Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  At Next Day Hill, Lindbergh revealed that he was taking his family to England because of the threats against their lives. He had no intention of changing his citizenship, he asserted, merely his residence. Lyman recognized the gravity of this story and asked why Lindbergh had not called any number of other respectable journalists. Lindbergh explained that he wanted the story to be “as dignified and accurate as possible” and that the Times had given him the most cooperation during the difficult past few years. He offered Lyman this exclusive, complete with details of his flight from America, on the condition that the Times hold the story until the Lindberghs’ ship was twenty-four hours at sea. The reporter agreed.

  On Saturday, December 21, 1935, Lindbergh called Lyman to say his ship was sailing at midnight. Later that evening, when the reporter was sure the paper had been put to bed, he revealed his scoop to the city editor. The editor wanted to run the story immediately, but Lyman got him to accept the terms to which he had agreed with Lindbergh.

  At 10:30 P.M. that Saturday night, Charles, Anne, and Jon said good-bye to Grandma Bee, Constance Morrow, and the staff at Next Day Hill and got into the chauffeured limousine. Accompanied only by Anne’s new secretary, Margaret Bartlett “Monte” Millar, they rode in silence to a mostly deserted dock at West Twentieth Street in Manhattan, their ghostly faces flashing in and out of the dark under the streetlamps. Not even the crew of the American Importer knew the identity of its only passengers as the Lindberghs marched in absolute silence up the gangplank and down the corridors of the forward deck to their rooms.

  Monte Millar shook hands with the Lindberghs and left them to settle into their home for the next ten days. As she disembarked, she could not help thinking, “There was something holy about it all …” Not for several more hours, during which Anne lay awake listening to the noise of other ships, did the American Importer set sail.

  Deak Lyman remained in the city room until he learned that the ship had departed. He returned the next day to write his story. The only man who could explain why the nation’s hero felt compelled to leave his homeland, Lyman wrote that the threats against Lindbergh since his flight to Paris had severely escalated over the years. His story omitted only the specifics of the Lindberghs’ “flight” plan. Lyman’s pages were handled with the utmost secrecy, bypassing copyboys as they went directly to the paper’s most trustworthy typesetter. It was later reported that no outgoing telephone calls from the Times had been permitted while the story was going to press.

  The Lindberghs had enjoyed their first day at sea—sitting on the sunny deck and taking their meals in their cabin—when the Monday issue of The New York Times hit the streets.

  LINDBERGH FAMILY SAILS FOR ENGLAND

  TO SEEK A SAFE, SECLUDED RESIDENCE;

  THREATS ON SON’S LIFE FORCE DECISION

  read the front-page, four-column headline that crowned Deak Lyman’s description of the Lindberghs’ passage. “The letters are coming once more, the demands for money, the threats of kidnapping and murder,” concluded the eloquent 1,750-word article, which would win Lyman the Pulitzer Prize; “and so the man who eight years ago was hailed as an international hero and a good-will ambassador between the peoples of the world is taking his wife and son to establish, if he can, a secure haven for them in a foreign land.”

  PART THREE

  13

  RISING TIDES

  “Western civilization—how I had taken it for granted before I came

  to Europe! It had seemed as immortal as life does to early youth.”

  —C.A.L.

  THE LINDBERGHS WERE AT SEA.

  Their crossing would take nine days; beyond that, their future was virtually uncharted.

  The American Importer encountered a bad storm mid-Atlantic, reconciling the ship’s three passengers to a largely cabin-bound journey and a quiet Christmas. Charles did not look back for a moment. As he wrote Henry Breckinridge, he had no intention of returning Stateside until he felt that his three-and-a-half-year-old son could live there “in safety and under reasonably normal conditions at home and at school.”

  The tempest the Lindberghs faced mid-ocean was not as great as the one they left behind. Deak Lyman’s account of the cloaked departure of America’s hero launched a massive public discussion about the dismal state of the nation. “I should say that the reaction … was overwhelmingly one of consternation and sympathy,” wrote Lindbergh’s friend Harry Guggenheim. “Your leaving America as you did, so quietly and so suddenly, just seemed to cast a gloom on our nation,” wrote a mother from Syracuse, one of countless people he had never met who wished him Godspeed. Journalists and their readers decried how they had forced Lindbergh into exile. Even William Randolph Hearst, whose newspapers had been among the most offensive, proclaimed that “it is extremely distressing and discouraging that this grand country of ours is so overrun with cranks, criminals, and Communists that a splendid citizen like Colonel Lindbergh must take his family abroad to protect them against violence.”

  The Lindberghs rose early on December 31, 1935, in Liverpool’s harbor. It suddenly seemed as though this hegira might be for naught, as a frenzied gauntlet of photographers gathered at the gangplank. Anne descended a few paces ahead of Charles, who carried Jon in one arm—the boy’s hat brim pulled down, partially covering his face. On their way to the Adelphi Hotel in town, where they would spend the night, Anne heard newsboys in the streets crying, “Lindbergh in Liverpool!”

  The next day, Aubrey Morgan motored the Lindberghs to Brynderwen, Llandaff, Wales, just west of Cardiff. In the privacy of their own apartment in the Morgan manse, surrounded by gardens, they promptly acclimated to their new surroundings. “No fear of the press trespassing on the grounds—or eavesdropping—no fear at night putting Jon up to bed—& then running up to see if he is all right,” Anne wrote Charles’s mother after but a few days in the Welsh countryside. “We have been bothered very little and seem to be left quietly alone here, both by people & press.”

  For weeks, the Lindberghs’ plans remained indefinite, as Charles talked vaguely of living in England or perhaps Sweden or France. They received unsolicited offers from strangers and friends to stay with them, some from as far off as the Archduke Joseph Francis in Budapest. From Aberdeenshire alone came two proposals—one from Lord Sempill offering his Craigevar Castle, the other from a “poor fisher woman” offering the “warmest corner of our home and heart.”

  Charles and Anne spent a few nights in London, where Lindbergh found to his amazement that he could walk the streets unmolested. One day, they watched the funeral procession of King George V from their window at the Ritz Hotel; on another occasion they dined with Harold Nicolson, who mentioned that he owned a property not an hour outside London that he was looking to lease. Lindbergh was reluctant to live so close to the city; but London’s apparent lack of violent crime opened his mind to that possibility. After several discouraging weeks house-hunting in the countryside, they agreed to inspect Long Barn, the Nicolsons’ “tumbled-down … cottage” in The Weald of Kent.

  Their twenty-five-mile drive to the southeast that last week of February was not as pastoral as they had hoped. But upon passing through Sevenoaks, their outlook brightened. Only the sound of singing birds greeted them as they opened the gate of the old, rambling house, “screened from the road by low feathery trees.” Anne and Charles walked to the back where they discovered the two main blocks of the house created a court. Looking down the hill on which they stood, they beheld beautiful gardens and fields and farms as well as a tennis court and swimming pool—“all quiet, all country, all still.”

  Harold and Vita Sackville-West had lived in Long Barn for almost twenty years before their recent move to nearby Sissinghurst Castle, which they had restored from a pile of Elizabethan ruins into one of England’s showplaces. Long Barn displayed their renovative powers as well. A melding of three cottages and a barn, this two-story house rambled without plan. First built in 1380 of oak beams from salvaged ships, its roo
f sagged from age; its floors sloped, its walls slanted, and its passageways staggered between steep spiral staircases. There was no hall upstairs, so that each of the seven bedrooms opened into the next, often at odd angles.

  The Lindberghs giggled upon entering each room, wondering what irregularity they would encounter next. Charles joked that he would enjoy bringing a drunk through the house, for it was without any two lines that were either parallel or perpendicular. Layers of dust had settled on the broken lamp shades and the old palm-leaf fans; and visible cracks in the windows and walls created drafts everywhere. Water had obviously leaked in as well, for several pictures were stained and the paint on the walls was curling. Before they left the house, Charles had only to nod to Anne and say, “Of course there’s no question about it—it’ll do!”

  Within two weeks, the Lindberghs had signed a half-year’s lease—for £45.15s a month—and made themselves at home. The only setback at first, Anne noted, was that it was all “too beautiful and I woke up each morning feeling detached and weekendy—like a guest.” They arranged for two of their dogs—Thor, the German shepherd, and Skean, the Scottish terrier—to be shipped overseas, on the Queen Mary. “I am afraid they have not appreciated the honor,” Charles wrote his mother.

  Although the lamp-plugs did not fit into the sockets, doors did not lock, toilet chains seldom functioned, and worms had eaten away at much of the furniture—the Lindberghs quickly adjusted to their house. William Caxton, England’s first printer, was reputed to have been born at Long Barn in the 1420s, and it was rumored that his ghost could be heard at night, clanking away at his printing press. But Vita Sackville-West assured them that she had not had a single supernatural encounter in the house in her two decades there. The Lindberghs realized that those noises they heard in the night were just mice living in the walls or bats in the bedrooms.

  Rearranging furniture and moving in some of their personal belongings, Charles and Anne made Long Barn their own. They hired a small staff, including a plain-looking, red-haired nurse, who, Charles kidded, “lowers our standard.” Harold Nicolson assured him that they would live there undisturbed by any of the local citizenry, except for the Chief Constable of Kent himself, who would occasionally drop by for a cup of tea, simply to ascertain whether or not they were “being bothered by curious and vulgar people and whether he can give you more police protection.” There was no need. Except for one scuffle with photographers, the press left them alone. Winston Churchill asked Nicolson to tell Lindbergh that he would be welcome to lunch with him at Chartwell, his nearby estate, whenever he wished. But the Lindberghs never pursued the invitation.

  Not since he quit college to take up flying had Lindbergh felt the opportunity to make such a “fresh start” in life. Cut off from most of his former business and social connections, he hired a secretary and winnowed away many of the commitments from his past. In his study at Long Barn, Lindbergh sometimes went weeks doing little else but dictating letters for hours at a time. Late at night, he often went to Anne’s smaller study to catch up on more mail, handwriting personal letters—on blue onionskin paper from Smythson’s. He continued to make and file carbon copies of even his most trivial dispatches, as he instinctively felt the need to keep a complete record of his thoughts and activities. He asked Henry Breckinridge not to destroy any of the mail, not even the envelopes, sitting in sacks in the attorney’s New York office. “Sometimes the most unimportant looking scrap of paper turns out to be of great value to the police,” Lindbergh explained. “They tell me that they quite frequently find that seriously threatening letters are preceded by other communications.”

  While Lindbergh’s relationship with Henry Breckinridge waned—especially after the lawyer entered politics and never made good on a $20,000 personal loan from Lindbergh—three friendships deepened in his absence from America, all with men he felt were involved in nothing less than advancing civilization. He conducted a massive correspondence with Harry Guggenheim, for one, writing about the citizens’ committee against crime in New York, which Guggenheim had been asked to chair. The two men also continued their epistolary conversation about rockets. Several institutions, including the California Institute of Technology, were trying to win the support Guggenheim had been lavishing solely on Professor Goddard. Lindbergh, however, persuaded his friend that Goddard alone would develop the rocket better than any team could.

  Believing the rocket had entered its most interesting period of discovery, Lindbergh also corresponded as much as ever with Goddard. After but a short time abroad, he saw enough political unrest to suggest the possibility of war in Europe. And so Lindbergh asked Goddard to consider the martial applications of the rocket, for it could “carry explosives faster than the airplanes, farther than the projectile.” In their unguarded correspondence, Lindbergh and Goddard agreed that “the rocket is inherently an offensive rather than a defensive weapon,” specifically in the areas of long-range shelling and high-speed planes. In no time, Goddard shared with Lindbergh his vision of “liquid propellant rockets of high speed such as we are testing here [in Roswell], capable of being directed to air craft from the ground by radio, or automatically in flight by infra red rays, the explosive charge consisting of the remainder of the propelling charge.”

  The third great relationship that sustained Lindbergh while he was abroad was with Dr. Carrel. As management of the Rockefeller Institute passed from Simon Flexner to a more bureaucratic Dr. Herbert Gasser, Carrel was being nudged into retirement. Gasser disapproved of the research scientist’s high profile, a public image that became sullied by new interpretations of his writings. Carrel’s admiration of Mussolini for his “building up of a great nation,” for example, read differently now that Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia. Other comments about civilization collapsing, modern nations saving themselves “by developing the strong,” not “by protecting the weak,” and his concern for the “salvation of the white races” sounded alarmingly like statements being uttered by Hitler.

  Carrel liked to display his boldness in almost everything he said, sometimes just for their shock value. (According to one of his colleagues at the Rockefeller Institute, Carrel once kidded that “if he had to live his life over, he would have become a dictator in South America.”) In truth, Carrel was an elitist who believed in a disciplined society; but he was appalled by both genocide and anti-Semitism. He was simply alarmed by what he considered the rapid decay of the democracies of the world, which he attributed to a diminution of faith. “He had no love for Nazism, Fascism, or Communism,” wrote a friend of Carrel, “but he knew that their ideologies gave those nations an ever-flowing source of energy. By contrast, the democracies seemed to have discarded faith, and there lay the cause of their weakness and inefficiency.”

  Carrel wrote to Lindbergh about creating a foundation devoted to “the study of man.” It was meant to consider: the use of voluntary eugenics in the building up of a stronger human race; procedures to increase the nervous resistance of the individual; psychological, physiological, and chemical factors of spiritual growth; the problems of longevity; social and economic conditions that are “indispensable to the life of an elite”; the possibility of raising human intelligence above its present level; the genesis of great leaders. The outline of Carrel’s plans—as broad-scoped as it was high-minded—appealed immensely to Lindbergh, giving him license to take a scattered-fire approach to science for a while and see if he hit anything worth pursuing.

  Upon his departure from the Rockefeller Institute, Carrel would return to his native France, maintaining an apartment in Paris but preferring to live on an island off the Brittany coast. In letters, he and Lindbergh discussed the Institute for Man, and everything else under the sun; one of Lindbergh’s epistles grew to fifty-six pages. As Lindbergh dabbled in a series of scientific studies, he never failed to rush to Carrel with his results.

  Lindbergh’s latest scientific work spanned a broad spectrum. He modified his organ perfusion apparatus; he studied infra-red ra
ys so that he might develop an instrument for their projection and measurement; and he read up on genetics. With a growing interest in immunology, he studied gibbons and gorillas, which drew him to texts about animal life in Africa. Combining his interests in aviation and medicine, Lindbergh corresponded with doctors, hospitals, and government agencies around the world, as he considered the possible uses of aircraft in connection with the control of locust on the savanna, tsetse fly research in Tanganyika, and yellow fever research in Entebbe. His original work in organ perfusion got him to thinking about “artificial hibernation”—reducing the respiration and pulse rate of an animal, producing different states of consciousness. He read up on sleep, hypnosis, anesthesia, even Indian mysticism and yogic meditation.

  So transfixed was Lindbergh by all his new study, he was virtually oblivious to the topic dominating the news at home. In the months following the October 1935 rejection of his appeal, Bruno Richard Hauptmann found swelling public support for his case. Such champions of justice as Clarence Darrow, H. L. Mencken, and Eleanor Roosevelt all issued public statements—not asserting his innocence so much as questioning his guilt. After studying the eleven volumes of trial transcripts, Governor Harold Hoffman launched his own investigation of the case.

  The day before Hauptmann was to be electrocuted, Hoffman granted a reprieve of thirty days. In so doing, he wrote Colonel Schwarzkopf and announced to the press, he was not expressing an opinion as to the guilt or innocence of Hauptmann. It was more, he asserted, that “I am impressed by the evident anxiety of so many people to hurry him to his death when too many questions are still unanswered which he may help to solve.” Hoffman focused his action on one aspect of the crime—the complicity of others. “I do not believe,” he said, “that this crime was committed by any one man, and there is ample evidence, direct from the record, that the chief witnesses and those who were engaged in the prosecution share my belief. The fact that others are implicated does not provide an excuse for Hauptmann,” he added, “but neither does it excuse any official from doing his full duty in bringing every other participant to the bar of justice.” Hoffman ordered Colonel Schwarzkopf “to continue a thorough and impartial search for the detection and apprehension of every person connected with the crime.”