14

THE GREAT DEBATE

“My father had opposed the United States’s entering

World War I…. I was not old enough to understand

the war’s basic issues, yet I felt pride in the

realization that my country was now powerful and

influential enough to take a major part in world crises.”

—C.A.L.

MUCH OF YESTERDAY’S HEARSAY BECAME TODAY’S HISTORY.

On January 1, 1939, for example, Walter Winchell stretched some comments of Joseph P. Kennedy and told his newspaper and radio audience that it was Lindbergh’s “now famous report on Germany’s power in the air, which was to prove a final factor in Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy at Munich.” An estimated fifty million people received that “information.” More than one historian later quoted Winchell in asserting that the terms at Munich might never have been conceded were it not for Lindbergh’s miscalculations of German strength. Another compounded that error, connecting it with the statement of an eminent British historian who said it had been “very well known” that the Germans had shuttled the same planes from one field to another during Lindbergh’s inspection tours—another piece of gossip. Some went so far as to suggest there might not have been a second World War had Lindbergh never gone to Germany!

Into 1939, as Hitler expanded his empire, “Munich” and “Chamberlain” entered the lexicon as terms of appeasement and fecklessness. In America, some referred to Lindbergh as a doomsayer, a Nazi dupe, even a “collaborator.”

After months of conflicting reports about Lindbergh’s travels in Europe, Washington correspondent Arthur Krock tried to set the record straight. With the United States government at last modernizing its flying fleet, the esteemed New York Times commentator explained that it owed much of its new size and efficiency to him, as they were at last responding to his alarm. “[C]riticism of any of his activities—in Germany or elsewhere—” Krock wrote, “is as ignorant as it is unfair.”

In his column of February 1, 1939, Krock detailed the results of Lindbergh’s missions to Berlin, stressing for his critics that Lindbergh “throughout has been an official American reporter and adviser on aviation,” and that the American government had been the chief beneficiary of his information and technical appraisal. “Colonel Lindbergh is no usual man,” Krock concluded, “and that applied to his temperament and methods. This individualism has earned him some personal unpopularity. But any founded on belief he has not been a patriot, and most valuably one, is ill-founded indeed.” Not everybody read the Times.

ON SATURDAY, April 8, 1939, Lindbergh bid adieu to his wife and their two children in Paris and trained to Cherbourg, where he boarded the Aquitania and sailed for New York. He confined himself to his stateroom as much as possible during the crossing, working on a new book, another rendering of his flight to Paris. The first night of the crossing he went to the dining room early, hoping to avoid the crowd. He was joined by one other passenger, one of many Jewish refugees on board. She was a pretty Romanian of twenty, and that presented problems of its own. He made polite conversation and enjoyed her company; but he knew he would have to change tables for the rest of the voyage, or else “the newspapers in America will grab her, photograph her, interview her, and then throw her in the gutter according to their usual procedure.” And yet, Lindbergh presumed, in changing tables she would probably think it was on account of her being Jewish.

In his introduction of Lindbergh’s Wartime Journals, which would be published in 1970, William Jovanovich noted that the entries were printed exactly as written, except in the cases of certain personal references to living people, repetitions or material deemed “not important enough to warrant adding to the length of the work as a whole.” That was, for the most part, true. But there were exceptions, several omissions in the published texts that were substantive in nature. As with the later publication of Anne’s diaries, the bulk of these omissions centered on one subject: the Jews.

None of the cuts contains any overt denigrations of Jews. In fact, most of the references express Lindbergh’s affinity and admiration for them. But in so writing about a single tribe, he was segregating them in his mind from the rest of the nation; and to that extent he was, like many of his countrymen, anti-Semitic. The following paragraph from Lindbergh’s journal entry of April 10, 1939, for example—after a day or two of rough waters, which kept most of the passengers from leaving their cabins—was never published:

The steward tells me that most of the Jewish passengers are sick. Imagine the United States taking these Jews in in addition to those we already have. There are too many in places like New York already. A few Jews add strength and character to a country, but too many create chaos. And we are getting too many. This present immigration will have its reaction.

Lindbergh was not singling Jews out for persecution; indeed, he could just as easily have written the same about any other minority. But it is difficult to imagine his making the same comment about White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

After more than three years abroad, Lindbergh was convinced that the world was tumbling toward chaos. He only hoped it was not too late to avert a major war—for that would “be more likely to destroy Western civilization than to solve either our problems or those of European nations.” With his return, Lindbergh resolved “to take whatever part I could in preventing a war in Europe, and to campaign against my country taking part if war broke out.”

America awaited his arrival, especially those with an interest in aviation—including policy-makers in Washington. General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, Chief of the Air Corps, radioed while Lindbergh was in transit, asking him to contact him as soon after arriving as possible.

Before the Aquitania had even docked, tugboatloads of newspapermen hopped on board. Lindbergh locked himself in his cabin, permitting nobody to enter except three unexpected callers—the Carrels and Jim Newton, who had anticipated the press and had obtained permission to go out on the pilot boat with the customs men, in order to help Lindbergh off the ship. In no time, reporters were pounding on the cabin door. At one point a photographer who had bribed a steward burst into the cabin from an adjoining stateroom, flashed a photograph, and ran. “It is a ridiculous situation when one cannot return to one’s own country without having to go through the rough-housing of photographers and the lies and insults of the press,” Lindbergh mused. “It takes the sweetness from the freedom of democracy and makes one wonder where freedom ends and disorder begins.”

After the gangway had been let down, two New York police officers came to Lindbergh’s cabin to suggest they form a cordon around him. Lindbergh said he preferred to exit alone if possible, and after all the other passengers had disembarked, he made a run for it. One hundred fifty reporters and photographers lined both sides of the corridor, popping flashbulbs in his eyes as they shoved toward him. “All the way along the deck the photographers ran in front of us and behind us, jamming the way, being pushed aside by the police yelling, falling over each other on the deck,” Lindbergh wrote of the arrival. He and his escorts crunched across the broken glass of hundreds of discarded flashbulbs. The Morrow chauffeur, waiting at the bottom of the gangplank, whisked him away, along the new Henry Hudson Parkway and across the George Washington Bridge to Englewood. Once at Next Day Hill, Lindbergh telephoned General Arnold.

The next morning, he borrowed the Morrow De Soto and drove to West Point. There Lindbergh and Arnold discussed the European situation. Acknowledging that Lindbergh had already supplied what Arnold called “the most accurate picture of the Luftwaffe, its equipment leaders, apparent plans, training methods, and present defects” that he had received, the General spoke of a new mission for Lindbergh. Meeting again two days later in Washington, Arnold asked if Lindbergh would go on active duty and “make a study of an attempt to increase the efficiency of American [aeronautical] research organizations.” The next morning Lindbergh accepted the call to active duty, as a Colonel in the Army Air Corps. He wrote Dr. Carrel that he would have to discontinue indefinitely their medical research together; and he cabled Anne in Paris to sail with the children on the next available boat.

On the morning of April 20, 1939, Lindbergh spent half an hour with Harry Hines Woodring, Secretary of War, discussing military aviation in Europe and America, before arriving at the White House for an appointment with his Commander in Chief. Although the two most famous living Americans had dueled over the airmail in 1934, this was Lindbergh’s first face-to-face encounter with Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The President was seated at his desk at one end of a large room. “He leaned forward from his chair to meet me as I entered,” Lindbergh would later write in his journal, “and it is only now that I stop to think that he is crippled. I did not notice it and had no thought of it during our meeting.” Roosevelt immediately asked about Anne, who had known his daughter at Miss Chapin’s School. “He is an accomplished, suave, interesting conversationalist,” Lindbergh noted. “I liked him and feel that I could get along with him well. Acquaintanceship would be pleasant and interesting.”

“But,” he added with equal conviction, “there was something about him I did not trust, something a little too suave, too pleasant, too easy. Still, he is our President, and there is no reason for any antagonism between us in the work I am now doing.” While he found FDR “mostly politician” and felt they “would never get along on many fundamentals,” Lindbergh was pleased to serve him and their country. “It is better to work together as long as we can,” Lindbergh told himself; “yet somehow I have a feeling that it may not be for long.”

After fifteen minutes with the President, Lindbergh left one pack of press photographers on the White House steps for another at the offices of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Lindbergh told the committee secretary that he would enter the room for their board meeting only after the photographers had finished taking pictures. They said they did not want any pictures without Lindbergh in them. At last the photographers proposed—on their “word of honor”—that they would leave him alone in the future if they could get just one picture of him. “Imagine a press photographer talking about his word of honor!” Lindbergh thought, flashing back seven years to one image from the past he could never shake. “The type of men who broke through the window of the Trenton morgue to open my baby’s casket and photograph its body—they talk to me of honor.” He waited in seclusion until the last photographer had left the room, and only then did the meeting commence.

That afternoon, Roosevelt told the press corps of his conversation with Lindbergh, asserting that Lindbergh’s figures about German air power “were the same that we knew at the time of Munich.” Furthermore, the President added, he had “corroborated what our people had accepted as fact last September in regard to the construction possibilities.”

The next day, Lindbergh drove to Bolling Field, where he was assigned a Curtiss P-36A, a single-seater monoplane, the Air Corps’ most modern fighter. He spent a few hours getting the feel of the plane. The next day, he embarked on a three-week inspection tour with twenty-three stops. Through the summer he traveled, visiting laboratories, educational facilities, factories, and airfields from coast to coast. During an overnight detour to Roswell, he saw Robert Goddard and discovered that the rocketeer had “accomplished more this year than during any similar period in the past”—making advancements with lightweight pumps, tube-wound combustion chambers, gyroscopic controls, and moveable vanes. Lindbergh told Goddard of what he had seen in Germany and how his every mention of rockets was quickly deflected. “Yes,” Goddard said, “they must have plans for the rocket. When will our own people in Washington listen to reason?”

“Obviously, the American potential was tremendous,” Lindbergh would later recall of his survey trip, “but existing factories and research facilities were inadequate in comparison with those existing in Germany.” He devoted the next several months to ameliorating the situation however he could. One way was in chairing a NACA committee formed to coordinate the two dozen separate organizations in America then engaged in aeronautical research. At General Arnold’s request, he also sat on a board charged with revising the Air Corps’ research-and-development program and proposing specifications for military aircraft that could be procured within the next five years. And for the rest of 1939, as Lindbergh later recorded, “I talked to Senators, Congressmen, diplomats, executives, scientists, and engineers about steps necessary for the development of American aviation and, inevitably, about the danger of war in Europe and the attitude America should take.” He excited National Geographic enough about Dr. Goddard to prepare an article about his work in Roswell. As had been his overriding mission for a decade, he pushed America to be the leading air power in the world. Lindbergh accepted only two weeks of pay for his months of government work.

The President soon recommended that $300,000,000 be budgeted for the expansion of the Army and Navy air forces. And, as Arthur Krock noted, “When the new flying fleet of the United States begins to take the air, among those who will have been responsible for its size, its modernness and its efficiency is Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh.”

Lindbergh’s new military duties kept him from meeting Anne at the dock when she returned to America at dawn on April 28, 1939. Besides, he suggested to her in a note which reached her on board the Champlain, his presence would only attract greater attention. With customs agents, a police guard of close to one hundred men, and a chauffeur for protection, Anne and the children disembarked with relative ease. When she arrived at Next Day Hill, she found Charles asleep upstairs, having driven from Washington through the night. He immediately awoke; and she delighted in finding her husband so chipper because of his new duties. “It is wonderful to see him like that,” she wrote in her diary, “—absorbed, active, putting his energy into something successfully.”

On May 27, 1939, the Morrows gathered around the dining table at Next Day Hill for Anne and Charles’s tenth wedding anniversary. “[A]ll went merrily till I asked for more champagne to drink a health,” Betty Morrow wrote in her diary that night. “I didn’t say to whom—but C. shook his head & said—in a low decided voice to me—’No—no—or we’ll never have another anniversary here.’” His mother-in-law suddenly remembered that threatening tone from a decade earlier, when she had started to get a sharper knife to cut their wedding cake. “Of course I didn’t go on with the toast,” she recorded further, “but afterwards in the evening I had a chance to say that I had not meant to go against his known feelings about anniversaries.” Later that night, Charles came into her room and apologized for speaking as he had. It was involuntary, he explained; he had been wrong and he was sorry. “He was very sweet about it,” Mrs. Morrow wrote of his apology, the first from him in her memory. “Oh! How he has changed in ten years!”

Three days later—between government trips—Charles and Anne went house-hunting. They got lucky with the first rental they looked at, a big, white clapboard house on a hill in Lloyd Neck, on the north shore of Long Island. It sat high, overlooking the Sound—a situation reminiscent of Little Falls and Illiec; and Charles appreciated that it was “neither too accessible nor too isolated,” with several airfields close by. They leased it until November first in the name of their secretary, Christine Gawne, for $2,000; and they moved right in—with Miss Gawne and Soeur Lisi, a governess for the children from Switzerland. But it would be almost two months before Charles would be able to spend an entire weekend there.

Recognizing the seriousness with which Lindbergh was taking his new governmental work, the mainstream press gave him some elbow room in which to perform his duties. Time even wrote a piece sympathetic to his side in his “long dark years of war” with the public and the press. “For twelve years Charles Lindbergh has been a hero, and twelve years is too much,” the article read. “… For the fact is that the relation of Charles Lindbergh to the U. S. people is a tragic failure chalked up against the institution of hero worship…. Either the pursuit of the public will drive him to lead an almost monastic life, abandoning the world which other men enjoy, or perhaps now at last hero worship will die a natural death.” Eating its cake and having it, Time put his picture on their cover.

Lindbergh paid no attention to the war Time spoke of, only to the saber-rattling along Europe’s borders. Before he had even returned home, Italy had conquered Albania. Days later, Hungary withdrew from the League of Nations and, in its alliance with Germany, instituted anti-Semitic laws. Lindbergh’s fears steadily grew as France, England, and Russia deadlocked in their attempts to form a “peace front” against Germany. He worried even more when the Nazis revoked nonaggression pacts with Poland and a naval agreement with England only to sign a nonaggression pact with the Soviets. Meantime, President Roosevelt hosted King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of England, in an overt display of amity. Shortly after their visit to America, FDR called for a repeal of the arms embargo to belligerents, so that the United States might come to the aid of Britain, and he asked Congress to revise the Neutrality Law. Lindbergh turned all his thoughts to the world situation.

Anne had never seen her husband so galvanized. She watched with envy and awe as he plotted a course of political action for himself; and she sometimes questioned why she did not feel equally passionate. Because their marriage had made Anne so utterly dependent upon Charles for most of her feelings and actions, she hardly allowed herself to see that she did not actually share all his political views. Living less with Charles than through him, she only knew that she was feeling incomplete and unfulfilled—and mildly depressed. That summer, most unexpectedly, Anne found inspiration, and even more, as she fell in love with another man.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was not yet forty but already an international legend. A pioneering airmail pilot, his yearning for adventure had led him across the cities of Europe, the mountains of South America, and the deserts of Africa. Born to a notable family without money, he had grown up without a father and become unusually close to his mother. This nomad who appreciated nature was six-foot-two, shy but exuding sex appeal. Anne Lindbergh had never met anybody like him.

Unlike Charles Lindbergh, “Saint-Ex,” was not only a man of action and science but also of philosophy and art—an aviator unafraid of expressing emotion. He was lauded in his native France as the first prose-poet laureate of the skies—the celebrated author ofNight Flight and Wind, Sand and Stars. (He would soon write and illustrate The Little Prince, a perennial bestseller that would make him France’s most widely translated author.) And he liked to perform card tricks.

Anne read Wind, Sand and Stars upon its American publication in the summer of 1939 and found it contained all she “ever wanted to say and more of flying and time and human relationships.” Seeing a kinship between their books, her French publishers enlisted Saint-Exupéry to write a one-page preface to their forthcoming edition of Listen! The Wind. Upon reading Mrs. Lindbergh’s book, however, Saint-Exupéry wrote nine pages, a penetrating analysis of both the work and the author. When she learned that he was then in New York City, she found the nerve to invite him to Lloyd Neck for dinner and the night.

With Charles off at a meeting, she picked him up at the Ritz and was surprised to find him stooped and balding and “not at all good looking.” Nonetheless, she fell instantly under the spell of his “inscrutable” face and intense dark eyes. Anne drove just a block from his hotel when her car stalled and refused to restart. They pulled over to a repair shop, then took a taxi to Pennsylvania Station. Waiting for a train to Long Island, they sat on high stools at a counter and drank orangeade, like a pair of teenagers on a date. They nattered in French all the way to Huntington, about everything from aviation to their mutual admiration of Rilke. Despite Anne’s rusty French, they spoke the same language. Before long, they were finishing each other’s sentences.

“It was very exciting,” Anne would write in one of the longest entries to be found among decades of diaries.

Perhaps it was only because it was almost the first time anyone had talked to me purely on my craft. Not because I was a woman to be polite to, to charm with superficials, not because I was my father’s daughter or C.’s wife; no, simply because of my book, my mind, my craft. I have a craft! And someone who is master of that craft, whowrites beautifully, thinks I know enough about my craft to want to compare notes about it, to want to fence with my mind, steel against steel.

More than sparks filled the air. “Summer lightning,” she wrote in her diary.

Charles was not waiting for them at the station nor back at the house. Peculiarly, he got caught in traffic that night and did not return home until ten o’clock. Anne and Saint-Exupéry carried on their spirited conversation, barely interrupting its flow when he returned, for Lindbergh hardly spoke a word of French. They sat up until midnight, with Anne summing up her two-thousand-word entry exclaiming, “What an incredible day!”

The next morning Charles steered the conversation to the war—Germany’s strength, England’s strategy, France’s struggle. After dropping Saint-Exupéry off at a friend’s house for lunch, Anne commented to Charles that she feared the Frenchman would be killed if he continued flying.

They picked him up at five and brought him home for a swim, supper, and a walk along the beach. Conversation continued for hours. By the time they all retired, again at midnight, Anne was practically beside herself. “When one finds a person who has the same thought as yours,” she wrote in the most uninhibitedly jubilant pages she had written in years, “you cry out for joy, you go and shake him by the hand. Your heart leaps as though you were walking in a street in a foreign land and you heard your own language spoken, or your name in a room full of strangers.” It had been a most unusual weekend, one of the few times in the Lindbergh marriage in which Charles was not the center of attention.

The next day, the Lindberghs drove their guest into the city. Charles became so engrossed in a fable Saint-Exupéry was relating that, until his engine began to sputter, he did not notice that he had run out of gas. Lindbergh was plainly embarrassed; but, fortunately, they stalled on a downgrade just before the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and coasted into a gas station just ahead. At last they parted. Charles was pleased to have made his acquaintance. Anne was changed forever.

“In Saint-Exupéry,” one of her oldest friends would later confide, “Anne saw that a man of machinery could also be a man of poetry. Oh, there’s no doubt, she fell in love—not just with Saint-Exupéry … but with all the possibilities he embodied. For the first time she understood that she did not have to remain trapped under her husband’s foot forever and that her marriage contract contained an escape clause.”

Anne was hardly about to leave her husband; and, indeed, Saint-Exupéry already had a wife and mistress. Instead, she reinvested her new feelings into her decade-old marriage, renewing the vows she had made to herself to become an artist. “My mind has quickened, and my sight and feelings,” she wrote in her diary while his memory was still fresh. “For a week now the world has been almost unbearably beautiful. It cries out everywhere I turn. A twisted branch tears at the heart. The tendril of a dried vine is infinitely pathetic. A driving white rainstorm gives me wings, and trees steeped in the drowsy dark of evening stand up like rooted gods, reaching for the sky.”

Charles did not yet realize the impact Saint-Exupéry had made, absorbed as he was in his own work. During his frequent visits to Washington—staying in a small pied-à-terre he rented in an apartment house called The Anchorage—Lindbergh renewed an old acquaintanceship with William R. Castle. Both a former Ambassador to Japan and Undersecretary of State, Castle had helped the Lindberghs with diplomatic arrangements when they had made their trip to the Orient. A rock-solid conservative, Castle was then working with the Republican National Committee. Dining with him that summer, Lindbergh spoke of “having a small group ready to jump in if a war begins in Europe, with the purpose of keeping this country out of trouble.”

Castle could not have been more sympathetic, writing him afterward that he wished to share Lindbergh’s thoughts with another friend, the conservative news commentator Fulton Lewis, Jr. The three men met alone for dinner at Castle’s house on August twenty-third and found themselves in accord over the need for action should war break out in Europe, as seemed imminent.

Privately, they agreed on another subject as well. “We are disturbed about the effect of the Jewish influence in our press, radio, and motion pictures,” Lindbergh confided to his journal that night. “It may become very serious. Lewis told us of one instance where the Jewish advertising firms threatened to remove all their advertising from the Mutual system if a certain feature were permitted to go on the air. The threat was powerful enough to have the feature removed. I do not blame the Jews so much for their attitude, although I think it unwise from their own standpoint.”

An expurgated portion of that evening’s entry revealed that the three men had more to say on the subject.

We must, however, limit to a reasonable amount the Jewish influence in the Educational agencies in this country—ie. press, radio, and pictures. I fear that trouble lies ahead in this regard. Whenever the Jewish percentage of total population becomes too high, a reaction seems to invariably occur. It is too bad because a few Jews of the right type are, I believe, an asset to any country, adding to rather than detracting from its strength. If an anti-Semitic movement starts in the United States, it may go far. It will certainly affect the good Jews along with the others. When such a movement starts, moderation ends.

On the first of September, Germany invaded Poland. “What stand should America take in this war?” Lindbergh asked his diary the next day. “This is now our most pressing issue. We have enough internal problems without confusing them with war. I see trouble ahead even in times of peace. War would leave affairs chaotic—and always the best men lost.” The next day Roosevelt addressed the nation, pledging American neutrality. Lindbergh liked the speech but said to himself, “I wish I trusted him more.”

After three years of observing conditions in Europe firsthand, Lindbergh did not intend “to stand by and see this country pushed into war if it is not absolutely essential to the future welfare of the nation.” To his journal, he announced, “Much as I dislike taking part in politics and public life, I intend to do so if necessary to stop the trend which is now going on in this country.” He considered the radio and magazines the most effective forums in which to air his views.

Lindbergh began thinking about the effect aviation had already had on the world—not only in augmenting military strength but also in decreasing the size of the planet. With his Olympian view of the earth—in which populations of continents appeared to him as masses of people—Lindbergh wrote: “We, the heirs of European culture, are on the verge of a disastrous war, a war within our own family of nations, a war which will reduce the strength and destroy the treasures of the White race, a war which may even lead to the end of our civilization.” Dr. Carrel had no doubt contributed to his thinking; but the words were all Lindbergh’s—handwritten in pencil, then edited on secretary-typed drafts.

Peace, Lindbergh felt, could exist only so long as “we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.” He viewed aviation as “a gift from heaven to those Western nations who were already the leaders of their era … a tool specially shaped for Western hands, a scientific art which others only copy in a mediocre fashion, another barrier between the teeming millions of Asia and the Grecian inheritance of Europe—one of those priceless possessions which permit the White race to live at all in a pressing sea of Yellow, Black, and Brown.”

Lindbergh believed the Soviet Union had become the most evil empire on earth and that Western civilization depended on repelling it and the Asiatic powers that lay beyond its borders—the “Mongol and Persian and Moor.” He wrote that it also depended on “a united strength among ourselves; on a strength too great for foreign armies to challenge; on a Western Wall of race and arms which can hold back either a Genghis Khan or the infiltration of inferior blood; on an English fleet, a German air force, a French army, anAmerican nation, standing together as guardians of our common heritage, sharing strength, dividing influence.” He did not believe the nations of the West should “commit racial suicide by internal conflict,” but must look instead to earlier fratricidal conflicts, such as the Peloponnesian War, in which Athens and Sparta battled, leaving much of Greece in ruins.

Lindbergh incorporated these thoughts into an article for the November Reader’s Digest, which he called “Aviation, Geography, and Race.” DeWitt Wallace, the magazine’s founding editor, was proud to publish it. Sending Lindbergh a check for $2,500, he wrote, “No one in the country is able to exert a deeper influence on public opinion than yourself.” The following March, The Atlantic Monthly published a continuation of Lindbergh’s thinking, a piece called “What Substitute For War?”

In that second article, he pointed out that the “history of Europe has always been interwoven with conflict … the Ethiopian war, the World War, the Boer War, the Franco-Prussian War, the war between Germany and Austria, the war between Prussia and Denmark, the Franco-Sardinian war against Austria, the Crimean War, the British opium war; revolutions and uprisings in Spain, Germany, Italy, France, Ireland, and the Balkans; British actions in Africa, India, China, Afghanistan, Palestine, and elsewhere; French action in Africa, Indo-China, and Mexico” all taking place within the last century. This new confrontation, Lindbergh believed, was but another convolution in the great coil of history.

From his perspective, “This present war is a continuation of the old struggle among western nations for the material benefits of the world. It is a struggle by the German people to gain territory and power. It is a struggle by the English and French to prevent another European nation from becoming strong enough to demand a share in influence and empire.” A strong Germany, he asserted, was as essential to a strong Europe as England and France, “for she alone can either dam the Asiatic hordes or form the spearhead of their penetration into Europe.”

“Europe divided in war,” Lindbergh believed, “reduces the stature of our civilization and lessens the security of all western nations. It destroys life, and art, and the spiritual growth that spring from peaceful intercourse among men.” He was reminded of his great flying trip to India in 1937, when he and Anne saw only “the bones of marble and of bronze that represent the greatness of Rome, and Greece, and Egypt, and Babylon.”

Lindbergh saved more trenchant rhetoric for his first radio address, the text of which would conjure up Washington’s Farewell Address—warning the people of America against becoming “entangled in European alliances”—and the Monroe Doctrine, opposing further European interference in the Western hemisphere. He intended to urge his audience to view the world situation as he did, with utter detachment—without permitting “our sentiment, our pity, or our personal feelings of sympathy, to obscure the issue, to affect our children’s lives. We must be as impersonal as a surgeon with his knife.” Incisively, Lindbergh asserted, “We should never enter a war unless it is absolutely essential to the future welfare of our nation.” He saw nothing essential in our participation in this one. “We must either keep out of European wars entirely,” he warned, “or stay in European affairs permanently.”

Lindbergh intended to call on Americans to accept his synthesis of years of xenophobic thinking. “[T]hese wars in Europe are not wars in which our civilization is defending itself against some Asiatic intruder,” he wrote, in what would prove to be the speech’s most memorable excerpt. “There is no Genghis Khan or Xerxes marching against our Western nations. This is not a question of banding together to defend the White race against foreign invasion. This is simply one more of those age old quarrels within our own family of nations—a quarrel arising from the errors of the last war—from the failure of the victors of that war to follow a consistent policy either of fairness or of force.” Lindbergh believed nothing less than Western civilization itself was at stake in this war, and that “as long as America does not decay within, we need fear no invasion of this country.”

Anne approved of the speech, but she feared “it will be confused, it will be smeared politically and brought down to the level of the Neutrality Act issue.” She worried that her husband would come under “heavy-fire criticism from many quarters,” friends as well as enemies. “He knows this & does not mind it,” Anne wrote Charles’s mother, for he felt “sure that he sees the right course.”

On Wednesday, September thirteenth, Lindbergh took the milk train out of New York’s Pennsylvania Station to Washington. “Won’t it be strange,” Anne wrote Mrs. Lindbergh, “if Charles will be fighting the same fight as his father, years ago!”

Thursday morning, Lindbergh went to see General Arnold and told him of his intention to take to the airwaves. Arnold recognized the strength of Lindbergh’s commitment and therefore suggested that he discontinue his current “inactive-active” status in the Air Corps so long as he was taking an active role in politics. Lindbergh concurred. Anxious not to embarrass the Air Corps, he offered a copy of his speech for Arnold to read. The General found that “it contained nothing which could in any way be construed as unethical” due to Lindbergh’s connection with the Air Corps; and he felt that Lindbergh was “fully within [his] rights as an American citizen” to broadcast the remarks. Arnold and Lindbergh discussed whether or not they should show the address to Secretary of War Woodring. Lindbergh said he preferred not to, unless it was absolutely necessary.

The next day, Lindbergh met with Truman Smith, then active in G-2 (General Staff, Military Intelligence Division), at Smith’s request. Colonel Smith said he had an urgent message to deliver, even though he knew what Lindbergh’s response would be. Smith said the Administration was “very much worried” by Lindbergh’s intention to broadcast his opposition to their country’s entry into a European war … and that a cabinet position of Secretary of Air would be created for Lindbergh if he would refrain. “So you see,” Smith said, laughing, “they’re worried.”

At 8:30, the Lindberghs and the Fulton Lewises went to the Carlton Hotel, where they walked through a lobby full of photographers. Upstairs they found a room filled with radio equipment and twenty people. At 9:45, Lindbergh stood before six microphones—two each from the National Broadcasting Company, the Columbia Broadcasting System, and the Mutual Broadcasting System—and spoke. He was not happy with his high-pitched and flat delivery; but, strangely, his unimpassioned tone accentuated his sincerity. As soon as he was finished, everybody in the room congratulated him; Jim Newton sat in the corner and beamed. One step ahead of the press, the Lindberghs raced outside the hotel and down several blocks, escaping to Fulton Lewis’s house, where they listened to a rebroadcast of the speech. Commentators were already signaling the speech’s political significance. The Lindberghs boarded the two A.M. train to New York.

By the time they arrived, Lindbergh had once again grabbed the morning headlines. By noon, hundreds of telegrams and letters—most from strangers—were arriving in Lloyd Neck. The vast majority of them were favorable—calling Lindbergh brave and patriotic. One likened his speech to the Sermon on the Mount. General Arnold wrote that Secretary Woodring thought “it was very well worded and very well delivered” (as did Arnold himself). Anne shared the general response with her mother-in-law, saying how heartening it was to receive support “from all kinds and types of people—grateful mothers & fathers, school professors and teachers, businessmen, and also farmers, ranchers, small shop keepers … as though C’s speech has answered a real need, a clear call in the confusion.”

Philippics followed. Hardest-hitting was Dorothy Thompson, who only months earlier had praised Lindbergh for following the courageous path of his father. In her syndicated column she dismissed this speech as the rantings of a “somber cretin,” a man “without human feeling,” a “pro-Nazi recipient of a German medal.” Furthermore, she got the bee in her bonnet that Lindbergh “has a notion to be the American Fuehrer.” She admitted that she had no proof of her theory; but she would attack him in three more columns that year, six in 1940, and four in 1941—all aimed at getting readers to see him as more than just “America’s number one problem child.” She believed he was a Nazi.

Less than one month after his first speech—on October 13, 1939—Lindbergh addressed the nation a second time. “Neutrality and War,” as he titled the speech, was less philosophical and more pragmatic in its content, with a specific program. American policy, he said, should not be directed toward Europe so much as America, and the United States should “draw a sharp line between neutrality and war.” That meant refusing credit to belligerent nations or their agents. Like his father before him, Lindbergh believed that once American money was invested in a warring country’s economy, “many interests will feel that it is more important for that country to win than for our own to avoid the war. It is unfortunate but true that there are interests in America who would rather lose American lives than their own dollars.”

“This talk is going to create more criticism than the last one,” Lindbergh predicted the day of its delivery. “It is more detailed and more controversial. However, I think it is desirable to get people thinking about fundamental problems and to speak clearly on this present issue of ‘neutrality.’ The criticism which arises is of very secondary importance.” By the following Monday, letters were arriving at radio stations by the sackload. Nearly ninety percent of the mail seemed to be in Lindbergh’s favor, though he was levelheaded enough to know “the people who like what you say are more likely to write than those who don’t—at least that is true in the intelligent classes.” He would never be able to get through them all, but Lindbergh saved what would grow into a collection of tens of thousands of letters, many of them never opened.

Days later, threatening letters began to arrive at the Lindberghs’ house. “It is a fine state of affairs in a country which feels it is civilized,” Lindbergh complained to his journal; “people dislike what you do, so they threaten to kill your children.” Lindbergh considered his options, but laying down his pen was never one of them. “I feel I must do this,” he wrote of his new political role, “even if we have to put an armed guard in the house.”

“I have taken the stand that this country should not enter the war,” Lindbergh wrote Madame Carrel after his second speech, feeling that any rational Frenchman would disagree with his position; “and that peace in the near future is the only way of preserving the quality, the prestige, and the influence of our western civilization.”

As a result of Lindbergh’s conviction, the Carrels and the Lindberghs did not stop communicating with each other, but their letters and time together decreased. Even though the doors of the Rockefeller Institute had closed to him, Carrel would have liked to continue working in America. But one evening, talking to Lindbergh and Jim Newton, he said, “It’s becoming more and more difficult for me to sit in New York and know that my country is sliding into hunger and disease. I feel I must go back. There must be more that I can do in France than here.” He thought he might even prove to be a “lifeline” for France, a link in getting whatever aid from America might be necessary.

Meantime, Lindbergh became the nation’s symbol of neutrality. His stand, Anne wrote Madame Carrel, “has been gravely misunderstood, misquoted, and as usual smeared with false accusations and motives.” She “felt very badly about this,” finding it difficult “to be arbitrarily labelled and shelved on a side so opposite to all one’s friends and feelings.” She was not surprised to find him as unconcerned as ever about public opinion. “Personally, I rather enjoy the situation,” Lindbergh admitted to his mother in November 1939, “for I feel that the goal ahead is well worth the effort necessary to atain [sic] it.”

Toward that end, Lindbergh met government figures of every stripe in Washington, aligning himself with no political party or organization. He spent one afternoon with a half-dozen Democratic senators who advocated language in the pending neutrality legislation that would minimize the chances of American involvement in the war. He spent another day with ex-President Herbert Hoover, William Castle, and Carl W. Ackerman, the influential Dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism—all Republicans who supported Lindbergh’s position wholeheartedly. Lindbergh knew his growing antipathy toward Roosevelt would lead most people to assume that he and the President were of opposite parties; but the labels meant nothing to him. “As far as I am concerned personally,” Lindbergh wrote in his journal, “I have but little fear of being classed as a Republican for long. I have too little interest in either politics or popularity. One of the dearest of rights to me is being able to say what I think and act as I wish. I intend to do this, and I know it will cause trouble. As soon as it does, the politicians will disown me quickly enough … I have no intention of bending my ideas or my ideals to conform to the platform of either party. One must make certain compromises in life—that is a part of living together with other men—but compromise is justified only when the goal to be gained is of greater importance than what is lost in compromising.”

When Senator William E. Borah, Republican from Idaho, suggested that Lindbergh would make a good candidate for President, Lindbergh explained that he enjoyed too much “the ability to do and say what I wish to ever be a successful candidate for President. I prefer intellectual and personal freedom to the honors and accomplishments of political office—even that of President.”

On November 4, 1939, FDR signed the Neutrality Act. It allowed sale of arms to belligerents as long as they paid cash and transported them in non-American ships. While this appeared to represent a policy of impartiality, Lindbergh saw it as an American effort to aid Britain and France. Except for his article “What Substitute for War?”—in the March 1940 issue of The Atlantic Monthly—he would not address the public for a half-year.

His silence coincided with a lull in the fighting abroad—what people called “the phony war.” When he was not brooding about foreign affairs, Lindbergh attended to his own domestic agenda, starting with the “ceaseless problem for us” of where to live—“how best to fit our unique set of circumstances to this changing world.” He wondered where Jon and Land could lead normal lives, where Anne could write, where they could be away from the “deadly life of a modern city, and yet not isolate ourselves from those contacts and associations that made up civilized life.” Complicating matters was the increase in terrifying letters arriving at his door—calling him a Nazi, threatening to kidnap his two sons. When the Lindberghs’ lease in Lloyd Harbor expired, they moved back to Next Day Hill.

On January 21, 1940, Charles and Anne stole away for a vacation on the “Florida West Coast Special.” They were ticketed to Tampa, but they hopped off the train in Haines City, centerstate, in order to evade the press. Only their host, Jim Newton, was there to meet them and to drive them through Fort Myers on the Gulf coast and just beyond to Punta Massa. There they boarded a one-horse ferry to Sanibel Island, drove its length, and crossed a small bridge to Captiva, where a shell road led to the Newton family’s cottage set in a grove of palms and pines. The three-bedroom house sat on a strip of land so narrow that the Gulf was visible from the front door and the bay from the back.

The next ten days were magical. Unusually cold weather descended upon this tropical haven, but that did not keep the Lindberghs away from the water. Newton borrowed a thirty-foot cabin cruiser; and along with him and an Audubon Society game warden named Charlie Green, Anne and Charles sailed down the coast into the Everglades, along the Shark River, and among the Keys. For the better part of a week, they explored exotic bayous and mangrove swamps, completely unnoticed except for the eyes of hundreds of pelicans, egrets, buzzards, ducks, and ibises.

Charles was rejuvenated, Anne transported. “Wilderness,” he blurted to Jim Newton one day. “People need it and miss it. It’s frightening to think that in a few years our children and their children may not be able to experience it. It feeds the soul.” Then he startled Jim Newton by claiming to have contributed to its gradual disappearance. While Lindbergh had hoped aviation might “unify the world,” he could not help seeing the trouble it was creating, enabling man to penetrate remote places, perhaps to trespass where he did not belong. At night in Florida, he rowed his wife out onto the still waters, and they soaked in the “beauty and quiet … and isolation” of their surroundings. Anne realized the importance of responding to her husband, whenever he pulled her into adventure: “I should always go when C. calls,” she wrote during this romantic interlude, “—break through my crust of inertia or fear—because life lies behind it.” By the time the Lindberghs returned to New Jersey, Anne was pregnant.

The thought of a fourth child forced Anne to confront feelings she had been avoiding for years. “Isn’t it possible for a woman to be a woman and yet produce something tangible beside children—something that stands up in a man’s world?” Anne had written a cousin during her last pregnancy. Even entering the new decade, such thoughts were bold. Now reaching her thirties, she heard a psychological clock ticking—one which made her feel “it’s time I did ‘get down to’ something, ‘too old’ to be ‘promising.’” She was struggling with feminism.

More than ever, Anne yearned to write—“not because I feel I have anything to give … not because being an artist comes first (it doesn’t) not because it matters to anyone else what I say.” She simply felt that the thread of her life “will not be strong without that strand.” All the imagery of Captiva and its environs had renewed her; and for the rest of her life, she would find herself drawn to that region, in search of metaphors. But unlike her feminist heroines—Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, and Rebecca West—Anne wanted to define new roles for women without sacrificing the traditional ones, those of wife and mother.

She had already become a magnet for similarly striving women all over the country, many of whom poured their hearts out to her. Although few of these women were her intellectual or social equals, Anne found comfort in their letters. They filled an emotional void her husband never could. For decades, she engaged in lengthy correspondences with many of these needy women. “Perhaps my job right now,” she wrote one such suppliant, “is not to write books but to have my baby, keep a peaceful home and try to give my husband the kind of atmosphere, and thought and encouragement, and balance that will help him to deal with some of the problems he feels so disturbed about in the world today.”

She and Charles moved into another house in Lloyd Neck, one more substantial than their first—a three-story wooden farmhouse dating back to 1714, full of charm and history. It overlooked a tidal inlet and Cold Spring Harbor. Anne suffered through the early spring there, as her morning sickness coincided with the disheartening news of Germany’s conquering Denmark, Norway, Holland, and Belgium. The Nazis now approached Paris.

Alone in bed, Anne did “a lot of mental writing and a soaking up of old trains of thought.” She found that she could not bring herself to blame Europe’s current ills entirely on Hitler, as though he were some “accidental scourge unconnected to other world events—alone responsible for all,” that if he were wiped out, all would be well. “Nazism,” Anne wrote in her diary in April 1940, “seems to me scum which happens to be on the wave of the future. I agree with people’s condemnation of Nazi methods but I do not think they are the wave. They happen to be riding on it.”

With pressure mounting for America to enter the war, Lindbergh felt impelled to address the nation again. He wrote a speech called “The Air Defense of America” on May fifteenth, which he arranged to deliver from the Columbia Broadcasting System’s Washington studios on the nineteenth, a Sunday, at 9:30 in the evening. His simple message required only twelve minutes of airtime. “We are in danger of war today not because European people have attempted to interfere with the internal affairs of America,” he said, “but because American people have attempted to interfere with the internal affairs of Europe.” He called on his nation to prepare itself for war, suggesting that the best offense was a proper defense. Without naming the faction, Lindbergh told his audience, “The only reason that we are in danger of becoming involved in this war is because there are powerful elements in America who desire us to take part. They represent a small minority of the American people, but they control much of the machinery of influence and propaganda. They seize every opportunity to push us closer to the edge.” A month later, Lindbergh spoke again, calling on the nation to resist the propaganda spurring America into battle.

With his mail running 20 to 1 in his favor, Anne felt that her husband was giving voice to the silent majority of the nation. “[H]e speaks for inarticulate America,” commented one of Anne’s friends. Increasingly, Lindbergh found himself speaking for intolerant America as well.

Lindbergh had no supporter more ardent than Father Charles Edward Coughlin, a Catholic priest with a large following on the radio and through a national weekly tabloid called “Social Justice,” which he published in Royal Oak, Michigan. With a definitely anti-Semitic agenda, he appropriated Lindbergh’s likeness to help sell his own message, putting him on the front of his national weekly, quoting him in his suggestion as to who were the unnamed “war-breeding clique.” The more Lindbergh attracted such bigots, the more people judged him by his followers.

On Monday, May 27, 1940, their wedding anniversary, Anne and Charles drove along Huntington Bay and found the spot where they had rowed out to their honeymoon boat eleven years earlier. It was a clear night, with dogwood and chestnut flowers in full bloom. Later they drove to the beach at Lloyd Neck, where they had summered the preceding year. Charles left for a walk alone down the beach, while Anne sat on a raft. Even in this peaceful moment, she could not help feeling depressed, thinking of all the people she cared about in England and France. And then she caught sight of her husband’s figure in the distance, an approaching silhouette, and she instinctively felt hope. “And I think, yes—that is what keeps one going in times like these,” she wrote in her diary, “the thought, the realization that there are a few men in the world, here and there—one has met them—who are on top of fate. And I do not mean just that they always win, but they are not downed by their circumstances in spite of everything.”

When Charles reached his pregnant wife after his walk, Anne told him of her thoughts, of her belief that there were strong people in Europe, survivors who “will not be embittered, will get something from it, make something of it—if they are not killed.” Even though Anne and Charles had never discussed the depth of her unrequited romance the preceding year, he saw his wife’s pain. After a quiet moment, he tried to comfort her by saying, “I hope Saint-Exupéry survives.”

Anne had followed Saint-Exupéry through the press—his return to France, his testing planes and training pilots. A Dorothy Thompson column the first week of June 1940 praised his flying missions against the Germans and moved Anne to tears. “Nobody has the right to write a word today who does not participate to the fullest in the agony of his fellow human beings,” Saint-Exupéry told Miss Thompson. “If I did not resist with my life, I should be unable to write…. The Christian idea has got to be served; that the word is made Flesh. One must write with one’s body.” Saint-Exupéry, a reserve officer, was demobilized from his flying group just weeks after France’s hasty capitulation to the Germans, which placed the government in the hands of elderly Marshal Henri Pétain in Vichy. Anne and Charles could not help thinking of their second home, as they often listened to a recording of Mignon, the opera that had been composed on Illiec. Their neighbors in France, the Carrels, were in their prayers.

Instead of resisting himself, or even hiding out on Saint-Gildas, the sixty-seven-year-old Alexis Carrel thought it in the best interests of his countrymen if he cooperated with the new Vichy government as much as necessary to help secure the authority, personnel, and equipment he would need to address the problems of “war medicine”—wound infection, hemorrhage, shock, gas burns, and poisoning that would soon plague his nation. As the “phony war” of the winter turned real, Carrel spent most of his time studying “the conditions which have brought about the degeneration of modern men”—moral, intellectual, anatomical, and racial. “The problem of remaking society is extremely complex on account of the multiplicity of the factor of deterioration,” he wrote a medical colleague. “In France, the main trouble is moral corruption.” When Carrel approached Pétain with his vision of an “Institute of Man,” Jim Newton would later recall, “Pétain offered to subsidize it. Carrel accepted and went to work, despite the obstructions placed in his way by the medical profession.”

Carrel’s pursuit of his humanitarian work in association with Pétain’s Vichy government would later provoke severe criticism from the Resistance forces backing de Gaulle. While suffering from wartime deprivation—refusing extra rations of food and fuel, which he could have procured—Carrel was observed one day at the German Embassy. He had arrived, in fact, to request help in feeding starving French children; but he happened to appear when a party was in full swing. Although the Carrels retreated as quickly as possible, rumors spread that the Germans had entertained them. “You know how Alexis felt about the Nazis when he was in New York,” Madame Carrel would later explain to Jim Newton. “He felt much more strongly, living in Occupied France. Why, many of our staff at the institute were members of the Resistance, and we protected them.” Accused of being a collaborator, the septuagenarian’s health declined.

Saint-Exupéry was conflicted about the German occupation of France as well. With only ill-will for the anti-Jewish Vichy government, and not much kinder feelings for the egomaniacal de Gaulle, he sought perspective on the situation in New York City. “Did you see?” Anne remarked to Charles one morning, “Saint-Exupéry is here, but he is going back again!”

“Yes,” Charles replied, “I see, with jealousy.” Taken aback, Anne asked why with jealousy. “Because,” he responded, “you seem to be so interested in him.”

Anne quickly interjected that she had a purely literary interest in him, that she admired him—“and because I keep looking for someone to be left like that from my world, my world of writing.”

Charles had long attempted to be his wife’s muse, but his methods usually failed. “He goes over the record,” Anne wrote in her diary, “—nine years, and only two books and wonders why it is. Has he not given me the right kind of environment?” As if shaming her was not enough, he further subjected her to a loyalty test. While Anne’s mother parceled Bundles for Britain and broadcast pro-Ally speeches on the radio, and Anne’s sister Constance, married to a Welshman, supported pro-British causes, Lindbergh kept pressing his wife to demonstrate whether she was more Morrow or Lindbergh.

Then Anne had a breakthrough. She found a way of making a literary offering to Saint-Exupéry, all the while affirming her loyalty to her husband. An article gushed from her in a few days.

It represented, she wrote her mother by way of preparing her for its publication, “all the winter’s mental strife—all the arguments—& counter arguments … building of a bridge between C.’s beliefs & my own & not least, my deep sense of the injustice to him & to his side.” But that was not its sole raison d’être. “I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t feel convinced of his integrity & the integrity of his stand,” she wrote. “… And I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t feel that there are things he has not—& probably could not present well. If I did not feel there were things I could present better than he. And that the presentation of these things might help both him & his cause.” In trying to be too many things to too many people, the article never congealed as either accurate history or sound philosophy. It remained a moving hodgepodge of an admittedly confused woman trying to make sense of contradictory feelings.

“I think the clearest definition of the article is that it attempts to give a moral argument for Isolationism,” Anne wrote her mother on September 4, 1940, “—which I think no one has yet presented.” Upon reading Anne’s description, Betty Morrow—whose lifelong devotion to Smith College had just been capped by being named her alma mater’s Acting President—broke into tears.

The five-thousand-word piece was hardly on paper before Lindbergh took a copy of it to her publisher, Alfred Harcourt. He read it on the spot, pronounced it “beautiful,” and said he was eager to publish it. In less than a month, the Lindberghs had copies of the forty-one-page, pocket-sized book in hand. Anne decided to tender all her income from the tract to the American Friends Service Committee to assist them in their war-relief efforts in Europe, especially France.

The book’s central metaphor became its title—The Wave of the Future. As Anne explained at the text’s core, the war in Europe did not strike her as a struggle between the “Forces of Good” and the “Forces of Evil” so much as a conflict between the “Forces of the Past” fighting against the “Forces of the Future.” Far from siding with the new totalitarian regimes, she suggested that “somehow the leaders in Germany, Italy and Russia have discovered how to use new social and economic forces; very often they have used them badly,” she wrote, “but nevertheless, they have recognized and used them. They had sensed the changes and they have exploited them. They have felt the wave of the future and they have leapt upon it. The evils we deplore in these systems are not in themselves the future; they are scum on the wave of the future.”

Anne condemned the tyrannies of Nazism and asserted that she could not “pledge my personal allegiance to those systems I disapprove of, or those barbarisms I oppose from the bottom of my heart, even if they are on the wave of the future.” But she did suggest “that it is futile to get into a hopeless ‘crusade’ to ‘save’ civilization,” for that task could not be accomplished by going to war. Instead, she thought America’s task was less in fostering a revolution in Europe than in fomenting a reformation at home, in protecting and preserving “our own family and nation.”

“There is no fighting the wave of the future,” she wrote toward the end of her essay, “any more than as a child you could fight against the gigantic roller that loomed up ahead of you suddenly.” In conclusion, Anne could only offer vague platitudes expressing the need for America to reaffirm its basic beliefs. Constance Morrow Morgan suggested that her sister’s prewar book was an obvious illustration of her identity crisis, “torn as she was between being Anne Morrow and Mrs. Charles Lindbergh.”

Few books in the history of publishing have encountered a reception like the one that greeted Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s The Wave of the Future: A Confession of Faith. It immediately became the number-one nonfiction bestseller across the country—fifty thousand copies in its first two months alone—and received prominent reviews everywhere. The book had many admirers, including the growing numbers of Americans who opposed intervention into the European war. DeWitt Wallace of Reader’s Digestcondensed the book for his readers and called it “the article of the year.” Even English-born poet W. H. Auden pronounced it a “beautiful book.” He reminded her that “everything one writes goes out helpless into the world to be turned to evil as well as good, that every work of art is powerless against misuse.”

Such was the case with The Wave of the Future, which overnight became the book people loved to hate. Surpassed in modern literary history perhaps only by Mein Kampf, it was one of the most despised books of its day. Anne’s hopeful message, innocently intended to bind the opposing sides with its universal images, only wedged them farther apart. It was promptly quoted and persistently misquoted. Ironically, it resulted in rallying greater support for the side she had meant to oppose by offering a weak stalking horse. Store owners as well as book buyers boycotted it, sending copies back to the publisher. One dealer wrote Alfred Harcourt that he thought both Lindberghs “should be put behind barbed wires!” Half a century later, The Wave of the Future remained a book nobody remembered with affection—not even the author, who later recanted much of its contents, which she ascribed to her naïveté.

Dorothy Thompson lashed out at Anne Lindbergh in the pages of Look, accusing her (as most readers did) of calling Communism, Fascism, and Nazism the “wave of the future,” accosting her for saying there was no way of fighting it. In her syndicated columns, Thompson repeatedly misrepresented Anne Lindbergh’s metaphor and distorted the record even further by suggesting that the Lindberghs supported several “American Fascists” just because they had endorsed the writings of the Lindberghs. (These rabble-rousers included William Dudley Pelley, who had organized the openly anti-Semitic “Silver Shirt” brigades, and the more intellectual Lawrence Dennis, who contended that Fascism was America’s best hope against the rising tide of Communism.) FDR’s outspoken Secretary of the Interior, Harold L. Ickes, went farther than that, publicly calling Lindbergh a Nazi and calling The Wave of the future “the Bible of every American Nazi, Fascist, Bundist and Appeaser.”

Franklin Roosevelt campaigned for a third term on a non-interventionist platform. Days before the 1940 election, he assured voters that American boys would not be sent into any foreign wars. Two months later, after his landslide election over Wendell Willkie—for whom Lindbergh voted—he spoke in a Fireside Chat of making America “the great arsenal of democracy.” At his inauguration, three weeks later, he invoked Anne Lindbergh’s book, chiseling her metaphor into the public consciousness. “There are men who believe that … tyranny and slavery have become the surging wave of the future—and that freedom is an ebbing tide,” he proclaimed. “But we Americans know that this is not true.”

The increasing attacks made Anne recoil, not only from further political statements but from publishing at all. “I find I am hurt, not by the reviews exactly,” Anne wrote in her diary, “but by the growing rift I see between myself and those people I thought I belonged to. The artists, the writers, the intellectuals, the sensitive, the idealistic—I feel exiled from them. I have become exiled for good, accidentally, really. My marriage has stretched me out of my world, changed me so it is no longer possible to change back.” Anne’s few intimates—her family and a scattering of friends—all recognized the new isolation she had created for herself by aligning herself so publicly with her now controversial husband. “You know, Anne,” her former suitor Corliss Lamont wrote her, “some of your old friends hesitate even to suggest meeting with you, for fear it might embarrass you in some way; though no doubt you may feel that you might embarrass them.” When Charles encouraged Anne to call on Saint-Exupéry during his visit to New York in January 1941, she refused for that very reason. She was distressed from not seeing him; but, alas, she wrote in her diary, “I am now the bubonic plague among writers and C. is the anti-Christ!”

Although politics strained many of Anne’s relationships, her family never abandoned her. When newspaperman William Allen White suggested conflict between Lindbergh and his mother-in-law, Betty Morrow fired a handwritten letter off to him in Emporia, Kansas, insisting “Colonel Lindbergh and I differ about what our country’s attitude towards the war should be, but each honors the sincerity of the other’s opinions and there is no misunderstanding between us.” Anne’s sister Constance and her husband, Aubrey, said that they and the Lindberghs had all “agreed to disagree.”

A few months later Anne would write an article, “Reaffirmation,” for The Atlantic Monthly, in which she tried to clarify the thesis of The Wave of the Future. Even though she reasserted her definition that the evils of Fascism were but the “scum on the surface of the wave,” and that she opposed the way in which the dictator-governed nations met the wave, there was no erasing what had been stamped into the public consciousness.

In the midst of this debate, Anne was presented with yet another reason to withdraw from the public. At two o’clock in the morning of October 2, 1940—within days of her book’s publication—she awoke at Lloyd Manor with labor pains. Charles rushed her to Doctors Hospital in Manhattan, where she gave birth a few hours later. Both Charles and Anne had hoped for a girl; and getting their wish, the father insisted on naming the child after her mother. To avoid confusion, the newborn—Anne Spencer Lindbergh—would be called Ansy. With reporters already staking out the Lindbergh house, and so much unpopular undertow from The Wave of the Future, Lindbergh thought it best for Anne to cloister herself in the hospital with their daughter for more than two weeks.

He visited the healthy mother and daughter almost every evening; but he spent his days working to keep America out of the war. His wife’s “confession of faith”—to both the anti-intervention effort and to him—refortified him for his mission. Charles reread his father’s book Why Is Your Country at War?

GRASS-ROOTS anti-intervention movements sprouted across the country. Even though veterans groups found their membership divided on the issue, most—like the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion—strongly supported Lindbergh’s position of building up America’s defenses. When legionnaire Bennett Champ Clark, Democratic senator from Missouri, invited Lindbergh to address an antiwar rally in Chicago, he agreed, for the first time, to address the issue at a public gathering. Although fronted by veterans, the assembly was backed by a local organization called Citizens Keep America Out of War Committee, led by a Chicago builder named Avery Brundage, who also headed the American Olympic Association.

On August 3, 1940, Lindbergh flew to Chicago on one of TWA’s new Boeing “stratoliners.” He was met by the chauffeur of Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the publisher of the Chicago Tribune, who showed his support of Lindbergh’s cause by offering extensive publicity for the rally in his newspaper. The next day Lindbergh drove to Soldier Field, where a respectable half-capacity crowd of forty thousand people gathered. Under a broiling sun, Lindbergh spoke for twenty minutes. “I do not offer my opinion as an expert,” he insisted, “but rather as a citizen who is alarmed at the position our country has reached in this era of experts.” And unpopular though some of his opinions might prove, he proclaimed, “I prefer to say what I believe, or not to speak at all. I would far rather have your respect for the sincerity of what I say, than attempt to win your applause by confining my discussion to popular concepts.”

As the first rumblings of the Battle of Britain were being felt, he asked his audience to consider “a Europe dominated by Germany,” insisting that no matter who won the war, Western civilization would depend on a strong America and that cooperation with a victorious Germany need not be impossible. To keep America out of the war, Lindbergh urged “an impregnable system of defense.” The crowd, eager to applaud at every opportunity, threw Lindbergh slightly off his rhythm; but in the end, he found it “much easier to speak to an audience than to microphones alone.” While a houseguest of the McCormicks, Lindbergh met other like-minded citizens, who urged him to continue speaking out.

Choosing public arenas over guarded radio studios made him a bigger public target; and it became open season on Lindbergh. The “attack launched against Lindbergh has gone far beyond the ordinary canons of debate,” observed The Christian Century not three weeks after his Chicago address. “It has pulsed with venom. If this man who was once the nation’s shining hero had been proved another Benedict Arnold he could not have been subjected to more defamation and calumny.” Indeed, Ralph Ingersoll, publisher ofPM, filled the front page of his new daily tabloid with a signed editorial censuring Lindbergh. Illustrated with only a photograph of a grinning Lindbergh sharing a jolly moment with Hermann Goering, Ingersoll declared, “Lindbergh is a political novice. His speech was post-graduate work. Obviously, he was helped in writing it. Who are the people who did his thinking and helped in his writing? Who are his gang?” Ingersoll concluded by denouncing “Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh as the spokesman of the fascist fifth column in America.” Walter Winchell called “The Lone Eagle” the “Lone Ostrich.” Lindbergh’s FBI file, quiet since the Hauptmann trial, was reactivated, as the agency gathered information that might bear upon “his nationalistic sympathies.” The most treasonous behavior investigators could uncover were sketchy reports of Lindbergh’s smiling on the streets of Berlin in 1936 or of Lindbergh’s associating with the likes of Merwin K. Hart, the head of the New York State Economic Council and an alleged promoter of an American Fascist movement who was assumed to have ties with more reactionary fringe groups.

Publicly, FDR let others in the White House speak for him. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and speechwriter Robert Sherwood delivered a radio address in which he attacked Lindbergh and Henry Ford, another anti-interventionist long considered anti-Semitic. Ford was partially excused because he was a genius; Lindbergh, on the other hand, was accused of having a “poisoned mind,” of being a traitor—an “unwitting [purveyor] of Nazi propaganda.” The Lindberghs were receiving so many obscene letters—generally unsigned—that the Post Office took the precaution of inspecting their mail.

At the same time, Lindbergh was not blind to his legions of supporters. “The sheer number of the unsolicited letters and telegrams is little short of astounding,” observed Paul Palmer, a Reader’s Digest editor who wrote an article that August on America’s apparent shift in attitude toward its living legend. He stated that more mail followed a Lindbergh radio address than that of any other person in America, including FDR, thus making this reluctant orator “one of the great radio voices of all time.” Even Robert Sherwood called Lindbergh an “extremely eloquent crusader for the cause of isolationism…. undoubtedly Roosevelt’s most formidable competitor on the radio.” What Palmer found most striking was “the amazing fact that over 94% of these thousands of letters and telegrams express ardent approval of the Colonel’s anti-war position.”

In covering America’s reaction to the new public Lindbergh for Scribner’s Commentator, C. B. Allen found many people asking why Lindbergh had chosen to step up to the microphones and wondering who was getting him to do it. “From the beginning,” Allen assured his readers, “it has been his own idea. No diplomat or former diplomat has been ‘advising’ him. He has not sought and even repels those who would be his special advocates or advisers. No word painter or ghost writer has been helping him prepare his speeches; they are as wholly and typically Lindbergh as his amazing flying career.”

While the Lindberghs’ controversial position ruptured several old friendships, it fostered as many new ones. Norman Thomas, America’s leading Socialist, disagreed with Lindbergh’s occasional bluntness; but, he wrote him, “I applaud your stand and deplore the rather vicious type of attack that has been made upon you.” New York attorney John Foster Dulles did not buy all Lindbergh’s arguments, but he too said he was “very glad you spoke as you did,” for he concurred with his feeling of “grave danger” should the United States continue its apparent foreign policy. Chester Bowles, then an advertising executive, congratulated Lindbergh for his courage and expressed his hope that “you will keep on talking and talking in spite of all the criticism and innuendos that will undoubtedly be fired in your direction.” Frank Lloyd Wright wrote, “We all knew you could fly straight. Now we know you can think straight. When talk is quite generally cheap and unreliable, you are brave enough to talk straight.”

With Americans from all walks of life hoping Lindbergh would become the spokesman for their anti-interventionist cause—including Senators Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri, Ernest Lundeen and Henrik Shipstead from Minnesota, Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota, Patrick McCarran from Nevada, and William E. Borah of Idaho, university presidents Alan Valentine of the University of Rochester and Robert Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago, and even John Cudahy, who had served in the New Deal’s diplomatic corps—Lindbergh found himself drawn to a group of young men in New Haven, Connecticut, mostly law students at Yale.

R. Douglas “Bob” Stuart, Jr.—a good-looking, go-getting graduate of Princeton, the son of the first vice president of the Quaker Oats Company, then studying law—had contacted Lindbergh back in November 1939, after Lindbergh’s first antiwar address to the nation. Along with Potter Stewart and Sargent Shriver, Stuart had been one of six Yale students who had invited him to the campus to speak. In the spring of 1940, Stuart and Stewart and two other Yale University law students—Eugene Locke of Texas and Gerald R. Ford of Grand Rapids, Michigan—circulated a mimeographed letter and petition to students and recent graduates of universities throughout the country “to enlist the support of those who feel, as we do, that the policy of the United States should be hemisphere defense rather than European intervention, and who are willing to work for the adoption of that policy.” This introductory letter asserted that they were neither pacifists nor affiliated with any political party. On four military matters, these young bulldogs were firmly committed:

1. The United States must build an impregnable defense for America.

2. No foreign power, nor group of powers, can successfully attack a prepared America.

3. American democracy can be preserved only by keeping out of the European war.

4. Aid short of war weakens national defense at home and threatens to involve America in war abroad.

Stuart had gone to Chicago in search of backing for his organization; and he enlisted a family friend, General Robert S. Wood, the chairman of Sears-Roebuck, to act as chairman. Stuart postponed his third year of law school in order to serve as the full-time director of this group, the Committee to Defend America First. The movement’s name got shortened in daily parlance to its last two words.

“The early members of its governing body,” wrote Richard Moore—a young attorney who would soon leave his firm to become America First’s Assistant National Director—“… included a mixture of conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats and independents.” From the Roosevelt Administration itself they included General Hugh Johnson, who had headed the National Recovery Administration, Stuart Chase, an economist credited with coining the phrase “New Deal,” and George N. Peek, the former head of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. Two senatorial wives, both Democrats—Mrs. Burton K. Wheeler and Mrs. Bennett Champ Clark—and two daughters of famous men—Alice Roosevelt Longworth (daughter of T.R.) and Kathryn Lewis (daughter of labor leader John L. Lewis) also served on the national committee. Liberal journalists John T. Flynn and Oswald Garrison Villard, popular novelist Kathleen Norris, humorist Irvin S. Cobb, and World War I ace Eddie Rickenbacker, then head of Eastern Airlines, rounded out the list.

Lindbergh was so impressed with the campaign the twenty-five-year-old Stuart had mounted in just a few months—complete with platform, personalities, and financing—he was considering his invitation to speak before a student gathering at Yale University. On October 22, 1940, Jim Newton and Lindbergh went to a Trans-Lux newsreel theater to watch the footage of a speech he had delivered eight nights earlier. That had been the first time he had not refused to allow the film companies to photograph him—a great risk, he believed, “because of the Jewish influence in the newsreels and the antagonism I know exists towards me…. I take the chance that they will cut my talk badly and sandwich it between scenes of homeless refugees and bombed cathedrals.” As Lindbergh’s picture came up on the screen, many in the theater hissed. The editing of the newsreels that night was not as distorted as Lindbergh had feared; and he was encouraged at the end when a larger number of people in the audience applauded. The next day, he accepted the invitation of the America First Committee, telephoning one of its leaders, Kingman Brewster—the student chairman of the Yale News, who would one day become president of the university.

Lindbergh drove himself from Long Island to New Haven on October 30, 1940. After dining with several students at the home of Professor A. Whitney Griswold, another future Yale president, they all drove to Woolsey Hall. The imposing marble building was filled beyond capacity—close to three thousand people. Lindbergh spoke for half an hour, his longest speech yet. His first ten minutes were professorial in tone, a brief history of the events in Europe that had led to the current war. Then he articulated his message for the “generation which is taking over the problems of life during the greatest period of mutation that man has ever known”: “We must either keep out of European wars entirely,” he said, repeating his familiar refrain, “or participate in European politics permanently.” In making that decision he asked his audience, “Do we intend to attempt an invasion of the continent of Europe. Do we intend to fight a war in the Orient? Do we intend to try both at the same time?” If the answer to the latter questions was yes, he said, “it is long past time for us to begin the construction of bases in the Pacific, and to stop our wavering policy in the Philippines—we should either fortify these islands adequately, or get out of them entirely.” He confined his remarks that night to Europe, because, he said, “no nation in Asia has developed their aviation sufficiently to be a serious menace to the United States at this time …”

Lindbergh expected heckling during his speech but encountered only rapt attention. He received a tremendous ovation, enough for him to note in his journal that the meeting “was by far the most successful and satisfying … of this kind in which I have ever taken part.” It encouraged him not only to continue speaking publicly but to do so under the aegis of this impressive “youth group.” While many of the other antiwar organizations had distinctly reactionary—often anti-Semitic—taints to them, America First seemed to attract men and women of all ages, political persuasions, and religions—including a number of influential Jews. These included Sidney Hertzberg, their publicity director, and Lessing Rosenwald, one of the Sears-Roebuck heirs. Furthermore, noted an FBI report on the organization, there was “a tremendous Jewish group” subsidizing the movement, using the Guggenheim Foundation as its front.

During the next year, millions of words would be spoken and written on the subject of intervention. As each side fought for the soul of the nation, the argument boiled down to eleven months of oratory between Franklin Roosevelt and Charles Lindbergh. The latter would prove to be the biggest draw for the America First movement, making thirteen public appearances as its featured speaker in practically every region of the country. Contrary to persistent rumor, Lindbergh wrote all his own speeches—with only minor editing from Anne. He received no compensation from any organization or individual for his efforts; and he paid for all his own transportation and lodging.

In January 1941, President Roosevelt asked for “all-out aid” for the democracies; and the Congress introduced a bill that would give him almost unlimited war powers. In his State of the Union address on January sixth, he gave the still-isolationist nation a big push toward war when he asked Congress for a lend-lease bill—one empowering the President to transfer war material to any country deemed vital to U. S. interests, deferring payments for those ships and arms. Four days later, Congress opened debate on the subject, one of the hottest in its history. Four days after that, Lindbergh received a telegram from Hamilton Fish, the President’s congressman, who actively opposed the bill in the House. “THIS IS MOST IMPORTANT AND FAR REACHING ADMINISTRATION BILL EVER PRESENTED TO CONGRESS,” Fish wired Lindbergh, asking him to testify before the Committee on Foreign Affairs.

Lindbergh arrived at Capitol Hill early on Thursday, January 23, 1941, and walked through some of the buildings that had been his childhood playground. When he approached the Ways and Means Committee Room of the new House Office Building—at 9:55 as scheduled—he encountered a huge crowd. Police had to escort him into the room, which was jammed with a thousand people. Motion-picture cameras and lights were already in place, and dozens of still photographers swarmed around the table at which Lindbergh sat. He faced the committee—twenty-five-strong. Although he was as charismatic as ever, the public got its first hard look at a Lindbergh just shy of forty, his hair thinning and graying at the temples, with age lines in the alabaster skin. The hero famous for his perfect smile sat solemnly in a dark suit, eager to talk.

For the next two and one-half hours he testified without pausing even for a drink of water. For the pro-intervention representatives, the hearing proved to be something of a joust, in which they attempted to knock Lindbergh off his horse of staunch neutrality. One such attempt came in answering questions from Rep. Luther A. Johnson of Texas:

You are not, then, in sympathy with England’s efforts to defeat Hitler? I am in sympathy with the people on both sides, but I think that it would be disadvantageous for England herself, if a conclusive victory is sought.

I think you are evading the question—not intentionally; but the question is very simple, whether or not you are in sympathy with England’s defense against Hitler?

I am in sympathy with the people and not with their aims.

You do not think that it is to the best interests of the United States economically as well as in the matter of defense for England to win?

No sir. I think that a complete victory, as I say, would mean prostration in Europe, and would be one of the worst things that could happen there and here…. I believe we have an interest in the outcome of the war.

On which side?

In a negotiated peace; we have the greatest interest.

… Which side would it be to our interest to win?

Neither.

After a lunch break, the tournament continued, as Rep. Wirt Courtney of Tennessee asked, “Do you think that either Germany or England is the more to blame for the present conflict?” Lindbergh replied: “Over a period of years, no.”

Lindbergh expressed his belief that American aid to England would only prolong the war. He urged America to arm itself and defend its own borders; and he suggested that American entry into this war “would be the greatest disaster this country has ever passed through.” Several times during his four and one-half hours of testimony, the crowd burst into applause. Before dismissing the witness, even Chairman Sol Bloom noted, “you have made one of the best witnesses that this committee could possibly ever hear. You answered all the questions only as a Colonel Lindbergh could answer them …”

A fortnight later, Lindbergh was back in Washington, testifying before the Senate. He found this hearing conducted with more dignity but also more acrimony. He used his opening statement to amplify some of the comments he had made before the House, particularly to explain that when he had refused to say he favored an English victory it was because “an English victory, if it were possible at all, would necessitate years of war and an invasion of the Continent of Europe,” which he believed “would create prostration, famine, and disease in Europe—and probably in America—such as the world has never experienced before.” That was why he preferred a negotiated peace to a complete victory by either side. Senate Bill 275, he believed, pursued a “policy which attempts to obtain security for America by controlling internal conditions in Europe.” It troubled Lindbergh that America was sending a large portion of its armament production abroad, while its own defense systems—especially the air forces—were in “deplorable condition.”

Senator Claude Pepper of Florida got the inquiry off to an unintentionally amusing start when he tried to put Lindbergh’s comments in some historical context. “Colonel,” he asked, “when did you first go to Europe?”

“Nineteen twenty-seven, sir,” he replied, which brought the house down in a prolonged demonstration of laughter and applause.

Pepper soon made it clear that he wanted to show that Lindbergh was pro-German. He asked Lindbergh to comment on the fact that many people “have been puzzled by the absence of any indication on your part of any moral indignation at what they consider outrageous wrongs which have been perpetrated and are being perpetrated by the German Government.” Lindbergh asserted his belief “that nothing is gained by publicly commenting on your feeling in regard to one side of a war in which your country is not taking part.” Instead, he suggested, he felt “very strongly that the attitude of this country should be receptive to a negotiated peace.” He further asserted his belief that America should not “police the world.”

While Lindbergh’s testimony may have sounded logical in theory, many Americans were incensed at the coldness of his responses. “[Y]our failure to denounce the perversions of Nazi doctrine, the shocking cruelty and destruction of which they are guilty,” wrote one stranger who expressed the sentiments of millions, “is an eloquent declaration of where you stand.” Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., expressed his sentiments more succinctly, when he wired Lindbergh: “WHAT AN UNPATRIOTIC DUMB BELL YOU ARE.” The Richmond News Leader, edited by biographer D. S. Freeman, observed on its editorial page that “Millions would vote today to hang LINDBERGH or to exile him—as enthusiastically as they cheered and extolled him. Half the letters that have come to newspapers during the past few days have been abuse of him. Some of the communications have been so scurrilous that they could not be printed, though the writers doubtless sealed them with satisfaction and then sat down by the fire to plume themselves as patriots.” Whether one agreed with Lindbergh’s view of the world or not, Freeman thought it surely demonstrated Lindbergh’s patriotism, that if he was trying to aid the Nazis he could achieve that “much more readily by keeping away from the committee room and plotting in the background.” Within the week, the House passed Lend-Lease by a vote of 260–165; the Senate followed suit in early March by a margin of 60–31. In London, the blitz continued.

A case of chicken pox ran through the Lindbergh house, first putting Anne in bed and ultimately downing Charles for ten days. They both recovered in time to stick to plans they had made to revisit Florida. As before, they eluded the press. On March 6,1941, Jim Newton met them in Haines City, then drove them to Fort Myers, where he had outfitted the Lindberghs with a large sailboat with an engine and a small dory. Because he knew the coastal waters so well, he would be their only guide.

“Occasionally we camped under twisted sea-grape trees on shore in a bugproof tent,” Anne would later write. “We explored Shark River again, silently this time, sailing before the wind with jib and jigger, into the timeless world of wilderness and wild life. Pushing through the maze of streams and rivers opening up before us, between bare ghostly arms of mangrove roots, we scarcely made a ripple, occasionally startling a great white heron, or a pink ibis, or water turkeys. Swallow-tailed kites circled slowly above our heads. At sunset we put the sails down and poled through small bayous under arching bushes.”

The centerpiece of their trip was a voyage to Dry Tortugas, one of the outermost keys off Florida’s southwest coast. Charles took command of the twenty-four-hour crossing, ordering watches on deck for everybody—“two hours apiece until nightfall, then four on and eight below.” Over the next few days, they explored the island—which boasted an enormous nineteenth-century fortress, Fort Jefferson—and the neighboring keys. In the calm waters they swam and dove, each trying for the first time a helmet attached by a forty-foot hose to an air pump. They were thrilled to enter this strange world of silence and exotic sights—“purple sea fans, luminous blue fish, yellow, black-and-white striped, gliding in and out of ferns, coral branches, all moving to a rhythm we did not know or feel.” Although they had set out for ten days, the Lindberghs floated off the tip of the United States for almost three weeks, all but completely detached from newspaper and radio reports. A refreshed Lindbergh returned to Long Island to resume his crusade.

Working through young Bob Stuart, Lindbergh spent the next two weeks writing an address for a meeting in the Chicago Arena on April seventeenth. General Wood introduced him to the crowd of more than ten thousand, announcing that Lindbergh had officially joined the national America First Committee. Over the next twenty-five minutes, Lindbergh explained why. “The America First Committee is a purely American organization formed to give voice to the hundred-odd million people in our country who oppose sending our soldiers to Europe again,” he said. “Our objective is to make America impregnable at home, and to keep out of these wars across the sea. Some of us, including myself, believe that the sending of arms to Europe was a mistake—that it has weakened our position in America, that it has added bloodshed in European countries, and that it has not changed the trend of the war.”

The plainspoken Lindbergh incited thirty interruptions of applause and almost no opposition within the hall. “War is not inevitable for this country,” he proclaimed. “Whether or not America enters the war is within our control.” While many took his clarity for clairvoyance, the future would later prove some of his pronouncements just plain wrong. “Personally, I believe it will be a tragedy to the world—a tragedy even to Germany—if the British Empire collapses,” he said. “But I must tell you frankly that I believe this war was lost by England and France even before it was declared, and that it is not within our power in America today to win the war for England, even though we throw the entire resources of our nation into the conflict. With all our organization and industry, we are not, and will not be able to transport an army across the ocean, large enough to invade the continent of Europe successfully as long as strong European armies are there for its defense.”

Six nights later, Lindbergh addressed another capacity crowd, filling ten thousand seats in New York’s Manhattan Center. Outside, among another ten thousand people milling on Thirty-fourth Street, were members of a watchdog organization called Friends of Democracy. Its national director, Leon M. Birkhead, had recently informed Lindbergh that his group had discovered “that the America First Committee is being used by Hitler’s propagandists to advance a doctrine which is anti-American and anti-democratic.” His supporters picketed the event, calling it “the largest gathering of pro-Nazi and pro-Fascists, of both domestic and imported brands, since the German American bund rallies in Madison Square Garden.” The Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League distributed handbills headlined “What One Hitler Medal Can Do.” PM characterized the gathering as “a liberal sprinkling of Nazis, Fascists, anti-Semites, crackpots and just people” in which the “just people seemed out of place.” Walter Winchell announced that “every hate spreader they could find showed up for that meeting.” Meantime Interior Secretary Ickes said the America First Committee’s ties to “professional Fascists and anti-Semites” had become “clear and scandalous”; and he named Lindbergh “the No. 1 United States Nazi fellow traveler.”

With so many others denouncing his opponent, President Roosevelt remained above the fray. But on April twenty-fifth, he could not resist a zinger or two of his own. At a press conference, a reporter asked, “How is it that the Army, which needs now distinguished fliers … has not asked Colonel Lindbergh to rejoin his rank as Colonel?” As though waiting for the question, Roosevelt launched into a folksy history lesson about Clement L. Vallandigham, leader of the “Copperheads,” those Yankees during the Civil War who were sympathetic to the Confederates. “Well, Vallandigham, as you know, was an appeaser,” Roosevelt said, getting a laugh from his audience. “He wanted to make peace from 1863 on because the North ‘couldn’t win.’ Once upon a time there was a place called Valley Forge,” he continued in making his point, “and there were an awful lot of appeasers that pleaded with Washington to quit, because he ‘couldn’t win.’” When another reporter asked the President if he was still talking about Lindbergh, FDR said, “Yes,” drawing another round of laughter as well as the next day’s headlines.

Lindbergh was not amused. Had FDR’s attack been strictly political, he would have paid little attention to it. Because the President of the United States had spoken specifically to Lindbergh’s commission in the Army, however, he felt his “loyalty, character, and motives” were being questioned and his honor impugned. Lindbergh handwrote a draft of his response, in which he stated, “I had hoped that I might exercise my rights as an American citizen, to place my viewpoint before the people of my country in time of peace, without giving up the privilege of serving my country as an Air Corps officer in the event of war.” But since his Commander in Chief had clearly implied “that I am no longer of use to this country as a reserve officer,” Lindbergh said he saw “no honorable alternative” to tendering his resignation as Colonel in the United States Army Air Corps Reserve. “Here I am stumping the country with pacifists and considering resigning as a colonel in the Army Air Corps,” he wrote ruefully in his journals, “when there is no philosophy I disagree with more than that of the pacifist, and nothing I would rather be doing than flying in the Air Corps.” He showed his letter to Anne, who suggested a coda: “I will continue to serve my country to the best of my ability as a private citizen.”

Miss Gawne typed the letter, which Lindbergh sent to the White House while his formal resignation went to the Secretary of War. “If I did not tender my resignation,” Lindbergh was forced to recognize, “I would lose something in my own character that means even more to me than my commission in the Air Corps. No one else might know it, but I would. And if I take this insult from Roosevelt, more, and worse, will probably be forthcoming.”

On May 3, 1941, at an America First rally of fifteen thousand at the Arena in St. Louis, Lindbergh hammered away at his new theme—that “no matter how many planes we build in America and send to England, we cannot make the British Isles stronger than Germany in military aviation.” One week later, he spoke to ten thousand people in Minneapolis, in his most personal and hard-hitting speech to date. After summoning up his father’s fight against American entry into the first World War, he attacked the President for misleading the nation, keeping it uninformed as to where it was being led. He asserted that he had never wanted Germany to win this war, but that the only way Germany could be defeated was by an invasion. “Even if an invasion were possible, which I do not believe,” Lindbergh averred, “the resulting devastation would be so great that Europe could not recover for generations if it could recover at all.”

When Lindbergh returned to New York City for his next address, on May twenty-third, the rally required Madison Square Garden. The night was charged with political energy, as some twenty-five thousand people filled the flag-festooned stadium. Almost as many stood on the street, listening to the speeches over loudspeakers. The Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies heckled that those who entered the stadium would “mingle with Nazis, Fascists and Communists.”

The charge was true, as many recognizable extremists had shown up for the meeting—including disciples of Father Coughlin and of Joseph McWilliams, leader of the pro-Fascist American Destiny Party. Furthermore, there were rumors (secretly substantiated by FBI reports) that Senator Burton K. Wheeler’s wife was “bitterly anti-Semitic,” as was one of Colonel McCormick’s key men, Harry Jung, who headed the American Vigilante Intelligence Federation, another purportedly pro-Nazi group. Talk of Colonel McCormick’s and General Wood’s anti-Semitism was rampant.

Arriving with a police escort, the Lindberghs were shunted past the crowd into a quiet room with the night’s other featured speakers. While waiting, John T. Flynn—columnist for The New Republic and leader of the liberal flank of the America First movement—was informed that Joe McWilliams himself was sitting in the front of the hall. Flynn said he was going to denounce McWilliams from the platform. Lindbergh advised disclaiming “any connection between America First and McWilliams” but stressed that “it should be done with dignity and moderation.”

At last the speakers paraded onto the stage into a flood of lights and a torrential ovation. Shouts of “Lindy!” and “Our next President!” went up. Photographers rushed toward him. The hysteria made Anne fearful that somebody might shoot her husband.

Flynn opened the meeting by attacking those who had smeared America First’s purpose and whose support they rejected—namely Communists, Fascists, Bundists, and Christian Frontists … and specifically, Joe McWilliams. The audience booed and threatened to turn unruly, until police stepped into the breach. The crowd settled down to listen to short addresses by Mrs. John P. Marquand, wife of one of the most celebrated novelists of the day; Kathleen Norris, a popular writer herself, who spoke of mothers losing their boys in times of war; and Norman Thomas, who simply believed, “This is not our war.”

The introduction of citizen Lindbergh set off a wave of applause that practically shook the Garden. He stood in silence—slightly stooped, grinning—until the crowd quieted. He spoke that night of the United States as a civilization of mixed races, religions, and beliefs, and he inquired why the country had to jeopardize all that “by injecting the wars and the hatreds of Europe into our midst?” The audience cheered wildly. “With adequate leadership we can be the strongest and most influential nation in the world,” he told the crowd. But first, he said, they must “demand an accounting from a government that has led us into war while it promised peace.”

The occasion offered the press enough material to skew their stories in any direction they wanted. The anti-isolationists played up the support that night for Joe McWilliams and his followers. Dorothy Thompson and PM wrote of Lindbergh’s becoming the leader of the pro-Nazi movement. Henry Luce’s Time and Life ran photographs of Lindbergh and his colleagues with their arms held high as they were reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, looking for all the world as though they were Sieg Heil-ing. Rumors of Lindbergh’s heading the German underground in America became rife.

In truth, Charles Lindbergh was never associated with any pro-Nazi or anti-Semitic organization; he never attended any Bund meetings; and since more than four months before the outbreak of war in Europe, he had neither consorted nor consulted with anyone known to have any connections with the Third Reich. When Truman Smith invited him to meet a visiting German dignitary, Lindbergh declined, noting: “I have had no communication with Germany, or with German citizens, since I left Europe in April 1939, and I think it is important for me to be able to say this whenever the question arises. It is a stupid situation, and I do not intend to govern my actions by such considerations indefinitely, but I do not want to give my enemies any unnecessary opportunity to cause confusion in the public mind at this time.” He even stopped writing to the Carrels so that he could attest, if ever necessary, to having had no direct communication with the Continent whatever.

In a speech at the Arena in Philadelphia on the night of May 29, 1941, Lindbergh traced the foreign policy the President had pursued, one which subtly but steadily engaged America in the European war. “First they said, ‘sell us the arms and we will win.’ Then it was ‘lend us the arms and we will win.’ Now it is ‘bring us the arms and we will win.’ Tomorrow it will be ‘fight our war for us and we will win,’” Lindbergh told the crowd of fifteen thousand, which spilled out into the street. Lindbergh reported that America First’s membership was increasing by thousands every day, as chapters were being formed across the country—each of which hoped for a “Lindbergh rally.” “If you can just arrange to divide yourself into 118 equal parts,” Bob Stuart wrote their top draw, “all the America First representatives will be happy.”

The movement gained momentum through the summer; and those who believed in it took pride in Lindbergh’s giving voice to their feelings. In response to a Dorothy Thompson column stating that many army officers disapproved of Lindbergh, Major A. C. Wedemeyer wrote Lindbergh that the opposite was true, “that most of the officers highly approve of you as an individual and as a clear thinking realist with the most unselfish motives.” Indeed, whether one agreed with Lindbergh’s position or not, most conceded that he was not appearing in public for personal gain. One man wrote a letter to the editor of the Dayton Journal-Herald likening Lindbergh to the prophet Isaiah, who sacrificed “his favored position in high places to warn his people against alliances that will destroy much that is good in the land.” A poll in FDR’s home district showed that more than ninety percent of the constituents were against American entry into the war.

But Lindbergh had never been subjected to such personal attack. Libraries across America pulled his books from their shelves; in Ottawa, Ontario, a group asked the Mayor to burn Lindbergh’s books in a public square. Charlotte, North Carolina, changed the name of Lindbergh Drive to Avon Avenue. The Kansas City Liberty Memorial removed Lindbergh’s name from its list of honorary members. And the town of Little Falls repainted its water tower so that it no longer boasted a favorite son. A Gallup poll published April twenty-seventh said while “there were still 81% of the people opposed to U.S. war entry now, if it appeared that the only way to beat Germany and Italy was for the U. S. to go to war, 68% would now say ‘Go.’”

Lindbergh went back on the warpath for peace, arguing his case on the West Coast. On June 18, 1941, he and Anne boarded a TWA DC-3. Riding in the “silvered limousine of a plane,” with its “soft seats, small curtained windows, muffled noise, air conditioning, [and] sky hostesses” hardly seemed like flying, so removed were they from the elements. With fueling stops along the way, they crossed the country in less than eighteen hours.

Two days later, Lindbergh spoke at the Hollywood Bowl to his largest live audience yet. Lindbergh said it was “the most beautiful and inspiring meeting place I have ever seen—open sky and stars above, and hills dimly outlined in the background, so that the rows of people merge into the hills themselves”—an estimated eighty thousand flowing onto the surrounding roads. After speeches by Kathleen Norris, Senator Worth Clark, a Democrat from Idaho, and actress Lillian Gish (who pled for a referendum on the war), the special guest star himself spoke. Because Japan had formed a military alliance with the Axis powers, Lindbergh said, America’s entering the war would probably mean “we must be prepared to fight Japan in the Pacific at the same time that we are convoying our troops and supplies across the Atlantic.” In its current state of unpreparedness for war, Lindbergh asserted that the “alternative to a negotiated peace is either a Hitler victory or a prostrate Europe, and possibly a prostrate America as well.” Cries of “Our next President!” went up again. “No,” Kathleen Norris said privately, “he is more like a Joan of Arc.”

Eleven nights later, Lindbergh spoke at San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium. Because of the fickleness of the European nations toward each other, Lindbergh underscored the folly of America’s allying with any of the belligerents. When the war started, he pointed out, “Germany and Russia were lined up against England and France. Now, less than two years later, we find Russia and England fighting France and Germany…. The murderers and plunderers of yesterday are accepted as the valiant defenders of civilization today.” Furthermore, he observed, “A refugee who steps from the gangplanks and advocates war is acclaimed as a defender of freedom. A native born American who opposes war is called a fifth-columnist.” Then he fell back on his own personal bugbear: “I tell you,” he said, “that I would a hundred times rather see my country ally herself with England, or even with Germany with all of her faults, than with the cruelty, the godlessness, and the barbarism that exist in Soviet Russia. An alliance between the United States and Russia should be opposed by every American, by every Christian, and by every humanitarian in this country.”

Before leaving California, the Lindberghs spent three days with William Randolph Hearst at his Wyntoon ranch, a veritable Alpine village he had constructed at the foot of Mount Shasta. Although Lindbergh still disapproved of Hearst’s journalistic practices, he appreciated the anti-intervention message that his newspapers spread. “A period of crisis is the real test of character and leadership,” Lindbergh wrote him afterward. “I believe that you have done something for this country in the crisis we are going through, for which our people will be forever grateful.”

In August, the great debate heated up. Opposition to Lindbergh had grown so vocal before his appearance in Cleveland, the police insisted on “X-raying” the furniture of the apartment in which he was staying and posting police guards all along his route, from his room to the podium. When he ventured to Oklahoma City on August twenty-eighth, to lecture on Air Power, he learned there had been threats of shooting. Worse, the city council unanimously voted to revoke America First’s lease with the Municipal Auditorium, forcing the organization to seek a new venue. Upon hearing this news, Lindbergh said, “if we could not rent a hall we could hold our meeting in a cow pasture.” They settled instead on a ballpark just outside the city. Fifteen thousand people weathered the blizzard of publicity, further convincing Lindbergh that American citizens were “definitely opposed” to intervention. “But what has Roosevelt in his mind,” Lindbergh asked in his journals, “and how far will he be able to take us? How close can we skate to the edge of war without falling in?” Closer, Lindbergh realized, if the President could somehow discredit him.

For months, Harold Ickes publicly hectored Lindbergh, now referring to him as a “Knight of the German Eagle”; and Lindbergh generally ignored him. On July 14, 1941, however, Ickes got his goat. At a Bastille Day meeting sponsored by France Forever, the Secretary of the Interior built his rousing speech at Manhattan Center on the subject of liberating France largely around the image of “ex-Colonel Lindbergh” and “what a menace he and those like him are to this country and its free institutions.” He said he could tell Lindbergh “where he could readily locate an artificial heart with the aid of an x-ray machine.” Beyond the name-calling, Ickes raised a point many Americans had thought but few had spoken: “No one has ever heard Lindbergh utter a word of horror at, or even aversion to, the bloody career that the Nazis are following,” Ickes said, “nor a word of pity for the innocent men, women and children, who have been deliberately murdered by the Nazis in practically every country in Europe.” For all Lindbergh’s repudiation of Communism, Ickes said, “I have never heard this Knight of the German Eagle denounce Hitler or Nazism or Mussolini or Fascism.”

No, [Ickes continued] I have never heard Lindbergh utter a word of pity for Belgium or Holland or Norway or England. I have never heard him express a word of pity for the Poles or the Jews who have been slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands by Hitler’s savages. I have never heard Lindbergh say a word of encouragement to the English for the fight they are so bravely making for Lindbergh’s right to live his own life in his own way, as well as for their own right to do so.

For months, Lindbergh had ignored such attacks. In this last speech, however, Lindbergh naively felt Ickes had been hoist with his own petard, placing both the Secretary and his president in a position Lindbergh could “attack with dignity and effectiveness.”

On July 16, 1941, Lindbergh wrote Roosevelt. His short letter called Ickes on his unfair behavior, specifically for criticizing him for accepting a decoration from the German Government in 1938. He asked the President to inform his cabinet member that he had received the decoration in the American Embassy in the presence of their own ambassador and that he was there at that ambassador’s request. Lindbergh offered his word that he had “no connection with any foreign government” and that he would willingly present himself and all his files for investigation to prove as much. Lindbergh felt he was owed an apology from him. Upon mailing the letter, he also released a copy to the press.

Lindbergh heard from neither the President nor his Interior Secretary. Instead, he received a nine-sentence note from FDR’s secretary Stephen Early, who dismissed the letter as an obvious publicity stunt, as demonstrated by the fact that the newspapers had received their copies a full day before the President. In his own reply to the press, Ickes chided Lindbergh for this breach of political etiquette and challenged him to reveal his true colors. “If Mr. Lindbergh feels like cringing when he is correctly referred to as a knight of the German Eagle,” Ickes wrote, “why doesn’t he send back the disgraceful decoration and be done with it? Americans remember that he had no hesitation about sending back to the President his commission in the United States Army Air Corps Reserve. In fact, Mr. Lindbergh returned his commission with suspicious alacrity and with a total lack of graciousness. But he still hangs on to the Nazi medal!”

Even Lindbergh’s supporters had to ask themselves some of the questions Ickes raised. General Wood gently suggested that Lindbergh publicly condemn totalitarianism in any form, thus silencing the whispering campaign that he was pro-Nazi. Billy Rose sent him a long telegram that same day, enumerating some of the Third Reich’s known atrocities to date. “IF YOU ARE WILLING TO CONDEMN HITLER AND HIS GANG AND THEIR UNSPEAKABLE BARBARITIES,” the theater impresario added, “I WILL ENGAGE MADISON SQUARE GARDEN AT MY EXPENSE AND GIVE YOU AN OPPORTUNITY TO AIR YOUR VIEWS. MY ONLY CONDITION IS THAT THE PUBLIC MELTING DOWN OR HAMMERING OUT OF SHAPE OF YOUR NAZI MEDAL BE MADE A FEATURE OF THE RALLY.” Lindbergh had “slipped badly,” Ickes noted in his diary. “He has now made it clear to the whole country that he still clings to this German decoration…. For the first time he has allowed himself to be put on the defensive and that is always a weak position for anyone.” The Great Debate was deteriorating into a more simplistic question, one which became the title of a pamphlet distributed by Birkhead’s Friends of Democracy: “Is Lindbergh a Nazi?”

THE LINDBERGHS could bear Long Island no longer. “[W]e are so sick of the atmosphere that surrounds New York & gets thicker all the time,” Anne wrote Kay Smith that summer, thinking of the “bitterness, suspicion, hate, pressure etc.” The Lindberghs’ unlisted telephone seldom stopped ringing—with requests and threats—keeping Charles and Anne from getting much work done there. They fled to Martha’s Vineyard, where they rented a small house at Seven Gates Farm in Vineyard Haven. It was smaller than they would have liked, so that children and secretaries would have to double up; but it sat in serene isolation, surrounded by wild hills, private beaches, trees and berry bushes, and endless vistas of rocks, distant islands, and the sea. It reminded Charles of Illiec. In a hillside hollow overlooking the water, he had two men erect a cabin-sized tent, in which he and Anne could bunk and she could write.

Lindbergh had long told himself that the moment American entry into the war seemed inevitable, he would drop a bombshell. He would publicly name “the groups that were most powerful and effective in pushing the United States toward involvement in the war.” Having agreed to speak at another America First meeting, in Des Moines, he realized his engagement there would provide that moment. He penciled draft after draft of his most provocative speech yet, one he bluntly titled “Who Are the War Agitators?”

In it, he pointed out that Americans had solidly opposed entering the war when it began, and that three groups had been “pressing this country toward war” ever since—the Roosevelt administration, the British, and the Jews. Behind those groups, he added, were “a number of capitalists, anglophiles, and intellectuals, who believe that their future, and the future of mankind, depend upon the domination of the British Empire.” He wrote that the first group was encouraging American participation so that it could accrue more power. The second group, he said, saw it as a way of lightening its military and financial load. But the core of his thesis rested on the third group, for whom he reserved his sharpest comments.

This portion of the speech threw Anne into “black gloom.” She did not disagree with anything he wrote. In fact, she found “what he says is as far as I can tell true and moderately stated,” without “bitterness or rancor.” Her desperation, she confided to her diary, came because “I hate to have him touch the Jews at all. For I dread the reaction on him.” She could already envision the next morning’s headlines—LINDBERGH ATTACKS JEWS—knowing that many people would read no further, “being only too eager to believe the worst of C.” The “ugly cry of anti-Semitism will be joyfully pounced upon and waved about [his] name,” she thought, as it was “so much simpler to brand someone with a bad label than to take the trouble to read what he says.” She tried to express as much to her husband, that the meaning of his words were not the same as the effect they would have, that the speech would be taken as “Jew-baiting.”

Lindbergh said the point was not what the effect would be on him but “whether or not what he said is true and whether it will help to keep us out of war.” Feeling that the perception was as important as the reality, Anne anxiously rewrote several paragraphs, making them less accusatory and more understanding. She hoped, for example, that he might say: “I call you people before me tonight to witness that I am not anti-Semitic nor have I attacked the Jews.” But he would not. He departed for Des Moines, leaving his wife with “a sinking of heart.” Instead of snuffing the inflammatory reaction she foresaw, she feared his words would prove to be “a match lit near a pile of excelsior.”

For the first time Lindbergh felt that he was “fighting a losing battle,” that Roosevelt had cleverly rigged the American psyche “so that just a small incident could draw us into a declaration of war.” The week before he was to deliver his fiery speech, the nation moved another step in that direction, when the U. S. destroyer Greer was attacked near Iceland on September fourth. Roosevelt did not address the nation on the subject until the evening of the eleventh, the very moment before Lindbergh was to speak, thus delaying the start of the America First rally. The President’s speech was piped into the Des Moines Coliseum, filled with eight thousand Iowans. They all listened to Roosevelt declare that he had ordered the U. S. Navy to “shoot on sight” any German or Italian ships in the American Defense Zone, which he said stretched from Iceland to the west coast of Africa. Less than a minute after the President had finished, Lindbergh and his colleagues walked onstage, to loud applause mixed with boos.

Although the loudspeakers did not function properly for the first few minutes, the other speakers warmed the crowd up enough so that by the time Lindbergh reached the microphone, the audience was ready to listen—even the hecklers. Six minutes into his speech, when he reached the point at which he named the three war-agitating groups, most of the crowd stood and cheered. For the rest of his speech, the Iowans drowned out the opposition that occasionally erupted.

In the end, Lindbergh had reduced his comments about the Jews to three paragraphs. They were the only public comments he ever made during the Great Debate in which he mentioned them. Although he felt he was showing his sympathy for a long-persecuted tribe, each additional sentence would be used to burn the brand of anti-Semite deeper into his public persona.

“It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany,” Lindbergh said. “The persecution they suffered in Germany would be sufficient to make bitter enemies of any race. No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany. But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy, both for us and for them.”

Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences. Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastation. A few far-sighted Jewish people realize this, and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our Government.

Ironically, it was in his third paragraph about the Jews, in what he intended to be his most compassionate words on the subject, that Lindbergh incurred the most wrath:

I am not attacking either the Jewish or the British people [he said]. Both races, I admire. But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and Jewish races, for reasons which are understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war. We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we also must look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction.

Lindbergh had bent over backward to be kind about the Jews; but in suggesting the American Jews were “other” people and that their interests were “not American,” he implied exclusion, thus undermining the very foundation of the United States.

Because he spent all the next day in seclusion on the train home, it was not until his arrival in New York on Saturday morning that Lindbergh learned how despised he had become. Most of the nation’s newspapers carried vituperative denunciations of his speech.

“He is attacked on all sides,” Anne noted in her diary, “Administration, pressure groups, and Jews, as now openly a Nazi, following a Nazi doctrine.” Thinking about the national response, Anne wondered why nobody minded his naming the British or the Administration as pro-war, but “to name ‘Jew’ is un-American—even if it is done without hate or bitterness or even criticism.” She asked her diary why.

By the time Charles arrived home, she could answer her own question, recognizing that the implied segregation was “setting the ground for anti-Semitism.” Her husband never saw that. When she told him that she would rather see the country at war than “shaken by violent anti-Semitism,” he rigidly held that those were not the options. For him the choice was “whether or not you are going to let your country go into a completely disastrous war for lack of courage to name the groups leading that country to war—at the risk of being called ‘anti-Semitic’ simply by naming them.” Happy to be reunited, Anne and Charles pitched a pup tent in the hills west of the house and slept together under the stars in the cool, clear night.

He awoke the next morning to a Niagara of invective. Few men in American history had ever been so reviled. One columnist stated that the Lone Eagle had plummeted from “Public Hero No. 1” to “Public Enemy No. 1.” Anne noted that he had become nothing less than “the symbol of anti-Semitism in this country & looked to as the leader of it.” Presidential Secretary Stephen Early commented only that Lindbergh’s words sounded like those pouring out of Berlin. He left prominent Republicans to issue harsher denunciations, and they did. Wendell Willkie called the Des Moines speech “the most un-American talk made in my time by any person of national reputation”; New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, on his way to becoming the party’s new standard-bearer, called it “an inexcusable abuse of the right of freedom of speech.” Jewish groups demanded retractions, as did Catholics and Protestants; Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called upon America First to “divorce itself from the stand taken by Lindbergh and clean its ranks of those who would incite to racial and religious strife in this country.” Time wrote, “The America First Committee had touched the pitch of anti-Semitism and its fingers were tarred.” Liberty went even farther, calling Lindbergh “the most dangerous man in America.” Before him, they observed, “leaders of anti-Semitism were shoddy little crooks and fanatics sending scurrilous circulars through the mails…. But now all that is changed … He, the famous one, he who was once illustrious, has stood up in public and given brazen tongue to what obscure malcontents have only whispered behind the back.” Rabbi Irving F. Reichart of Temple Emanu-El of San Francisco commented that “Hitler himself could not have delivered a more diabolical speech.”

One Sol Schwartz of Brooklyn, who introduced himself in a letter to Lindbergh as a Jewish anti-interventionist, said the Des Moines speech had become “a tragic event in my life.” He explained that his gentile friends now regarded him differently, that to the man in the street, Lindbergh had suggested that all Jews were “INTERNATIONAL BANKERS, WARMONGERS, BOLSHEVIKS … whether he lives on Riverside Drive or in the slums of the east side.” Norman Thomas asserted that the speech “did great harm.” He told his friends that Lindbergh was no anti-Semite but that this speech was “by no means the whole truth or free from error.” By way of instruction, he wrote Lindbergh, “There are lots of forces, for instance, impersonal economic forces, which make for war beside the groups which you mention.”

He also censured him for exaggerating “the solidarity of the Jews in this matter and their power,” a common misconception.

In fact, statistics revealed less Jewish domination of the media than Lindbergh supposed. A study in 1941 by a Notre Dame philosophy professor pointed out that Jews controlled only about three percent of the American press. The government departments most responsible for foreign policy were largely in the hands of non-Jews; and only one Cabinet member was Jewish. In radio NBC’s twenty-six member advisory council contained but two Jews; the president of CBS was Jewish, but the majority of its board of directors was non-Jewish; Mutual was a co-operative organization, the Chicago Tribune chief among its stockholders. And though most of the American motion-picture studios were owned by Jews, most were virtually paranoid about keeping pro-Jewish sentiment off the screen.

To anyone who asked, Lindbergh’s longtime friend Harry Guggenheim insisted that “Slim has never had the slightest anti-Semitic feeling.” But during the years surrounding the America First movement, their friendship undeniably eroded. Walter Winchell gleefully announced that Lindbergh’s “halo has become his noose.” And the President continued to say nothing, allowing the rest of the populace to kick his rival now that he was down. Although eighty-five percent of the mail pouring into the offices of America First backed Lindbergh, thousands of letters excoriated him. Lindbergh read only occasional samples, but he instructed the secretaries of the local chapters not to destroy any of it—“no matter how unfavorable or blasphemous it may be”—explaining, “I am holding all mail as a matter of record, and I want the bad as well as the good.” Ultimately, these tens of thousands of letters went to Yale University, which began housing his archives shortly after he had delivered his America First address on its campus.

Lindbergh’s few public defenders tended to be names that harmed more than they helped—Alf Landon, Father Coughlin, Merwin K. Hart, and Herbert Hoover. While maintaining that his “remarks at Des Moines were true, and moderately stated,” Lindbergh intended to suggest that the most practical solution to the crisis was for him to resign from the America First Committee. He left for Chicago, where General Wood had called an emergency meeting to discuss the possibility of adjourning the committee altogether.

At breakfast the next morning, Lindbergh told Wood he did not feel it was time to adjourn, and that while he was “not willing to repudiate or modify any portion” of his statement, he would announce that his Des Moines speech expressed his opinion and not necessarily that of America First.

Lindbergh absented himself from the lunch meeting, so that the committee members could freely discuss the Des Moines speech and how to repair its damage. Several hours later, Bob Stuart called Lindbergh and asked him to join them. The committee had decided to issue a statement asserting that neither Lindbergh nor America First was anti-Semitic and that the interventionists, “by twisting and distorting what Colonel Lindbergh said at Des Moines, have tried to label that address as anti-Semitic.” America First was remaining in business, its doors open to “all patriotic Americans, whatever their race, color or creed.” While continuing the policy of not imposing restrictions on America First speakers, General Wood suggested to Lindbergh that he make no reference to Des Moines at his next speaking engagement.

On October 3, 1941, at Fort Wayne, he took Wood’s advice and spoke of the many violations of the Administration against the “will of the people.” Before concluding, however, he did interject a few personal remarks, the closest he ever came to pleading for sympathy. “In making these addresses,” he reminded his audience of eight thousand in the Gospel Temple, and millions more listening on their radios, “I have no motive in mind other than the welfare of my country and my civilization. This is not a life that I enjoy. Speaking is not my vocation, and political life is not my ambition. For the past several years, I have given up my normal life and interests … because I believe my country is in mortal danger, and because I could not stand by and see her going to destruction without putting everything I had against that trend.” After the speech, Lindbergh was feeling “written out” on the subject of isolationism. He explained to General Wood that it seemed advisable to him for the committee to “avoiding building up any one man to a position of too great importance in the organization.”

Just when it sounded as though Lindbergh was throwing in the towel, FDR revived him. The President asked Congress to revise the Neutrality Act, which had prevented the arming of American merchant ships and kept them from entering the war zones. To America Firsters, such as Richard Moore, this reversal seemed the last step before “the final straw which would turn America into a full belligerent.” Lindbergh agreed to speak at the next meeting at the end of October in Manhattan and another in early December in Boston.

Because Anne was busy moving the family into another house—one with heat—at Seven Gates Farm, Charles left for New York alone. “The most fundamental issue today is not one of war or peace, but one of integrity. Whether we go to war or whether we stay out, we have the right to demand integrity in the leadership of this nation,” he told a crowd of twenty thousand at Madison Square Garden on October 30, 1941. “The enthusiasm generated by the New York rally was contagious and gave an important lift to the rank and file members just when it was needed most,” Richard Moore later recalled. But the “man on the street” felt different. Lyle Leverich, then a copy boy on the New York Daily News, attended the rally and remembered it fifty years later as one of the most “awesome sights” of his life. “There, in the midst of many, open Nazi-sympathizers was the hero of my childhood, Lindy, and I was literally sickened by the spectacle,” he recalled. “I felt betrayed.” Millions felt the same.

On November 7, 1941, the Senate passed FDR’s neutrality bill amendment by a vote of 50 to 37. Six days later, the House did the same by the slightly narrower margin of 212 to 194. America First refused to say die. By December first, it was going public with a new policy called “We Will Meet You at the Polls!” by which they would target swing Congressional votes and support only those candidates who would “oppose further steps to involve us in war.”

Anne spent the first week of December in New York and New Jersey. In her absence, Charles repitched her tent by the side of the new house and camped out. He divided his time there between the book he had started in Paris two years earlier—a detailed account of his 1927 flight—and writing his next America First address, which he had agreed to deliver in Boston on the tenth.

It promised to be his strongest speech yet. In it he would ask the audience to consider “how ridiculous it is that this democratic nation has twice, within a generation, been carried to war by Presidents who were elected because they promised peace.” Before crusading for four freedoms across the seas, Lindbergh wrote, “let us make sure that the roots of freedom and democracy are firmly planted in our own country”—starting, he added, with “the Negro … in our southern states.”

Anne was still away on Sunday, the seventh, when the radio announced that Japan had attacked the Philippines and the Hawaiian Islands. Lindbergh was shocked. “An attack in the Philippines was to be expected,” he wrote in his journal, “although I did not think it would come quite so soon. But Pearl Harbor! How did the Japs get close enough, and where is our Navy?” He anxiously waited for confirmation of the story, that this was not just a hit-and-run raid being exaggerated by radio commentators into a major attack. “If C. speaks again,” Anne thought on her way home, “they’ll put him in prison.”

Details of the events unraveled slowly, but by the next morning there was no doubt that the attack on Hawaii had been heavy. Lindbergh telephoned Bob Stuart in Chicago to recommend canceling their meeting in Boston. Then he phoned General Wood, who said, “Well, he got us in through the back door.”

Realizing his two-year crusade had come to an end, Lindbergh composed a statement for the America First Committee to release on his behalf that December eighth. “We have been stepping closer to war for many months,” he wrote. “Now it has come and we must meet it as united Americans regardless of our attitude in the past toward the policy our government has followed. Whether or not that policy has been wise, our country has been attacked by force of arms, and by force of arms we must retaliate.” He urged the nation to build its neglected military forces into the mightiest in the world. He wired his message to Bob Stuart, then fell publicly silent on the subject of the war, or anything else for that matter, for several years to come. He took Anne for a walk across their isolated beach, during which he pronounced the bombing in Hawaii “the most important event in our lives.”

Over lunch, the Lindberghs listened to the radio, as the President addressed a special joint session of Congress, calling for a declaration of war against Japan. “What else was there to do?” Lindbergh mused. “We have been asking for war for months. If the President had asked for a declaration of war before, I think Congress would have turned him down with a big majority. But now we have been attacked, and attacked in home waters. We have brought it on our own shoulders; but I can see nothing to do under these circumstances except to fight.”

Lindbergh wrote in his journal that day—for posterity—“If I had been in Congress, I certainly would have voted for a declaration of war.”

Anne concurred, but she approached the day’s events with more practical incertitude. “Where,” she wondered, “will we be thrown in the maelstrom—our private lives?”