Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  Finding a kindred spirit in Lindbergh, Elizalde gave him a brief tour of some settlements of the uncivilized tribes, generally spending a few hours, on one occasion the entire night. “As you know,” Lindbergh wrote Elizalde after his second visit to the Philippines, “I am deeply interested in primitive peoples and the impact our civilization is having on them…. and the ways you are bringing assistance to them. I am thoroughly in accord with your philosophy of making assistance available to these minority peoples, but of not attempting to push them too far beyond their needs and desires.” With every intention of returning soon, Lindbergh asked if it would be possible to arrange for him to “live quietly” among them. Because he slept well on splitbamboo floors and would carry his own blanket, he said he needed only a corner in one of the native huts.

  When Lindbergh returned to Manila in October 1969, he rented a Consolidated-Vultee L-5 from the Philippine Air Transport Service and flew anthropologist Dr. Robert Fox of Panamin to an abandoned logging strip on the northeast coast of Luzon. There, beyond roads and radio contact, he lived among the semi-naked, black-skinned Agta tribe, sleeping on the beach beneath a leaf-sheaved lean-to. During his stay he learned that businessmen from the cities were threatening the lives of the Agta by deceitfully acquiring their territory. “If they keep on taking our land away,” an Agta hunter told Lindbergh through an interpreter, “we will put poison back on our arrows.”

  Lindbergh lived among other tribes the following June, this time bringing Alden Whitman and a photographer. He hoped Whitman would report the crises the aborigines were facing, not only the shady real estate deals in Mindanao, Mindoro, Palawan, and northern Luzon but also the cultural war the “Christian-Filipino world” was waging against them. Lindbergh recognized it as a “war of shame,” one in which the minorities were told they were ignorant, their dress was silly, and their names ugly. Elizalde’s policy was to encourage the tribes to respect their own cultures and to partake in legal services if they wished to remain separate from the rest of the country or in social services if they wished to assimilate. Lindbergh became a director of Panamin.

  On July 18, 1970, he rode with a busload of Panamin officials through South Cotabato on Mindanao. Passing through Surallah, where opposition to Panamin was known to be high, a truck sat before them blocking the road to the next town. The Panamin bus driver blasted his horn and slowed down, but the truck did not move. Instead fifteen men suddenly appeared, armed with automatic rifles. A member of the Philippine Constabulary who worked with Panamin emerged from their bus wielding his automatic weapon, and rifle barrels poked out of every one of its windows. Lindbergh was armed with a 9mm. Swiss HK submachine gun. Gunbolts clicked all round, but the ambush ended there.

  Realizing the tension between Panamin and many Christian settlers, however, Lindbergh suggested to Elizalde that they call on the Mayor of Surallah—who had stood behind the truck that night with a hundred armed men. “No shooting was intended,” he explained to Lindbergh when he and Elizalde returned to the region, “but if anyone had shot, it could have been very serious.” After two or three days together, Lindbergh was made an Adopted Son of Surallah and Honorary Chief of Police, and the Mayor had become an adviser to Panamin. “I remain highly apprehensive,” Lindbergh wrote Alden Whitman; “but as of the time we left South Cotabato, there was a reasonably friendly working relationship between Panamin and the Christians of Surallah.”

  Through his repeated visits to the Philippines, Lindbergh cultivated a cordial relationship with President Marcos, who remained sympathetic to his causes despite growing opposition from businessmen eager to exploit the land. Within a few years, Panamin was able to help the Agta in northern Luzon by establishing a school to teach the children how to maintain their property rights. Panamin also helped the more culturally advanced Taboli in southern Mindanao by sending troupes of their native- costumed dancers to Manila and other countries to display the beauty of their culture.

  During their now occasional visits together, Anne came to understand the hold the Philippines had on her husband. “It is not simply wild-life & wilderness and its preservation,” she wrote in her diary, “… nor is it entirely his study of & fascination with the impact of civilization on primitive life (which one can see there as in few places in the world) but it is also his extreme interest & admiration for what some Filipinos … are attempting to preserve & to build in their country—a multi-racial nation, living harmoniously together & preserving their divergences and dissimilarities.” The country was one great laboratory for Lindbergh, where the laws of human nature could be tested. For all her festering resentment because of her husband’s chronic absence, Charles’s ever-expanding mind never ceased to amaze his wife.

  “I must say Father has really done it this time!” Anne wrote daughter Ansy in April 1972, from Argonauta, where she had just heard on the radio that “Lindbergh & the anthropologists have been living in isolation with … the world’s only surviving cavemen … on the side of a steep mountain deep in this southern Philippine rain forest.” For one of the few times, media reports about Lindbergh did not exaggerate. A cave-dwelling, primitive tribe called the Tasaday had been discovered in the mountainous rain forests of southern Mindanao, a people with but the slightest knowledge of the world beyond their secluded foraging grounds; and Lindbergh helped organize the first expedition into their colony.

  Jumping from a helicopter onto a treetop platform, which Panamin had previously erected in the rain forest, seventy-year-old Lindbergh felt he had leapt through time. “In seconds,” he later wrote, “my environment had transformed from that of civilization to that of a stone-age-cave-dwelling culture. I felt that I might have been on a visit to my ancestors a hundred thousand years ago.” Across a sharp-toothed mountain ridge and a “deep, thorny, rainsoaked valley” loomed the Tasaday caves. The expedition pitched camp in the forest.

  The next morning, Lindbergh and his Panamin colleagues climbed the slippery mud trail until they reached the high caves at the jungled cliff edge. A few small, brown men with black, bushy hair, wearing loincloths, stood at the openings of the caves above. Grabbing at vines, Lindbergh hoisted himself up and into the thirty-foot-deep dwelling, where eighteen people sat around a pair of fires. “No sign of any attempt to improve or modify cave in any way although generation after generation apparently has lived in it—probably for centuries,” Lindbergh noted.

  Observing the Tasaday over the next week, Lindbergh had never seen “a happier people.” The jungle supplied them with all their needs, and they knew of no threats to take anything away. Elizalde managed to ask the tribesmen what they wanted most from the outside; and one of them said, “We do not know what to ask for because we do not know what we want.” When asked how long they had lived in that cave, one replied, “Since time began.” Outside, over the sound of the rain pattering on his tent at night, Lindbergh heard human howls.

  With the discovery of the Tasaday came practical and ethical questions as to how the Philippine government should treat them. Exploitation—from the media and foresters—was sure to follow. Lindbergh recognized that this Panamin expedition helped paved their way; but he also felt that they were in a position to protect the tribe preemptively, for logging roads would otherwise approach their caves within a few years. Lindbergh and Panamin returned to the caves the following month, bringing cloth for blankets and a doctor with medicines. By then, in response to a Panamin request, President Marcos had proclaimed a reserve around the Tasaday. Panamin offered them their choice of futures, isolation or integration. The natives said they would like to remain in their cave culture, as they had since the dawn of man. But within a few months the outsiders proved to have infected the tribe with curiosity, which gradually drew them beyond the forest.

  Lindbergh’s intense interest in the Philippines was as visceral as it was intellectual. While living among the primitives, he found himself stripping his life of “civilized accoutrements” and going native himself. On one of his Panam
in expeditions, he was especially attracted to a young woman. Anne would later discover a photograph of the nubile Filipina, one provocative enough for her to assume that Charles had slept with her. She and her husband never discussed the liaison, just as they had never discussed Anne’s earlier affair with Dana Atchley; but there was no doubt in her mind that it had occurred. Lindbergh had skinny-dipped all his life; but now, back at Tellina, he took to wading nude in the Long Island Sound at low tide, wallowing in the ooze and covering himself in mud, like some primitive man. Then he would splash himself clean and sunbathe in the hollow of the big rock on the edge of the cove, naked.

  His boundless awe of nature drew Lindbergh into searching for its creator. Always a loner rather than part of any flock, Lindbergh had long eschewed formal religion. But in 1971, he retreated one day to the Regina Laudis Priory in Bethlehem, Connecticut, at the suggestion of Anne, who periodically found solace there. Communing with the Benedictine nuns on their pastoral grounds, Lindbergh was surprised, as he wrote one of the sisters afterward, by “the welcome, the singing, the sense of earth, the spiritual atmosphere, and with these qualities, a broadness of viewpoint and sense of humor that result in a character I have never encountered before in a religious organization.” He would return several more times over the next few years, when he felt the need to center himself, a chance to search his soul.

  Lindbergh showed signs of mellowing, appearing more frequently in public, even dressing in black tie without complaint. His non-conservation activities of late were a chary selection from the hundreds of invitations that continued to arrive every year. He accepted the National Institute of Social Sciences Gold Medal Award in 1968 and was made an honorary fellow of The Society of Experimental Test Pilots in 1969. At both ceremonies, his message was not much different from the one he delivered in 1973 at the dedication of the Interpretive Center at the one-hundred-and-ten-acre Lindbergh State Park in Little Falls, Minnesota. From the front porch of his boyhood home, he told two thousand well-wishers, “I believe our civilization’s latest advance is symbolized by the park rather than by satellites and space travel.”

  Although he still had no interest in celebrating the past, Lindbergh took part in commemorative events if he thought the attendant publicity might honor unsung friends. And so in 1968 he accepted, in a private ceremony, an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Georgetown University, largely because of the care with which they curated the Alexis Carrel collection. And after spending several afternoons in Sands Point, Long Island, when his friend Harry Guggenheim was dying, Lindbergh appeared at the 1973 posthumous dedication of Falaise as a county museum. There he spoke to interviewers and strolled freely among the guests through the twenty-six-room Norman mansion where he had written “We,” courted his wife, and found sanctuary from the press with his new bride. Upon reaching his former bedroom, one woman noticed the four-foot-by-seven-foot bed and could not help asking, “General, how did you ever sleep in this bed?” Anne could not resist interjecting, “Oh, he likes to curl up.” That made Charles laugh, all the way down the grand staircase.

  He also made exceptions for the military. In 1969, he attended a reunion in Colorado Springs of the 475th Fighter Group, his war buddies from the South Pacific. And in 1973, he accepted the National Veterans Award, presented on behalf of twenty-eight million American veterans. Both events were happy occasions for him, public reminders that the man many accused of having been a traitor was, in fact, a patriot.

  More than thirty years after his explosive Isolationist statements, Lindbergh still refused to recant anything. And though he said he never cared what the public thought of him, private actions occasionally revealed otherwise. He sometimes blurted out nonsequiturs, which revealed that his fall from grace stuck in his craw. One weekend, while David Read, a young psychiatrist friend of the Lindberghs, was visiting, Charles said suddenly, “Dave, they didn’t pay attention to the rest of the speech.” Noticing that Lindbergh suddenly looked hurt and puzzled, Read asked what he meant. Lindbergh told him about that night in Des Moines in September 1941. “I did explain,” Lindbergh said with great sincerity, “why the Jews would be concerned.”

  Ever since he had become famous, Lindbergh had been aware of false statements about his life and beliefs; and a generation later, many of those mistakes were reappearing in new books and articles. After discussing this problem with his closest new friend, William Jovanovich—a dynamic young publisher who had become president of Harcourt, Brace & World—Lindbergh reread the journals he had kept between 1938 and 1945 and decided to publish them. He believed those two thousand entries were, “to the best of my ability, an accurate record.”

  He cut his six hundred thousand words by a third. While he prided himself on doing no rewriting—not even to correct the occasional bad grammar—several excisions were of an editorial nature. Without fully realizing that some of his comments were anti-Semitic, he intuitively deleted many of them. His admiration for Germany’s accomplishments got soft-pedaled. The result of his labors, which he squeezed in between his travels, was a thousand-page tome.

  The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh was published in September 1970 to great fanfare. It received attention not only in book reviews but also on editorial pages and the front sections of news magazines, reigniting the old America First debate. Reaction to the book fell almost entirely along political lines, echoing prewar attitudes. Lindbergh’s own introduction to the book revealed a stubborn adherence to the beliefs he had voiced decades earlier, a failure to admit any mistakes.

  In order to defeat Germany and Japan we supported the still greater menaces of Russia and China [he wrote]—which now confront us in a nuclear-weapon era. Poland was not saved. The British Empire has broken down with great suffering, bloodshed, and confusion. England is an economy-constricted secondary power. France had to give up her major colonies and turn to a mild dictatorship itself. Much of our Western culture was destroyed. We lost the genetic heredity formed through aeons in many million lives. Meanwhile, the Soviets have dropped their iron curtain to screen off Eastern Europe, and an antagonistic Chinese government threatens us in Asia.

  In reviewing The Wartime Journals for the New York Times Book Review, Professor Eric Goldman wrote perhaps the most objective appraisal that appeared anywhere, evaluating Lindbergh’s style as well as his substance. Commenting on Lindbergh’s visit to Camp Dora, Goldman wrote: “In a five-page entry so moving that it may well find a place in American literature, he cries out against ‘the shame and degradation’ of which nations are capable. He did not add what he might have been witnessing if the United States had followed the leadership of men like himself, who let the finest in themselves be overwhelmed by addiction to the apparent present and fear of the onrushing future.” The book became a solid bestseller and was a semifinalist for a National Book Award. Lindbergh’s fan mail included letters from Nixon as well as Kennedys (“That family—and me—admire you more than anyone,” wrote Jacqueline Onassis). But Wartime Journals did not foster new opinions of Lindbergh so much as reinforce old ones. It did, however, temper some of the long-standing hatred toward him, as it revealed at least a man who had been loyal to his country.

  By the 1970s, Lindbergh was devoting as much time to other people’s writings as he was to his own. While writing “sketches” and chapters of what he was calling an “autobiography of values,” Lindbergh also wrote introductions to books on Maui, the Vanguard rocket, and the Tasaday tribe, as well as Michael Collins’s autobiography, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys. He provided detailed answers—both by mail and in person—to authors researching the lives of many of his friends, from Henry Ford to John P. Marquand; and he was especially generous with anyone writing about Dr. Carrel. Lindbergh championed the work of several authors enough to recommend them to William Jovanovich—including Bruce Larson, who wrote a biography of Lindbergh’s father, and Wayne Cole, who wrote an account of Lindbergh’s battle against intervention.

  Lindbergh
also began to read a new generation of biographies about himself, all of which he found so riddled with errors that he typed up detailed memorandums of the mistakes and filed them with the Library of Congress.

  No writer received more of Lindbergh’s encouragement than his wife. Several ecological pieces she wrote for Life were but a suggestion of the extent to which he impacted upon her work. She credited him further with goading her into a major project, a “companion piece” to his war journals. The process of sifting through more than a quarter century of diaries and letters and editing them into publishable form would occupy Anne for the next decade. She was ambivalent about the process, approving of it in principle but dreading “the reaction, the invasion of my privacy, the publicity, the insultable letters.” The more he pushed her, the more she realized her diaries would be “a counter & filler-in for the misapprehensions & false pictures given by some of the reaction to his.” The first volume, Bring Me a Unicorn: Diaries and Letters, 1922–1928, was published in 1972 to critical and popular acclaim, enough to get her through the next few years of entries, which climaxed with the kidnapping and killing of her child.

  “Even though I have read the last part (1932) six or seven times—perhaps more,” Anne wrote in her diary in April 1972, “I still go blind with tears at places. It is so far in the past and that girl who suffered is not me. She died & was reborn again—slowly. It is because I’m reading about a stranger that I cry.” When the book, Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead, was published the following year, hundreds of thousands of readers felt they were reading about a friend. Another three bestselling volumes would be published over the next seven years, making Anne Morrow Lindbergh one of the century’s most popular diarists.