Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life

by Susan Hertog

  Viewing the streets of Berlin on the morning after Kristallnacht, Hitler, it was said, told his men that the success felt like a “dream,” accomplished with a modicum of bloodshed and with the tacit blessings of the people. Through his skillful handling of a docile and able press, he had invented a monstrous propaganda machine and had turned his greatest enemy, the voice of a free people, back on itself. He had broken not only the public will, but the resolve of Western officialdom.

  On November 12, as Charles left to confer with Finance Minister Monnet in Paris, all the papers, except those in Germany, attacked him. The German atrocity had stoked the fire. Pravda continued to call him a “stupid liar,” a lackey and henchman of the Nazi Reich;8 the British press began to wonder aloud whether Charles Lindbergh was a German spy.9 The Times of London blackballed Anne’s book Listen! The Wind, omitting it from its Christmas list,10 and the American press reported demands that Charles return the Nazi medal.11 Public pressure became so high in the United States that Transcontinental and Western Air were forced to drop Lindbergh’s name from their advertising slogan.12 While Charles remained “marvelously untouched,”13 Anne had deep forebodings. She believed it would be an age full of hatred, lies and slander that would require her total commitment, even at the cost of her principle.14

  To bolster her spirits, Betty Morrow shipped reviews of Listen! The Wind to Illiec. “Mrs. Lindbergh,” declared the New York Times, “has written a nearly perfect little book … It is the personal record of one who writes at least as well as her husband is said to fly.”15 While North to the Orient had been touted as the book equal in expertise to her own flying, this time she was being treated as Charles’s equal—a writer who could fly like a hero.

  To Anne, it was as if they were writing about someone else. Charles, on the other hand, felt unreserved joy. Anne was immensely touched by his praise.16

  In spite of the political snubs, Listen! The Wind did well in the American market. By November 1938, it was already in its fifth printing, in 1939, Anne would receive the American Booksellers Association Award for “favorite” nonfiction.17 The praise came to her like a dove of peace from an American audience grown hostile. Now, the prospect of facing a public that admired her work, regardless of her husband’s politics, along with the offer of an honorary degree from Amherst, encouraged her to consider a trip to the States in the spring.18 For the moment, though, she and Charles had to decide where to live.

  As Daladier’s fear of invasion mounted,19 and in spite of Hitler’s obvious threat to France, the Lindberghs decided to move to Paris. Charles believed he would be welcomed there.20

  Anne finished packing on December 3 and took one last walk with Charles around the island. Sitting on the huge rock overlooking the sea, she experienced a bright awareness. “Journey pride.” She had felt it before; the very act of traveling, which defied the rhythms of the norm, seemed to carry the weight of sin. At eight P.M., as the cart waited at the door and the trunks were piled high, the shores of Illiec were reminding her that nothing important would ever change. Yet she did feel a vast uncertainty.

  She awakened and dressed Land and handed him to Charles so that she could climb onto the high cart. From there, she said good-bye to the servants at the lighted door and to Thor, standing inside. Jon, dressed in his town coat and huge hat, sat beside her, and Land clung to her in his fuzzy Eskimo suit.

  In one of the most lyrical passages of her diaries, Anne describes the sights and sounds of their “strange exit” from the island: her child singing to the rhythm of the cart, the soft cloudy “mackerel” sky, and the “three-quarter moon” gleaming on the rocky coast of the sea.21

  While Anne was settling into their apartment on Avenue Maréchal-Maunouy, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, speaking at a banquet of the Zionist Society in Cleveland, on December 19, blasted Charles:

  Any American who accepts a declaration from a dictator automatically forswears his American birthright. How can any American accept a decoration at the hand of a brutal dictator who, with that same hand, is robbing and torturing thousands of fellow human beings?22

  His comments were a reflection of the administration’s anger toward its officials in Berlin. President Roosevelt could not reconcile the current wave of Nazi brutality with the reports coming from the embassy. Resolved to purge the State Department of all pro-German influence, he began to call his officers home. Truman Smith, summoned to Washington to be tested for diabetes, understood that his career was over. “Retirement at this crucial moment in history would be too cruel, too uselessly cruel,” Kay Smith wrote in her diary.23 Later, her daughter Kaetchen said that her father’s involvement with Lindbergh in Berlin “all but destroyed his career.”24 An era in American diplomacy was over; the new ambassador, Hugh Wilson,25 would also be recalled. Sympathetic to the Nazi regime, Wilson had been running the embassy as if it were an officers’ club, a salon for the American and German military and intellectual elite.26

  Walter Winchell, a New York journalist and radio broadcaster, quipped that the boys in Berlin must have been out playing baseball while the Nazis moved in.27 In point of fact, it was golf and squash. Within the elegant American Embassy, the Wilsons and the Smiths and their entourage dined in splendor with their German guests. A meeting in the morning, a game at the club in the afternoon, a house filled with servants—the sinecure of serving in the Nazi Reich was not at all unpleasant, and the Truman Smiths, as well as the Wilsons, found it painful to leave. When Wilson was recalled to Washington, in the spring of 1939, he left his wife at the embassy in the hope of his swift return.28

  “We do not love, we do not hate, we do not judge, we do not condemn,” Wilson later said. “We observe, we reflect, we report.”29 Kay and Truman Smith echoed his claim when they were called home. “We did not look either right or left,” Kay Smith said. “We were just there to do our job.”30

  As Roosevelt’s cabinet denounced Charles as an American unworthy of his birthright, Anne moved in the rhythms of French society, though she was hungry for home.

  For Anne, Elisabeth was a symbol of “home,” and she again read Elisabeth’s letters, in search of “another age and a more golden one.”31 When she later wrote the poem “The Little Mermaid,” based on Hans Christian Andersen’s story, she was composing a lament for the loss of childhood, family, and home—the exchange of innocence for moral doubt.32

  Roosevelt now had little doubt that America would have to go to war. After the events of late 1938, he began to make his position clear, and called for a re-evaluation of the U.S. neutrality laws and a dramatic increase in the defense budget. On January 4, he said, “We have learned that when we deliberately try to legislate neutrality, our neutrality laws may operate unevenly and unfairly—may actually give aid to an aggressor and deny it to the victim.”33

  Anne felt like it was the end of the Roman Empire—not knowing what was coming, “waiting for the storm.”34

  Charles, however, was more certain than ever that eugenics was the answer to the degeneration of Western civilization.35 On January 16, he returned to Berlin, ostensibly to procure engines for French aircraft. He talked to Air Minister Milch, who demanded to know what Lindbergh had said in London before the Munich conference. Apparently he was satisfied with Charles’s answer and agreed to send engines to France.36 His words, however, were as hollow as always. The Germans never intended to keep their promise. Once again, Charles had overestimated his power. He thought, to the Germans’ satisfaction, that the force of his personality would deflect France and Germany from their collision course. Hitler was even then planning to invade Poland on his way to France.37

  Charles returned to Paris, and Anne rejoiced. She was only alive when he was home.38 She was proud that he had stood up for himself in the face of all the bad publicity.

  At just this time, Goering accelerated the “evacuation” of the Jews, Mussolini renewed his support of Franco and the Spanish Nationalists, and France and Britain reaffirmed their alliance
.39

  While Charles believed the lessons they had learned while living in Europe would prove invaluable, Anne felt they “had exiled them forever.” She would never see America the same way again.40

  In the salons of Paris, they were greeted by an aristocracy steeped in delusion. To Anne, everyone looked like “the Queen in Alice in Wonderland” or, scarier yet, “Mary Queen of Scots.” She found that her anger at public derision had given her new courage. After being so shy and reticent, she was able to talk to anyone.41

  In February 1939, at a dinner at the American Embassy, Anne was approached by the Duke of Windsor. When he left England after abdicating so that he could marry Wallis Simpson, Edward roamed the salons of Europe. Like Charles, he was criticized by the press for his visits to Germany and his friendships within the Reich. Attracted by the rigor and vitality of the Reich, he, too, threw his support to the Nazis. It was later said that Hitler had promised to return Edward to his throne once Germany had conquered England.42

  Anne spoke to the duke of their rootless life and of her fear of going home; he nodded in commiseration. They agreed that Germany was the best hope for the average worker and that the country was an important force, whether or not one agreed with its policies. As she had in London, Anne saw Edward as a kindred spirit, a sensitive man forced to conform to a public image. Soon the duchess and Charles joined the conversation. Drawn together by their isolation, the four exiles stood in the center of the room. They were “like a people in a foreign land who suddenly realize they speak the same language … A pair of unicorns meets a pair of unicorns,” Anne wrote.43

  As the press raged at Hitler, and Britain and France readied their troops, Anne’s anger at Charles began to surface. She mourned her misspent youth and the time lost to Charles when she denied her own worth and directed her life and energy to his ends. And yet she tried to silence her doubts, to convince herself that her struggle for internal harmony was over. No longer would she dwell in “divided selves.”44

  But she was more confused than ever; like Anne the narrator in Listen! The Wind, she was trying to summon up moral courage. As if her life were imitating her art, Anne again adopted an attitude of helplessness.

  At the end of January, Anne and Charles visited the Astors. On their way to Cliveden, passing through the drab suburbs of the working classes, Anne delighted once more in the beauty of the Astors’ home.45 Yet her new way of thinking cast a pall on both their wealth and their politics. Their self-conscious aristocratic behavior and their phalanx of servants seemed absurd. And this time there was a self-congratulatory manner that Anne had not seen before. Neville Chamberlain arrived, with a shy young “niece” who reminded Anne of her former self.46 All at once, her detachment shattered, sending her crying into Lady Astor’s arms. In spite of her distortions, Nancy seemed to Anne beautiful, courageous, and confident. She reminded her of Elisabeth, a feminine ideal to which Anne could only aspire. She realized how much she missed her sister and the depth of her loneliness.47 With introductions from the Astors, they visited London salons where talk of books, poetry, social philosophy, and art distracted them from the news of impending war.48

  But the more their reputations were tarnished, the more Charles clung to his ideal “images.” In November, Charles had commissioned the French sculptor Charles Despiau to make a bust of Anne, and the New York designer and artist Jo Davidson to make a figure of himself.49 But somewhere inside, Anne wondered whether it was a golden calf. By year’s end, she was overwhelmed by a deep and heavy depression.

  Anne blamed herself for a winter without purpose or accomplishment.50 As had happened after Charlie’s kidnapping, her unexpressed rage toward Charles made it impossible for her to write. Moreover, she could not conceive another child. With Carrel and Charles pushing her to perform her sacred role, Anne accepted her infertility as the final confirmation of her worthlessness.

  On March 14, Chamberlain and Daladier renounced their commitment to protect the Czech border. Their agreement did not apply, they reasoned, since Czechoslovakia had not been attacked.51 In Prague, George F. Kennan, stationed at the American Embassy, saw crowds of people weeping in the darkened streets at the “death knoll of their independence.”52

  Privately, Anne, too, condemned the Nazis. “All the Edens and Hulls are right. I can’t bear it.”53

  When Roosevelt sought assurance from Mussolini that Germany and Italy would not “attack or invade,” Hitler and Mussolini called his appeal “absurd.”54 Anne remained in Paris while Charles took a ship to New York on business on April 14.55 As the Aquitania sailed into port, the Carrels and Jim Newton rode the tugs to greet him. Embittered by events that had made them pariahs in their own land, Dr. Carrel and Lindbergh commiserated in Lindbergh’s cabin aboard the ship while James Newton stood guard at the closed door.

  As luck would have it, the arrival was the night of the photographers’ annual ball. On hearing of Lindbergh’s return, the conductor stopped the music, and the men, cameras in hand, rushed to meet the Aquitania. Stampeding on board, they hammered on Lindbergh’s door. When he refused to open it, one photographer broke into the adjoining cabin, took photos, and fled.

  Charles walked down the plank of the ship, swarmed by reporters shooting hundreds of flashbulbs into the air. “It takes the sweetness from the freedom of democracy,” he thought as he scuttled across the broken glass.56

  24

  Which Way Is Home?

  Anne, Jon, and Land arrive in New York, April 1939.

  (Sygma)

  NO ANGELS1

  You think there are no angels any more—

  No angels come to tell us in the night

  Of joy or sorrow, love or death—

  No breath of wings, no touch of palm to say

  Divinity is near.

  Today

  Our revelations come

  By telephone, or postman at the door,

  You say—

  Oh no, the hour when fate is near,

  Not these, the voices that can make us hear,

  Not these

  Have power to pierce below the stricken mind

  Deep down into perception’s quivering core.

  Blows fall unheeded on the bolted door;

  Deafly we listen; blindly look; and still

  Our fingers fumbling with the lock are numb

  Until

  The Angels come…

  —ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH

  APRIL 28, 1939, NEW YORK HARBOR

  Two weeks later, Anne awoke to the brightening sky as the Champlain paddled softly up the Hudson River toward the West Side piers. The April air still held its chill, and rain tapped the deserted deck outside her cabin. The quiet breathing of her young sons was muffled by the sound of reporters gathering outside her door. She wondered whether “coming home” was not just another plunge into the nightmare she had left two years earlier. She hurried the children into their clothes, pulled their hats down over their eyes, and handed Land to his nurse. Dressed in black, as if in mourning, she grabbed Jon’s hand and told the others to follow her. They all ran breathlessly down the gangplank and out to the waiting limousine. As police sirens carved a path through the moving traffic, Anne’s car rumbled across the George Washington Bridge and turned northward to Englewood. Her mother and Margot were waiting at the door.2

  Charles had made an important decision. Even before touching shore, he had cabled his friend General Henry (Hap) Arnold to say that he wished an army aviation post. Within two days of his return, after announcing to everyone that he would not stay long, Charles accepted the position President Roosevelt had reluctantly assigned him. Charles was to study the efficiency of aeronautical production in the United States,3 and, though neither man trusted the other, they understood the need to bury their anger. Charles was convinced that nothing about his current work would evoke Roosevelt’s opposition.4

  Writing at her desk in their private suite at Next Day Hill, Anne assessed the quality of their lives since their retu
rn to America. She marveled at Charles’s robust energy and his power to find fulfillment wherever he went. For the moment, Anne was content to relax in the luxury of her mother’s home. The flowers were beautiful and the robins were huge, she wrote. Anne took much pleasure in the company of Margot, Con, and their babies, drinking it all in with the thirst of one who has been in an emotional desert.5 The war in Europe seemed far away, and too unreal to feel its pain. But America with its speed and brightness offended her sensibilities. She felt herself an outcast in a corrupt land. Everything seemed “false … flashy and cheap,” especially the movies and the press. She wanted her old America back—the one she had known in her innocence.6

  There were many who would have welcomed a garish assault on their senses. To the German Jews, who feared for their lives, the bright face of America was an aspect of its democratic freedom. After Kristallnacht, nothing about America could deter the German Jews from banging on its doors. Throughout Germany, people searched for relatives abroad who would help them through the arduous and serpentine process of emigration. But the concerted efforts of Jewish and non-Jewish groups in the United States to persuade Roosevelt and the Congress to liberalize immigration laws proved fruitless. Even legislation to permit German-Jewish children to bypass the quota system failed, and pleas from the international committee established by the Evian Conference were viewed by attendant nations as “Jewish blackmail.”