There Was Only One Lindbergh

...s The Future That Doesn't Work...

...The result: more disastrous publicity as two headstrong and convinced characters fought it out...

...Franklin Roosevelt and Harold Ickes made a huge mistake when they figured that Lindbergh was just a power-hungry candidate to become a Fascist gauleiter...

...An open-air person, he had disliked Washington ever since being forced to live there as a boy when his father was in Congress...

...He wanted to effect a reconciliation between the Germans and the British in order to face the bigger menace from the Communist East...

...Louis, Charles A. Lindbergh took himself discreetly out of the country...

...Hasn't anybody told them about the First Amendment...

...Harry Schwartz Plop Plop, Fizz Fizz What government should and shouldn't do about medical costs...

...No such villainy will take place if the FTC has its way...

...As a matter of fact, Lindbergh had become disenchanted with what had happened to flying even before 1967...

...In the short term, of course, Hitler was by far the greatest threat, but today, with the Communists breathing down our necks in Cuba, Southeast Asia, and Angola, to say nothing of at the Berlin Wall, the Lindbergh view of the prolonged struggle in the Europe of 1914-1945 as a suicidal civil conflict makes complete sense...

...If it had been left to a contest of weapon against weapon, and if Hitler had not had the stupidity to sink himself in Russia despite the warnings of his generals, Germany would surely have won the war...

...When l said something about the military "genius" of the Nazi general in charge of the invasion, Smith scoffed...

...revulsion to the demands of fame quarrelled inevitably with his sense of duty, explaining the "now you see him, now you don't" pattern of his life...

...He converted her, not vice versa...

...Of course, if you were dying of incurable cancer, you might think the something to be done would be a doubling or tripling of spending on research about your particular type of malignancy...

...His John Chamberlain, a personal friend of Lindbergh, is now a columnist for the King Features Syndicate, and was formerly the daily book reviewer for the New York Times...

...Lindbergh, of course, turned the offer down...

...Walter Ross, author of the temperate The Last Hero, is, to date, the only understanding biographer Lindbergh has had...

...He haunted the game parks of Africa, troubled that his contributions to aviation might have brought the extinction of great beasts closer...

...Secretary of Air...

...Total national health expenditures grew from $42.1 billion to $139.3 billion during the same period...

...Though he had a tremendous affinity for machinery as a boy, and thought of himself as a scientific mechanist in the tradition of his mother's family (his maternal grandfather, a dentist, invented the porcelain cap), Lindbergh was always at bottom a natureloving mystic...

...There were never "two Lindberghs," and in this year of the golden anniversary of a pioneering flight, it is time to put the old cliches to sleep for good...

...A few are professional sadists and spoil sports or secret members of the Women's Christian Temperance Union or one of its fellow-traveler organizations who think the high cost of health care is the lever that will get the old 18th Amendment and glorious Prohibition reinstated...

...The Charles A. Lindbergh Fund Committee, which hopes to raise $5 million for a Memorial Endowment Fund, is headed by estimable men--James A. Doolittle, who led the first bombing raid on Tokyo, and Neil A. Armstrong, the first person to walk on the moon--whose characters Lindbergh had always admired...

...In his fifties and sixties the forms of life become more and more of a transcendent wonder to the person who had thought himself a mechanist when young...

...While diners, including his old reporter friends Deke Lyman of the Times and Carl Allen of the Herald-Tribune, were cheering his name at a dinner on Long Island near the shopping center that was once Roosevelt Field, Lindbergh was busy searching for a menaced breed of rhinoceros in Indonesia...

...Apparently something dreadful happened in 1966 which unleashed the inflationary monster...

...Louis II commemorative flight in five or six hours in a comfortable Pan American Boeing 747 along the same great circle route that Lindbergh pioneered, in the original Spirit, in thirty-three-and-one-half wracking hours...

...When she saw the medal, Anne Lindbergh called it the Albatross, but Lindbergh could not have turned it down without prejudicing his mission of trying to belp German Jews...

...And here are these FTC jokers trying to prevent all the pitchmen, even the pharmacist, from telling us what's good for the blahs...

...He faded from sight for long periods, working for Pan American Airways, raising a family of five children, competing with his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, as a stylist in writing his own books, and pursuing his growing interests in the world of nature...

...But what Lindbergh could not know was that the British had, through a Polish mechanical genius, obtained a complete duplicate of the Nazi encoding machine...

...Jon was the world's most wanted underseas diver and now raises land-locked 6 The Alternative: An American Spectator May 1977 salmon, I~nd ranches in Montana, and Scott, the youngest boy, is an animal psychologist in France, specializing in monkeys...

...Cost containment" is the magic phrase to mention early and often if you find yourself at a cocktail party or a massage parlor with a group of health apparatchiks...

...But one of the means originally suggested to entice six-figure donors would surely have sent him looking for other rare rhinoceri as far from New York as he could get: the proposal to stage a Spirit of St...

...This was three weeks before storm troopers began smashing Jewish shops...

...You know, the people who put announcers to such tasks as putting tablets in glasses of water and pronouncing poems of purest ecstasy over the fact that tablet A dissolves one-tenth of a second faster than tablet B. Yes, it's the over-the-counter drug industry, the good people whose cheap products save us so much money every year in avoiding visits to doctors and hospitals...

...The intensely individual Lindberghs have been all over the lot pursuing their several interests...

...He would have taken Washington as a wartime duty, but not in peacetime at the sacrifice of his freedom to speak out...

...Although he had always been a most private person, resenting the intrusive demands made by other Americans on his time and energy when he was a "public" figure, Lindbergh always had a secret love affair with his country...

...Here in standard bureaucratic prose is the Carter Adrninistration's description of the health care cost crisis as given in President Jimmy's budget revision statement last February: "National health spending per person has more than tripled during the last decade, from $212 in 1966 to $638 in 1976...

...Smith, an infantryman, did not consider himself a proper judge of air power...

...The idea was to let Lindbergh speak to Goering as one aviator to another in hopes that Goering, no anti-Semite, would commend the proposition to Hitler as a pragmatic way of solving the "Jewish problem...

...The daughters, Ansie and Reeve, write sensitive poetry, fantasy, and short stories...

...He missed the old seat-of-the-pants cross-country flying...

...After the 4car, in which he flew many quiet missions against the Japanese in the Pacific even though he had only test pilot civilian status, the private person in Lindbergh finally got his wish...

...He had advised his sonJon, a deep sea diver who had been trained as a Navy Frogman, to try something more challenging than aviation, which had become "too automatic, too push-button...

...But Franklin Roosevelt had other ideas...

...At a truite au bleu dinner in the mountains near his home in Vaud, Switzerland, in 1961, he remarked to friends that he had more fun exploring for the sources of the Rhone River in a Volkswagen than he did flying a jet...

...This led to more disagreeable publicity as he was entertained, in his quest for information, by Nazi air force bigwigs...

...As he once explained to a fellow flyer, he couldn't stand being pawed...

...Very politely he wrote me a long letter explaining exactly why he preferred to work incognito...

...When we talk about illnesses these days, we usually discuss either esoteric and exotic ailments like Legionnaires Disease or virtually nonexistent diseases like swine flu...

...But the biographers wouldn't leave him alone...

...The FTC is worried that one of these companies might want to advertise that its tablet or pill or lotion or cream or whatever might be good for the blahs or for the trots or for that horney feeling you get every once in a while...

...The Nazis, he said, had twenty generals who could have pulled off the coup...

...To him, the first continent-to-continent trans-Atlantic flight was an old story...

...What call did a mere American have to lecture Britain on its duty to rearm...

...Harry Schwartz, author of The Case for American Medicine and many other books, contributed as essay o. British health care to R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...

...The solution would seem to be obvious: Find out what inflationary monster was let loose in 1966, get rid of it, and health spending per person would zoom down again--maybe not all the way to $212, but $300 ought to be The Alternative: An American Spectator May 1977 7...

...Lindbergh had done his part by imparting correct military intelligence...

...There persisted the legend of the two Lindberghs--one, the aviation genius, and, two, the "totalitarian" personality who, allegedly, had admired the Nazis...

...He saw World War II as the culminating phase of a civil war inside Western civilization...

...I learned in the forties about the nature of Lindbergh's missions through Colonel Truman Smith, who had returned to Washington after his stint as military attache in Berlin...

...The Alternative: An American Spectator May 1977 5 The truth is that Lindbergh went to Germany in the thirties on patriotic, pro-democratic, and even pro-J ewish missions set by the State and War Departments of two countries, the U.S...

...He could exasperate pragmatic activists by taking the long view in situations where less philosophical souls felt they were up against the gun...

...In May 1967, on the fortieth anniversary of his famous New Yorkto-Paris flight in a single-engine Ryan monoplane, The Spirit of St...

...But when Lindbergh substantiated Churchill, it was quite another...

...When, as a girl in the benighted sixties, she voiced doubts about American democracy, Lindbergh--the alleged anti-democrat--argued "long and intensely" that her "starry-eyed" Leffish friends failed to appreciate the advantages of a "correctible democracy...

...Blinded by the stereotype, the Lindbergh biographers have gone on repeating each other in forgetting nothing about the animosities of the late thirties, when America was polarized over the enigmatic question of its world duties...

...He had written two books about it--and, as his one decent biographer Walter Ross quotes him, "it's not that era any more, and I'm not that boy...

...The idea was unrealistic, given Hitler's madness, but it was an idea held by such American worthies as Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman, and Bob Taft...

...The legend was summed up recently in a few sentences in Parade magazine: "He was an instant hero whose heroism was tarnished by flaws in his character and the character of the American people ...an opinionated celebrity to whom the rich and influential listened as if his knowledge of politics...equalled his knowledge of aviation...

...The trouble Charles Lindbergh had in behaving as a public figure is that he despised the role in the first place...

...At a later date Colonel Smith put me on to the existence in the Yale University Library of his diary of Lindbergh's German missions, urging me to read it as the answer to such biographers as Kenneth Davis...

...Such language isn't used on drug labels whose authors are all born-again Puritans...

...and France, which had good reason to worry about Hitler's growing strength...

...The purpose of the Fund, to provide fellowships in the fields of aviation, aerospace technology, conservation, wildlife preservation and exploration, would surely satisfy Lindbergh's protean soul...

...Louis' s flight, Lindbergh is entitled to retrieve a reputation for total integrity...

...Each over-the-counter remedy will have a few prim, standardly phrased claims authenticated on the label and that's all the advertisers are going to be able to talk about...

...This would naturally have silenced him as a critic...

...The astonishing story of how this machine helped the British to listen in on every German decision of importance through four years of war, enabling them, for example, to hold North Africa by duping Rommel and sinking his gasoline supply ships, was not told until after Lindbergh's death...

...The Federal Trade Commission is striving with might and main to protect me and you and you and you...

...But General Albert Wedemeyer, who translated for Lindbergh on one of his German missions, says that Lindbergh was entirely accurate...

...I begin with this remarkable event because the chief topic of health conversation these days is no longer the grim toll taken by cancer and heart disease or something serious like that...

...When Churchill warned the British of Hitler's growing power, it was one thing...

...Roosevelt tried to bribe Lindbergh by suggesting, through an emissary, that he might become the first U.S...

...Even when he had to flee to England to protect his family, he knew he would be coming back...

...The charge that Lindbergh malevolently overestimated Nazi strength in order to scare the democracies into surrender was spread all over Washington in the days immediately preceding Pearl Harbor...

...Smith, like Lindbergh, got the name of being pro-Nazi because he was the bearer of the bad tidings of Nazi power...

...The forces of evil against whose machinations the FTC is struggling so fiercely are those friendly folk who do so much to support television, the networks and the independent stations both...

...Lindbergh who had stood with Senator Robert M. LaFollette in trying to avoid entanglement in World War I. A characteristic of all the Lindbergh men, from Charles' emigrant grandfather who had tried to abolish flogging in Sweden on down to Lindbergh's three sons, Jon, Land and Scott, is the stamina to go their own way oblivious to what the world might say...

...When others were looking back to the days of his cross-ocean flight, he was off to the Philippines to help his friend, Manuel Elizalde, Jr., in a crusade to protect the Tasadays, a stone-age tribe...

...He had become an Albert Schweitzer in his reverence for life...

...But the message eluded Leonard Mosley when he came to write his biography, in which Lindbergh figures as Goering's unpaid publicity man...

...Amusingly, Scott treats his monkeys in the family tradition, letting them go out from protected quarters "into the nature" ("clans/a nature") as they please...

...Every pharmacist I've ever met is prepared to give you an instant diagnosis of your version of the blahs and to suggest one of his better profit margin non-prescription remedies to do what needs doing...

...They could not understand a dedicated apolitical man...

...The availability and use of new medical services account in part for rising spending...

...The fact that Lindbergh had made those five trips to Nazi Germany before coming home to make speeches for America First is conclusive evidence to Kenneth Davis, author of The Hero: Charles A. Lindbergh and the American Dream, and to Leonard Mosley, the English writer of Lindbergh: A Biography, that Lindbergh was anti-democracy and, if not anti-Semitic, at least insensitive to the rights of Jews...

...His books include Farewell to Reform and The Enterprising Americans...

...I incorporated the evidence that Lindbergh went to Germany on a pro-Jewish mission in something written for National Revww, and was gratified when the New York Times picked it up for a front-page story...

...What we do about the blahs, the trots, or that homey feeling will be our business...

...Health care costs too much and something's got to be done about it...

...A later mission, concocted by Smith and Ambassador Hugh R. Wilson, was designed to help Jews leave Germany with enough of their possessions to start life elsewhere...

...And it usually works, I've noticed...

...He spent a lot of time trying to save the blue whale...

...When I wrote a column about his triumph, he was disturbed...

...Brought up in an atmosphere in which individualism was encouraged, it is small wonder that Reeve, the youngest daughter, cannot possibly understand how biographers such as Kenneth Davis see her father as a "totalitarian" personality...

...The Nazis had just invaded Norway...

...The sons, like Lindbergh himself, are outdoor characters...

...Having watched the shilly-shallying of France and Britain close up, he wanted passionately to keep the U.S...

...In the course of their meeting Goering decorated Lindbergh with the Service Cross of the German Eagle for his transAtlantic flight and his services to aviation...

...In trying to keep America out of war, Lindbergh was following the example of his father, the ten-year Congressman C.A...

...I was introduced to Smith, a crusty and forthright character, by Hal Horan of Time magazine on a memorable day in front of the old Navy Department building...

...Lindbergh hated politics, but his sense of duty pushed him into the America First movement...

...Surely, in this fiftieth anniversary year of the Spirit of St...

...Alas, Europe was coming apart in the late thirties, and his sense of duty impelled him to inform the West about air power development in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia...

...But anybody with a micron of intelligence knows that aspirin and Dristan and Rolaids and the kindly pharmacist who sells them are the most effective weapons we have to date against rocketing health care costs...

...So what would Charles Lindbergh, if he had lived, have had to say about the massive preparations for celebrating, this coming May 20-21, the fiftieth anniversary of his 1927 exploit...

...Following the example of his own father and grandfather back in Minnesota, Charles Lindbergh let his children find their own way...

...He had premonitions, even when young, of another realm behind the veil--premonitions that were reinforced by his experiences as a test pilot who, on occasion, narrowly missed death...

...out of a war he thought no one in the West could win...

...But the people who talk this way are usually very healthy, and besides they see chances for getting better jobs or bigger research grants as part of the push to cut health costs...

...Anne Morrow Lindbergh is the foremost personal essayist of our day...

...He wanted no publicity for his efforts, for he felt he could do a more effective job for conservation by working behind the scenes...

...The head reels to think of the millions of dollars being spent on lawyers' fees alone in these incredible proceedings...

...Of course the drug companies are complaining and fighting, and even as I write, hearings on these momentous issues are going on in Washington...

...He succeeded by private entreaty in getting a big American whaling company to refrain from slaughtering whales on the endangered species list...

...Lindbergh saw what he saw, and was badly disillusioned when the British and the French did little to act on the information...

...Without cost restraints, Federal spending for Medicare and Medicaid alone would climb 75 % between 1978 and 1982, from $38 billion to $66 billion...

...It was Smith who invited Lindbergh to come to Germany to make some informed estimates of the Nazi air manufacturing capacity...

...One cannot be sure...

...He couldn't dodge the spotlight when his first child was kidnapped and murdered, but when tabloid news photographers persisted in running a teacher's car off the road in order to get a picture of his second son he decided he must leave the country for a haven in England to get a little peace for his family...

...His biographers, particularly Mosley, show little knowledge of the depth and sincerity of the American Midwest's natural pre-war isolationism...

...Nevertheless much of the increase has resulted from health cost inflation...

...Even as I write these words, a titanic struggle is underway in Washington, D.C...

...he could not have done the work of the mysterious Pole, Richard Lewinski, who, for ten thousand pounds and a British passport, built a magic box for the British MI-6 that gave the Allies almost perfect foresight through four years of uphill struggle...