PART THREE

13

RISING TIDES

“Western civilization—how I had taken it for granted before I came

to Europe! It had seemed as immortal as life does to early youth.”

—C.A.L.

THE LINDBERGHS WERE AT SEA.

Their crossing would take nine days; beyond that, their future was virtually uncharted.

The American Importer encountered a bad storm mid-Atlantic, reconciling the ship’s three passengers to a largely cabin-bound journey and a quiet Christmas. Charles did not look back for a moment. As he wrote Henry Breckinridge, he had no intention of returning Stateside until he felt that his three-and-a-half-year-old son could live there “in safety and under reasonably normal conditions at home and at school.”

The tempest the Lindberghs faced mid-ocean was not as great as the one they left behind. Deak Lyman’s account of the cloaked departure of America’s hero launched a massive public discussion about the dismal state of the nation. “I should say that the reaction … was overwhelmingly one of consternation and sympathy,” wrote Lindbergh’s friend Harry Guggenheim. “Your leaving America as you did, so quietly and so suddenly, just seemed to cast a gloom on our nation,” wrote a mother from Syracuse, one of countless people he had never met who wished him Godspeed. Journalists and their readers decried how they had forced Lindbergh into exile. Even William Randolph Hearst, whose newspapers had been among the most offensive, proclaimed that “it is extremely distressing and discouraging that this grand country of ours is so overrun with cranks, criminals, and Communists that a splendid citizen like Colonel Lindbergh must take his family abroad to protect them against violence.”

The Lindberghs rose early on December 31, 1935, in Liverpool’s harbor. It suddenly seemed as though this hegira might be for naught, as a frenzied gauntlet of photographers gathered at the gangplank. Anne descended a few paces ahead of Charles, who carried Jon in one arm—the boy’s hat brim pulled down, partially covering his face. On their way to the Adelphi Hotel in town, where they would spend the night, Anne heard newsboys in the streets crying, “Lindbergh in Liverpool!”

The next day, Aubrey Morgan motored the Lindberghs to Brynderwen, Llandaff, Wales, just west of Cardiff. In the privacy of their own apartment in the Morgan manse, surrounded by gardens, they promptly acclimated to their new surroundings. “No fear of the press trespassing on the grounds—or eavesdropping—no fear at night putting Jon up to bed—& then running up to see if he is all right,” Anne wrote Charles’s mother after but a few days in the Welsh countryside. “We have been bothered very little and seem to be left quietly alone here, both by people & press.”

For weeks, the Lindberghs’ plans remained indefinite, as Charles talked vaguely of living in England or perhaps Sweden or France. They received unsolicited offers from strangers and friends to stay with them, some from as far off as the Archduke Joseph Francis in Budapest. From Aberdeenshire alone came two proposals—one from Lord Sempill offering his Craigevar Castle, the other from a “poor fisher woman” offering the “warmest corner of our home and heart.”

Charles and Anne spent a few nights in London, where Lindbergh found to his amazement that he could walk the streets unmolested. One day, they watched the funeral procession of King George V from their window at the Ritz Hotel; on another occasion they dined with Harold Nicolson, who mentioned that he owned a property not an hour outside London that he was looking to lease. Lindbergh was reluctant to live so close to the city; but London’s apparent lack of violent crime opened his mind to that possibility. After several discouraging weeks house-hunting in the countryside, they agreed to inspect Long Barn, the Nicolsons’ “tumbled-down … cottage” in The Weald of Kent.

Their twenty-five-mile drive to the southeast that last week of February was not as pastoral as they had hoped. But upon passing through Sevenoaks, their outlook brightened. Only the sound of singing birds greeted them as they opened the gate of the old, rambling house, “screened from the road by low feathery trees.” Anne and Charles walked to the back where they discovered the two main blocks of the house created a court. Looking down the hill on which they stood, they beheld beautiful gardens and fields and farms as well as a tennis court and swimming pool—“all quiet, all country, all still.”

Harold and Vita Sackville-West had lived in Long Barn for almost twenty years before their recent move to nearby Sissinghurst Castle, which they had restored from a pile of Elizabethan ruins into one of England’s showplaces. Long Barn displayed their renovative powers as well. A melding of three cottages and a barn, this two-story house rambled without plan. First built in 1380 of oak beams from salvaged ships, its roof sagged from age; its floors sloped, its walls slanted, and its passageways staggered between steep spiral staircases. There was no hall upstairs, so that each of the seven bedrooms opened into the next, often at odd angles.

The Lindberghs giggled upon entering each room, wondering what irregularity they would encounter next. Charles joked that he would enjoy bringing a drunk through the house, for it was without any two lines that were either parallel or perpendicular. Layers of dust had settled on the broken lamp shades and the old palm-leaf fans; and visible cracks in the windows and walls created drafts everywhere. Water had obviously leaked in as well, for several pictures were stained and the paint on the walls was curling. Before they left the house, Charles had only to nod to Anne and say, “Of course there’s no question about it—it’ll do!”

Within two weeks, the Lindberghs had signed a half-year’s lease—for £45.15s a month—and made themselves at home. The only setback at first, Anne noted, was that it was all “too beautiful and I woke up each morning feeling detached and weekendy—like a guest.” They arranged for two of their dogs—Thor, the German shepherd, and Skean, the Scottish terrier—to be shipped overseas, on the Queen Mary. “I am afraid they have not appreciated the honor,” Charles wrote his mother.

Although the lamp-plugs did not fit into the sockets, doors did not lock, toilet chains seldom functioned, and worms had eaten away at much of the furniture—the Lindberghs quickly adjusted to their house. William Caxton, England’s first printer, was reputed to have been born at Long Barn in the 1420s, and it was rumored that his ghost could be heard at night, clanking away at his printing press. But Vita Sackville-West assured them that she had not had a single supernatural encounter in the house in her two decades there. The Lindberghs realized that those noises they heard in the night were just mice living in the walls or bats in the bedrooms.

Rearranging furniture and moving in some of their personal belongings, Charles and Anne made Long Barn their own. They hired a small staff, including a plain-looking, red-haired nurse, who, Charles kidded, “lowers our standard.” Harold Nicolson assured him that they would live there undisturbed by any of the local citizenry, except for the Chief Constable of Kent himself, who would occasionally drop by for a cup of tea, simply to ascertain whether or not they were “being bothered by curious and vulgar people and whether he can give you more police protection.” There was no need. Except for one scuffle with photographers, the press left them alone. Winston Churchill asked Nicolson to tell Lindbergh that he would be welcome to lunch with him at Chartwell, his nearby estate, whenever he wished. But the Lindberghs never pursued the invitation.

Not since he quit college to take up flying had Lindbergh felt the opportunity to make such a “fresh start” in life. Cut off from most of his former business and social connections, he hired a secretary and winnowed away many of the commitments from his past. In his study at Long Barn, Lindbergh sometimes went weeks doing little else but dictating letters for hours at a time. Late at night, he often went to Anne’s smaller study to catch up on more mail, handwriting personal letters—on blue onionskin paper from Smythson’s. He continued to make and file carbon copies of even his most trivial dispatches, as he instinctively felt the need to keep a complete record of his thoughts and activities. He asked Henry Breckinridge not to destroy any of the mail, not even the envelopes, sitting in sacks in the attorney’s New York office. “Sometimes the most unimportant looking scrap of paper turns out to be of great value to the police,” Lindbergh explained. “They tell me that they quite frequently find that seriously threatening letters are preceded by other communications.”

While Lindbergh’s relationship with Henry Breckinridge waned—especially after the lawyer entered politics and never made good on a $20,000 personal loan from Lindbergh—three friendships deepened in his absence from America, all with men he felt were involved in nothing less than advancing civilization. He conducted a massive correspondence with Harry Guggenheim, for one, writing about the citizens’ committee against crime in New York, which Guggenheim had been asked to chair. The two men also continued their epistolary conversation about rockets. Several institutions, including the California Institute of Technology, were trying to win the support Guggenheim had been lavishing solely on Professor Goddard. Lindbergh, however, persuaded his friend that Goddard alone would develop the rocket better than any team could.

Believing the rocket had entered its most interesting period of discovery, Lindbergh also corresponded as much as ever with Goddard. After but a short time abroad, he saw enough political unrest to suggest the possibility of war in Europe. And so Lindbergh asked Goddard to consider the martial applications of the rocket, for it could “carry explosives faster than the airplanes, farther than the projectile.” In their unguarded correspondence, Lindbergh and Goddard agreed that “the rocket is inherently an offensive rather than a defensive weapon,” specifically in the areas of long-range shelling and high-speed planes. In no time, Goddard shared with Lindbergh his vision of “liquid propellant rockets of high speed such as we are testing here [in Roswell], capable of being directed to air craft from the ground by radio, or automatically in flight by infra red rays, the explosive charge consisting of the remainder of the propelling charge.”

The third great relationship that sustained Lindbergh while he was abroad was with Dr. Carrel. As management of the Rockefeller Institute passed from Simon Flexner to a more bureaucratic Dr. Herbert Gasser, Carrel was being nudged into retirement. Gasser disapproved of the research scientist’s high profile, a public image that became sullied by new interpretations of his writings. Carrel’s admiration of Mussolini for his “building up of a great nation,” for example, read differently now that Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia. Other comments about civilization collapsing, modern nations saving themselves “by developing the strong,” not “by protecting the weak,” and his concern for the “salvation of the white races” sounded alarmingly like statements being uttered by Hitler.

Carrel liked to display his boldness in almost everything he said, sometimes just for their shock value. (According to one of his colleagues at the Rockefeller Institute, Carrel once kidded that “if he had to live his life over, he would have become a dictator in South America.”) In truth, Carrel was an elitist who believed in a disciplined society; but he was appalled by both genocide and anti-Semitism. He was simply alarmed by what he considered the rapid decay of the democracies of the world, which he attributed to a diminution of faith. “He had no love for Nazism, Fascism, or Communism,” wrote a friend of Carrel, “but he knew that their ideologies gave those nations an ever-flowing source of energy. By contrast, the democracies seemed to have discarded faith, and there lay the cause of their weakness and inefficiency.”

Carrel wrote to Lindbergh about creating a foundation devoted to “the study of man.” It was meant to consider: the use of voluntary eugenics in the building up of a stronger human race; procedures to increase the nervous resistance of the individual; psychological, physiological, and chemical factors of spiritual growth; the problems of longevity; social and economic conditions that are “indispensable to the life of an elite”; the possibility of raising human intelligence above its present level; the genesis of great leaders. The outline of Carrel’s plans—as broad-scoped as it was high-minded—appealed immensely to Lindbergh, giving him license to take a scattered-fire approach to science for a while and see if he hit anything worth pursuing.

Upon his departure from the Rockefeller Institute, Carrel would return to his native France, maintaining an apartment in Paris but preferring to live on an island off the Brittany coast. In letters, he and Lindbergh discussed the Institute for Man, and everything else under the sun; one of Lindbergh’s epistles grew to fifty-six pages. As Lindbergh dabbled in a series of scientific studies, he never failed to rush to Carrel with his results.

Lindbergh’s latest scientific work spanned a broad spectrum. He modified his organ perfusion apparatus; he studied infra-red rays so that he might develop an instrument for their projection and measurement; and he read up on genetics. With a growing interest in immunology, he studied gibbons and gorillas, which drew him to texts about animal life in Africa. Combining his interests in aviation and medicine, Lindbergh corresponded with doctors, hospitals, and government agencies around the world, as he considered the possible uses of aircraft in connection with the control of locust on the savanna, tsetse fly research in Tanganyika, and yellow fever research in Entebbe. His original work in organ perfusion got him to thinking about “artificial hibernation”—reducing the respiration and pulse rate of an animal, producing different states of consciousness. He read up on sleep, hypnosis, anesthesia, even Indian mysticism and yogic meditation.

So transfixed was Lindbergh by all his new study, he was virtually oblivious to the topic dominating the news at home. In the months following the October 1935 rejection of his appeal, Bruno Richard Hauptmann found swelling public support for his case. Such champions of justice as Clarence Darrow, H. L. Mencken, and Eleanor Roosevelt all issued public statements—not asserting his innocence so much as questioning his guilt. After studying the eleven volumes of trial transcripts, Governor Harold Hoffman launched his own investigation of the case.

The day before Hauptmann was to be electrocuted, Hoffman granted a reprieve of thirty days. In so doing, he wrote Colonel Schwarzkopf and announced to the press, he was not expressing an opinion as to the guilt or innocence of Hauptmann. It was more, he asserted, that “I am impressed by the evident anxiety of so many people to hurry him to his death when too many questions are still unanswered which he may help to solve.” Hoffman focused his action on one aspect of the crime—the complicity of others. “I do not believe,” he said, “that this crime was committed by any one man, and there is ample evidence, direct from the record, that the chief witnesses and those who were engaged in the prosecution share my belief. The fact that others are implicated does not provide an excuse for Hauptmann,” he added, “but neither does it excuse any official from doing his full duty in bringing every other participant to the bar of justice.” Hoffman ordered Colonel Schwarzkopf “to continue a thorough and impartial search for the detection and apprehension of every person connected with the crime.”

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 forLe 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, an 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 the 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.”

While Anne enjoyed a week of deluxe tours around Berlin, Charles followed a rigid military schedule, a succession of inspections. Accompanied by an assistant air attaché, Theodore Koenig, Lindbergh visited the Tempelhof civil airport, where he was permitted to pilot a Junkers (JU) 52, the Luftwaffe’s standard bombardment plane, and the Hindenburg, a large four-motored experimental passenger plane. He spent a day with the Richthofen Geschwader (Wing), the elite fighter group of the Luftwaffe. One day he visited two Heinkel factories and saw their latest dive-bomber, medium bomber, fighter, and observation planes—all, Lindbergh found, of superb design. He spent another day at the Junker works at Dessau, where he saw their new JU 210 engine, a liquid-cooled engine far more advanced than he or Koenig had expected, and a JU 86, a low-wing, all-metal medium bomber already in mass production. Lindbergh spent another day at the German air research institute of Adlershof, where the scientists spoke freely of their work until he steered the conversation to the subject of rockets.

In light of all the new construction he saw, Lindbergh concluded that Germany was “now able to produce military aircraft faster than any European country. Possibly even faster than we could in the States for the first few weeks after we started competitions. Certainly we have nothing to compare in size to either the Heinkel or Junkers factories,” he wrote Harry Davison. Even greater than the size of the plants and their crews was “a spirit in Germany which I have not seen in any other country. There is certainly great ability, and I am inclined to think more intelligent leadership than is generally recognized. A person would have to be blind not to realize that they have already built up tremendous strength,” he wrote Henry Breckinridge.

Lindbergh participated in three important social events during his week in Germany. The first came the day after his arrival at an Air Club luncheon in his honor. Before a crowd of aviators and diplomats, Lindbergh delivered a speech, which he had worked on for weeks. Its text ran longer than anybody had expected, prolonged by its having to be translated into German, sentence by sentence. Its subtext lingered long after it had been delivered. “We who are in aviation carry a heavy responsibility on our shoulders,” Lindbergh said, “for while we have been drawing the world closer together in peace we have stripped the armor of every nation in war. It is no longer possible to shield the heart of a country with its army. Armies can no more stop an air attack than a suit of mail can stop a rifle bullet…. Our libraries, our museums, every institution we value most, are laid bare to our bombardment.”

With his unique diplomatic status, Lindbergh seized this opportunity to express a simple sentiment theretofore unspoken. “In making the address,” he would later explain, “I tried to issue a warning of the dangers involved in the Nazi military development, and, at the same time, keep in mind that I was a guest of Germany on an invitation issued through the military branch of an American Embassy.” In straddling that line, he drew his lunchtime remarks to a close by saying: “Aviation has brought a revolutionary change to a world already staggering from changes. It is our responsibility to make sure that in doing so we do not destroy the very things which we wish to protect.”

The reaction in the hall and in the German press was measured. While Hitler himself was said to have insisted that the newspapers print the speech in its entirety, no papers commented editorially.

The reaction elsewhere was far less repressed. Speaking of a “new” Charles A. Lindbergh, The Literary Digest observed, “He was Lindbergh in full maturity, no longer shy, ready to take his place as a world citizen, among the influential of the planet. In a ten-minute speech … and at the age of thirty-four, he had thoughtfully and deliberately abandoned forever, the role of private citizen to which he had clung with desperate futility since he stepped out of ‘The Spirit of St. Louis’ at Paris at twenty-five.” “Colonel Lindbergh’s frank, truthful and courageous words have rendered a notable service to Europe and perhaps to the entire world,” wrote British pundit Henry Wickham Steed. The speech deeply moved Dorothy Thompson, columnist in the New York Herald Tribune, as well. It reminded her of another brave oration, one she had heard as a young woman just out of college, when the recently defeated Congressman C. A. Lindbergh had argued against American intervention into the European war. “The colonel spoke bravely in the midst of the quicksands, with the backing and aid of world prestige and world renown,” Thompson wrote on July 28, 1936. “But it was from his father, whom the war drove into obscurity, that he inherited both the courage and the right to speak as he did and where he did. There is some justice in history. And ‘as the twig is bent, so is the tree inclined.’” Editorial reaction at home was almost unanimously favorable.

Some Jews, however, wished Lindbergh had never gone to Germany. “I AM CONVINCED THAT THE GERMAN PROPAGANDA DEPARTMENT WILL TRY TO INTERPRET YOUR VISIT AS AN APPROVAL OF THEIR REGIME,” cabled Harry Guggenheim’s brother-in-law Roger Straus. “I EARNESTLY REQUEST THAT YOU DO WHATEVER YOU CAN TO PREVENT SUCH AN INTERPRETATION BEING MADE EITHER WITHIN OR WITHOUT GERMANY.” The world was already aware of overt public acts of anti-Semitism in Germany—the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped the Jews of German citizenship and forbade their marrying Aryans, while earlier laws had already restricted their employment and excluded them from public office, participation in any of the mass media, or sitting on the stock exchanges. But Guggenheim himself wrote Lindbergh that he had “every confidence that you would so conduct yourself as to give no aid to anti-Semitism.”

Lindbergh’s second important social occasion in Berlin was on July 28, 1936, when Hermann Goering hosted a formal luncheon in his honor at his opulent official residence on the Wilhelm Strasse. Past a line of bows and salutes, the Lindberghs were taken upstairs into a long hall, where Frau Goering—dressed in green velvet and wearing a dazzling pin, a diamond swastika set in emeralds—greeted them. The most important figures in German aviation—including Chief of the Technical Bureau of the Luftwaffe, Colonel Ernst Udet, whom Lindbergh had met years earlier at air races in America—suddenly fell silent when a pair of doors at one end of the room opened and an imposing figure appeared.

General Goering wore a white uniform bedecked with gold braid and medals. His body was turning to schlag, but the visage was still worthy of marble—strong, good-looking, and youthful. “There were few people in Berlin in 1936 who doubted that Goering was dangerous and a ‘killer,’” observed Truman Smith of the Führer’s most faithful adjutant—for he had undoubtedly been involved in the “blood purge” of June 30, 1934, and other internecine atrocities. But Goering also presented himself as the Third Reich’s renaissance man—the one with an eye for masterworks of art, antique furniture, precious stones, as well as the German crafts of handwrought silver, porcelain, and weaving tapestries. “My paladin,” Hitler called him, appointing him not only Air Minister but also the presiding officer of the Reichstag, Commissioner for the Four-Year Plan for economic recovery, Director of the state theaters of Prussia, and Minister of forests.

Goering made charming conversation with Anne during lunch—about the opera at Bayreuth, the fine wine, and her role in aviation; but he was most interested in her husband. Long fascinated with all things Swedish, Goering wanted time with Lindbergh alone.

After their meal, Goering and the Lindberghs walked through art-filled galleries to a less formal room, where he sat on a couch and played with his pet lion until the beast urinated on his white pant leg. While Goering changed into a pair of golf knickers, the Lindberghs were granted the further honor of visiting Goering’s study, a long, book-lined drawing room decorated in scarlet and gold, with tapestries, Madonnas, and other objets d’art he had “borrowed” from German museums. Now reeking of cologne, Goering rejoined them, showing off his possessions, including a fine sword. He handed it to Lindbergh to test, but Lindbergh courteously refused. At last, Goering took Lindbergh off alone to a side table on which sat a photograph album. “Here are our first seventy,” he said turning the pages, each of which contained a picture of a military airfield. “From the inspection trips I had made through German factories,” Lindbergh would later note, “I knew warplanes were being built to fill those fields.”

“Beyond question,” Truman Smith would later write of that afternoon, “the ‘state’ luncheon of Goering’s was an important milestone in the air intelligence progress of the office of the American attaché. From this day on, an even closer liaison developed between the American officers and the Air Ministry.” Had it not been for Lindbergh’s visit to Germany in 1936, “it is likely that the American air attachés would never have obtained the privileged position that was soon theirs in the Berlin attaché corps.”

At the third important social event, on his last full day in Germany, Lindbergh got a glimpse of Adolf Hitler himself. On August first, both Lindberghs joined a crowd of one hundred thousand for the colorful opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games. The predominantly German crowd cheered wildly when Hitler arrived in the stadium and received a bouquet of roses from a young blonde girl. Lindbergh had a choice seat from which to view the proceedings. Although Truman Smith, with the approval of the Embassy, had hoped to arrange for a meeting between Lindbergh and Hitler, Lindbergh’s place on one of the gray stone benches of the grandstand that day was the closest he would ever get to the Führer.

The following afternoon, the Lindberghs flew to Copenhagen, where Charles and Dr. Carrel addressed the International Congress of Experimental Cytology. They remained for two weeks, during which time Lindbergh and his mentor demonstrated their pump—perfusing a cat’s thyroid gland—in a small room of the Carlsbad Biological Institute for ten scientists at a time. In this, Lindbergh’s debut before a scientific body, he explained each part of the apparatus, while Dr. Carrel translated into French. After viewing the mechanism, many of the two hundred fifty scientists who saw the pump in action declared that “Lindbergh’s work as a scientist would probably be remembered long after his flight to Paris is only a dimly recalled event in aviation history.”

Lindbergh himself had, in fact, become more concerned with the immediate future; and in the middle of his stay in Copenhagen, he committed to paper some thoughts. “As I travel in Europe,” he wrote, “I become more concerned about the power of destruction which is being built in aircraft; yet it is not so much the power I think is dangerous, as the suddenness with which it can be used. There has been great military power assembled before but it could only be expended with comparative slowness. The flame of war has never been difficult to light, but while it has burned in the past it is more likely to explode in the future.”

For all his fears, Lindbergh could not help feeling Germany was “the most interesting nation in the world today, and that she is attempting to find a solution for some of our most fundamental problems.” Some solutions he had trouble accepting, as with the case of a brilliant young doctor he met in Copenhagen: Richard Bing, a half-Jewish German citizen, was just then coming “under the Jewish stigma.” Lindbergh and Carrel rushed to Bing’s aid, helping him secure a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, which enabled him to move to New York and become an American citizen. But Lindbergh could not open his eyes to the fact that Nazi anti-Semitism was much more difficult to deal with than that.

“There is no need for me to tell you that I am not in accord with the Jewish situation in Germany,” he wrote Harry Guggenheim after his visit to Germany. And while he was not yet able to accept what he heard as anything but rumor or propaganda, the “undercurrent of feeling” was “that the German Jews had been on the side of the Communists.”

“While I still have many reservations,” Lindbergh wrote Truman Smith from Denmark, “I have come away with a feeling of great admiration for the German people. The condition of the country, and the appearance of the average person whom I saw, leaves with me the impression that Hitler must have far more character and vision than I thought existed in the German leader who has been painted in so many different ways by the accounts in America and England.”

“With all the things we criticise,” Lindbergh added, this time to Harry Davison at J. P. Morgan, “he is undoubtedly a great man, and I believe has done much for the German people. He is a fanatic in many ways, and anyone can see that there is a certain amount of fanaticism in Germany today. It is less than I expected, but it is there. On the other hand, Hitler has accomplished results (good in addition to bad), which could hardly have been accomplished without some fanaticism.”

In thanking General Goering for his visit, Lindbergh offered nothing but praise. “It is always a pleasure to see good workmanship combined with vision in design and great technical ability,” he wrote on August 20, 1936. “I have never been more impressed than I was with the aviation organizations I saw in Germany. I believe that the experimental laboratories which are being constructed will undoubtedly contribute very greatly to the progress of aviation throughout the world.”

In the afterglow of the Berlin Olympics, Lindbergh’s feelings toward Germany were hardly unique. Anne, even more than Charles, found herself shocked by the “strictly puritanical view at home that dictatorships are of necessity wrong, evil, unstable and no good can come of them—combined with our funny-paper view of Hitler as a clown—combined with the very strong (naturally) Jewish propaganda in the Jewish owned papers.” While Anne’s published papers would later reveal her enthusiasm for the new vitality in Germany, she would take her editor’s advice and expurgate some of her gushier effusions about her ten “perfectly thrilling” days in Berlin. “Hitler,” she wrote her mother on August 5, 1936, “I am beginning to feel, is a very great man, like an inspired religious leader—and as such rather fanatical—but not scheming, not selfish, not greedy for power, but a mystic, a visionary who really wants the best for his country and on the whole has rather a broad view.”

The Lindberghs were hardly alone in being swayed by Hitler’s magnetism. Arnold Toynbee and Lloyd George had recently formed similar opinions. From Lindbergh’s vantage point, “Europe, and the entire world, is fortunate that a Nazi Germany lies, at present, between Communistic Russia and a demoralized France. With the extremes of government which now exist, it is more desirable than ever to keep any one of them from sweeping over Europe. But if the choice must be made it can not be Communism.” In the end, Lindbergh felt the Germans were “especially anxious to maintain a friendly relationship with England,” they had no “intention of attacking France for many years to come, if at all,” and they seemed “to have a sincere desire for friendly relations with the United States, but of course that is much less vital to them.”

“I don’t believe anybody else in the world could have succeeded in doing what you did,” Major Smith wrote Colonel Lindbergh after his visit: “pleasing everybody, both the German public and the American public.” After that visit, Truman Smith observed, “Captain Koenig found himself in a privileged position in the attaché corps. In the ensuing twelve months, he visited more factories and airfields than any other foreign attaché, with the possible exception of the Swedes and the Italians.” Of even greater benefit, Smith added, by the end of that year, Air Corps headquarters in Washington awakened at last to the “imposing rearmament program in Germany.”

Something reawakened in Lindbergh as well, a spirit that had lain dormant since his son’s kidnapping. His wanderlust had returned. Over the next year he would spend more than two hundred hours in the air, most of it piloting his new Miles Mohawk with its Menasco B6 engine, across three continents. These flights—always in the name of professional aviation but just as much for his personal edification—had not lost their power to enthrall the world.

In November 1936, he flew alone to Ireland to inspect a landing field for Pan American. What was meant to be a three-day trip stretched to ten, as a stubborn fog created the longest delay Lindbergh had ever faced on account of weather. He made the most of his time in the home of his forefathers, the Lodges and Kissanes. “It has always had a strange attraction for me,” Charles wrote his mother of Ireland. “Possibly because I shall never forget the first sight of the hills of Kerry from the Spirit of St. Louis; possibly because a love of the old country is passed on even to the distant descendants of all Irishmen.”

Lindbergh gave Eamon de Valera, the Prime Minister of the Republic of Ireland, his first airplane ride; and the thrilled passenger invited Lindbergh to a dinner he was giving for U. S. Postmaster General Farley. En route to the dinner, Lindbergh thought it might amuse his host, the Minister of Defence, to know that he and Farley had been on opposite sides of the recent airmail controversy. “Oh! Don’t let that worry you,” he replied in his lilting brogue. “The leader of the opposition will be present tonight. He executed seventy-nine of us a few years ago. We haven’t forgotten it, but we don’t bring politics into affairs for people from other countries.” Anne was happy to have sat this trip out, for she had recently discovered she was pregnant for the third time, her baby due in May.

The Lindberghs spent Christmas at Long Barn, preparing for a major trip on which his wife would accompany him. During the many stops they would make in Asia, Africa, and Europe in early 1937, the Lindberghs observed what Charles would later record were “the early symptoms of the breakup of the British Empire and of Western civilization’s waning power in the East”:

In Rome, Lindbergh was startled by the omnipresence of Mussolini’s soldiers and intrigued by the massive excavation within the city, exposing its great past in building its future. “The twentieth-century dictator prophesied that Italy would return for a third time to be the directing force of Western civilization,” Lindbergh observed. “He would electrify railways, drain the Pontine Marshes, increase the birth rate, and reclaim the Italian Empire. How imitative it was! A dictatorship, conquest, and power, armies marching off for Africa and Spain, great structures rising—one might be describing ancient Rome instead of modern Italy.”

The Lindberghs flew down the Tyrrhenian coast, over the ruins of Pompeii. Charles looked at the skeleton of the magnificent Grecian temple of Jupiter at Segesta in Sicily and could not help feeling “that a people who had hewn such mystic beauty from the material of stone could have risen above the morbidity of war and human quarreling. Yet,” he realized, “the Greek city-states were in constant disagreement, and the civilization they had developed gave way to the centralized power of Rome.”

Flying over what had once been a Roman triumphal arch in Carthage, the remnants of ancient Alexandria and Cairo, an old wall from Biblical Jerusalem, and the site of Babylon, Lindbergh saw reminders of once glorious civilizations, all fitting together in his mind like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

Into March, they crossed India just above its mid-section, from Gwadar to Calcutta, stopping in Karachi, Jodhpur, Udaipur, Bombay, Nagpur, and Raipur. They would have toured the country from Kashmir in the north to Ceylon in the south as well, had an engine part not failed, grounding their plane for more than two weeks. They spent most of that time in Calcutta, which had been Lindbergh’s ultimate destination anyway. His purpose in traveling this distance was in part to advance aviation—“On the one hand,” he would later write, “it was time to establish air routes around the entire earth and I wanted to gain first-hand experience in the area lying between eastern Europe and China.”

On the other, he was interested in Indian mystical phenomena. In London libraries Lindbergh had read medical reports of yogis “who controlled their pulse and breath, of an Indian who drank sulphuric acid and still lived, of others who had themselves buried alive for days or walked uninjured over beds of glowing coals. There were publications from more doubtful sources which described miracles of levitation and clairvoyance.” In India he hoped to “learn secrets as yet undiscovered by Western science … even find bridges between the physical and spiritual worlds. After all, radio was unknown not many years before. Why mightn’t there be some way of recording emanations from the human spirit?”

Lindbergh also hoped to meet up with one of his English neighbors, Sir Francis Younghusband—a British soldier, explorer, author, and mystic—who had led the British expedition into the forbidden city of Lhasa in 1904 and who was attending a Parliament of Religions organized in honor of the Eastern saint and mystic Ramakrishna.

During several sessions the Lindberghs sat in the front row of a Calcutta auditorium, before a large picture of Ramakrishna. Charles listened intently to Sir Francis “advocate the unity of faiths under a brotherhood of man,” the audience “striving hard to break down the religious barriers between them.” Anne could barely keep a straight face, seeing her agnostic husband in front of banners declaring “Religion is the highest expression of man,” as he sat among “crowds of barefoot Indian monks, holy men, students, and a few stray, wispy people from Pasadena, London, Boston, following an Indian swami in an orange turban.” She had to bite her lip when the alarm on Charles’s wristwatch alarm sounded in the middle of a prayer. At another session an Indian poetess noticed the famous visitor from the West and compared him to “Buddha, Galileo, and other spiritual figures of the world.” Lindbergh’s embarrassment was visible. “What other man on earth today could have his blush reported on five continents?” The New York Timesasked in an editorial. “Not STALIN, MUSSOLINI, nor HITLER. They are past the blushing stage.”

Lindbergh also got to explore Calcutta, observing its poverty, filth, and disease. He could hardly believe this same country had “once produced a civilization of art and architecture and religion—or that conditions were in fact worse before the British government took over.” On March 18, 1937, the Lindberghs flew their repaired plane over Fatehpur Sikri, the former capital of Akbar, descendant of the Mogul khans. “These were once great buildings,” Lindbergh noted, “now a mass of ruins.”

They arrived in Athens at the start of April. Wandering among the broken columns of the Acropolis after having seen the remains of a dozen other civilizations, Lindbergh reached an epiphany. “In these ruins,” he realized, “lay a timeless warning. At the same moment, one sensed the heights of Western achievement and the depths of Western failure. One realized how easily strength was perverted to decay, how human wisdom was more essential to a temple’s walls than the rock on which it stood.” Lindbergh thought of Athens and Sparta warring with each other until all of Greece collapsed. Now he thought of England and Germany assuming those same positions. “War! War!” he would later write. “What useless conflicts there had been through those intervening centuries!” Seeing that cycle gearing up anew, Lindbergh became consumed with the idea of stopping it.

Anne and Charles returned to Long Barn on April 9, 1937. His travels had led him to see England in a new light. The impending coronation of George VI, who had ascended to the throne upon the abdication of Edward VIII the preceding December, depressed him. “The life of the monarch should be an example to his subjects,” Lindbergh wrote. “A good king must either have great strength or a good reputation.” He felt the monarchy had lost much of its prestige as a result of the whole affair: “There is no example of true romance, and no clear principle has been established—unless it be that the King of England may have his mistresses, but must not marry a twice divorced woman. However, the majority of the Empire carries on with cowlike placidity and satisfaction in the knowledge that they now have a king who will do the proper thing.”

Lindbergh appreciated all that England had offered him and his family. He and his family had lived “without worry from politics, press, or fanaticism,” he wrote Colonel Schwarzkopf back in New Jersey. And yet, England now struck him as a backward nation, another crumbling empire. “It was as though the Englishman’s accomplishments, century after century, had become a cumulative burden on his shoulders until his traditions, his possessions, and his pride overweighed his buoyancy of spirit,” he would later write. “I felt that England, aged, saw not the future but the past and had resigned herself to the gardens of her greatness year by year. She was satisfied with her empire and a legal status quo enforced by her warships’ guns. It was as though her desires blocked out the knowledge of her mind that life is not stabilized for long by conquest, and that wings fly over land and sea and gun batteries.” It troubled Lindbergh that the best propeller he could get for his Miles Mohawk in England was of the type he had used on the St. Louis-Chicago airmail in 1926, one already obsolete in America by the time the Spirit of St. Louis had been built.

The night of May 11, 1937—Coronation Eve—Charles drove Anne into the city. She had felt labor pains for two days, and she suffered more in the car, just as they found Oxford Street blocked off for the next day’s procession. Pulling out of a huge traffic jam on Wigmore Street, Lindbergh was asked if he had a permit to drive through. “I have something better than a pass,” he told the constable. “I have my wife, who is going to have a baby.” They registered Anne in The London Clinic as “Mrs. Charles,” and she lay there quietly through another night and day. Doctors and nurses agreed the baby would not be arriving on Coronation Day; but around eleven that night, Anne went into labor. Charles, gowned and masked, was present for the birth, forty-five minutes later. “A Coronation baby, after all!” Anne would record in her diary. He had blue eyes, what Anne called the Morrow “pug,” and the unmistakable Lindbergh cleft in his chin.

Because public attention had been diverted, it was several days before the press caught wind of the birth. One night while reporters staked out the main entrance of the clinic, Charles slipped Anne and their new son out the doctors’ entrance and into a waiting car. They enjoyed another several days of quiet at Long Barn before the press discovered them there. Charles had arranged to bypass normal governmental regulations on the registering of births; and it was May twenty-fourth before he submitted a press release of the event to the American Embassy. Not until June twenty-first did Lindbergh register his son’s name—Land, Evangeline Lindbergh’s maiden name.

All that spring, several joyous Morrow events made Anne feel the gentle tug of her family. Her mother received an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Smith College; her sister Constance, upon turning twenty-one, married Aubrey Morgan, their late sister Elisabeth’s widower; and her brother, Dwight Jr., after many years of treatment for mental disorders, was well enough to marry Margot Loines, a friend of Constance. But Anne knew it would be the worst time for Charles to return to New York, for that May twentieth to the twenty-first would mark the tenth anniversary of his flight. A committee of college presidents, ambassadors, military leaders, and captains of industry, headed by General Pershing, Governor Lehman, Mayor LaGuardia, and Orville Wright joined forces for the occasion. “I am embarrassed to think of your being asked to devote your time and energy to preparing a speech for the anniversary of my flight to Paris,” Lindbergh wrote Morgan partner Thomas W. Lamont. “I believe that the past should not be turned into an obligation for the future; and ceremonies for celebrating past events almost invariably become an obligation for those taking part in them. It seems to me that the past should be used to simplify rather than to complicate our lives. At this time, especially, there are too many serious problems which require concentrated attention to justify our spending very much time celebrating the accomplishments of another period.”

The guest of honor’s absence notwithstanding, a day of encomiastic ceremonies and intercontinental broadcasts took place in both New York and Paris, culminating in a banquet for hundreds at the Waldorf-Astoria. The New York Times noted in its editorial that day that “When this age is viewed in retrospect the monument to Colonel LINDBERGH … will more probably be for his impetus and continuing contribution in bringing about the air transport era than even for his heroic deed of May 20–21, 1927.” Indeed, in St. Louis alone—where 165,000 people turned out for a three-day air meet celebrating the 1927 flight—airline and airmail service had doubled in the last eighteen months.

Lindbergh spent the day quietly in England, refusing all invitations to speak to reporters or over the radio. He acknowledged the anniversary only by placing an order with Tiffany & Company in London for eight silver boxes—the lids engraved with maps showing the route of his famous plane—one for each of his St. Louis backers.

The Lindberghs continued to explore Europe, making two trips that summer to the Carrels’ private island off the Brittany coast; and in October they accepted a second invitation from Germany, officially to attend the Lilienthal Aeronautical Society Congress in Munich and unofficially to gather more intelligence about the Luftwaffe for the United States Army.

“What a life you have had!” Ambassador Dodd wrote Lindbergh in advance of his visit. “There is not a match for it in all our history; but what dangerous plans lie ahead for poor old Europe. I hope you may render some service in the direction of peace.” Lindbergh could not help feeling the same, that he was singularly able to visit any country in the world and collect information about its air forces. Such information, he believed, was crucial for the avoidance of war, for, as he wrote the Ambassador, “It is not sufficient for people to desire peace. It is necessary to be able to enforce peace, and to do away with the advantages which may be obtained by war.” To Lindbergh, that meant “preparing” for it.

Charles and Anne flew their Miles Mohawk to Munich on October 11, 1937, and spent the next five days in and around the city. During the Lilienthal Congress the Lindberghs were lodged in a thirteenth-century castle nestled in the Bavarian Alps as guests of an anti-Nazi baron. Lindbergh met no leaders of the Third Reich this trip; and he left Germany even more impressed than he had the last time. “Hitler is apparently more popular than ever in Germany,” Lindbergh wrote Dr. Carrel, “and, much as I disagree with some of the things which have been done, I can understand his popularity. He has done much for Germany.” Charles wrote Anne’s friend Amey Aldrich that he saw “youth, hope and vigor in Germany today—and a strength … based on one of the strongest of foundations—defeat.”

As before, Lindbergh visited factories and airfields. Even more impressive than the array of shiny planes he saw was the large decentralized system of small factories ready to mint many more of them. Lindbergh was the first American to visit the Focke-Wulf factory in Bremen, where the Germans demonstrated a model of a flying machine that landed and took off vertically and was able to hover without any apparent movement; it could also fly backward or forward with good maneuverability in turning. “I have never seen a more successful demonstration of an experimental machine,” he would write of the helicopter.

Most important, Ernst Udet of the Luftwaffe was authorized to show Lindbergh alone the Rechlin air testing station in Pomerania. “This,” Truman Smith commented, “was one of the most secret establishments in Germany, and so far as was then known, foreign attachés were barred.” Lindbergh thus became the first American to examine in detail the Messerschmitt (ME) 109, the Luftwaffe’s leading single-engine fighter, as well as the Dornier (DO) 17, its latest light bomber-reconnaissance airplane. From his visits, he gathered that the Luftwaffe was developing a Messerschmitt 110, a twin-engined fighter with 1200 h.p. Daimler-Benz engines—which turned out to be the case. Before Lindbergh’s departure, he helped Truman Smith prepare Report no. 15540, “General Estimate (of Germany’s Air Power) of November 1, 1937.”

“Germany is once more a world power in the air,” announced the four-page survey. “Her air force and her air industry have emerged from the kindergarten stage. Full manhood will still not be reached for three years.” The report detailed the planes Lindbergh had seen and estimated the strength of the entire air force which he had not seen. He said that Germany had already outdistanced France in its technical development and had all but closed the gap on Great Britain. “A highly competent observer,” Truman wrote in conclusion, referring to Lindbergh, estimated that “if the present progress curves of [America and Germany] should continue as they have in the past two years, Germany should obtain technical parity with the USA by 1941 or 1942.” At the end of the year, Truman Smith returned to America on leave and discovered his report had been photostatted and circulated widely. He was, therefore, disappointed to see Congress cut rather than increase War Department requests for appropriations for the Army Air Corps.

Other American embassies wrote Lindbergh, inviting him to inspect air bases in their countries. But at the end of 1937, he was most anxious to see what strides America was making in aviation. So mindful was Lindbergh of his position in these obviously historical times, he began to keep a journal. For the first time in his life, he would write daily entries for more than a few weeks; in fact, he would maintain the habit for most of the next seven years.

The Lindberghs celebrated a quiet—and early—Christmas at Long Barn, with their two children, on the twenty-fifth of November. Charles and Anne were sailing on the S. S. President Harding on the twenty-seventh, and they planned to be gone several months. Charles had clearly developed a pattern of embarking on a long trip after the birth of each child, as though weaning his wife from their children.

They stuck to themselves during the crossing, mostly writing. Anne progressed on Listen! The Wind, her account of their Africa-to-America journey; and Charles prepared chapters of a medical book he was cowriting with Dr. Carrel, The Culture of Organs. Before their ship had docked, the Lindberghs learned that reporters had flocked to meet them. Charles took Anne to the third-class gangplank and down a freight elevator, thereby evading the army of photographers and journalists waiting at the foot of the first-class gangplank. The newsmen ran after them, but they escaped to Mrs. Morrow’s waiting car.

No sooner had they reached Next Day Hill than the press cars had returned to wait outside the gate. A sentry had to be put on duty, which the media soon exaggerated, reporting twelve policemen on guard, as well as a direct telephone wire to the state police headquarters. “Suppose we will have constant trouble with press now,” Lindbergh wrote in his new journal. “Rumors, lies & all the sensation of American journalism at its worst.”

“Let’s leave Colonel Lindbergh alone,” Frank E. Gannett urged the editors of the papers that comprised his chain. “I believe firmly that it is a newspaper’s duty to print the news, but I am utterly opposed to the invasion of the privacy of a citizen.” Other major media announced a similar policy, in an effort to prove that the Lindberghs’ fleeing America had taught them a lesson. But within days, the press coverage was as bad as ever.

Most of the Lindberghs’ trip was spent catching up with old friends and business associates. Other than sitting for Robert Brackman, who painted oil portraits of both Charles and Anne, the most consequential encounter was with a good-looking, bespectacled thirty-two-year-old named James Newton. An entrepreneurial real-estate developer from Fort Myers, Florida—and a friend of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford—Newton moved on to a strenuous career working for Harvey Firestone, until he collapsed from overwork. Then he found himself attracted to the Oxford Group, “an informal association of men and women, started by an American, Frank Buchman, who were committeed to creating sound homes, teamwork in industry, and unity within and between nations, based on moral and spiritual change.” Introduced by Dr. Carrel, Newton—a powerful personality with a gentle soul—would become Lindbergh’s most constant friend for the rest of his life. Lindbergh did not get to survey American developments in aviation on this trip, as he had hoped; but what little he saw convinced him, as he wrote Major General Frank Ross McCoy, “that Germany is rapidly surpassing us in air strength.”

On February 20, 1938, Hitler spoke to the Reichstag of the ten million Germans living just beyond his borders, suggesting his vision of an Anschluss. By the time the Lindberghs boarded the England-bound Bremen, less than three weeks later, the Nazis had marched into Austria. Lindbergh was already dreading the possibility that America and Germany might end up crossing swords. “If we fight, our countries will only lose their best men,” Lindbergh noted, echoing his late father’s sentiments. “We can gain nothing…. It must not happen.”

Lindbergh found such thinking lost on the English. To him, they seemed worried about Germany but just as incapable of doing anything about it. Except for a few people he met at Cliveden, he found the conversation at tea parties centered on grouse hunting and the indomitability of the Royal Navy. “And the people show little sign of changing,” he wrote. “They need an entirely new spirit if British greatness is to endure.” Literally choking on the smoke-filled fog of London, Lindbergh craved fresh air.

THE MOST STIMULATING CONFLUENCE of earth, water, and sky Lindbergh had ever seen lay not two hundred miles across the English Channel, where Brittany’s Côtes-du-Nord forms the Inlet of Pellinec. On this northwestern spur of France, huge cumulonimbus clouds roiling off the Atlantic play with the light, flooding a tiny archipelago of miniature islands below in pinks, oranges, and purples. Most of the time, these rock formations sit as islands dotting the coastline; but twice a day the tide recedes, pulling so much water out of the inlet that the islands stand as weird, craggy hills among tidal pools—a wet desert, dead-quiet except for the birds and the constant winds.

It was no wonder that the Carrels had settled on the Île Saint-Gildas, the largest member of this mystical archipelago. Since the eleventh century, a chapel has towered over the small compound of buildings that came to be erected behind protective walls on the hundred-acre island—“a combination of an old French farm and a Maine island and the moon.” Lindbergh had enjoyed nothing more in Europe than his visits there, savoring the arrival as much as the stay.

When traveling alone to Saint-Gildas, Lindbergh flew over the island and dropped a message tied to a streamer and weighted with a stone to announce his approach. Then he parked his plane at the airdrome at either Morlaix or Dinan, where a car and driver navigated the sinuous Brittany roads and dropped him off at the edge of the small town of Port-Blanc, where the pavement dead-ended at the water. Lindbergh did not reach this point on his first visit until close to midnight and high tide, which would have consigned most visitors to the mainland for the night. But along with his personal bag, Lindbergh carried an emergency rubber raft, which he inflated and paddled through the phosphorescent water to the island.

A few islands away—ten minutes by boat, a kilometer walk at low tide—was Illiec. Barely four acres, it was smaller but higher than any of the surrounding islets, completely at one with the elements—“a part of the sea,” Lindbergh wrote in his diary, “—like a boat in a storm.” Anomalously, in the middle of this bizarre natural granite sculpture, jammed up against a towering rock with one sheer side that dropped to the water, sat a majestic, three-story Breton manor house. Beneath its slate roof, the stone structure had a dozen rooms, including a tiny chapel and two conical towers. It was built in the 1860s by Ambroise Thomas, who composed his opera Mignon there. It lacked all the modern conveniences—heating, electricity, and plumbing, though it had cistern drinking water.

The moment Lindbergh learned that it might be for sale, he deputized Madame Carrel to negotiate its purchase. For the asking price of $16,000, it became the Lindberghs’. He knew it was a folly, seeing “only too well that the conditions in France are bad—that they may even lead to revolution.” But, he admitted to his journal on March 31, 1938, “even one summer at Illiec would almost justify buying it. The very memory of such a summer would strengthen the rest of life. I have never seen a place where I wanted to live so much.”

Within a week, Charles and Anne flew to Brittany, to inspect the pig they had bought in a poke. Anne was as taken by the scenery as her husband, but the interior of the house was drearier than she feared—dark walls covered with matting, heavy Victorian furniture, cheap tapestries. By the end of the the day, however, Anne had planted some cuttings from Long Barn among the heather and gorse, and her head was swimming with plans for redecorating, building cupboards, buying chemical toilets. Off to one side of the house was a cottage, where a caretaker, cook, and their thirteen-year-old son lived. The next day, men began work on the property, inside and out.

The Lindberghs returned to England for the balance of the spring, during which time Charles completed his work on The Culture of Organs and Anne all but completed hers on Listen! The Wind, for which Charles wrote a foreword and drew several maps. They also spent these six weeks cramming in as much social activity as possible.

The Lindberghs discussed politics at Sissinghurst with Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson (“Lindbergh is most pessimistic,” Nicolson wrote in his diary a few weeks later, erroneously ascribing Lindbergh’s suggestion that England “should just give way and then make an alliance with Germany” to what he assumed was his belief “in the Nazi theology, all tied up with his hatred of degeneracy and his hatred of democracy as represented by the free Press and the American public.”) That same week they also stayed with the Astors at Cliveden, where Anne found Charles “shocking the life out of everyone by describing Germany’s strength”; and they rejoined Lady Astor at 4 St. James’s Square for luncheon with George Bernard Shaw. The other guests included the American Ambassador to France, William C. Bullitt, Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, and Thomas Jones, Lloyd George’s confidant and Secretary to the British Cabinet. The conversation that day turned mostly to a provocative mimeographed newsletter being published in London called The Week, whose editor, Claud Cockburn, had coined the term “Cliveden Set,” a disparaging term he used to suggest the pro-Nazi leanings of the Astors and their friends. (The American Embassy had long since discredited the bulletins, finding them riddled with gossip, scandal, and unreliable information.)

The Astors also invited the Lindberghs to a ball at the end of the month for the King and Queen. Charles wore a new set of tails, his first since Paris in 1927. The Queen conversed with Anne, noting that she had heard that the Lindberghs’ child had been born on Coronation Day. “I think it’s very nice,” Queen Elizabeth said, “when something big is happening to you, to think that something big is happening to someone else, too.”

Later in the evening, the Queen sent word that she wished Lindbergh to dance with her. Lindbergh explained to the attendant that he had never danced a step in his life and was told it would be acceptable to sit out the dance and talk. And so for twenty minutes they conversed about the troubles of the world and the perils of the American press. Lindbergh liked Queen Elizabeth, finding her natural and dignified, “but not at all stiff.” After the party, when Anne asked what they had talked about, Charles explained that he felt the Queen was terribly tired, showing the strain of her new regal life, and that he just went on prattling because he thought “it was the easiest thing for her.”

Two days later, an invitation arrived from Buckingham Palace, inviting the Lindberghs to a ball on June first. The Lindberghs booked a room at Claridge’s for the evening, where they could dress for the formal event, which was called for 10:30 P.M. Shortly before leaving for the palace, Anne and Charles sat opposite each other at a small table in their room, sipping sherry and eating melba toast—he in his knee breeches and white waistcoat, and she with a tiara—laughing at each other.

Anne danced until three. Charles sat out all the dances, finding the event less of an ordeal than he had anticipated, thanks in large measure to Lady Astor’s conversation. He granted that nobody pulled off formal occasions with more dignity than the English. Through it all, he could not help noticing that his wife looked positively “drunk with happiness,” happier than he had ever seen her. For a moment it seemed to dawn on him that had he not swept her away a decade earlier, this would probably have been the sort of life Ambassador Morrow’s daughter would have led.

Instead, on June seventh, Lindbergh flew his wife and their two sons to their private island—where heat came only from the fireplace, light from kerosene lamps, and water from a well in front of the house. By the twenty-third, they were able to move out of their guest quarters on Saint-Gildas and into their own house on Illiec. Work continued all summer, with five hundred cypress trees getting planted on the east side of the island and five hundred pines on the west.

Illiec proved to be the haven of Lindbergh’s imaginings, a physical and mental challenge. He and Anne found it conducive for walking and working. Although Jon was deprived of any friends his own age, he was already growing up enormously independent, fascinated by marine life. He spent most of his time swimming, shell-collecting, and often gathering their dinner from the sea—shrimp, crab, even abalone, which he pried from underneath rocks.

Illiec’s greatest attraction remained Dr. Carrel. Lindbergh spent every available minute with his mentor; and for months his mind was Carrel’s to mold. Sitting in the doctor’s high-walled garden or by the fireplace late into the night, the two men discussed improving qualities within the human species and the population at large, through diet and reproduction. “Eugenics,” Carrel wrote in Man, the Unknown, “is indispensable for the perpetuation of the strong. A great race must propagate its best elements.” He and Lindbergh carried on such discussions over the course of the summer, delving into the subject of “race betterment.” Unfortunately, similar discussions were raging throughout the Third Reich, a coincidence that would not be lost on future detractors of either Carrel or Lindbergh.

Lindbergh planned to continue his quest for life’s answers that summer in Brittany and beyond. He had hoped to study the local folklore and its superstitions in the neighboring islands and provinces; and he wanted to return to India and see the Himalayas. But along with “the maritime tides of Saint-Gildas,” he found, “there was a rising world-wide tide of war.” Increasingly, letters requesting his participation in more earthly affairs arrived for him at the Penvénan post office on the mainland. “Problems of civilization and survival towered above my fascination with phenomena that sometimes lay exposed in the tidelands of rationality and life,” he wrote of those days. “Why spend time on biological experiments when our very civilization was at stake, when one of history’s great cataclysms impended?”

At the suggestion of Colonel Raymond L. Lee, military attaché for air in the U.S. Embassy in London, Lindbergh agreed to undertake a survey of aviation in the Soviet Union. He and Anne spent the last two weeks of August 1938 in Russia, following an itinerary prescribed by the Soviet government—Mogilev, Kiev, Odessa, Rostov, and Moscow.

What Lindbergh did not see on the trip impressed him more than what he did. It quickly became apparent that “Stalin’s Russia did not wish to expose her Air Force to foreign eyes”—mostly, Lindbergh realized, out of embarrassment. The few aeronautical sites he was shown were far inferior to the many other sights they showed off—the new subway, the new theater built in the form of a huge tractor, the new ice-cream factory, and a collective farm. While Lindbergh could not observe enough to estimate the nation’s production capacity, he concluded that “the Russian Air Force probably consisted of several thousand planes which would be effective in a modern war but were no match for the Luftwaffe in either quality or quantity.” He found Russian life bleak—marked by secrecy, scarcity, and suppression.

They left the Soviet Union by way of Czechoslovakia, where Lindbergh met with President Eduard Beneš and his military staff and visited their aviation establishments. “This country is prepared for a German invasion at any moment,” he wrote his mother. He found their army strong and modern but “not well equipped in the air.”

On September 8, they flew to Paris and checked into the Crillon. The press quickly gathered outside the hotel. The Lindberghs delayed their return to Illiec by a day in response to a private invitation from Ambassador Bullitt. At dinner the next night, with French Minister of Air Guy La Chambre also in attendance, they talked for hours about aviation. Lindbergh tried to make La Chambre see, as he would write in his journal, “The French situation is desperate. Impossible to catch up to Germany for years, if at all.” France was producing fifty warplanes per month, about one-tenth Germany’s output.

Charles and Anne had only a few days in Illiec before they flew to England. They spent the third week of September in London, often in the company of Ambassador Kennedy. More than ever, Lindbergh felt that “the English are in no shape for war…. They have always before had a fleet between themselves and their enemy, and they can’t realize the change aviation has made.”

At Kennedy’s request, Lindbergh committed to paper the next day some of his comments regarding military aviation in Europe, so that they could be transmitted to both the White House and Whitehall. Kennedy promptly wired the bulk of the letter to Secretary of State Cordell Hull—including Lindbergh’s estimates of German production and his conviction that “Germany now has the means of destroying London, Paris, and Prague if she wishes to do so. England and France together have not enough modern war planes for effective defence or counter-attack.” That being the case, Lindbergh added, “I am convinced that it is wiser to permit Germany’s eastward expansion than to throw England and France, unprepared, into a war at this time.”

Germany felt less bold. Although Lindbergh would have no way of knowing it, that very day Goering received a secret report from his own General Helmuth Felmy, who informed him that none of their bombers or fighters could “operate meaningfully” over England. “Given our present means,” the report stated, “we can hope at best for a nuisance effect…. A war of annihilation against Britain appears to be out of the question.”

The Lindberghs spent the night of September twenty-sixth at Cliveden, where they listened to Hitler on the radio. It was a spellbinding oration, even to those who did not understand German—one that brought the aggressive nation to the brink of war. The Astors and their guests debated the issue all night. Charles and Lady Astor argued that England should steer clear of the fray, while Lord Astor and the others got caught in what Lindbergh called “the spirit of the ‘Light Brigade,’” insisting that Germany must be stopped now before getting any stronger. Charles and Anne retired for the night in the “Tapestry Room,” which afforded them a view of the gardens and beyond to the Thames.

The next day, Lindbergh went into London, where he noticed trenches being dug in parks, sandbags surrounding doors and windows of buildings, and lines of people waiting for gas masks. He had tea with David Lloyd George, who told him that war seemed inevitable and that the Nazi system was as bad as the Russian system. Having visited both countries recently, Lindbergh became exasperated that the former Prime Minister did not “recognize any difference to England between an alliance with European Germany and Asiatic Russia. He apparently does not worry about the effect of Asia on European civilization.”

Lindbergh spent much of the next two days at the Embassy with Joseph Kennedy, who, in turn, preached appeasement to an already persuaded Neville Chamberlain. The Prime Minister left for a conference in Munich—where he would meet Hitler, Mussolini, and Daladier of France. Chamberlain returned to his jubilant nation with the promise of “peace for our time.”

As much as any diplomat in the world, Lindbergh spent the next month globe trotting among the capitals of Europe on government missions. A minister without portfolio, his sole motivation was public service. He had no thirst for power or attention, and he paid for all his flights out of his own pocket. At Ambassador Bullitt’s beckoning, he went first to Paris, where he was asked to help supply military aircraft to France. The goal was to purchase warplanes from the United States, which the Neutrality Act of 1935 made impossible. Bullitt suggested, however, that American factories be built in Canada, where they could circumvent the law and produce the planes.

This private meeting—which included Daladier, La Chambre, Bullitt, and Jean Monnet—thrust Lindbergh into a crisis of conscience. “Aside from the personal problems involved,” Lindbergh would later retell, “there were serious questions relating to loyalty to my own country and to the civilization of which it was a part. I loved France second only to America, and I had fallen in love with Europe as a whole. From the time the Canadian Plan was first outlined to me, I had reservations about the effect it would have on both America and Europe.” It seemed to Lindbergh “a roundabout way of getting the United States again involved in Europe’s wars—against the wishes of Congress and the American people.”

Lindbergh believed England and France were viewing the gameboard in the wrong way, looking only at short-term moves. To him, totalitarianism was the ultimate enemy, and that if England and France would draw back, “a westward expansion by Hitler might still be prevented through a combination of diplomacy, strategic convenience, and the use of defensive power.” Lindbergh’s worst fear was that “the potentially gigantic power of America, guided by uninformed and impractical idealism, might crusade into Europe to destroy Hitler without realizing that Hitler’s destruction would lay Europe open to the rape, loot, and barbarism of Soviet Russia’s forces, causing possibly the fatal wounding of Western civilization.”

“I was far from being in accord with the philosophy, policy, and actions of the Nazi government,” Lindbergh would later write of his position, “but it seemed to me essential to France and England, and even to America, that Germany be maintained as a bulwark against the Soviet Union.” Lindbergh astounded his confreres at the private meeting by suggesting that France purchase bombers not from Canada but from Germany! He argued that Hitler might actually “welcome the opportunity to make a gesture to protect his western frontier.”

Lindbergh went to Illiec to ponder his role in the Canadian Plan. After three days of climbing the rocks and wandering among the tidal pools, he patriotically recommended men in American aviation whom the French could contact in confidence. After writing letters of introduction, he excused himself from further meetings on the plan, which soon dissolved. He flew to Berlin, where the military attaché of the American Embassy had invited him for the third time, ostensibly to attend the Lilienthal Society’s Aeronautic Congress. Before his arrival, Lindbergh received his first slap in the face over his new role in world affairs.

Delayed in Rotterdam for a night because of weather, he learned in a telephone conversation with Truman Smith that trouble had flared up in Moscow over an article published in the mimeographed London newssheet The Week. It claimed that Lindbergh had told members of “the Cliveden Set” that “the German air force could take on and defeat, single handed, the British, French, Soviet and Czechoslovak air fleets,” and that “he knew all about the Russian air force because, when in Moscow recently, he had been offered the post of head of the Soviet civil aviation administration.” The latter remark was sheer invention on somebody’s part, and the rest was a simplification of Lindbergh’s feelings about the strength of the Luftwaffe—which had not been uttered at Cliveden but at a luncheon Thomas Jones hosted in London.

Pravda reprinted the article as though it had come from a reputable news source, allowing the Russian government to denounce Lindbergh as a liar. Lindbergh’s hosts from the Russian Embassy wired that it was “imperative” that he set the record straight. But Lindbergh adhered to his longtime policy of offering no comment—which only created greater concern.

Flying into Berlin the next day, Charles was immediately struck by the changes in the country since his visit a year earlier. Berlin showed every sign of “a healthy, busy, modern city.” The aviation community seemed more ebullient than usual, willing to show off their latest planes and factories not only to Lindbergh but also to many distinguished guests who had flown in for the conference, Lindbergh’s friend Igor Sikorsky among them. For a solid week, Lindbergh inspected sites.

On Tuesday, October 18, 1938—after a long day visiting the Junkers engine factory at Magdeburg, flying to Dessau to visit the Junkers factory, then back to Berlin—Lindbergh left Truman Smith’s apartment for a stag dinner at the American Embassy. The new Ambassador, Hugh Wilson, saw in Lindbergh’s presence the opportunity to establish friendly personal relations with Hermann Goering, thereby improving American-German relations. Furthermore, unknown to Lindbergh, Wilson had told Truman Smith that he also “hoped to obtain at such a dinner Goering’s support for certain measures especially desired by the State Department concerning the easing of the financial plight of the large number of Jews who were being forced to emigrate from Germany in a penniless condition.”

Lindbergh joined a distinguished group of gentlemen that night—Generals Milch and Udet, the Italian and Belgian ambassadors, several American military attachés, and three of the greatest minds in German aviation, Ernst Heinkel, Adolf Baeumker, and Dr. Willy E. Messerschmitt. Goering was the last to arrive. Lindbergh was standing in the back of the reception room as the Marshal made his way toward him. Before he had even reached Lindbergh, Goering accepted a red leather box from his chief aide-de-camp and began a speech.

Nobody was prepared for the moment. Because Lindbergh did not speak German, the American Consul-General in Berlin, Raymond Geist, stepped forward to translate. To the surprise of at least every American in the room, Lindbergh was being decorated with the Verdienstkreuz Deutscher Adler—the Service Cross of the German Eagle—a decoration for his services to the aviation of the world and particularly for his 1927 flight, which postwar Germany had never acknowledged. “By order of der Führer,” Goering said, opening the box.

Inside was a golden cross with four small swastikas, finished in white enamel, strung on a red ribbon with white and black borders. Accompanying the medal was a proclamation on parchment signed by Hitler. Lindbergh was surprised by the honor but thought little of it, only that it “was given with the best of intent and with no more political motif in the background than was usual with the presentation of decorations in Europe.” (In fact, the French Ambassador and Henry Ford had recently received the same award.) Lindbergh accepted the decoration as unceremoniously as it had been presented, and the men all took their seats for dinner.

Ambassador Wilson sat at the head of one of the two tables, Lindbergh at the other. Through the meal, Lindbergh spoke mostly to Air Minister Milch about aviation, though Milch did ask why Lindbergh should not winter in Berlin. In fact, Anne had been house-hunting that week, as Charles believed Berlin would be the most interesting city in the world during the next few months. Privately, Ambassador Wilson had told Lindbergh that such a move would prove “helpful” to him.

After dinner, Goering approached Lindbergh again, leading him into a room for a personal talk. Ambassador Wilson accompanied them to translate. Goering immediately asked about Lindbergh’s trip to Russia; and before a second question on the subject could be raised, Wilson diplomatically offered the translating services of Consul-General Geist, knowing that an ambassador’s presence during a private conversation about world affairs could prove inhibiting if not embarrassing. Lindbergh spoke frankly, saying that he did not think the conditions in Russia were good and that the people did not seem well-fed or happy.

Goering steered the conversation to German aviation. While the American diplomats were grateful for whatever information they could glean, they also had to consider the possibility that the Germans were using Lindbergh, pulling the wool over his eyes by filling him with false impressions of German strength. (Later, people told stories of the Germans secretly moving planes by night from one airfield on Lindbergh’s itinerary to another, to impress him with the size of their fleet. The stories were both untrue and unnecessary, as Lindbergh was less concerned at that moment with the potency of the Luftwaffe than with its potential. He was more interested in their research and development than the existing number of planes.) And when Goering spoke of a new Junkers 88 bomber, which no American had seen, Lindbergh did not doubt the Air Marshal’s boasts of its ability to fly at five hundred kilometers an hour. (In fact, the JU 88 would quickly become the nucleus of the Luftwaffe’s fleet of bomb-carriers, with Germany producing fifteen thousand of them over the next six years.) Lindbergh left the Embassy a few minutes after Goering. It was the second, and last, time they ever conversed.

Anne Lindbergh and Kay Smith were chatting when their husbands returned from the Embassy. Neither of the men had attached much importance to the Goering medal; and Charles showed it to Anne without comment. “She gave it but a fleeting glance,” Truman Smith observed, “and then—without the slightest trace of emotion—remarked, ‘The Albatross.’”

Lindbergh never saw it that way, insisting almost twenty years later that the decoration “never caused me any worry, and I doubt that it caused me much additional difficulty.” But Kay Smith went to bed that night prophesying to her husband, “This medal will surely do Lindbergh much harm.”

Two weeks later, Lindbergh wrote General H. H. “Hap” Arnold, Chief of the Air Corps, urging him to visit Germany immediately to assess the military situation there for himself. Arnold wrote back that he was “100% in favor of making the trip just as you outlined.” Lindbergh himself prepared to return there for his own enlightenment. “I am extremely anxious to learn more about Germany and I believe a few months spent in that country would be interesting from many standpoints,” Lindbergh wrote Joseph Kennedy on November 9, 1938. Anne found a house in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, which she thought would “do perfectly.” They returned to France to pack up Illiec and collect their children.

The very night of Lindbergh’s letter to Kennedy, Germany staged the worst pogrom that the Third Reich had witnessed, a nationwide series of “spontaneous” demonstrations. More than one hundred synagogues were burned, thousands of shops and houses owned by Jews were destroyed, tens of thousands of Jews were arrested and carted off to confinement camps, and dozens of Jews were killed. “Kristallnacht,” as that night of mayhem came to be known, opened the world’s eyes to the barbarism on which the Third Reich was built. “My admiration for the Germans is constantly being dashed against some rock such as this,” Lindbergh wrote in his journal back on Illiec. Then he confessed an utter inability to understand such persecution.

The Service Cross of the German Eagle suddenly reflected badly on its recipient. The press, which had grown to resent Lindbergh’s uncooperative attitude, instantly revised history. In December, for example, Liberty Magazine reported Lindbergh’s having flown to Berlin especially to receive the medal; The New York Times wrote of his proudly wearing the medal all evening. “With confused emotions,” wrote The New Yorker on November 26, 1938, “we say goodbye to Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, who wants to go and live in Berlin, presumably occupying a house that once belonged to Jews…. If he wants to experiment further with the artificial heart, his surroundings there should be ideal.” FDR’s Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, lashed out against Lindbergh in a speech before a Zionist meeting in Cleveland that December, asserting that anyone who accepts a decoration from Germany also “forfeits his right to be an American.”

For more than ten years, Lindbergh had been a universal symbol, an Übermensch whose accomplishments had been in the name of mankind, not any single class of people. And though he had been for three years a man without a country, many at home now hoped he would end his exile and lead the fight against Fascistic oppression.

As a long-festering resentment of Germany surfaced in the United States, it became increasingly difficult for Lindbergh not to take a stand against the Third Reich. “Now,” theorized Aubrey Morgan in a letter to Lindbergh at year’s end, that boiling population had “found a convenient channel to explode their pent-up wrath by stoning a fellow American. So you have become the scapegoat. The press certainly went out of their way to make you the real villain and Machiavellian intriguer behind the European scenes.”

“People in this country have stopped thinking,” Dr. Carrel wrote Lindbergh from New York—where, he noted, gentiles almost as much as Jews had become agitated by the German attacks against its Jews. “The papers have published misleading articles about your plan to stay in Berlin,” he added, noting their terrible effect. “There is a good deal of ill feeling against you.” Friends and relatives wrote the Lindberghs, urging them not to live in Berlin and to return the medal. “We know Charles never denies anything the newspapers print and we know too that some outrageous things have been printed about him,” the wife of one of Anne’s cousins wrote her. “But this thing seems to us to be different. For the first time, it actually puts Charles on a side, it allies him with something this country believes is wrong and bad, and it may give impetus and encouragement to some weaker men who lean to the wrong side.”

Lindbergh needed nobody to tell him to abandon his plans to move to Berlin. Wanting immediate access to the diplomatic corridors of a city (and a proper school for his son Jon), Anne and Charles decided on their own to leave Illiec for an apartment at number 11 bis Avenue Maréchal Maunoury in Paris’s 16th arrondissement. “I am not very much concerned by the stories printed in the newspapers, and I have neither desire nor respect for a popularity which is dependent on the press,” he explained to Dr. Carrel in early December. The move to Paris, he explained, was for one basic reason: “the fact that I do not wish to make a move which would seem to support the German action in regard to the Jews.” He admitted that he still did not understand the Germans’ methods; and until he did, he wrote, “I do not wish to cause embarrassment to our Government, or to the German Government. Moving to Berlin under present circumstances might easily do this.”

As for returning the medal, Lindbergh would write almost three years later, after it assumed even greater significance in the public eye: “It seems to me that the returning of decorations which were given in times of peace, and as a gesture of friendship, can have no constructive effect. If I were to return the German medal, it seems to me that it would be an unnecessary insult. Even if war develops between us, I can see no gain in indulging in a spitting contest before that war begins.” And, Lindbergh wondered, what of medals from other nations that might become enemies. All those decorations were part of the past, the property of the Missouri Historical Society.

With Paris as his base, Lindbergh spent the next four months continuing his shuttle diplomacy. He paid several visits to England, where he conferred with Ambassador Kennedy, the Astors, and the aviation officials of the United Kingdom. At the requests of the air ministers of France and Germany, he embarked on two secret missions to Berlin—a week in mid-December and three days in mid-January—during which he advanced the same notion he had during the Canadian Plan conferences. Recognizing the need to fortify their air force, Daladier and La Chambre at last told Lindbergh that they were prepared to buy engines at least, if not planes, from Germany, if the Third Reich was willing to sell them. Lindbergh never learned whether or not the plan was agreed to by Hitler himself, but Air Minister Milch told Lindbergh that they could proceed with a deal. His work done, Lindbergh withdrew from the project. He subsequently learned the French did as well, for tensions between the countries were mounting again.

During his visits to Berlin, Lindbergh persistently sought answers to what was euphemistically being called “the Jewish question.” Raising the subject whenever possible, he did not find a single German who did not seem ashamed of the recent lawlessness against the Jews. Nor did he encounter a single German who did not want the country rid of the Jews. He felt the entire nation had bought into the Nazi propaganda that the Jew “is largely responsible for the internal collapse and revolution following the war. At the time of the inflation the Jews are said to have obtained the ownership of a large percentage of property in Berlin and other cities—lived in the best houses, drove the best automobiles, and mixed with the prettiest German girls.” Lindbergh met with George Rublee, an old friend of Dwight Morrow who had become Chairman of the Inter-governmental Refugee Committee and was in Berlin lobbying for Germans to moderate their attitude toward the Jews. Lindbergh extolled Rublee’s virtues to Milch and Udet and introduced him to Otto Merkel, of Lufthansa, whom he thought might prove sympathetic to Rublee’s mission.

Nazi Germany, a rising monument to technocracy, was an ideal Lindbergh kept hoping to embrace. So long as he was able to intellectualize his feelings, he was able to believe some new system of government—a new order—might save a degenerating world. “I shared the repulsion that democratic peoples felt in viewing the demagoguery of Hitler, the controlled elections, the secret police,” he would later reveal. “Yet I felt that I was seeing in Germany, despite the crudeness of its form, the inevitable alternative to decline—a challenge based more on the drive to achieve success despite established ‘right’ and law.” Rather than look at the price being paid for that “success,” Lindbergh buried his head in the sand when confronted with the crimes of inhumanity that repelled so many others.

In Lindbergh’s mind, the final shootout in Europe would not be between Fascism and democracy but between two dictators—Stalin and Hitler. Nothing he had heard attributed to the Nazis even approached the “ruthlessness and terror” of the Russians, who were rumored to have slaughtered forty million people since their revolution. “My greatest hope,” Lindbergh would write, explaining the political policy that would guide him over the next few years, “lay in the possibility that a war would be confined to fighting between Hitler and Stalin. It seemed probable that Germany would be victorious in such a conflict; and by that time France and England would be stronger. Under any circumstances, I believed that a victory by Germany’s European people would be preferable to one by Russia’s semi-Asiatic Soviet Union. Hitler would not live forever, and I felt sure the Germans would eventually moderate the excesses of his Nazi regime.”

As late as April 1939—after Germany overtook Czechoslovakia—Lindbergh was willing to make excuses for Hitler. “Much as I disappove of many things Germany has done,” he wrote in his diary on April 2, 1939, “I believe she has pursued the only consistent policy in Europe in recent years. I cannot support her broken promises, but she has only moved a little faster than other nations have in breaking promises. The question of right and wrong is one thing by law and another thing by history.” After his January 1939 mission, Lindbergh did not set foot on German soil until the Third Reich had fallen.

The Lindberghs took advantage of their winter in Paris, frequenting museums and galleries. They posed for sculptors—Jo Davidson did a bust of him, and Charles Despiau one of her; and they bought several oil paintings by Vlaminck. They also dined with the likes of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Lin Yutang, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. (Lindbergh now wrote him off as an utter bore, noting of his private conversation with the ex-King, “The entire time was spent in talking about two subjects: the flavor of wines and how much higher the Étoile is than the Place de la Concorde.”)

One night Anne and Charles went to the Tour d’Argent on the Seine. Their beautiful dinner was spoiled by a group of Americans and French at the next table, who recognized them. They spoke too loudly about Lindbergh’s hostile relationship with the press—“about newspaper rumors, about the kidnapping of our baby, about the trial at Flemington, about all the things that discretion should have prevented their mentioning at an adjoining table,” Lindbergh wrote in his journal. He was no longer an unequivocal hero.

Indeed, some held him in contempt. In the Lindberghs’ absence, many Americans wearied of feeling guilty for their departure and wondered why they were reluctant to return. Family and friends informed them that there was a campaign afoot against them. Audiences in motion-picture houses hissed when Lindbergh appeared in the newsreels; many Jewish booksellers boycotted Anne’s critically acclaimed bestseller Listen! The Wind; and, in December 1938, advertisements from TWA appeared without its slogan “The Lindbergh Line.” These rumblings distressed Anne deeply, because she felt, “C. is not and never has been anti-Semitic.” She hoped this moment of unpopularity would prove fleeting, but she knew the “ball of rumor and criticism, once it starts rolling, is difficult to stop.”

After three years abroad, Lindbergh questioned what further contribution he could make toward improving relations among the countries of Europe. If there was to be a war, he thought, “then my place was back in my own country. I felt I could exercise a constructive influence in America by warning people of the danger of the Soviet Union and by explaining that the destruction of Hitler, even if it could be accomplished through using American resources, would probably result in enhancing the still-greater menace of Stalin.” As one of the few people to have visited the world’s political hot spots, he felt compelled to argue for an American policy of “strength and neutrality, one that would encourage European nations to take the responsibility for their own relationships and destinies. If they prostrated themselves once again in internecine war, then at least one strong Western nation would remain to protect Western civilization.”

Lindbergh booked passage on the Aquitania. His decision to summon his family to America, he noted in his journal, would depend on “what I may find I may be able to do if I spend the summer there.”