Anne was a far gentler parent than Charles, ruling by kind example rather than intimidation. In his absences, there was a palpable relaxation at home. “He must control everything,” Betty Morrow observed in her diary, “every act in the house.” Each of the children learned to deal differently with his despotism, as their personalities reflected. Jon was the most deferential, almost always following his father’s rules; as a result, his grandmother observed, “he withdraws into himself.” Land learned to anticipate his father’s demands, finding it easier than rebelling; and his mind often wandered. Even as a preschooler, Scott often escaped into his own world. Ansy was already expressing defiance and exhibiting nervous tics. One of Jon’s schoolteachers commented in a report card on his behavior, which, in fact, summarized the way all the Lindbergh children felt about their father: “The children like him,” she wrote, “but are puzzled by his dreaminess, abruptness, and periodic indifference to them when he is involved in his own plans.”
“They are all apprehensive,” Betty Morrow wrote of her Lindbergh grandchildren, “—never knowing when their father will fall upon them. The atmosphere—the tension in the house is so terrible—that when C. goes off for a day or two—everybody sings!” Increasingly, Anne found herself alone in her room, crying.
Lindbergh hired a series of secretaries, each of whom was given a “policy” statement to study before starting work. “I want to create the impression that I am difficult to reach and away much of the time” was its basic premise. “I will leave posted, by the telephone, the policy to be followed for the day in regard to calls by phone or door, business details, etc.” it read. Even when he was at home, he had what he called “away” days, on which he was to be considered “out” except for those people on the prescribed list.
In late 1946—at age forty—Anne became pregnant for the seventh time. But her morning sickness did not seem the same as with her prior children. Upon the recommendation of her friends Mrs. John Marquand and Mrs. Philip Barry, she visited their physician, a doctor from Englewood who practiced in the city. Renowned as much for his bedside manner as for his medical ability, Dr. Dana W. Atchley discovered that Anne had gallstones. He said the remedial operation was perfectly routine but that it could affect her pregnancy. In the gentlest way, Dr. Atchley asked her to consider an abortion.
After discussing the situation with Charles, Anne elected to proceed with her pregnancy, postponing any surgery until such time that it became mandatory. Then shortly before Christmas—“apparently for no reason at all”—Anne miscarried. “I did nothing consciously to cause it,” Anne confided to her sister Con, “—though I suppose one could make out a good case for it being the subconscious just simply rejecting it. But I cannot help but taking it as an act of mercy.” On Valentine’s Day, 1947, she underwent the necessary surgery—suddenly panicking, thinking she might die.
The operation went without incident, but the experience proved profound in unexpected ways. Anne had discussed her preoperative fears with Dr. Atchley, and he displayed rare qualities of wisdom, humor, and “dry compassion.” When Anne tried to describe these conversations with her husband, he found them difficult to comprehend. “But you’re not the kind of person who needs to go to anyone for help,” he said. “You’re the kind of person other people go to for help.” Anne agreed with him only to end the conversation, for she had long felt otherwise.
During the next few weeks of recuperation, Anne and Dr. Atchley continued their dialogue, which became more intimate—often about Anne’s role as an artist and a woman. He told her that she had “every attribute of an artist except one—& that was the conviction that it was more important to cultivate one’s own garden than anyone else’s.” She countered that she felt that was true of most women; but Dr. Atchley begged to differ, suggesting that this was not about gender so much as about her upbringing—that, as Anne realized, “I had been made to feel that what I did for others was all right but what I did for myself was wrong.” Anne had never met anybody with such piercing insight.
These conversations—usually held during Charles’s long absences—made Anne realize how much she could not discuss with her husband. Having bottled up most of her sorrow and anger for decades, Anne reached out for confidantes. She had long maintained regular correspondences with her mother, sister, sister-in-law, and a handful of old friends. She wrote regularly to her mentor from Smith, Mina Curtiss, and from Cranbrook, Janet de Coux. Like Charles, she kept all their letters and made carbon copies of all her penned replies, which supplemented the diaries she maintained. She received fan letters every week, picking up new followers every time she published a book, article, or poem. Some admirers proved so persistent in either their praise or their pleas that Anne simply could not resist replying. Every now and then, Anne would select one of them and reveal an aspect of her personality long submerged, a doleful little girl who needed a shoulder to cry on.
Shortly after her release from the hospital, Anne left for Phoenix, where she stayed alone in an inn and relaxed. A few weeks later, in April 1947, Charles joined her, and they enjoyed several happy days together. One night, they were invited to Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s desert estate, by the eighty-year-old master himself. In his Autobiography, Wright had recently called Lindbergh “a square American,” praising his integrity and forth-rightness during the prewar years. “And,” he added, “this goes for his brave little wife.” Anne spent her time in Phoenix in constructive thought, sitting at night on top of the flat roof of her cottage, thinking of the mirador in Cuernavaca and how her life had “catapulted” since then. She wondered, “what have I made of it? & will I ever write again? & what I have learned this winter?”
Charles tried to answer her questions by challenging her to write about the changing world. After engaging her with the idea that “contact with post-war Europe was essential to an understanding of all life today, that Europe gave something vital but intangible”—without which nothing less than Christianity, Western Civilization, and Democracy were at stake—he suggested to both Anne and Reader’s Digest, with its ten million readers, that she write a series of articles on postwar Europe, pieces that would require her traveling abroad for a month or two.
Shortly after they returned to Connecticut, the assignment came through. “It is, of course, a wonderful offer—I can go anywhere I want, write what I want, & they take care of all transportation, expenses, etc.—and facilitate everything. It is an ideal way to go,” Anne wrote Farmor. “And yet it is such a decision for me to go & has taken a lot of courage. I hate to leave Charles & the … children … and I feel so shy meeting strange people.” But she knew Charles wanted her to go.
On August 1, 1947, Anne sallied forth, traveling across France, Germany, and England—big cities as well as small towns—for the next nine weeks. It was a depressing journey, as she witnessed destruction and deprivation on a scale worse than she had imagined. “The basic values of our civilization,” she observed in one piece, “are crumbling away like this rubble.” Anne often wrote home of the difficulties of the trip, but her newsy letters revealed a growing inner strength at being able to take care of herself. “I have been lonely,” she wrote Charles just days before boarding the boat home, “it has been difficult. I have made mistakes & yet it has been one of the big things in my life. Of all the things you have given me in life—& you have given me so much—perhaps this is one of the biggest. Your sending me out on this mission alone. (For I should not have done it if you had not pushed me a little & told me I could do it!) I am grateful to you for it. You are always giving me life, life itself. May I make something of it!”
Upon her return, Charles was delighted to see Anne spending so much time in the trailer. She wrote five pieces, which were published in Life, Harper’s, and Reader’s Digest. She even published a poem called “Second Sowing” in The Atlantic Monthly, which drew considerable notice, including a note of praise from Edna St. Vincent Millay. Charles lauded her as well, pleased to see that
his plan had helped her flourish as an artist. But he still did not understand his wife’s demons any better than he did before her European trip. He found her subsequent writer’s block—aborting two novels and abandoning her poetry—utterly incomprehensible.
His nagging and all its attendant tension returned, which only set Anne back further. Melancholy often sent her rushing to Next Day Hill, where she divulged to her mother, for the first time, “the difficulties of her life—being married to such a powerful man as Charles who had never known a woman till he married.” Things had been different when Anne did not assert herself. But her growing independence—which, ironically, came from his encouraging her to find her own voice—provoked greater intolerance. Over the next year, conditions worsened. The love Charles professed in his letters when he was away on his many trips for the Air Force, SAC, CHORE, and Pan American was as constant as the criticism he expressed when he was at home. Having missed the last two Christmases himself, Charles had taken to discouraging his sons from attending birthday celebrations at Next Day Hill, on the grounds that “all family celebrations are sentimental.”
In Charles’s absence, Anne sometimes allowed herself to cry through entire days. When he was home, he monitored her so closely as to infantilize her. “I want so much for you to think me a ‘good girl,’” she would admit to him on days she was so frozen with panic that she could not write. That all his efforts were not enough to inspire her frustrated him even more; and he alternated between being her comforting muse and a cruel scourge. Worst of all, he became a shining example:
In Anne’s absence and the months after her return from Europe, Charles committed to paper some of his thoughts of the past few years. “There are times in life when one feels an overwhelming desire to communicate belief to others, to band together with one’s fellow-men in support of a common cause,” he wrote of his latest impulse. Twice in the past he had felt such a desire—when he had been a young pilot and preached aviation, and a decade later when he spoke against American intervention in “Europe’s internal wars.” In 1948, with mankind “in the grip of a scientific materialism, caught in a vicious cycle where our security today seems to depend on regimentation and weapons which will ruin us tomorrow,” he felt compelled to speak out for a third time.
He wrote close to twelve thousand words, which he divided into two parts. The first contained vignettes from his life, each with a moral. The day at Willow Run in 1943 when he almost went down testing a P-47 fighter because of a faulty pressure gage taught him that “in worshipping science man gains power but loses the quality of life.” The day over the South Pacific in 1944 when he almost went down in his P-38 while confronting a Japanese Zero taught him that “without a highly developed science, modern man lacks the power to survive.” And visiting Germany in 1945 taught him that “if his civilization is to continue, modern man must direct the material power of his science by the spiritual truths of his God.” These experiences led to conclusions in the second part of the book, an essay aimed at breaking that grip of a scientific materialism whose values and standards “will lead to the end of our civilization.”
The core of Lindbergh’s argument was that “the quality of a civilization depends on a balance of body, mind, and spirit in its people, measured on a scale less human than divine.” He warned that science had become as much a victim of its technologists as religion had of its fanatics, that just as the “spiritual truths of Christ and Lao-tzu were perverted by the temporal exploitation of Christian and Taoist creeds, the intellectual truths of great scientists are being perverted by the material exploitation of industry and war. Hiroshima was as far from the intention of the pure scientist as the Inquisition was from the Sermon on the Mount.”
Besides preaching his brand of apocalypticism, Lindbergh had other compelling reasons to publish his tract. It would show that he had served in the war, that he had come to recognize the evils of Nazi Germany, and that he had found religion—a sect of his own culled from his understanding of “the sermons of Christ, the wisdom of Lao-tzu, the teachings of Buddha … the Bible of the Hebrews … the philosophy of Greece … the Indian Vedas … the writings of saints and mystics.” He also used the book to preach against “the godless philosophy and armies of the Soviet.” The man once hailed as a deity appeared eager to claim his place as a human entity and nothing more.
Upon completing his manuscript, Lindbergh asked his friend John P. Marquand, the most successful novelist of the day, to recommend publishers who might be open-minded enough to accept the work from a still controversial figure. Lindbergh sent his manuscript to Marquand’s first choice, the firm of Charles Scribner’s Sons. Within a few days, he received a telegram from Charles Scribner himself, expressing his eagerness to publish it. The contract required the author to accept a low ten percent royalty because of the costs involved in manufacturing so small a book without raising its price beyond the $1.50 they hoped to charge.
In consenting to the terms, Lindbergh asked that one clause be added to the contract, the extraordinary stipulation that twenty-five thousand copies of the book be exempt from royalty. He asked that the amount he would normally earn on those copies be added to Scribner’s promotion budget. Unsure as to the prospects of so unusual a book from so recently reviled an author, Scribner’s printed a cautious ten thousand copies.
Of Flight and Life was published on August 23, 1948, and its first edition sold out within a day. Another forty thousand copies were rushed into print and were gone in a few weeks. The overwhelming majority of the reviews were favorable, including mild astonishment at the quality of Lindbergh’s prose; but the book did not completely rehabilitate him. The New York Times Book Review, while praising the book, could not help quarreling with a few sentences in his three-page preface, which suggested that Lindbergh had been less “partisan” during the America First period than he actually was. And so, reviewer John W. Chase concluded, Of Flight and Life “is the honest expression of one man’s evolving responsibility and his new faith in a time of crisis. It carries emotional currents of high tension. For this reason, it should, perhaps, be approached not only with respect but with caution.”
John P. Marquand, who had never been impressed with Lindbergh’s intellect, wrote him that the book “has filled me with respect and amazement—respect for what you have said and for the clarity of your thought and amazement for your literary skill.” Even one Bernhard Goldfarb wrote to tell him that for years, “I hated you like many others,” but that upon reading Of Flight and Life he said to himself, “maybe after all he must be a great man.” Tens of thousands had their faith in Lindbergh restored, thus readmitting him to America’s pantheon. He would forever have his detractors; but so long as he avoided certain sensitive subjects, people generally kept a lid on their sentiments about him, silently deifying him or demonizing him. His mail turned decidedly friendly again.
Honors and favors also came his way. The Secretaries of the Armed Forces reminded Lindbergh that as a Congressional Medal of Honor winner, he was authorized to ride as a passenger on any scheduled military flight “as a further token of the appreciation of your country for the outstanding service you have rendered the Nation.” The Order of the Daedalians, an organization dedicated to “serving the country and the cause of Air Power,” elected Lindbergh an honorary member. The American Ordnance Association, comprised of industrialists who supported national defense, voted to give Lindbergh its highest award, the Crozier Medal. When General of the Air Force H. H. “Hap” Arnold died in January 1950, Air Force Secretary Symington requested that Lindbergh serve as one of a half-dozen honorary pallbearers at Arlington National Cemetery. The Smithsonian asked Lindbergh how he felt about moving the Spirit of St. Louis toward the opposite end of the North Hall of its Arts and Industries Building to make room for the newly arrived Wright brothers’ plane; Lindbergh had helped settle the dispute between Orville Wright and the museum over its place in the timeline of aviation, and so he considered it nothing less than an �
��honor” for his plane to share airspace with its progenitor.
The Girl Scouts in New Canaan wrote Lindbergh that they wished to name their local “Wing Flight” after him—though he replied that he felt “strongly that it is best not to name such an organization after a living person.” Lindbergh Junior High School in Long Beach, California, wrote that it wished to dedicate its 1947 yearbook to him. In 1951 Little Falls informed him that its newest educational facility was being named Charles Lindbergh Elementary School. Offers of honorary degrees, which he refused, once again streamed in—from such prestigious institutions as Dartmouth College and the University of Notre Dame.
This Lindbergh revival coincided with the twenty-fifth anniversary of his flight. Predictably, Lindbergh refused to participate in any commemorations of 1927; and he declined the many requests for interviews that year. “I hope you will understand,” he politely explained to one reporter, “when I say that I am anxious to continue living quietly with my family, and therefore wish to avoid personal publicity wherever possible.” To the journalist’s executive editor at the Associated Press, he elaborated, “I doubt that it is possible for anyone who has not lived through long periods of intense personal publicity to realize fully the problems it creates and the difficulties involved. I believe that over the years I have come to value the freedoms of privacy as highly as you value the freedoms of the press.”
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