Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  One day in August, when the Lindberghs were grounded, the media lost sight of their whereabouts altogether. By nightfall, rumors of their demise had spread. At ten o’clock, Reuters in London teletyped, “IT IS REPORTED HERE THAT LINDBERGH HAS CRASHED AND BEEN KILLED IN GREENLAND.” The rumor avalanched into a global sensation, a major news item that had to be retracted, making the press themselves realize how reckless they became when writing about Lindbergh.

  Another day in Holsteinsborg, where Charles was returning from a flight over the fjords, Anne watched a group of children run out to greet the plane as it descended from the sky onto the Davis Strait. “Tingmissartoq! Tingmissartoq!” they shouted, Inuit for “the one who flies like a big bird.” On their last day in Greenland, after hearing the cry throughout their stay, the Lindberghs asked a young Eskimo to paint it on the fuselage of the Lockheed Sirius.

  On August fifteenth the Tingmissartoq left Greenland’s east coast for Reykjavik, Iceland. After the five-hour flight across the Denmark Strait, they found the waters in the harbor too rough to reach the capital city. A British aviator named John Grierson, then flying the northern route from England to America, came to their aid. He commandeered a ferryboat and brought the Lindberghs and their plane to a mooring near the hangar where his plane was lodged.

  They spent a week in Iceland, circumnavigating the entire country before flying on to the Faroe and Shetland Islands. A five-hour flight over the North Sea brought them to Copenhagen. During their week in Denmark, mobs snowballed as word of their presence spread. Charles wanted to visit Sweden, but he knew the arrival of its favorite “son” would unloose festivities beyond his desires. To shake the press, he and Anne steered the Tingmissartoq south for several minutes before radically changing course and making their way for Stockholm.

  After a few days in the city—where the Lindberghs were able to enjoy some of its restaurants, parks, and museums before photographers and crowds began following them—Charles quietly arranged to visit his ancestral home. On September seventeenth, they flew to the island of Karlskrona, in southern Sweden. A man met them in a motorboat, brought them ashore, and drove them into the Skåne countryside. They arrived in the village of Gårdlösa, a scattering of white houses with red roofs and green doors, as night was falling. There was still enough light to see green fields and windmills along the rolling hills in the distance. At last they arrived at a white house which made up one side of a cobblestoned courtyard; barns formed the other three sides. Far from any reporters, Lindbergh had reached the home-site of Ola Månsson.

  Charles and Anne crossed the road to visit another farm, where they met a man whose grandfather had known Lindbergh’s grandfather. He gave Charles a pair of Ola Månsson’s eyeglasses, which Månsson had evidently sent seventy years earlier as payment on a debt. He also presented Lindbergh with papers written in Månsson’s hand, complete with his signature. Lindbergh autographed a book for the family, and the matriarch hugged it. When it was time for the Lindberghs to leave, all the people in the neighborhood gathered around them in the dark courtyard. As one of them shone a light from a bicycle on Lindbergh’s face, they broke into the Swedish national anthem.

  The Lindberghs toured Europe for another two months, taking in Finland, Russia, Estonia, Norway, England, Ireland, Scotland, France, Holland, Switzerland, Spain, and Portugal—all potential airline gateways to the New World. Charles devoted much of his time to airport inspections and meetings with heads of foreign airlines, while Anne enjoyed the role of tourist. Together, they saw a ballet from the royal box at the opera house in Leningrad, attended a banquet in their honor in Moscow, and met the King of Norway in Oslo. They also spent a week in Wales with Anne’s sister and Elisabeth’s new husband, who were preparing for their imminent move to California for her health. At the Berkeley Hotel in London they bumped into Jean Monnet, an old Morrow friend, who spoke of his fears about America under the new president: “Roosevelt is trying to bring about social reforms in a period of reconstruction,” the French economist said, “and that is fatal.”

  For Charles, the happiest moments abroad seemed to be when he was alone with his machinery. One night in Inverness he came in from having spent six hours in a cold rain, fixing a broken cable on the plane, which was anchored on the river Ness. Tired and soaked to the bone, he told Anne, “I’d a hundred times rather spend an evening like this than one in New York.”

  On October twenty-sixth the Lindberghs slipped into Les Mureau naval base on the Seine; but once they entered the lobby at the Crillon in Paris, there was hardly a moment during the next week when Charles did not go unnoticed. “Tiens! C’est Lindbergh!” cried Parisians on the boulevards. “They still regard him as a romantic young boy—the Fairy Prince,” Anne wrote Elisabeth shortly after their arrival. “Women bang at the door of his car, crowds collect as he leaves the hotel.” With mixed emotions, Anne found that she was often ignored, for the French did not connect her with Lindbergh. “They simply can’t think of him as married,” she observed. “It is like a famous movie actor. He is Romance.” The constant hysteria surrounding him in France made Lindbergh talk seriously of giving up aviation and of never visiting another major city again.

  He charted their journey home. The Tingmissartoq took them to the Azores, more than eight hours out to sea from Lisbon. Once there, however, Charles discovered that the harbor at Horta was too small for them to take off with the full load necessary to reach Newfoundland. He hoped to find a larger harbor on another of the islands, at Ponta Delgada. When it too proved inadequate, Lindbergh replotted their route, charting the equatorial waters between Africa and South America.

  Anne had had enough. “I am homesick for my baby,” she told the press at Horta. “It’s time my husband took me home.” But Lindbergh remained strangely noncommittal both to the reporters and to his wife. He would say only, “My time is my own.” Ironically, once the Lindberghs had at last decided to conclude their journey, they encountered one unforeseen obstacle after another.

  They turned southward and inland, toward the bulge of Africa that came closest to South America. They stopped in the Canary Islands and what was then the Spanish colony of Río de Oro on the African continent before proceeding to the Cape Verde Islands, two hundred miles closer than any port in Africa. Huge ocean rollers made landing extremely difficult; and Lindbergh realized that taking off from there for South America in their overloaded seaplane would be impossible.

  He decided to forfeit their two-hundred-mile advantage and fly with a light load of fuel back to the West African coast—to Dakar, in Senegal. The Lindberghs were about to leave when they were informed by telegraph of an epidemic of yellow fever there. They learned of a safe port where they could land just one hundred miles south of Dakar—Bathurst, in British Gambia, where the Gambia River meets the ocean. They encountered absolutely no trouble putting the Tingmissartoq down on the river’s gentle waters. That stillness would prove to be a curse.

  As opposed to their predicament in Cape Verde, the Tingmissartoq would need more wind or wave chop to help lift the plane’s pontoons “on their steps,” especially with the added burden of extra fuel necessary for a sixteen-hour flight. Bathurst, during that season, typically provided no wind whatever. The Lindberghs lightened their load, leaving behind such nonessential Arctic items as sealskin boots and even their anchor.

  They tried to take off from their glassy runway five times that day. During each attempt, Charles worked the controls in silent frustration, not even communicating to his wife. The stillness kept them from even an attempt the next day. Lindbergh spent the day after that, December fifth, jettisoning more of their load—food, tools, sleeping bags, practically all their clothes. He even went into the plane with metal shears to cut a gasoline tank out of the fuselage. Later that night, while out walking, Anne noticed her handkerchief fluttering in the wind. A few hours later, with the rising of the moon, they made what would have to be their last attempt before settling on another route home altogether.
After an unusually long run in semidarkness, the plane splashed across the water, then spanked it many times, before the pontoons rose from the sea.

  Sixteen hours later the Lindberghs spotted the Pan American barge at Natal, on the bulge of Brazil—1,875 miles from Bathurst. It was three o’clock in the afternoon local time, and steaming hot. Feeling punch-drunk as she got off the plane, Anne let herself think of Christmas at home with her son Jon.

  Lindbergh promptly learned, however, that Juan Trippe wanted him to return to New York by way of Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and all the other major Pan American stations along the way. Mindful of his wife’s anxiety, Lindbergh told her he too wanted to go home directly and that they would stop only where necessary. At that, it would be almost another week just getting out of Brazil. Even though Anne was desperate for the travel to end, Charles announced that they would be going via Manáos, a thousand miles up the Amazon.

  They might very well have lingered in the jungle were it not for an unpleasant encounter outside a rubber factory. An American approached the Lindberghs and thoughtlessly blurted, “You know, we were the first to hear of the kidnapping here!” It was an unpleasant smack of reality after nearly six months of living virtually unattached from the rest of the world.

  The next day, the Lindberghs left Brazil for Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, despite a torrential rain. It was one of the few times even Charles conceded to Anne that it was “Bad stuff!”—the sort of weather through which he generally chose not to fly. Months later, he learned that their departure through cloud-covered mountains had given birth to a jungle myth: Just after the Tingmissartoq had passed over a band of Waiwai natives, a bolt of lightning had struck the chief’s house, running down one of the hut’s poles, singeing both his son’s head and daughter’s backside, melting the head of his hunting spear, and splintering a floorlog that they used as a ceremonial seat. Because, as one anthropologist explained, “There is no such thing in the jungle as coincidence,” the tribal explanation for this phenomenon was that the god Makanaima, upset with the Waiwais, had created a great mosquito to buzz over them, inflicting this fiery sting.

  Despite Anne’s anxiety, Charles took another week getting them to Miami by way of Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo. They received a telegram from The White House within hours of their December sixteenth arrival on American soil. “WELCOME HOME AND CONGRATULATIONS UPON THE SUCCESSFUL COMPLETION OF THIS, ANOTHER FLIGHT MADE BY YOU IN THE INTEREST AND FOR THE PROMOTION OF AMERICAN AVIATION,” wired Franklin D. Roosevelt. “I HOPE THAT OUT OF THE SURVEY YOU HAVE MADE NEW AND VALUABLE PRACTICAL AIDS TO AIR TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATIONS WILL COME.” The Lindberghs thanked the President for his surprising interest in their trip.

  The Tingmissartoq’s pontoons splashed down into Flushing Bay, Long Island, at 7:37 on the evening of December 19, 1933; and the media blitz on the Lindberghs’ lives resumed. A flotilla of speedboats carrying motion picture and still photographers, reporters, and radio interviewers closed in on them, one of the boats cutting so close that the plane rocked dangerously. Although they had been gone five months and ten days (to the minute)—during which time they had logged 29,781 miles and linked four continents—it was as if the Lindberghs had never left.

  With the rapid advances in technology, the journey marked an end in a period of aviation, one which Lindbergh believed “was probably more interesting than any the future will bring.” The perfection of machinery, he observed just a few years later, “tends to insulate man from contact with the elements in which he lives. The ‘stratosphere’ planes of the future will cross the ocean without any sense of the water below.” Wind and heat and moonlight takeoffs would no longer concern the transatlantic passenger. Before the year had ended, Lindbergh called his friend F. Trubee Davison, president of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, to offer the Tingmissartoq and all its accoutrements—down to the Lindberghs’ can of insect repellent. For years it hung in the museum’s Hall of Ocean Life, where it became one of the museum’s most popular attractions. After another few years at the Air Force Museum in Ohio, it found a permanent home as part of the Smithsonian Institute’s collection of aircraft.

  Despite his aversion to New York City, Charles had taken of late to saying, “The only place where I’d feel content leaving a baby” was in an apartment. And so, in January 1934, the Lindberghs moved to 530 East Eighty-sixth Street. Their penthouse had two terraces, a river view, and a feeling of privacy and security. Jon, then sixteen months old, slept but a room away from his parents. Around the corner, Anne located a nursery school, to which she walked Jon and the dogs every morning. Jon was young, even for this playgroup; and yet Anne felt that she and Charles lived in a strange world “where we are ‘different,’” and the sooner Jon was sent “into it … and with the youngest possible children, the easier it will be for him.” She found the apartment conducive for finishing her book about their expedition to the Orient and for starting a National Geographic article about their trip to Greenland. Busy settling in, the Lindberghs refused an invitation to a large informal reception on the night of February first at the White House. Had Charles been more politically savvy, he might have attended the event, for the President evidently had aviation on his mind those days. One week after the event, he realized just how much.

  On February 9, 1934—without any warning—President Roosevelt annulled all domestic airmail contracts between the government and more than thirty airlines. He claimed that there had been criminal conspiracy in awarding the contracts, and he ordered the Army to assume responsibility for carrying the mail. The root of the problem lay in the spoils system—specifically, the New Dealers suggested, the payoffs of their Republican predecessors.

  In anticipation of Roosevelt’s taking office, the lame-duck Congress had established a special Senate committee under Senator Hugo Black, Democrat from Alabama, to investigate airmail and ocean-mail contracts. In his preliminary investigations, Black learned that former Postmaster General Walter Folger Brown had dispensed numerous contracts at a “clandestine conference,” capriciously and corruptly. While most people in aviation recognized Brown’s vision had done as much to galvanize the industry as any other force, his unilateral, dogmatic practices left much to criticize.

  The Black Committee went into session in September 1933, requesting the financial records of every important player in aviation. Even before the Lindberghs had returned from their recent tour, he had been asked to submit itemized statements of all his cash and stock transactions with airlines since 1924. Audits of some companies’ books revealed that certain contracts had been awarded to the least desirable bidder—United Aircraft and American Airways among them. As a result, a United executive testified that his $253 investment in the company was now worth $35,000,000; a TWA executive testified that his company had paid a competitor over $1,000,000 not to bid on an airmail award. After hearing a few such gross examples, and assured that Army pilots were capable of flying the mail, Roosevelt revoked all the existing contracts.

  The results were devastating. The aviation industry on the whole, many argued, had solidified during the Depression because of Brown’s work, though most of the companies were still struggling, paying down their initial debts. Transcontinental & Western Air, Inc., for one, was still posting losses after more than three years of operation—$1,270,973 since incorporation, and over $5,000,000 if its predecessor companies were counted. In all that time, nobody had received a bonus nor had any stockholders received dividends. Company salaries had never exceeded $20,000. What the Black Committee was overlooking, TWA President Richard Robbins wrote the new Postmaster General, James A. Farley, was that “there has been created in the United States of America the greatest air transport system in the world. In this development our company has played a leading part.” TWA, he said, was still committed to that development, prepared to spend another $3,500,000 purchasing the newest and finest flying equipment. All their financial planning was predicated on their governmen
t contracts. In the name of his employees and over twenty thousand stockholders, he asked the administration to reconsider its decision.

  The company’s most famous employee and stockholder was incensed, convinced that the President had thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Lindbergh believed in the integrity of the people who ran TWA and knew how they had sacrificed to get the company off the ground. He had never taken part in any contract negotiations, but he felt he could not “remain silent in the face of action so unconsidered, drastic, and unfair.”

  “Your action of yesterday affects fundamentally the industry to which I have devoted the last twelve years of my life,” Anne wrote, starting off a draft of a telegram Lindbergh would complete. In it, he insisted on a point greater than TWA’s or his own benefits—the right to a fair trial, where honest parties could assert their innocence. “THE CONDEMNATION OF COMMERCIAL AVIATION BY CANCELLATION OF ALL MAIL CONTRACTS AND THE USE OF THE ARMY ON COMMERCIAL AIR LINES,” Lindbergh concluded with certainty, “WILL UNNECESSARILY AND GREATLY DAMAGE ALL AMERICAN AVIATION.” Lindbergh sent his 275-word telegram to the President, simultaneously releasing a copy of the text to the press.

  Stephen T. Early, secretary to the President, was dispatched to attack the messenger not the message. He told the press that the President first read Lindbergh’s telegram in that morning’s newspaper, before it had even reached his desk, and that Lindbergh had thus violated the usual courtesy of allowing the President to receive communications before the media. Because there was little the Roosevelt administration could dispute in Lindbergh’s argument, Early accused Lindbergh of sending the message strictly for “publicity purposes.”

  Initially, most of Washington sided with the power of the presidency. Even a Farmer-Laborite congressman from Minnesota said Lindbergh was “like a small boy trying to aggravate the President with a beanshooter”; Senator George Norris, a Nebraska Republican, referred to the signing bonus Lindbergh had received when he first joined TWA, and declared, “At last Colonel Lindbergh is earning the $250,000 stock fee and other fees he received from the aviation industry for use of his name. The public long has wondered just what Colonel Lindbergh really did for the tremendous payment revealed as going to him by the airmail investigating committee. Now we know.” Despite these early efforts to dismiss Lindbergh’s attack as the work of a lobbyist, nobody challenged the truth of what he had to say.