The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight

by Winston Groom

  In the meantime, Lindbergh had returned to the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and Dr. Carrel to resume work on his experimental heart pump. Ever since his childhood when he had worked on his father’s Ford Model T, and on the electric milking machines at the farm, Lindbergh had developed an almost uncanny understanding of machinery.

  “Lindbergh understood the machine like few people of his time,” wrote a professor at the University of Minnesota, who took no note of the fact that Charles must have come a very long way from his days in academia. “No piece of mechanized equipment escaped him. He looked into each as if he had X-ray vision, took it apart, and put it back together in his head.”1

  In the glassblowing lab Lindbergh fashioned his first successful “perfusion pump,” or “system for cardiopulmonary bypass.” Time magazine described it as “Looking like a twist of vitrified bowel oozing out of a clear glass bottle,” while others said it looked like an inverted saxophone with a football on top. In experiments with laboratory animals the pump was found to be able to keep cells, tissue, and organs alive for long periods outside the body and led to the development of the artificial heart pump used so frequently today in bypass procedures. Lindbergh published a scholarly and well-received article in the Journal of Experimental Medicine titled “An Apparatus for the Culture of Whole Organs.” And with Dr. Carrel, he published an equally well-received book titled The Culture of Organs, which afterward landed them both on the cover of Time. That was in the summer of 1934. The fall brought a different kind of news.

  IN SEPTEMBER, ANOTHER OF THE BILLS, a gold certificate, used for the kidnap ransom money turned up at the Corn Exchange Bank in the Bronx. An alert filling station owner had written down a license plate number in the margin of the bill.

  A check of the license with the New York Bureau of Motor Vehicles revealed that the plate belonged to a blue 1930 Dodge sedan owned by one Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a handsome, muscular, thirty-five-year-old German-born carpenter and former machine gunner in the German army. Hauptmann claimed he had struck it rich in the stock market, but nobody believed him since the stock market had been at all-time lows since the crash of ’29.

  Hidden in the wall of Hauptmann’s garage was found tens of thousands in bills that matched the ransom bills. In one of his notebooks police discovered a carpenter’s rough draft drawing of a three-piece extension ladder, similar to the one used to kidnap the Lindbergh baby. Paper found in the home matched that of the ransom notes and a small empty green bottle marked “ether” was uncovered as well as maps of the New Jersey area where the Lindberghs lived. Police also noted that Hauptmann’s tool chest was missing a three-quarter-inch chisel, such as one that was left at the crime scene. Experts said Hauptmann’s handwriting bore conclusive similarities to that in the ransom notes in the Lindbergh case. It was further discovered that he had a significant criminal record in Germany, including using ladders to break into houses.

  Still the police had no confession, so they attempted to obtain one by the accepted method of the day. They shackled Hauptmann to a chair and attacked him with a hammer and other blunt tools. For some reason this did not produce the desired result, so they went back to his home to see what else they could find. It proved to be a fruitful visit.

  In the attic they found that a piece of wood flooring was missing. When a rail from the ladder left at the Lindbergh residence after the kidnapping was brought in, it not only fit exactly the length of the board that was missing but the four nail holes in it lined up perfectly with four nail holes in the floorboards. Further investigation uncovered more of the ransom money, a loaded revolver, and also a hand plane that the wood expert from the Forest Service lab declared conclusively to be the tool used to hone the Lindbergh ladder. The New York Times declared “MYSTERY SOLVED.” It had been two and a half years since the kidnapping. “Oh,” Anne groaned to her diary, “now it starts all over again.”

  NEXT MONTH, IN NEW JERSEY, a grand jury convened by the state attorney general indicted Hauptmann for the murder of little Charlie Lindbergh under a state law that automatically made any death connected with the commission of a felony—whether accidental or on purpose—a felony murder, eligible for the death penalty. Mobs under torchlight milled around the Hunterdon County courthouse and jail in Flemington, New Jersey, when Hauptmann arrived on the night of October 19 after being extradited from New York. Lindbergh told Anne that Hauptmann was a good-looking man, but that his eyes “were like the eyes of a wild boar—mean, shifty, small and cruel.” Hauptmann’s trial opened January 2, 1935. As one of Anne’s biographers put it, “The madness took hold again—the crowds, the reporters, the frenzied energy of the human hunt.”2

  Once more, a carnival midway overtook the Lindbergh kidnapping case. Vendors and hucksters hawked everything from food and drink to photographs of the Lindberghs with forged autographs, pictures of the dead child, and replicas of the ladder. It was reported that someone was even selling golden curls of hair—from his own head! Aside from the usual rubberneckers, morbid gawkers, and courtroom habitués, hundreds of reporters and columnists, movie cameramen, press photographers, radio announcers, and all their assistants and technicians descended on the town and spilled out of the local hotel, taverns, and saloons and into the streets freshly covered with snow where limousines deposited hopeful movie stars, comedians such as Jack Benny, café society socialites, and other would-be celebrities, all come to witness the so-called Trial of the Century, as it had come to be known. The New York Times hired a series of novelists, including Edna Ferber, to cover the proceedings, which she did in a piece titled “Vultures at Trial,” declaring that the spectacle “made you want to resign as a member of the human race.” The quaint little town of Flemington, she wrote, “looked like a picture postcard gone mad … We are like the sans-culottes, like the knitting women watching the heads fall at the foot of the guillotine.” As Anne Lindbergh’s biographer Susan Hertog noted, “Indeed, there was the smell of execution in the air.”3

  The trial lasted six weeks. Each day the newspapers regurgitated paroxysms of frenzied copy and headlines of testimony by witnesses recounting Hauptmann’s numerous falsehoods, his possession of the ransom money, his “signature” interlocking circles on the ransom notes, the missing chisel, the theory of the ladder, the child’s sleeping garments—a growing mountain of circumstantial evidence to prove that he and he alone had kidnapped and killed the Lindbergh child. On weekends they followed up with recaps and analyses.

  At last, on January 24, Hauptmann took the stand in his own defense—a calculated mistake. He had no respectable answers for his lies to the police, the ransom money, his link to the kidnapping ladder, or any of the rest of it. Edna Ferber wrote, “We sit and stare hungrily like vultures perched on a tree, watching a living thing writhe yet a while.”

  By the afternoon of February 14, 1935, the summations had been made and the case was put into the hands of the jury. That evening the Lindbergh family gathered for dinner at Next Day Hill in the presence of a new personage who had been drawn into the Lindbergh drama, Harold Nicolson, later to become Sir Harold Nicolson, British politician, diplomat, journalist, biographer, and tell-all diarist. Like many of his contemporaries who were educated at Oxford and Cambridge, Nicolson was a terrific snob. Openly homosexual, he was married to the English poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West, a well-known lesbian who came from money. His appearance at Next Day Hill was at the behest of Betty Morrow and the publishers Harcourt, Brace as the writer of a biography of the lately deceased Dwight Morrow, whom he had met during the London Naval Conference of 1930.

  In the drawing room where the radio was playing, Nicolson wrote, one “could hear the almost diabolic yelling of the crowd. They were all sitting around—Miss Morgan with embroidery,‡ Anne looking very white and still. ‘You have now heard,’ broke in the voice of the announcer, ‘the verdict in the most famous trial in all history. Bruno Hauptmann now stands guilty of the foulest …’ ‘Turn that off, Charles, turn
that off!’ ”

  They went into the pantry and had ginger beer. “Charles sat there on the kitchen dresser looking very pink about the nose,” according to Nicolson. Lindbergh said, “My one dread all these years has been that they would get hold of someone as a victim about whom I wasn’t sure. I’m sure about this—quite sure. It is this way …”

  Charles then proceeded to recite the entire case against Hauptmann to Nicolson, point by point, with the others looking on. “It seemed to relieve all of them,” Nicolson later told his diary. “He did it very quietly, very simply. He pretended to address his remarks to me only. But I could see that he was trying to relieve the agonized tension that Betty and Anne had passed through. It was very well done. It made one feel there was no personal desire for vengeance or justification.”

  It would be tempting here to say something like, “Thus ended the tragedy of the Lindbergh kidnapping case,” but it is not so. There was of course the execution of Hauptmann, but beyond that the case has provoked one of the great historical controversies in the annals of crime. Every few years a new book is introduced, either making the case for Hauptmann’s innocence or revealing accomplices or fingering masterminds. Many of these are quite intriguing, and the fact remains that no one has ever satisfactorily explained how Hauptmann knew exactly where the baby’s nursery was located at Highfields, and which window to go through, and at what time, and also that the baby would even be there on that particular night when the family was nearly always away—or was he just guessing?

  BETWEEN THE CLOSE OF THE TRIAL and Hauptmann’s scheduled execution date, January 17, 1936, the Lindberghs endured a number of alarming incidents that eventually drove them out of America entirely. Shortly after the trial a deranged mental patient got loose and found his way one night inside the grounds of Next Day Hill, where Charles caught him peeping through a window.

  After Jon was born, Lindbergh issued a rare statement appealing to the press to “permit our children to lead the lives of normal Americans.” The family wished to remain in the country, he said, but it would be “impossible for us to subject the life of our second son to the publicity which we feel was responsible for the death of our first.” This was a heavy indictment, but it did not in the least deter the members of the press, who redoubled their efforts; Lindbergh—both Lindberghs now—still sold newspapers.

  There were numerous stalkers and people who thought that Hauptmann was innocent and wrote horrible letters to Charles and Anne. Charles began carrying a .38 revolver wherever he went. People made so many death threats against their son Jon that Lindbergh had to have him escorted by a bodyguard armed with a sawed-off shotgun whenever he was out of the house. By Lindbergh’s account, “Post Office authorities made fourteen arrests during a single year in connection with threatening letters we received.” Their car was sometimes followed.4

  One day Anne received a call from a teacher at the Little School in Englewood, which Jon attended, saying that “a suspicious-looking truck” was parked just outside the grounds. The children were called inside, and shortly afterward state troopers apprehended the vehicle, which turned out to be “full of newspaper photographers, who had snapped pictures of Jon Lindbergh through slits in the canvas.” Not long afterward, Jon’s nurse was driving him home when a car full of men “forced them into the curb.” The nurse thought they were gangsters and, terrified, clutched Jon, who began to cry. A man jumped out, stuck a camera to the window, and began taking pictures of the wailing child, then returned to the car and drove away. Because of the power of the press and the First Amendment, there were no laws to protect Lindbergh from this unwanted media attention, and “no effective action I could take,” he lamented.

  Then the kidnapping case began to erupt again. Even though the New Jersey Court of Errors and Appeals quickly upheld the Hauptmann guilty verdict, for some reason New Jersey’s governor, Harold G. Hoffman, stuck his nose into the case. In a personal meeting with Hauptmann that was supposed to be secret (it wasn’t) Hoffman somehow concluded there was enough evidence to at least investigate further, prompting the press to report, “LINDBERGH CASE REOPENED.” Abundant theories found their way into the newspapers, one being that while attempting a practical joke Lindbergh had killed his own child accidentally and covered it up with the kidnapping story. Another wild theory held that Anne’s sister Elisabeth had hired people to kidnap and murder the baby out of jealousy because Charles had picked Anne instead of her. In the midst of all this, Hauptmann’s wife Anna’s new leading lawyer, C. Lloyd Fisher, asserted that he had found a child on Long Island that he said was “the Lindbergh baby.”

  LIFE, IN LINDBERGH’S WORDS, had become “intolerable,” and he at last decided to take his family abroad until by some happy circumstance conditions would change enough in the United States to allow him and his family a measure of personal privacy.

  Cloaked in deep secrecy, Lindbergh made arrangements for the family to be smuggled out of the country aboard the American Importer, one of the better-appointed cargo vessels owned by United States Lines, which would carry them to England and which, Lindbergh declared, “had greater regard for law and order” than other nations.

  Under cover of darkness on the night of December 21, 1935, Anne, Charles, and Jon Lindbergh bade farewell to Betty Morrow and the staff at Next Day Hill and drove to Manhattan’s West Side docks where, shortly before midnight, they quietly boarded American Importer as its only passengers.§ After nearly ten days at sea, mostly cabinbound because of North Atlantic winter gales, they arrived on New Year’s Eve morning in Liverpool where they were aghast to find a swarm of photographers and reporters awaiting them, chomping at the gangplank to have their story and photographs.

  Before he left, Lindbergh had contacted a reporter at the New York Times, the only newspaper he had any small measure of respect for—even after the phony first-person account of his flight to Paris—and offered to explain why he was leaving in exchange for the paper holding the story until he and the family were at sea. The reporter agreed and Lindbergh proceeded to spell out his reasons, basically, the safety of his family, including “demands for money, threats of kidnapping and murder.” He omitted, however, the fact that his angst over the unwanted intrusions of the press had an awful lot to do with it. He assured the reporter that he and his family would remain American citizens. The scoop would win the reporter and the New York Times a Pulitzer Prize.5

  When the newspaper hit the streets the morning after the ship sailed a new national uproar commenced. Everyone was shocked and horrified that a man of Lindbergh’s stature had been driven from his own country, by his own people. A pall had been cast across the nation. The Hearst newspapers hypocritically lamented that Lindbergh’s departure was “distressing,” in light of the fact that America was filled with so many “cranks, criminals and Communists” and that it drove away “a splendid citizen like Colonel Lindbergh.” The Hearst papers had been among the worst offenders, especially its photographers.

  From Liverpool, the Lindberghs went immediately to Wales where Charles and Anne’s brother-in-law Aubrey Morgan had a grand manor near Cardiff. There they stayed for several months, relaxing, acclimating to the country, and weighing their options. In late January the Lindberghs traveled to London where Charles was both astonished and delighted when he did not get mobbed in the streets. They stayed at the Ritz; Betty Morrow was now there also, consulting with Harold Nicolson on his biography of her late husband. On January 20, King George V, with whom Lindbergh had a memorable audience in 1927, had died, and Charles and Anne watched his long and elegant funeral procession from their hotel window, Big Ben chiming, the minute guns firing, a cold, gray day, and the British nation draped in mourning; he was much beloved, the king who had led England through World War I. It was a stirring sight as the casket went by, on a gun caisson drawn by horses with only a wreath and the fabulous royal crown resting on top, surrounded by the regiment of guards in their red tunics, preceded by cavalry with white ostrich plumes
on their golden helmets, followed by the heads of state of many nations, afoot in mourning clothes.

  That night the Lindberghs dined with Mrs. Morrow and the Nicolsons and a discussion arose about their plans. Lindbergh had been vague since their arrival; there were so many choices—Sweden, France, England. Nicolson’s mother-in-law had recently died, leaving his wife, Vita Sackville-West, a small fortune and eliminating the need for the couple to sell Long Barn, a “tumbled-down cottage” they owned in the tiny Weald of Kent, a quiet garden district about twenty-five miles southeast of London. Nicolson offered to lease it to the Lindberghs.

  Long Barn was quite larger than the ordinary American definition of a cottage, and “tumbled-down” or not it was a comfortable, warm home, dating back to the 1420s. It reportedly came with its own ghost, according to Sackville-West, but it also provided a welcome safe haven. Harold Nicolson had phoned the local postmistress asking her to put out word that the Lindberghs should not be disturbed. There was, however, one ugly incident after Charles refused to bring the family out for news photographs, and photographers then “threw rocks at our dog,” apparently to bring the Lindberghs out to see what was the matter. But the dog “caught some of the stones in his bleeding mouth,” Lindbergh said, and “several of his teeth were broken.”6