Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  In Dr. Carrel, the hero found a hero—the first since his father; and Carrel found a son. Lindbergh promptly recognized that he was sitting with a Renaissance man dedicated to both enlightenment and the occult, a scholar who accepted the existence of powers unknown. “Carrel’s mind,” Lindbergh would later state, “flashed with the speed of light in space between the logical world of science and the mystical world of God.”

  Carrel listened to all of Lindbergh’s questions. He patiently explained that a mechanical pump could not be used to circulate blood through the body while surgeons operated on Elisabeth Morrow because “blood soon coagulated in contact with surfaces of glass or metal … and its delicate cells could not withstand the hammering of mechanical valves.”

  After lunch, Carrel escorted Lindbergh and Flagg through the laboratories of his department of experimental surgery on the top two floors of the main building of the Institute. He explained that years before he had experimented with transplantation of limbs and organs, and he showed Lindbergh photographs and specimens of the work he had done in which the grafting had failed entirely. In no instance had a graft from one individual to another been successful. Dr. Flagg observed that as the three of them passed through each laboratory, activity stopped, the scientists standing in “silent tribute” to their special guest.

  At last, Lindbergh asked if whole organs could be kept alive outside the body just as the fragment of chicken heart continued to pulsate with life. Upon hearing one of the very questions Carrel had been wrestling with himself, he opened a cabinet to show him an apparatus that had been built in his laboratory several years earlier. It was a perfusion pump—for circulating the nutrient media over tissue cultures, which was necessary to keep them alive. As Lindbergh looked at it, Carrel shook his head. “Infection,” he said, “always infection.” He had hoped to perform experiments on isolated living organs, but nobody had been able to build an operable perfusion pump that did not introduce infection.

  Lindbergh gave this delicate but complicated contraption of glass tubes, electric wires, magnetic coils, and valves the once-over. It was so crudely designed that he felt he could improve upon it. Carrel said that if Lindbergh wished to design a new pump, he could have complete access to his facilities. The offer was irresistible. “Here was the possibility of working with a great surgeon and biologist, a man overflowing with ideas and philosophical concepts,” Lindbergh later wrote of the opportunity, “in laboratories far better equipped than any I could dream of establishing in the basement of my New Jersey home.” What was more, he would be able to pursue his work in private.

  Lindbergh made sketches that night of a Pyrex perfusion pump. It was a simple design, which Carrel passed on to Otto Hopf, an extraordinary glass blower with a workshop in the basement of one of the Institute buildings. Carrel first experimented with this pump by inserting a section of a cat’s carotid artery in the petri dish organ chamber. “We were for the first time in the history of experimental perfusion,” Lindbergh proudly recalled, “able to avoid infection.” They successfully perfused one tissue sample for a month. But when it came to perfusing whole organs, they discovered that the perfusing pressure was too low, and that when the organs were attached to the cannulae—the metal tubes used to introduce and draw off fluid—infection set in.

  Lindbergh put in long weeks in Carrel’s laboratory. He used the two-hour drive over New Jersey roads and through the Holland Tunnel “for contemplation on both conscious and subconscious levels,” to rethink and redesign. If he could not put aside a day to get into the city, he would work in one of the laboratories at Princeton. (Although he continued to refuse offers of awards and honorary degrees, he did accept an honorary Master of Science degree that June sixteenth from Princeton University for “[leading] us in our conquest of the air.”) Between his airline survey flights and business conferences, he often worked well past midnight with his microscope and textbooks, building and discarding one apparatus after another. “I learned,” Lindbergh wrote, “about the problems of infection, the sensitivity of blood, the complicated character of living tissue, the hereditary qualities in every cell.” He became absorbed watching through his microscope the slow movements of living cells—“especially after I had designed and constructed flasks containing tissue fragments embedded in quartz sand through which a nutrient fluid circulated, allowing individual cells to migrate or form group structures.” One night, he examined his own sperm.

  Carrel put each new apparatus Lindbergh designed to the test. The protégé found his mentor “untiring in his willingness to adopt surgical techniques to the requirements of my constantly changing apparatus. No matter how often infection developed or a mechanical breakdown occurred, he was ready to schedule another operation.” For his part, Carrel was impressed with Lindbergh’s industry as much as his ingenuity, marveling at the way this unschooled mind grasped this sophisticated discipline. “My friends,” Carrel slyly said one evening to a former ambassador and an attorney, “the world will hear from this young man some day.”

  Lindbergh found Carrel himself “even more fascinating” than any of the projects he was pursuing in the Department of Experimental Surgery. “There seemed to be no limit to the breadth and penetration of his thought,” Lindbergh recalled. He always looked forward to sitting at Carrel’s lunch table in the large dining room, because of the stimulating conversation. “One day he might discuss the future of organ perfusion,” Lindbergh would recall. “On another, he would be talking to a professional animal trainer about the relative intelligence of dogs and monkeys, and the difficulty of teaching a camel to walk backward.” At another lunch, he expressed his concern over “the environmental effect of white bread on French peasants, and the effect of civilization in general on our human species. ‘No one realizes,’ he said, ‘how many genetic defects modern man contains.’” One never knew if Carrel might launch into one of his tirades—ranting that “all surgeons are butchers” and that “all people are fools”—or if he might quietly withdraw to write—formulating some such notion as: “We must liberate ourselves from blind technology and grasp the complexity and the wealth of our own nature.” Lindbergh once looked up from his work to see Carrel step into the room with Albert Einstein, discussing extrasensory perception.

  Lindbergh recognized that Carrel had a “blunt tactlessness that created many enemies.” But he also found in this fifty-seven-year-old doctor “character that attracted the love of those who knew him well.” Nobody in Charles Lindbergh’s adulthood affected his thinking more deeply than Alexis Carrel. Their relationship would intensify over the next decade; and Lindbergh would come to conclude at the end of his own life that Carrel had “the most stimulating mind I have known.” And so it was that in recalling the winter of 1930–31, Lindbergh began to balance in his mind an “interest in aircraft” with an “interest in the bodies which designed and flew them.”

  IN THE THREE YEARS since Lindbergh’s flight to Paris, teams of pilots had flown from northern California to Honolulu, the Fiji Islands, and Brisbane. Rear Admiral Byrd and pilot Bernt Balchen flew over the South Pole; Frenchmen Coste and Bellonte completed the first successful flight from Paris to New York; and another team flew from Newfoundland to Tokyo, with stops across Europe and Asia. Falling for the first time into a commonplace routine of commuting between home and a job made Lindbergh itch for another great expedition of his own. Before he became tied down to his new work, and before Anne became too attached to their new baby, Charles plotted a journey that would take him and his wife to Japan by way of the northernmost reaches of the Pacific.

  He had his new Lockheed land plane modified into a seaplane. At a cost of $4,000, he ordered two Duralumin pontoons—each with a 150-gallon fuel tank—from the Edo Aircraft Corporation in College Point, Long Island, to replace the landing gear. Because more power would be necessary to lift a heavier load, he asked the Wright Aeronautical Corporation for their new 575 h.p. Cyclone engine and a more effective propeller. For the first tim
e, Lindbergh also installed a lightweight, long-range radio, one designed by the Communications Department of Pan American Airways. Anne—who had just received her pilot’s license—would serve as radio operator.

  From May to July 1930, the Lindberghs prepared for the trip, she putting their homelife in order while he nailed down the details of the flight. Fascinated, Anne watched Charles turn packing into a science of prioritizing. Mindful that every pound must equal its “value in usefulness,” he stacked up the vitaminic benefits of canned tomatoes against the nutritionless but filling qualities of hardtack, warm bedding if they were forced to land in the North against an insect-proof tent if in the South. Using the baby’s scale, Charles weighed the six pounds of a shotgun and two ounces for each shell against the birds they could kill if they needed food. Generally, a balance was found by packing a little of everything. He left the rifle at home, taking two revolvers instead. Lindbergh “conceived, organized, and financed” the flight personally; but as a consultant to Pan American, he intended to share all information and conclusions with them.

  With an itinerary that included Eskimo villages as well as Asian capitals, Charles and Anne would have to pack for wilderness subsistence and embassy banquets. Each had an eighteen-pound personal allowance, suitcase included. The most “weight-expensive” item was footwear, and Anne found a pair of shoes that could double as slippers in both the bedroom and the ballroom. The Lindberghs spent their early July nights rearranging the three piles that covered their room at Next Day Hill—necessities, discards, and those items still being considered. While Charles corresponded with the Canadian Air Force about using their gasoline caches in northern Canada, with Nelson Rockefeller about Standard Oil providing fuel on their Siberian stops, with the Lomen Reindeer Corporation about supplies in the Northwest Territory of Canada, and with explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson about the aberrations of weather in the Arctic, Anne brushed up her Morse code.

  “I would have been content to stay home and do nothing else but care for my baby,” Anne would later write of 1931. “But there were those survey flights that lured us to more adventures. I went on them proudly, taking my place as a crew member. The beauty and mystery of flying never palled, and I was deeply involved in my job of operating radio.” The greater—unspoken—lure was the rush of being alongside her husband. “Oh, how she loved her Lindy!” remarked the baby nurse, Betty Gow, more than sixty years later. “She’d have gone anywhere and done anything for him … even leave that beautiful little baby behind.”

  After a year, Anne was warming up to motherhood. She felt more comfortable with little Charlie in her arms, and she delighted in his growing to look like his father. Two new dogs had joined the Lindbergh household, a fox terrier named Wahgoosh (after Charles’s childhood dog) and a fearless Scotch terrier named Skean, neither of which strayed from the baby.

  On a hot Monday, July 27, 1931, Charles and Anne arrived at College Point, Long Island, to begin their excursion. Their black Lockheed Sirius with orange wings sat upon its shiny pontoons at the end of a wharf in Flushing Bay. A small crowd pressed against the gates as the Lindberghs loaded their plane with its final provisions. Until their return, Charles and Anne would be in the world’s newspapers almost every day, often on the front page. Sunday rotogravure sections were filled with photographs of their trip, practically turning their lives into comic-strip adventures.

  They flew south for a day in Washington, gathering visas and clearances, before splashing down in The Thoroughfare at North Haven on the night of the twenty-ninth. The baby had already arrived by train with Betty Gow; and his parents had a few minutes to play with him before Anne put him to bed. Then she pulled Betty aside to give her special instructions: “I was told not to cuddle him,” the baby nurse recalled, “—or to make him fond of me.” The next afternoon, a little after two, the Lindberghs took off, heading over the pine trees toward the Camden hills.

  From that moment on, Little Charlie became Betty Morrow’s baby, with complete run of the place at North Haven. Before the Lindberghs departed, they had discussed Charlie’s spending part of the summer with his other grandmother. But Evangeline reluctantly begged off, asserting, “Police protection is almost nil in Detroit; there is far too great a number of unemployed; conditions here are much like Chicago which, as you know, is in a bad way.”

  Surrounded by Morrows all summer, Charlie played on the beach, swam in the pool, and went on boating trips to neighboring islands. He took food only from his Grandma Bee or Betty Gow, both of whom recited poems, read books, and sang to him. When the baby’s hair grew too long for a boy, they cut it, saving every “snip of gold.” That summer little Charlie began putting words together, and he took his first steps. As the Morrows returned to Englewood at season’s end, an epidemic of infantile paralysis struck New York City. It was decided that Charlie and Betty Gow should remain in Maine until the crisis had passed.

  Meantime, Charles and Anne had flown from Ottawa up the western coast of Hudson’s Bay, from Moose Factory to Churchill and onto Baker Lake. The country was barren there, except for a few houses and a church on the bare shore. At Baker Lake, a Canadian Mounted officer in his red coat, a few other white men, and some Eskimos greeted them. Two Eskimo boys could not take their eyes off Anne, for she was the first Caucasian woman they had ever seen.

  The Lindberghs flew an entire night from Baker Lake to Aklavik, the northwesternmost point of the Northwest Territories. Throughout the flight—as they slipped between white cloud banks hovering over the Arctic ice pack to their right and the gray, treeless coast to their left—it never grew dark. They found a settlement of thirty houses and stayed with the region’s only doctor, who made rounds on some of his patients just once a year by dogsled. They witnessed the excitement of the supply boat arriving the following afternoon.

  Lindbergh piloted to Barrow through a storm, with Anne at the radio, securing the weather information they needed to land. They stayed for three days, enjoying a “Thanksgiving dinner” that ran into the early morning with most of the town in attendance—including the doctor, the minister, the nurse, the schoolteacher, and an old Scotch whaler. As cold in August as New England in November, this northernmost point in Alaska treated the Lindberghs to a banquet of reindeer meat, wild goose, cans of sweet potatoes, peas, and beets, even some canned celery. Charles and Anne left Point Barrow for Nome, a small mining town on the Bering coast.

  Crossing the Bering Sea from North America to Asia—from Nome to Karaginski on the Russian island of Kamchatka—the Lindberghs felt as though they were returning to civilization. But only the most expert piloting enabled them to land in the fog at the harborless, uninhabited island of Ketoi. A typhoon also hit the area, grounding them for a day. Anne and Charles gave thanks throughout this trip for his training as an airmail pilot. After thrashing through seaweed, the Lockheed Sirius developed mechanical problems, which Anne broadcast on her radio, leading a Japanese naval vessel to come to their rescue, towing them into Buroton Bay.

  One month after they had left New York, they arrived in Nemuro, Hokkaido, Japan, where they enjoyed their first bath since Nome. For over a week, they had been able to wash themselves only out of a basin; now they shared a tub, pouring basins of hot water over each other. The next day, they flew to Kasimigaura Naval Base in Tokyo. As the Lindberghs’ journey was covered in front-page detail around the world, Japan had prepared for their arrival.

  “Bouquets, cameras, reporters, crowds …,” recorded Anne, understanding for the first time what the throngs must have been like when her husband returned from Paris to New York. A car drove them to the Embassy in town, pushing its way through one hundred thousand people, most dressed in white, shouting “Banzai! Banzai!” The media reported that it was “one of the greatest demonstrations ever seen in the ancient capital.” Scores of letters and cards in beautiful Oriental writing, attached to Embassy translations, awaited them. Most congratulated the Lindberghs on their safe arrival across the Pacific, assuring the
m that their visit would promote aviation as well as friendship between the United States and Japan. For many Japanese, Lindbergh’s arrival was tantamount to a religious experience, thus furthering his cult following. Missionary groups of all sects throughout eastern Asia hoped he might visit them. The Prime Minister received them.

  The Lindberghs spent more than two weeks in Tokyo—indulging in tea ceremonies and banquets when Charles was not inspecting air bases and roughing out the continuation of their expedition. They expected to fly to Nanking and Peking for two weeks, then on to the Philippines. Beyond that Charles was vague, though he was leaning toward returning home by way of Africa and South America. Not only was that the “best-weather route,” but it had become traveled enough to have developed radio communication. It would also allow the Lindberghs to visit South American countries they had not yet seen—Argentina, Brazil, and Chile.

  Anne was homesick. She had counted on returning by fall and confessed in a letter to her mother that she dreamed about “The Baby” every night—“almost.” But she said little on the subject to her husband, feeling it was “such poor sportsmanship—when this is a marvelous experience.” Besides, she had to admit, she did want to see Peking before returning. Mid-September they flew to the southern part of the main island of Japan.

  After the Lindberghs said their sayonaras to the officials in Osaka, Charles made his final baggage check. He was so particular about the order of the equipment in the Sirius that Anne was not allowed to do the final packing. He noticed that the water canteens were out of place, and in setting things straight he discovered an eighteen-year-old Japanese boy stowed away, cramped into the space of the two two-gallon canteens. The Lindberghs asked the officials to be lenient with the boy, who had explained that life was not happy at home, and that he had hoped this great aviator from America would take him there.