Lonely Eagle

...It was this experience of the complexities of social life, some suggest, that drove him to science: "The young Lindbergh," notes Hertog, "learned to value the clean-cut language of science and precise methodology of his physician grandfather . . . whose laboratory in Detroit provided him with a refuge from relations and controversies he could neither control nor understand...

...He would have been shocked...

...By 1963, he would tell his friend the philanthropist Harry Guggenheim: The idea of racial inferiority or superiority is foreign to me...

...Louis...

...He was present at the moon shot in July 1969, lauded by all for his contributions to air and space travel...

...Chester Bowles, then an advertising executive...

...His last flight took him to his home in Hawaii, where he supervised the digging of his grave and made plans for his funeral, concerned with drainage details at the gravesite, and insisting that his coffin's lining be biodegradable...

...He ginned up commissions for her, pushed her out on assignments, and tried to protect her from household distractions...

...As his daughter Anne would say later, "We never knew whether father was coming or going, and it didn't really matter, because whether he was there or not, he always made his presence felt...

...As a natural scientist—a Darwinian in his orientation, and not a lawyer or diplomat—Lindbergh believed aggression was a fact of life...

...The man she describes does sound a great deal like the Old Testament deity: protective, all-knowing, loving, and stern...

...By that year," writes Berg, "radio, telephones, radiographs, and the Bartlane Cable Process could transmit images and voices around the world within seconds...

...In his courage, restraint, and amazing good looks he was the idealized image of a young American...

...He came to believe that 'Science held the key to the mystery of life, science was truth, science was power.' With this key, he would later write, man 'could taste the wine of the Gods, of which they would know nothing.'" Flying was his entree to the pure heart of science, bringing him close to mechanics and nature, the two worlds to which he best related...

...The small, flimsy planes, with their low range and exposed cockpits, their sweeping views of the clouds, and the landscape beneath them, gave unparalleled access to nature...

...Having worked unstintingly for the American military throughout the Second World War, Lindbergh continued after the war his deep involvement in aviation and defense issues...

...The American antiwar movement of the 1930s, which Lindbergh began to lead almost immediately, had several faces...

...there was Norman Thomas, the premier American socialist...

...Each day with him was a rigorous exercise, with small events tied to large issues...

...Without his 'rational' mind and his commanding presence, there was nothing for her to push against," maintains Susan Hertog...

...As his daughter Reeve explains, he didn't just fly, "he became the airplane...

...His fame cost them their first child, and the scar of the trial...

...If civilization is to continue, modern man must direct the material power of his science by the spiritual truths of his God...

...He was unreserved in his admiration for Germany's scientific advances...

...In May 1945, Lindbergh was one of the first civilians to set foot inside conquered Germany, on a mission to seek information on Nazi rocketry programs, before the Russians could get to them first...

...Rich now for life, they planned joint careers of high purpose...

...I can't feel inferior or superior to another man because of race, or in any way antagonistic to him...

...Doubtless, both pictures are true...

...future president of Yale Kingman Brewster...

...Clearly, there were "better" and "worse" isolationists...

...Science, he saw, did not guarantee morals or wisdom...

...A man so complex, in some ways unknowable, is perhaps better seen from a number of angles, and all the important ones are now at hand: the comprehensive biography by Scott Berg, now out in paperback...

...His antiwar work had put her on the rack...

...he paradox starts early in the story: The young man who landed in Paris wasn't just the apple-cheeked farm boy of press reports but the offspring of a line of eccentrics, people described by Berg as "prideful to the point of arrogance . . . so evangelical as to appear fanatical, so global in their vision as to be short-sighted . . . rebels so far apart from the rest of society as to be above the law...

...More trips followed in the next three years, and with each, Lindbergh was impressed at how the German forces became stronger, and the French and British governments more effete and lethargic...

...Youthful and lively into his seventies, he might still be among us, had he not fallen ill with lymphoma...

...But the move put them in easy reach of the Continent, where Hitler was building the German armed forces—in particular, the air arm, the Luftwaffe...

...Morgan and Company, to an ambassadorship to Mexico (where Charles and Anne met), and a seat in the United States Senate...

...In this sense, it was Lindbergh who had interests that were "not American...

...But I am saying that the British and Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war...

...He did not want to see France and Britain defeated by Germany...

...He was calmest in practical crisis, and grew restless during quiet periods," says Reeve, noting that he was at loose ends when there was no threat against which to shelter his family...

...Even Anne, who had planned earlier to "live as a widow" found that once she was one, she could barely function without this stubborn, inspiring, maddening man...

...future Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart...

...And if race—language, culture, bloodlines, religion—did not mean a standard of values, then what was race good for...

...And people still do, and perhaps always will...

...This was not only incendiary at a time when anti-Semitism was one country's lethal national policy, but it was an affront to the core idea of American nationhood, which is of one country composed of differing peoples who profess a common civic creed...

...I spoke of her father...

...Power, to be successful, must be backed by morality," Lindbergh would write in the late 1940s...

...And in this unusually good-looking young avi-ator—of apparently impeccable charac-ter—the new technology found its first superstar...

...He was not capable of the ethnic slurs or racial 'jokes' I heard occasionally at the homes of other suburban Connecticut children...

...In Camp Dora, he saw his mistake, and it changed him forever...

...Lindbergh was not an anti-Semite, he only sounded like one, which in that time was sufficiently dangerous...

...and socialists, who objected to saving imperialist powers, considering the difference between England and France, on the one hand, and Germany and Italy, on the other, to be one of degree...

...But increasingly, he looked on science, and his branch of it, as a sinister element: "While missiles have opened to our knowledge unexplored reaches of space, they have made our civilization subject to extermination within hours...

...The sight of this hellhole cheek-by-jowl with a monument to modern technological progress shook Lindbergh to his marrow...

...And he could not see how it was—though his anguished wife tried to explain it to him—that he had allied himself with anti-Semites when he said at an America First rally in Des Moines in September 1941 that American Jews, in calling for intervention, did not have America's interests at heart...

...He did want Germany to defeat Russia, if it came to a battle: His great hope had been that Hitler and Stalin would busy themselves with each other, and leave Western Europe alone...

...In some ways the perfect feminist husband, he gave her the much-longed-for Room of Her Own (he bought her a trailer) and insisted she work in it often...

...I am not attacking either the Jewish or the British people...

...I would rather have one of my children marry into a good family of any race than into a bad family of any other race...

...He went there with his mother, Evangeline Land, a high-school teacher and child of a Detroit physician, a dissatisfied daughter of the middle prairie...

...Weeks later, the murdered infant's body was discovered in a nearby ditch...

...for science, for mankind, for history...

...Active in student chapters of America First were Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., who would die in the war in a suicide mission (but not brother John, whose hero was Churchill...

...They managed to find peace for awhile—at Long Barn, the recently vacated home of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson...

...An indefatigable man of science, who besides his aviation exploits helped make possible organ transplants with a pump he invented in the 1930s, Lindbergh late in life turned on this passion, spending his last years protecting virgin forests and primitive tribes...

...They came home, and settled down in New Jersey, where a son was born to them...

...I must plan, as a widow, to augment my life...

...In choosing his course, he was true to his roots—his father's views were eerily similar—but Anne had been turned against hers...

...Lindbergh then wed an American princess, Anne Spencer Morrow, daughter of Dwight Morrow, whose legal skills had lifted him from scholarly poverty, to a partnership in the firm of J.P...

...The Prince of Wales-JFK of the late 1920s...

...Reeve on the other hand recalls the unbroken conversation of years that went on between her two parents, the incessant sharing of values and concepts, the long working sessions, when, for hours and hours, they went over each other's books...

...These were not, after all, his civilized brethren...

...without seeing the dangers involved...

...Not until the assassination of Kennedy three decades later would the world be so stunned by one criminal act, so shocked by the way fate could turn on the fortunate...

...Two arms of the meritocracy were thus conjoined...

...Anne spoke of Charles...

...Never mentioned at home, the kidnapping remained a dark undertow, bringing them into touch with dementia...

...On March 1, 1932, Charles A. Lindbergh Jr...

...He would not have been able to laugh at the hopelessly ignorant jokes...

...there were pacifists, who objected to all use of force...

...The newlyweds flew round the world, charting new routes for air travel...

...But no person of honesty and vision can look at their pro-war policy...

...Like many people who have lived with real dangers, he was exceedingly cautious in everyday matters, content to stay on beginners' runs on the ski slopes, checking his cars before routine errands, driving in the slow lane, being passed on all sides by hot-rodding drivers unaware that the codger in the Ford doing fifty-five was the daring Lone Eagle...

...A domineering and controlling husband, he was at the same time the most ardent of feminists, pushing his writer-wife into a career of her own and taking great pride in her work...

...and Alice Roosevelt Longworth, whose main aim was annoying her fifth cousin, Franklin...

...It was only natural that the American Embassy in Berlin would ask their country's ace pilot to come see and report on the Nazis' new air force, and the Lindberghs made their first trip to Germany in July 1936...

...there were anti-Communists, who backed anyone whom they saw as a check on Stalin...

...the tree-hugging Henry David Thoreau of the 1960s—Lindbergh was all of these, the most adored, and reviled, of men...

...The Lindberghs, once famous for grace, gifts, and courage, now became famous for affliction and suffering...

...Ideally, France, England, and Germany should all be united, in a "Western wall of race and arms . . . against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races" and "the infiltration of inferior blood...

...He had always supposed, he wrote later, that science had to go along with a certain level of civilized conduct: Part of his blindness about Hitler's Germany came from his belief that a people so advanced in science could not be that bad...

...He became the airplane, and he and the airplane became part of the sky...

...His spartan simplicity mirrored an aspect of the collective past that Americans feared they were losing...

...He won his great fame in a stunt—his twenty-seven hour flight from New York to Paris in May 1927, the first solo flight across the Atlantic—and used it to fund a long and complicated life as a scientist and mystic, writer and man of action...

...The controlling patriarch married an ambitious woman and promoted her writing, convinced that she was a great talent...

...embassy in London before World War II...

...And in his planes, he dreamed: of better planes, faster planes, longer flights, of the kind of plane that could make the journey from New York to Paris, a flight for which Raymond Orteig, a French-born American, had offered a $25,000 prize...

...His very faith in her—his belief that she was a great writer, who should be writing great books—made her defensive and broke down her self-confidence...

...Now and then, strange young men would show up at their house and be met at the door by their father, who would walk them away slowly, with a hand on their shoulders, and an infinitely sad expression on his face...

...Where others saw clashes between good and evil, or Allied and Axis, he saw them between light and dark...

...An attentive father, he was seldom home...

...Even after the war, there was trouble in paradise: The union that endured through death, war, and trial showed signs of stress during peace...

...That the greatest threat to civilization might come from the center of Europe, from a people scientifically advanced, culturally literate, and nominally Christian, was something he could not fathom...

...An affectionate father, he was unrelenting and rigorous...

...When Hertog visited Anne in 1987, the following exchanges took place: "I spoke of her books...

...Lindbergh thought he was doing something grave and weighty...

...He godfathered modern ecology movements...

...When he left, there was a great relaxation—followed by very great emptiness...

...University of Chicago chancellor Robert Maynard Hutchins...

...Their daughter Reeve describes invading her mother's workroom as a child, only to be escorted out by her father, who would instruct her, gently but firmly, that her mother was a Great Writer who must not be disturbed...

...At about the same age, I dreamed that he was God...

...For his children, "There was a 'Freedom and Responsibility' lecture . . . an 'Instinct and Intellect' lecture . . . and a 'Downfall of Civilization' lecture, prompted by our father's encounters with air conditioning, television, politics, Pop Art...

...With him gone, she stopped writing completely...

...The youngest of the five children born after her brother was murdered, Reeve grew up with her siblings much as John Kennedy's children did, with parents of almost mythic dimension: famous for things they could barely, if at all, remember...

...I judge by the individual, not by his race, and have always done so...

...He was right to call the "Grecian inheritance of Europe" the prime human achievement, but wrong to think common bloodlines implied common values...

...There would be calls and letters from men her sister Anne called the "young pretenders," who believed they were the lost Lindbergh boy...

...In June, he reached the V-2 rocket factories in Nordhausen, attached to Camp Dora, a branch of the notorious Bergen-Belsen slave labor-extermination camp...

...But what really sounds sinister, in our time, is his obdurate focus on race...

...In many ways, Lindbergh was right for the moment...

...Lindbergh thought he was helping the Jews, saving them from the backlash that would arise if "they" pushed the country into what he thought would be a bloody and futile war...

...She was chiefly dissatisfied with Lindbergh's father, and the marriage broke down when the boy was a toddler...

...There his guide, an ex-inmate, showed him the gas chambers, the crematoria, the piles of ashes, stopping once to pick up a human femur that had not been consumed in the flames...

...That said, there are good reasons why many people came to believe that the one-time paragon of American virtues had become a dangerous man...

...Lindbergh told them that nothing had been lost...

...In that, the children's feelings were those of their mother...

...He read, quoted, and worshiped Thoreau...

...Lindbergh's father, Charles Sr., was a crusading populist congressman—later vilified and hanged in effigy for opposing entry into World War I. As a boy, young Charles sat with his father on the floor of Congress, dropped light bulbs from the top floor of the House Office Building, and went often to the Smithsonian Institution, whose Air and Space museum now houses his Spirit of St...

...From the sky, Lindbergh could see man's encroachment on nature...

...Reeve Lindbergh, born in 1945, was angry and heartsick, she writes, when "I first heard my father's voice on tape in his Des Moines speech, telling the world that one of the greatest dangers in pre-war America was the influence of Jews...

...As Reeve writes, "He left behind a vast hole in our universe, as great as the death of a star...

...The persecution they suffered . . . would be sufficient to make bitter enemies of any race...

...rather it needed morals and wisdom to restrain its potential for evil...

...Lindbergh's paternal grandfather, Ole Mansson, a Swedish politician close to King Carl XV, emigrated to America and changed his name to Lindbergh to escape the consequences of bigamy and scandal...

...A pioneer in the realm of scientific advancement, he also seemed, in the midst of the Jazz Age, a throwback to older values, a "dragon-slaying man of action, courage, and moral rectitude...

...The son of a classic midwest isolationist, Lindbergh believed the First World War was a terrible error, which had helped to bring on the Second...

...There was Father Coughlin, the bigoted radio priest...

...He was not hostile to the Jews or the British, or unmoved by their suffering...

...So, they talked about Charles...

...How did such a person then raise children, who, by his instruction and example, day after day, year after year, learned [tolerance] from him...

...was taken from his second-floor nursery while his parents ate dinner below...

...On the other hand, when home, he was almost too present, holding her up to his rigorous standards...

...Lindbergh's complexities were still more in evidence in his role as a parent...

...He died on August 26, 1974, and was buried in hours, before the press could get to him—still the most private of all public men...

...In kindergarten, one of my brothers told a friend on the playground that our father had discovered America," Reeve Lindbergh begins her memoir of her parents...

...She could always write, but he had given her the subjects—war, death, and ultimate pressure—that pushed her feminine prose into harder and more lasting metal...

...and future president of the United States Gerald Ford...

...They were forbidden to celebrate holidays he deemed fraudulent, such as Mother's and Father's Days...

...the Pat Buchanan (some think) of the late 1930s...

...The paradoxes carried over into Lindbergh's private life...

...Mainly through stubbornness, he refused to return or disown a medal that Nazi Field Marshal Hermann Goering thrust on him, not understanding that, in the public mind, it bound him to Hitler's Germany...

...There were fascists and racists, who approved ethnic cleansing as practiced by Hitler...

...What he did not sense—what his wife tried to tell him—was the danger of differentiating Jews from other Americans, of suggesting that "they" had interests that differed from "ours" and were "not American...

...But it also captured a nostalgia for the past...

...What did he think, and when did he think it...

...But it's not as though his family had an easy time understanding him, either...

...future Peace Corps head Sargent Shriver...

...an empathetic new view of Lindbergh's wife, the writer Anne Morrow, by Susan Hertog...

...a conquering prince...

...I spoke of her poetry...

...According to both Berg and Hertog, Anne was often depressed and spent long hours crying...

...No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany...

...Loathed (with some reason) by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who considered him close to a Nazi and a traitor, he was welcomed back to the White House by John and Jacqueline Kennedy (he shared an antiwar bond with Kennedy's father, whom he met in the U.S...

...At times, she was bitter...

...A frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Noemie Emery is a writer in Alexandria, Virginia...

...He thought it natural that one country should covet the land and the treasure of others...

...He was widely attacked as a fascist and bigot, charges that would stun his five children, who had been raised by a father they knew as the essence of tolerance...

...For the first time, their lives broke off from one another: Charles went off on his various missions, while Anne stayed at home with their five growing children, feeling forlorn and deserted...

...For the first time, all of civilization could share as one in the sights and sounds of an event—almost instantaneously and simultaneously...

...What Lindbergh said in fact was this: It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany...

...I have always done so"—No, he had not always done so, but this was the man whom his children remembered...

...He took her into his world of adventure, and encouraged and nurtured her poetry...

...Louis touched earth in Paris, it deposited its pilot not only in Europe, but in the burgeoning center of a celebrity culture that had been waiting for someone like him...

...Lindbergh grew up moving back and forth between places and parents, close to and adored by both but aware of the discord between them...

...In the midst of sometimes unsettling progress, there could also appear reassurance: "Americans knew what they had gained even as they feared the price they were paying...

...Three flights had failed, and two men had died in them, before Lindbergh took off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island, in a plane he had designed himself, with money he had raised himself, and whose construction he had lovingly supervised...

...and the unique and wonderful Under a Wing, Reeve Lindbergh's memoir of life as the youngest of the Lindbergh children, growing up with two gifted parents and fame...

...With his beliefs about science had gone his beliefs about race...

...He never recanted what he had once said and written, but he spent much of his later life outside of Europe, immersed in the yellow, black, and brown peoples he had once thought a threat to his culture...

...By the time Charles and Anne returned to America in 1938, he had become convinced that Britain should seek a negotiated peace with Hitler as the only way to avoid being decisively beaten...

...The answer he reached was, not much...

...The public had different ideas...

...he had urged both to mobilize quickly and been disheartened and depressed when they had not...

...The question about Lindbergh, which persists to this day, is to which group he belonged...

...He had moved from one polar extreme to the other...

...To this would soon be added fame of a still darker nature: the infamy of the quisling or dupe...

...Anne spoke of Charles...

...Seemingly the best that the country (and world) had to offer, they had all that the world had to give them...

...The sandy-haired boy with his modest grin and borrowed suits . . . confirmed some sense of heartland integrity...

...As a result of the crime, and the trial that followed—and threats against their second son, Jon, born five months after his brother was murdered—the Lindberghs sailed for England on December 21, 1935, seeking security they could no longer find in America...

...He spent more and more time in primitive areas...

...The young man on a perilous quest—the Lone Eagle—is a signature theme of the human experience, touching a magical chord in all cultures, and in 1927 the techniques of modern communications had just reached the point at which the particular exploits of one special hero could unite the fantasies of men around the globe...

...in All in the Family...

...But living with Lindbergh was never too easy, and Anne's nerves were often scraped raw...

...And it would quickly be taken away...

...Convinced also that American intervention would merely delay, at great cost, a German victory on the mainland of Europe, Lindbergh began to invest more and more of his effort in the antiwar America First movement...

...Fights between England and Germany were "civil wars" in "our own family of nations," a "family" threatened by alien forces...

...As an airman, he was appalled at the damage that could be done to civilians by the new techniques of warfare: He did not shrink from war, but the bombing of women and children struck him as wholly uncivilized...

...Science became his home and his refuge, his faith, and fount of his morality...

...These forces were non-whites (among whom he placed Russians) who did not share our ideas, or scientific proclivities...

...His flight symbolized the hope of the future," writes Hertog perceptively...

...Anne spoke of Charles...

...Her friends, her mother, her sister, and brother-in-law were all staunch interventionists...

...Lindbergh's hypernatural qualities—his standards, his demands, his curiosity, his energy, his restlessness, his constant need to be learning and doing—began to exhaust them...

...is not going to change his pattern of being away from home most of the time," went a 1959 diary entry...

...But most of all, she was stunned...

...When the Spirit of St...

...Both races I admire...

...He was neither opposed to democracy nor friendly to authoritarian systems, but when he looked at France and England, he was appalled at their weakness...