Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  The next month brought forth no new information, only louder arguments about evidence and witnesses that had already been examined. The execution was rescheduled for the week of March 30, 1936. The confession from Hauptmann, which so many had expected since his capture, never came—not even when a newspaper offered him close to $100,000 for his wife’s future security nor when the Governor offered to commute his sentence to life imprisonment for the same confession.

  Then, at the eleventh hour, a confession did come—but not from Hauptmann. On March twenty-seventh, each of the eight members of the New Jersey Court of Pardons received a copy of a twenty-five-page typed statement admitting to the crime. It was written by one Paul Wendel, a convicted perjuror, disbarred attorney, and sometime mental patient. It proved to be fraudulent, but for several days it warranted close scrutiny; and with only minutes to go, Hauptmann’s execution was postponed for another forty-eight hours. When Governor Hoffman told the Attorney General he believed another reprieve might induce the long-awaited confession, Wilentz convinced him that Hauptmann had been given plenty of last-minute opportunities and that this man would never confess. When Hoffman asked about the possibility of accomplices, Wilentz contended that Hauptmann’s naming them would first require incriminating himself, which he would never do.

  “What a miserable mess New Jersey had made of the Bruno Hauptmann case!” read the lead editorial in The Boston Herald on April second. It echoed the sentiments of most of the nation, that the trial of Hauptmann had been a “shocking exhibition”—with a judge who “exercised little control over his courtroom,” where “[y]ellow journalism reached its malodorous climax,” in an environment “which suggested the ballyhooed sideshow of a circus.” But like most of the nation, the editorial did not call for any mercy for Hauptmann. Harold Hoffman became a symbol of politics interfering with justice. “It may be that at first the Governor had some grounds for doubting the correctness of the verdict,” continued the editorial from Boston. “But he has not revealed them. He has not brought forth a shred of evidence to justify his dilatory tactics. The people know as much now about the facts as before he intervened.” A movement was launched to impeach him.

  After another day, the best case that could be presented for Hauptmann came from André Maurois, who raged at the cruelty of preparing a man for his execution three times. “Whether Hauptmann is guilty or not is no longer the question,” he wrote in an article for Le Figaro, which made its way around the world. “The death of a guilty man may be necessary for the good of society. But all civilized people ought to admit that a man who has had the order of his execution countermanded at the last moment, should not then be forced to die.”

  At 8:44 P.M. on Friday, April 3, 1936, Bruno Richard Hauptmann was strapped in a chair in the brightly lit execution chamber at the state prison in Trenton and received three electrical shocks of 2,000 volts. At 8:47 the prison physician pronounced him dead. “HAUPTMANN … REMAINS SILENT TO THE END,” read The New York Times headline the following morning, though, in fact, the executed man left behind a statement he wanted published after his death. It repeated his “innocence of the crime for which I was convicted” and asserted: “Should … my death serve for the purpose of abolishing capital punishment—such a punishment being arrived at only by circumstantial evidence—I feel that my death has not been in vain.”

  Because the Lindbergh kidnapping case ended on an unresolved note, discord over the case will forever linger. Until her death sixty years later, Mrs. Hauptmann petitioned the state to reopen the case; but she found support from neither future governors nor state supreme court justices—one of whom was Attorney General David Wilentz’s son.

  “WHILE APOLOGIZING FOR THIS INTRUDING YOUR PRIVACY WOULD LIKE TO OFFER FULL FACILITIES OF UNITED PRESS OF AMERICA IF YOU SHOULD DESIRE TO MAKE ANY STATEMENT WHATSOEVER IN CONNECTION HAUPTMANNS EXECUTION,” the wire service informed Lindbergh. He made none. Harold Hoffman would persist in privately investigating the case, long after he was voted out of office. He enjoyed some revenge in June 1936, when he chose not to reappoint Colonel Norman Schwarzkopf as head of the New Jersey State Police, believing he had been responsible for the “worst bungled police job in history.”

  Many in the United States thought the execution might trigger Lindbergh’s return; but the postmortems only repelled him further. “There has never been any question in our minds about returning to America,” Lindbergh wrote Abraham Flexner later that year. “I do not want to live under conditions similar to those which existed at the time we left. The crime situation is probably a little better, but the newspapers have improved little, if at all, and I believe it would be difficult for the political situation in New Jersey to be much worse. When Colonel Schwarzkopf was head of the State Police, I had complete confidence in that organization at least. Since it has now become involved in New Jersey politics, we have no longer even that element of stability.”

  “We are very happy in England,” Lindbergh asserted. “At least we are able to read and think about things which are both pleasant and interesting.” So secure did they feel at Long Barn, the Lindberghs ventured into public. Since their arrival there had been invitations from leaders in aviation, medicine, and government. American Ambassador Robert Bingham’s dinner offers usually included the option of spending the night at the Embassy. The Lindberghs became frequent guests of Lady Astor, who took to inviting them for tea or dinner at 4 St. James’s Square and for weekends at their magnificent country estate, Cliveden.

  The Lindberghs’ landlords provided the greatest entrée of all. A friend of the new king, Harold Nicolson informed Lindbergh that His Royal Highness “would be very glad” to resume the acquaintanceship they had formed during two meetings in 1927, after the flight to Paris. Pleased with the invitation, Lindbergh hoped to arrange for a private audience; but he insisted on one condition: “I have spent a large portion of my life in a country where such a thing [as a top hat] would be immediately shot off,” he wrote Nicolson, “and while I wish as far as possible to conform with the customs of England, I still feel quite strongly about this particular item. I did once, under pressure, wear one of these things, but fortunately none of my friends ever found out about it.”

  On May 12, 1936, the Lindberghs met the King at a “tea” given by the assistant Military Attaché for Air in the United States Embassy in London. Edward VIII arrived with a lady friend, Mrs. Ernest Simpson, an American, whom Anne felt was “not beautiful and yet vital and real to watch,” one of “the few authentic characters in a social world—one of those who start fashions, not one of those who follow them.” Lindbergh and the King had but a few minutes to speak privately before a circle of all the other guests had formed around them. Three days later, a message arrived from St. James’s Palace, inviting the Lindberghs to dinner.

  May twenty-seventh was Derby night, and the King celebrated with a party for eighteen—including Lord and Lady Mountbatten, Prime Minister and Mrs. Stanley Baldwin, and Mr. and Mrs. Simpson. Although Anne was easily the most accomplished woman at York House that night, she reverted to her insecure self, feeling, “Nothing I said mattered.” Charles, utterly relaxed despite having to wear a tail coat and white tie, said little and, as usual, became a center of attention. Afterward, Charles told Anne he got a strong sense from Edward VIII “that he frequently wishes that he could stop being King and have some of the freedom which other men can have.”

  These occasional sips of the high life reminded Lindbergh why he preferred to abstain. Enjoying more privacy in their marriage than they had ever known, Charles and Anne felt that they had awakened from their four-year nightmare. Holding hands, they walked for miles across their fields each evening, delighting in the flowers and the birds. His dry but corny sense of humor returned. He and Anne ate all their meals with Jon; and Charles taught him the first stanza of Robert Service’s “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.”

  Long Barn became everything Hopewell had been meant to be. Anne settled into a new book, a
n account of their 1933 journey from Africa to America. Charles became more interested in aviation than he had been in several years. While the business had suffered because of the airmail crisis in 1934, technology had surged. The companies that regained their footing were already taking their planes to new heights, speeds, and destinations.

  Both Pan American Airways and Trans World Airlines asked Lindbergh to return to their payrolls as Technical Adviser. He refused them both, feeling he could not accept such a position so long as he saw “no possibility of maintaining a home in the United States to which I am willing to take my family.” His participation with both companies, however, hardly diminished. If anything, his correspondence about aviation increased while he was in Europe—especially with Pan Am, whose officers he kept apprised of the latest European developments in aircraft, air routes, and airports. He also got Pan Am and TWA to work together in solving the problems of pressure cabins. And by the end of the following year—only ten years after the Spirit flew the Atlantic—Lindbergh was reviewing bids from eight manufacturers for the construction of one-hundred-passenger airplanes that could make the same crossing—aircraft whose cruising speed would be two hundred miles an hour with a range of five thousand miles or more, and a payload capacity of twenty-five thousand pounds.

  In addition to his other scientific interests, Lindbergh used his time in England to visit aircraft manufacturers and landing fields. He was appalled that “the country which produced the Industrial Revolution” had allowed much of its aviation industry to rust as it had. It appeared to be a country looking back at the glory of its Navy instead of ahead to the importance of an Air Force. And yet Lindbergh found pockets of progress, especially in military designs, some of which surpassed American planes. That spring, Lindbergh placed an £1800 order with Phillips & Powis Aircraft Ltd. in Reading to build a low-wing monoplane with an American Menasco engine of 250 h.p. A redesign of an existing model—with modifications by Lindbergh—it would have two cockpits in tandem with a sliding roof, orange wings, a black fuselage, a cruising speed of 170 miles per hour, and a range of one thousand miles. The manufacturers promised delivery in August.

  For the weekend of April twenty-third through the twenty-sixth and again for a long weekend starting June fifth, the Lindberghs visited Pierre Lecomte du Noüy—a biophysicist, philosopher, and former colleague of Dr. Carrel—at his country house outside Paris. There they also met Carrel’s wife, Anne, a large woman with thick gray hair parted in the middle and pulled back off her strong face. Both Lindberghs felt an instant kinship with her—“She has a woman’s emotion, quick intuition and understanding,” Anne wrote in her journal, “and yet a man’s breadth of mind, breadth of view, clarity of vision, impersonality of attitude (the scientific attitude).”

  Charles was even more impressed, however, with Mme. Carrel’s unexpected interest in the occult. Going outside for a walk that Sunday, he found her looking for her wedding ring, which she had lost. In order to find it, Mme. Carrel sketched a map of the grounds where she had been walking earlier; then she held over the paper a small pendulum—a weight on a string—which kept zeroing in on one particular area. Lindbergh and Anne Carrel walked along the path in the direction of that spot. “Soon Mme. Carrel took the lead,” Lindbergh would later record of the event, “with the pendulum in her hand which she held in front of her. About 200 yards from the house, and in the area which she had located, the pendulum began to swing in circles.” Mme. Carrel said that the ring was near. Within two minutes the pendulum was “swinging violently,” and when they looked down, there it was. That afternoon Mme. Carrel instructed Lindbergh in the ways of the pendulum; and by the end of their visit, he proved to be unusually gifted in its use. He found himself increasingly drawn to mystical phenomena.

  Other than the Carrels and their friends, however, little in France impressed Lindbergh positively. The flourishing nation that had apotheosized him a decade earlier had gone to seed. “I have never before been in a country which has so definitely given me the impression that a change of some kind must take place,” he wrote Henry Breckinridge. “There is an air of discouragement and neglect on every hand, and people seem to be waiting almost from day to day for something to happen.” French cities showed obvious physical disrepair, political corruption, labor unrest, fuel shortages, store closures, and overall lack of leadership. “There is a wonderful feeling of peace and stability in England,” Lindbergh wrote a former colleague at the Rockefeller Institute on July 4, 1936, “but it is shaken a little when one crosses to France and finds, in a country so near, such fear of military invasion, such depression and such instability. England now seems to need an ocean instead of a channel on the East.” Greater danger lay beyond France.

  SHORTLY BEFORE the Lindberghs had moved abroad, the United States Army had appointed Major Truman Smith—a Yale graduate and career officer with a longtime interest in German history—to be Military Attaché to the American Embassy in Berlin. The chief responsibility of the handsome six-foot-four career soldier was “to report to Washington about the growth of the German army, including the development of new weapons and new battle tactics.” Smith was soon alarmed, for he recognized that Germany was erecting a new military force in the air—the Luftwaffe—and that American intelligence had gathered little information about it. To make matters worse, the Ambassador—an academician, William Dodd—displayed little interest in military matters; and Washington, accordingly, did not appreciate the magnitude of the German buildup. An infantryman, Smith realized he needed an aviation expert to help him size up the Luftwaffe.

  One Sunday morning in May 1936, Smith’s wife pointed out a squib on the front page of the Paris Herald about Charles Lindbergh’s having just visited a French airplane factory. It occurred to Smith that Lindbergh might be just as willing to inspect German air factories.

  Smith broached the subject of such a tour to the German Air Ministry and was informed within the day that approval for such a visit had come from the highest levels, Hitler’s number-two man and Air Minister, Hermann Goering, and his chief assistant, State Secretary Erhard Milch. Fearing that the Germans might use the visit for their own propagandistic purposes, without revealing anything new, Major Smith asked his German counterpart to specify what combat units, factories, and bases they would show such a distinguished visitor as Lindbergh. The list included a number of air installations not yet seen by any American. Never having met Lindbergh, Smith mailed his invitation in care of the assistant air attaché in London, assuring Lindbergh that his visit would be interesting, private, and “of high patriotic benefit.”

  Lindbergh was intrigued. “Comparatively little is known about the present status of Aviation in Germany,” he wrote his mother of the unique opportunity, “so I am looking forward, with great interest, to going there. Even under the difficulties she has encountered since the war, Germany has taken a leading part in a number of aviation developments, including metal construction, low-wing designs, dirigibles, and Diesel engines. If it had not been for the war she would probably have produced a great deal more. On the other hand, if it had not been for the war it is doubtful whether aviation would be as far advanced as it is today.”

  Lindbergh requested only that the proposed dates of the visit be changed, so that he could keep appointments he had already with Carrel and a Frenchman who was reputed to have exceptional powers in the use of a pendulum. The Germans complied, suggesting the last week of July and insisting that the Lindberghs attend the August first opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games in Berlin, as Goering’s special guest.

  Only in the last month had Lindbergh requested a reappointment in the Air Corps Reserve, so that he could become “immediately effective in case our country is ever involved in war.” Because of that military status, he was being invited as a civil guest of Lufthansa, the German commercial airline, rather than as a guest of the Luftwaffe. Much of the program the Air Ministry assembled for Lindbergh pertained to commercial aviation; but according to th
e man who initiated Lindbergh’s visit, there was no mistaking this as anything but a military mission.

  Borrowing a Miles Whitney Straight from Phillips & Powis, Lindbergh and his wife flew on July twenty-second from England to Berlin, landing at Staaken—the military airport. Fifteen huge German bombers and a phalanx of heel-clicking officers were on hand to greet them. The president of the Air Club of Germany welcomed Lindbergh in the name of the entire German aviation community. The Lindberghs were driven into town separately—Charles in an open car with Truman Smith, to the reminiscent sound of a cheering crowd, while Anne rode with his wife, Kay. Germany appeared recovered from the Great War. A sense of festivity, even superiority filled the streets, which were draped with the red-and-black Nazi flags. Past the Brandenburg Gate, Anne noticed young slips of trees planted in perfect rows. The Lindberghs stayed with the Smiths in their apartment; and Charles found his host an unusually “able and perceptive army officer.”