitism, Lindbergh could not bring himself to see, let alone admit, that the Germans had mounted a massive Final Solution to eliminate the Jews. In a war civilians often get killed, and that was that regarding the Jewish question in Europe as far as Lindy was concerned. He also had opinions regarding America’s Jews, which he intended to express in Des Moines, Iowa, on September 11, 1941, at a gathering sponsored by the powerful America First Committee, of which he was a ranking member and a premier spokesman. The undertaking proved star-crossed. By chance FDR was to speak on the radio earlier that same evening. In the spirit of fairness, the America First organizers, much to Lindbergh’s distress, allowed the speech to be broadcast in the Des Moines auditorium. FDR made an all-out attack on the Nazis—and was applauded eleven times by the supposedly hostile gathering. A minute after his talk ended, Lindbergh entered the auditorium, took the podium and, for the first time since his arrival from Europe, was booed more than he was cheered, and this from a supposedly partisan crowd.

  Three groups were pressing for this country’s entry into the war, he told an audience of seventy-five hundred: the British, the Roosevelt administration—and the Jews. He did not deny that Jews had some reason to be unhappy with Hitler, but then he warned, if not threatened, the Jews not to use the media they controlled—movies, radio, newspapers—to drag this country into war. Aiding them in this effort were the Jews in government. There was more on how the Jews in this country should behave.

  The accusation against the Jews was an unwelcome surprise for those members of the America First hierarchy. The condemnation and protest against what Lindbergh said was deafening and came from conservatives as well as liberals, Republicans as well as Democrats, even from America Firsters. The nation’s press unanimously joined in. Cartoonists portrayed the Lone Eagle in Nazi uniform as well as kissing Hitler’s boot. America’s national hero had become a national disgrace, a Nazi lackey. A street that had been named after him was renamed. In Little Falls, Minnesota, the sign on the water tower which proclaimed that this was the home town of Charles A. Lindbergh was painted over. He was dropped from the board of directors of Pan Am, which stopped calling itself the Lindbergh Line and got rid of its logo, a drawing of the Spirit of St. Louis. Through it all, Charles Lindbergh never doubted that his cause was just, never stopped hating Franklin Roosevelt, never desisted from urging America to stay out of the war. Then came Pearl Harbor.

  With the country at war, Lindbergh decided to fight for America. His ego and taste for deceptive ploys affected the way he went about it. Rather than simply go to a recruiting office the day after Pearl Harbor and enlist—a move that would have regained him the admiration and respect of his countrymen—Lindbergh waited nearly two weeks before contacting the head of the Air Force, General Hap Arnold. After a series of delays and excuses, he ended up in the office of the Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, who politely denied Lindbergh’s request to join the armed forces by saying that a defeatist was not a capable leader of soldiers. It was a stinging rebuke, one Lindbergh was sure had been orchestrated by the man he continued to perceive as an arch devil: President Roosevelt.

  Lindbergh’s efforts to help the war by working in various sectors of the aircraft industry were thwarted by the unfriendly administration. Only Henry Ford, a scurrilous anti-Semite, had the power and inclination to hire Lindbergh. By 1945, with the connivance of military officers who held him in high esteem, Lindbergh, without the administration’s knowledge, became a civilian adviser to the air force in the Pacific and flew combat missions against the Japanese—downing at least one enemy plane in a dogfight. But the old leanings persisted. Visiting Germany immediately after the war, he was appalled by the callousness he felt the Allies displayed in their treatment of the defeated civilians. He assiduously avoided visiting concentration camps, w
hich he refused to call concentration camps. To him they were German prison camps, and he seemed unimpressed by the one installation he inadvertently visited. Charles Lindbergh saw no difference between American-run prison camps for captured Japanese soldiers he had heard about and what the Nazis did to the Jews.

  FDR had died in office. Germany and Japan surrendered unconditionally. And the Gyntian travels of Charles Lindbergh continued. Estranged from everyone who had been close to them, he and Anne entered the postwar world virtually alone, save for their children. Lindy was no longer the relaxed, boyish grinner of yesterday. He looked far older than his forty-three years. His political ambitions had ended, at least for the time being. He and Anne and the children settled in Darien, Connecticut. Fences slowly began to be mended. He was reinstated on the board of Pan Am, became the U.S. Air Force’s roving troubleshooter as well as advising them on rocketry and space matters. Charles and Anne reconciled themselves with their respective mothers and families. He remained ardently anti-Communist. When the Russians blockaded Berlin, Lindy took an active role in the U.S. airlift into that city.

  Lindbergh was mellowing. More and more he involved himself in good works. Even so, many could never forgive him for his stand on the Nazis, and he would never admit that perhaps he had been wrong regarding them. He still had the ability to rile antagonists, but many of his deeds were amazingly just and productive, drawing the applause of former detractors. According to his biographer Leonard Mosely, “Sometime in this period of his life, Charles Lindbergh seemed like an actor in a small-town repertory theater who has to play most of the male parts in the script, one moment twirling his mustache as the villain of the piece, a few minutes later reappearing as the blue-eyed hero.”14 With the advent of the McCarthy era in the early fifties, he was back to mustache twirling. Though not an advocate of McCarthy’s methods, he was not particularly bothered by the Wisconsin senator’s efforts to root out communism. Happier scenarios were on the way.