Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life

by Susan Hertog

Anne threw herself into physical work. She scrubbed the floors, washed the dishes, the children’s socks, and the baby bibs. She felt vulnerable. Harcourt Brace had published her book, but the critics didn’t seem to understand it. The Book of the Month Club did not select it, and the sales were lower than Harcourt had hoped. Only Mina Curtiss offered her comfort and perspective.11

  Charles toured the Hawaiian, Gilbert, and Marshall Islands, recording his impressions with razor-sharp precision. With detail and thorough analysis, he described the jungle terrain and the untainted beauty of the natives and the wildlife. He recorded evidence of American atrocities against the Japanese: small mass graves, skulls, bones, and equipment, hung on barbed-wire entanglements, and the desecration of human bodies. He saw nothing in the war but the destruction of wildlife and native culture by the brutal American soldiers. There in the jungle he was never so certain that the universe moved according to evolutionary law, and that men, with all their moral pretensions, were no higher than animals.12

  Ironically, Charles’s noncommissioned status permitted him the luxury of moral distance. Committed to no one, except by choice, he stood in judgment of his officers and peers. Frustrated by the narrow limits of his mission, Charles flew, with the tacit approval of his superiors, on fifty combat and reconnaissance flights, adding up to 178 hours in the air. He locked horns with Japanese fighters and succeeded in downing at least one plane.13 As he surveyed the vacant beaches of the islands and their jungles, he recorded his struggle to separate himself from the blood-sport and animalism of his commissioned comrades. Adopting once again Saint-Exupéry’s stream of consciousness form, he wrote at the crux of “time” and “eternity.” He described his temptation to kill a Japanese, unarmed and naked on a deserted beach. In war, he wrote, life and death balance on “a muscle’s twitch.” But at close range, with the power to kill at the press of a button, Charles saw the value of individual human life. The lives of our enemies are worth so much more than their deaths, he wrote.14

  On June 6, 1944, D-day, the massive amphibious operation was launched by the Allies under the command of General Dwight Eisenhower. Within twenty-four hours, 176,000 troops landed on the northern coast of France between Cherbourg and Le Havre. By evening the United States V Corps established a beachhead. Six days later, all beachheads in Normandy were linked, constituting a fifty-mile-wide front. After four years, Charles de Gaulle made his triumphant return to France.15

  Charles was virtually silent about the invasion, wondering only how many soldiers died; Anne knelt in prayer. The Allied victory was a testimony to democracy. She recognized the truth of her father’s belief that there were certain ideals worth dying for.16

  With no sign of Charles’s return, Anne, for the first time, cultivated a “circle of friends.” Resisting her desire to write, to think, or to wallow in her loneliness, she kept up her sculpture classes and attended exhibitions and neighborhood parties. Music, talk, art, writing—the conversations were fun, natural and free. Within an artistic circle, she believed she had found herself.17

  In early July, Anne traveled by train to visit Margot in San Francisco. Through the windows of the Pullman car, she sought perspective in the rolling landscape, much as she had done seventeen years earlier on her way to Mexico to meet Charles for the first time. This westward journey, intended to be a vacation, became a quest for reconciliation with Charles, whom she hoped to greet in California. Free of domestic responsibility, Anne felt whole again. As she watched the fields of Iowa darken and the homesteads stand “courageous” among the flatlands like “oases in a desert,” she was overcome with the richness of their lives. But even as she sensed that her marriage was crumbling, Anne sought to understand the value of their past. Anne quoted a poignant passage from John Jay Chapman in a letter to Charles:

  How are the waters of the world sweet—if we should die, we have drunk them. If we should sin—or separate—if we should fail or secede—we have tasted of happiness—we must be written in the book of the blessed. We have had what life could give, we have eaten of the tree of knowledge, we have known—we have been the mystery of the universe.18

  Once in California, she grew tired of waiting. After a month-long visit with Margot, Anne returned to Detroit. Charles’s homecoming had been delayed by an assignment to work with Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines, teaching pilots the efficient use of fuel. Acting on their decision to move back east, Anne spent August searching for a home in Westport, Connecticut.

  On the morning of August 24, 1944, as Hitler committed Germany to “total war,” the “liberated” tanks of a French armored division rolled into Paris. By 3:15 the following afternoon, the German commander had surrendered to a French brigadier general, and jubilant Parisians moved from house to house, clearing them of Germans.19 Within a week, the new government turned the Palais des Sports into a detention camp for four thousand civilians accused of collaborating with the Germans. Among them was Alexis Carrel.20

  After dismissing Carrel as director of the Vichy-supported Foundaton for the Study of Human Relations, also known as the Carrel Institute, the health minister publicly announced that “important new evidence” proved conclusively that Carrel had collaborated with the Germans. Though Carrel publicly denied the charges and asserted his loyalty to France, the American press did not hesitate to link this suspected collaborator to Charles Lindbergh.

  While his former colleagues at the Rockefeller Institute acknowledged the possibility of Carrel’s collaboration, they did not deny his genius.21 His enemies, however, both here and abroad, insisted that he was a Nazi sympathizer who had finally got what he deserved. But Carrel was never tried in a court of law. Three months after his incarceration, the seventy-one-year-old doctor was dead.22 His friends would say he died of a “broken heart”23—lonely, alienated, and far from the scientific brilliance of his youth. Charles and Anne, however, remained silent, commenting neither on his arrest nor his death. For the rest of their lives, though, they worked with his friends and biographers to dispute the charge of collaboration and clear his name.

  By mid-September, Anne and the four children awaited the arrival of Charles in their new rented home in Westport. On September 19, dismissed from his duties in the Pacific, Charles flew to Texas and then to Pittsburgh, where he boarded the night train to New York.24 Photographers and reporters flocked to meet him at the station. Masked in a hat and glassless spectacles, Charles sprinted out the back of the train but was spotted and immediately surrounded by shouting, bulb-popping reporters.

  “I’m sorry,” he told them, “I have nothing to say.”

  Crouching and jumping, the photographers were like “monkeys,” he wrote in his diary—not much different from the animals in the jungle. Nothing, during his six-month absence, had changed. America, he said, was still a lawless country.25

  He was, though, overjoyed to see Anne and the children. The hills and woodlands of their new home held the promise of renewal. The house, located on Long Lots Road, was surrounded by lush foliage and trees. There was a big open field, intersected by a crystalline mountain brook. It was a much better place, Charles wrote, than he had dared to hope.26

  For Anne, Charles’s homecoming was a disappointment. After months of separation, during which she had cultivated both friendship and solitude, she discovered that his physical presence had lost its power. The insulation of Bloomfield Hills and now the humdrum suburban pace of Westport made her feel hungry, cheated of life.27 And the suspected death of Saint-Exupéry, lost on a mission in North Africa, stirred again her dissatisfaction with Charles.

  It was not that she was surprised by Saint-Exupéry’s disappearance; she had expected it for a long time. He had, in a sense, achieved what he had set out to do: to sacrifice his life to a higher cause, to make his word flesh. Nonetheless, she felt a profound loss. Saint-Exupéry, she wrote, was the one person in the world who might have understood Steep Ascent. She had written it as a letter to a friend to explain who she was and where she was g
oing. And now that he was gone, she was certain she was alone.28 His work had become a touchstone for her—a facilitating principle, a validating voice. He had cracked the walls around her, and had spoken her language better than anyone she had known. And though she had seen him only once, she hoarded his memory to sustain her courage. Their war views, she mused, seemed to get in their way. She wondered whether he had forgiven her for Wave of the Future.

  “Now,” she wrote, “all the planes in the sky are going nowhere.”

  With the death of Saint-Exupéry, her last bastion of self-delusion was gone. She would measure herself by no one’s standards but her own. As the Allies prepared to invade Germany, Anne wrote in her diary that she and Charles were “together” but “a little lost.”29

  In the spring of 1945, the capitulation of Germany, the liberation of the concentrations camps, the death of Roosevelt, the suicide of Hitler, and the assassination of Mussolini all changed the face of Europe. On May 8, the European war was officially over. Eager to witness the scene firsthand, Charles secured a commission from the War Department to study German developments in jet and rocket aircraft and to analyze their implications for postwar Europe.

  His head pressed against the windows of his naval air transport as it prepared to land in France, Charles saw the bomb-dug craters, the roofless houses, and the ruins of monuments once testaments to tradition. “It reminded me of a Dali painting …” he wrote. “Creation without God.”30 And while he assumed the air of an objective observer, his written record seemed a justification of his wartime views. Men were predators, he wrote, no matter what their nationality. The only difference between the Allies and the Germans was the absurdity of the Allies’ moral pretensions.31 They treated the “Japs” and the Germans much as the Germans had treated the Jews. The Americans were merciless and cruel, delighting in the suffering of the homeless, starving citizens of conquered Germany. He condemned the “heinous delight” with which Americans “liberated” occupied territories, confiscating the best houses, and stripping others bare of food, with little concern for the plight of the townspeople. The Russians, Poles, and Frenchmen were even worse than the Americans. Who is clean? Who can condemn the Germans for their sins?

  Ultimately, his message lay in his silence. Charles simply did not understand the moral distinction between the Allied soldiers who had fought for democracy, and the German troops on a bloody rampage for dominance and power. Six million Jews had been murdered by Hitler in the name of racial superiority, and Charles Lindbergh could not discern the difference between government-sanctioned genocide and the atrocities of war by some debased individuals. Hitler’s systematic extermination of the Jews launched a worldwide conflagration that challenged the fundamentals of morality and law that, for thousands of years, had governed Western civilization.32

  Nor was Charles content to survey the damage; he wanted to feel the pain of the vanquished. Hoping to see the war through Hitler’s eyes, Charles traveled from Stuttgart to Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s mountain retreat. Charles made his way through the rubble to a large gaping hole that was once Hitler’s window. Standing at its frame, he composed an ode to the beauty of the countryside: “The high Alpine range—sharp gray crags, white fields of snow, saw-toothed peaks against the blue sky …”

  It was in this setting, I realize, that the man Hitler, now the myth Hitler, contemplated and laid his plans—the man who in a few years brought the human world into the greatest convulsion it has ever known and from which it will be recuperating for generations. A few weeks ago he was here where I am standing, looking through that window, realizing the collapse of his dreams, still struggling desperately against overwhelming odds.33

  Charles contemplated the strength of prewar Germany and the potential “goodness” of Hitler’s power. He was a man whose “dreams” had simply gone awry, resulting in evil and devastation. The best of Germany’s youth, Charles explained, was dead. The population was not only homeless and hungry; it was vulnerable to what Hitler feared most: the Bolshevik armies of Soviet Russia. There was pathos in his words for the German people, but there was no hint of apology. To Charles, Hitler’s demise was the very stuff of tragedy.

  Only a trip to a concentration camp, and a tour through the rubble led by a “skeleton” boy, moved him to condemn the brutality of the Germans. This kind of human destruction, he wrote in his diary, was not worth the fulfillment of political ends. But his questions remained. Was German brutality really very different from the American atrocities in the Philippines? “Only in the sky is there hope,” he wrote, “only in that which man has never touched and which God forbid he ever will.”

  When Charles returned home to Connecticut in mid-September, he and Anne walked for hours among the trees, stopping at dusk in an open field. Again, they had been apart for six months, and yet, Anne wrote, the lines of their thoughts moved in parallel course. Was it the sight of the “skeleton” boy, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or was it Anne’s newfound clarity? This, their public record doesn’t reveal. But by year’s end, Charles had made a spiritual turning, confirming his belief in a Christian God.

  Charles had told Congress and the press of the need for Christian ideals in a technological society that had the power of mass destruction. In a statement that echoed his warning to the Germans on that July afternoon in Berlin a decade earlier, he pleaded for the restraint of a world organization to monitor military power with Christian ideals.

  The philosoph{ies} of Christ may have been too intangible for the Nazi Government to understand … but in a deeper sense they affect every industry and every action. They cannot be left alone to Church and clergy. They must live in the philosophy of a nation, in the policies of a world organization, in the use of science and its great inventions.34

  For the moment, at least, the devastation wreaked by the Nazis humbled him. If Charles saw the error of his judgment, he glimpsed it, in part, through the eyes of Anne. And if one listened carefully to his words, one could hear Anne’s voice pushing through his darkness.

  30

  Pure Gold

  Beach across the road from Anne’s cottage on Captiva Island, where she wrote Gift from the Sea.

  (Photographed by the author)

  THE UNICORN IN CAPTIVITY1

  Here sits the Unicorn

  In captivity;

  His bright invulnerability

  Captive at last;

  The chase long past,

  Winded and spent,

  By the king’s spears rent

  Collared and tied

  To a pomegranate tree—

  Here sits the Unicorn

  In captivity,

  Yet, free.

  —ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH

  SEPTEMBER 1945, WESTPORT, CONNECTICUT

  Charles’s homecoming was an intrusion. For the first time in fifteen years, Anne had planned her days to suit her own needs, balancing her work with the demands of the children. She had tasted not only the sweetness of solitude but the camaraderie of artists who were also friends. And just as she was feeling separate and whole, finding a language and a culture of her own, Charles was back and omnipresent.

  As a special consultant to the air force, teaching pilots long-range fuel efficiency, Charles had a scattered and unpredictable schedule. Anne never knew when to expect him, but when he arrived, he took over the house, disciplining the children and demanding her attention. The placid quality of suburban Connecticut life, first in Westport and, a year later, in Darien, had deepened Anne’s isolation and resentment. She was thirty-nine years old; this was their tenth move in fifteen years; and she still didn’t feel she was “home.” The needs of four children under the age of thirteen and the household chores were consuming and incessant. Drives to music and dance lessons, PTA meetings and visits to the school, Saturday sports, doctors appointments, meals, laundry, buttons to be sewn and seams to be repaired—the everyday mechanics sapped Anne’s strength and creativity. She may have glimpsed “the changeless lig
ht,” but the gift of “grace” still alluded her.

  Feeling captive to her husband’s and children’s lives, Anne buried herself in another pregnancy. Their sixth child, a daughter, Reeve, was born on October 2, 1945, on the fifth birthday of Anne Jr. The baby, named for her grandmother’s great-uncle, urgently needed a blood transfusion from Charles; it was a gift for which Reeve would always be grateful.2 But the fragility of the baby was evidence of Anne’s physical exhaustion.

  The following fall, at the age of forty, Anne conceived her seventh child, but this pregnancy was more difficult than the others. As usual, Anne felt weak and nauseated, but this time she had constant abdominal pain. At the suggestion of friends, she consulted a physician, Dana Atchley, a neighbor in Englewood who practiced in New York City at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. He diagnosed the presence of gallstones, and recommended surgery to remove the obstruction. It was a routine operation, he explained, but it could jeopardize her pregnancy, and he suggested the possibility of an abortion.3 The deliberate termination of a pregnancy, however, must have weighed heavily on Anne. The burden was relieved when, shortly before Christmas, she miscarried.

  In February, following surgery for the removal of the gallstones, Anne spent many hours in Dr. Atchley’s office, talking about her conflicts as an artist and a woman. Atchley was warm and engaging, with a smile that filled his face and his eyes. Fourteen years older than Anne, he had a paternal air, heightened by his thinning gray hair and rimless spectacles. He summoned up, perhaps, memories of her father.

  In August 1947, after months of frustration with her work and bouts of depression, Anne was offered an assignment from Reader’s Digest to write about the survival of “Christianity, Western Civilization, and Democracy” in postwar France, Germany, and England. Reluctant to leave home and the children, but encouraged by Charles, Anne gratefully accepted the time to write and travel, and to test the limits of her independence. When she arrived home two months later, Anne wrote daily in a trailer parked in the woodlands bordering Long Island Sound.