PART FOUR

16

PHOENIX

“To me in youth, science was more important than either man or God.

The one I took for granted; the other was too intangible

for me to understand.”

—C.A.L.

BECAUSE THE WAR NEVER HAD AN OFFICIAL BEGINNING FOR Lindbergh, it never had an official ending either.

He had not been in his Westport house an entire morning before he began commuting regularly either to the United Aircraft offices in Hartford or the Chance Vought factory in Stratford to discuss fighter design, new jet projects, fuel range, climb, speed, and firepower—still for no pay. At forty-two, he continued to work as a test pilot.

“[T]here’s no denying the fact,” Lindbergh would later write Colonel Charles MacDonald, “that I never had a more fascinating time in my life than on those combat flights in the South Pacific.” But he never shook some of the horrifying memories he carried back from the war zones—the destruction, degradation, and deaths. For years he prayed for the soul of the Japanese pilot he had shot down at Amahai Strip; and like everybody else who lived through the war years, Lindbergh lost many who were dear to him: Philip Love, whom he had met at Kelly Field and drafted into the Air Mail Service, was killed in a transport plane crash; William Robertson, who had run the company that hired Lindbergh and Love to fly the mail and became a backer of the Spirit, was killed in a glider accident; and flying ace Major Thomas McGuire, who had recently shared his tent on Biak with Lindbergh, went down in the Southwest Pacific. The hardest blow for Lindbergh, however, came at what should have been a moment of jubilation, as the last German forces in France were surrendering.

Dr. Alexis Carrel died on November 5, 1944. The man who had been a father-figure to Lindbergh for fifteen years had returned to wartime France to display his patriotism by serving his countrymen. In so doing, he subjected himself to four years of hardship as well as ostracism for collaborating with the enemy forces. “Cold, privations and isolation,” he had recently written a friend, had brought suffering to him and his wife. Another friend of the Nobel laureate eulogized, “He died really of a broken heart; he could not stand the accusations made against him and his sensitive soul broke under them.”

“It is distressing,” Lindbergh noted upon Carrel’s death, “that a man who cared as deeply for his country and who was as much concerned about the welfare of mankind as Carrel should die under such a cloud of accusations. I suppose that it is to be expected in revolutionary times, and I feel sure that in the more objective future his actual accomplishments and character will show these accusations in their true light.” While many, including Corliss Lamont, had long found much of Carrel’s thinking “indescribably muddled, banal, and prejudiced”—particularly his belief in “the superiority of the white race”—Lindbergh considered Carrel one of the great figures of his time. “Regardless of whether his philosophy was right or wrong in instances,” he wrote, “it was carefully thought out and courageously stated. Many of the men who now accuse him are those whose shortsightedness and political indifference, if not actual dishonesty, brought about the conditions in which France now finds herself.”

For the rest of his life, Lindbergh would contribute time, energy, and money wherever he thought it might restore the reputation of his mentor. Toward that end, Lindbergh helped establish a Carrel Foundation. Its objective was “to promote the study and dissemination of the ideas expounded during his lifetime by the late Alexis Carrel; to preserve manuscripts, records, apparatus, and other memorabilia left by or which relate to the late Alexis Carrel; to sponsor research projects which shall deal with subjects in which the late Alexis Carrel was interested; and the advancement and diffusion of knowledge concerning science, religion, and humanity.”

The following year, Lindbergh and Madame Carrel themselves would pack fifty-eight wooden crates with the artifacts of this extraordinary life—everything from unpublished manuscripts to an Egyptian mummy. Lindbergh would supervise moving the bulk of the Carrel collection to Georgetown University. And in 1949, he would contribute an introduction to A Trip to Lourdes, an account of a miracle Carrel witnessed, which he had not wanted published in his lifetime. While the loss of other friends sensitized Lindbergh, Carrel’s death spiritualized him, leading him to question, as Carrel had most of his life, the relationship between science and religion.

By the spring of 1945, battle fatigue had exhausted the nation. Anne Lindbergh, for one, felt an air of desperation overtaking her friends and family. The Lindberghs and Morrows had been luckier than most, losing no immediate family members in the war; but she sensed a virtual epidemic of depression. After years of relative calm, her brother, Dwight Jr., was displaying signs of mental disorder again; and George Vaillant, the husband of one of her oldest friends, the former Susanna Beck, committed suicide. “Obviously,” she wrote in a letter as the end of the war was in sight, “this winter & spring people are going through profound disillusionments & despairs.” On April 12, 1945, the nation’s leader for the last twelve years died.

The passing of Franklin Roosevelt did not affect Washington’s official attitude toward Lindbergh overnight. It took a week. While Allied forces surrounded Berlin, Lindbergh was called to the capital to discuss his joining a Naval Technical Mission expedition to Europe. He would travel, as he had in the South Pacific, as a civilian representative of United Aircraft, to study the enemy’s development in high-speed aircraft. The nature of this mission was far more sensitive than Lindbergh’s recent military venture and required State Department clearances, authorization he felt he would have theretofore been denied. But, as he wrote a friend from America First in the second week of the Truman administration, “I … found a general feeling that there will be a definite turn in the direction of constitutional government from now on.” And, he would later report to General Wood, “the vindictiveness in Washington [has] practically disappeared as far as I was concerned.”

“Conflicting reports have been coming in in regard to the effectiveness of German jet and rocket fighters—some say their value is greatly exaggerated,” Lindbergh wrote his mother, as he was waiting for his final clearances; “some say the Germans would have held supremacy of the air if they had been a year farther ahead with their jet and rocket development. It is important for us to find out what the real facts are, and that is my primary mission.”

On Friday, May 11, 1945—four days after the Germans surrendered—Lindbergh left Washington on a Navy transport plane for Europe, via Newfoundland and the Azores. The Captain invited Lindbergh to take the controls for part of the journey; but he was just as happy spending the bulk of the flight lying on the cabin floor. “One might as well sleep,” Lindbergh wrote elegiacally in his journal, “for the modern military plane is usually uninteresting from the passengers’ standpoint—high above the earth—often above the clouds, so that no details can be seen (even if bucket seats and badly placed windows didn’t make it so difficult to see anyway). Every year, transport planes seem to get more like subway trains.”

Sunday, he awoke to see the soft morning light bathing Mont-Saint-Michel outside one of the cabin portholes, seven thousand feet below. “What wouldn’t I give to spend a day on Illiec and watch and listen to its tides!” he wrote of his own magical island. “Illiec,” he wrote, “a half hour’s flight away, six years away, a war away, and God knows how much more.”

Arriving the Sunday morning after V-E Day, Lindbergh found few officers at the Paris headquarters of Naval Force France with whom he could conduct business. Reacquainting himself with the city that had once thrown itself at his feet, he spent most of the day touring familiar sites, unrecognized. At first glance, everything seemed unchanged. Second looks revealed pockmarks of machine-gun bullets in the Arc de Triomphe and an entire column felled by a tank shell at the Hotel Crillon. Even so, Paris seemed to have escaped the war relatively unscathed. Over the next three days, Lindbergh studied secret intelligence data and met with U. S. Ambassador Jefferson Caffery and General Carl Spaatz. Admiral Alan G. Kirk informed Lindbergh that France had been harmed in ways not necessarily visible—the harbors were destroyed, the country was slow to reorganize, and there persisted the threat of its turning Communist.

It was not until the Naval Mission penetrated deeper into the Continent that Lindbergh could take full measure of the war’s effects. At times over the next week, he felt as though he were walking through a sequence of dreams, each more surreal than the last. The visions were all the more disturbing for Lindbergh, who clearly remembered all that he had admired in the Third Reich just six years earlier.

In a G. I. uniform, Lindbergh flew into Germany along with several Technical Mission officers. Despite the armistice, they were armed with pistols because resistance activity was still being reported. The destruction he saw in Mannheim, where they landed, reminded Lindbergh of a Dali painting—“which in its feel of hellish death so typifies the excessive abnormality of our age—death without dignity, creation without God.” He found Munich also in ruins.

Worse than any demolition of buildings for Lindbergh was the breakdown of human behavior. The French, Russians, and Poles, he learned, had looted and murdered; and the next day, in Zell-am-See, headquarters for the German Air Force, he learned that the Americans had as well. As Lindbergh’s party drove within a few miles of Berchtesgaden, they could not resist detouring to Hitler’s fabled mountain headquarters, which had been heavily bombed. Walking through rubble, Lindbergh entered Hitler’s inner sanctum and was rendered speechless. Standing at a vast space in a wall, which once held a plate-glass window, he looked onto one of the most beautiful sights he had ever seen—“sharp gray crags, white fields of snow, sawtooth peaks against a blue sky, sunlight on the boulders, a storm forming up the valley.” Through a gap in the mountains, he could see Bavarian plains all the way to the horizon. “It was in this setting,” Lindbergh saw further, “that the man Hitler, now the myth Hitler, contemplated and laid his plans—the man who in a few years threw the human world into the greatest convulsion it has ever known and from which it will be recuperating for generations.”

“Hitler,” he would write in his journal that night, “a man who controlled such power, who might have turned it to human good, who used it to such resulting evil: the best youth of his country dead; the cities destroyed; the population homeless and hungry; Germany overrun by the forces he feared most, the forces of Bolshevism, the armies of Soviet Russia; much of his country, like his own room and quarters, rubble—flame-blacked ruins. I think of the strength of prewar Germany.” The 1970 publication of this journal entry would be one of the few times Lindbergh ever came close to admitting that he might have misjudged Hitler, his first suggestion of a condemnation.

Lindbergh was billeted that night in Zell-am-See, in a house that had been seized from a German family. As he carried his barracks bag through the door, he passed a forlorn woman lugging her belongings out. Three young children followed, looking “angry and a little frightened.” Later that night he discussed the German Air Force with the commanding officer of the 506^th Parachute Infantry over dinner, at which the American soldiers proudly drank “Goering’s wine”—from his private cellar, which had been “liberated” when he had been captured nearby. Lindbergh could not help thinking of his earlier private audiences with the second-most powerful man in the Third Reich. Although he seldom imbibed, Lindbergh sampled the wine.

Moving on to Oberammergau, Lindbergh hoped to locate an old acquaintance, Dr. Willy E. Messerschmitt, who had engineered many of Germany’s most effective flying machines and had ushered aviation into a new age. His Me262 was the world’s first jet-propelled combat airplane, and his Me163 Komet the first practical rocket-powered airplane—capable of speeds close to six hundred miles per hour. Both of these jet aircraft had been unleashed on the Allies too late to change the course of the war. Lindbergh learned the once-revered designer’s large country house had been “liberated” by American troops; and he found him living with his sister’s family in a village farther into the country, reduced to sleeping on a pallet in a barn.

Speaking through Messerschmitt’s bilingual brother-in-law, Lindbergh conducted a technical conversation with the jet-age pioneer. Messerschmitt propounded the development of rocket-type planes for both military and commercial use and prophesied that within twenty years supersonic aircraft would need only a few hours to carry passengers between Europe and America. A visibly broken man, he told Lindbergh that he had been concerned about defeat as early as 1941, when he saw America’s estimates for its own aircraft production. Lindbergh further learned that Messerschmitt had only recently returned from England, where he had been a prisoner of war. Both the British and the French had asked him to serve as a technical adviser. When Lindbergh asked whether he would be interested in working in America if an opportunity arose, he said he would have to hear the conditions. Wernher von Braun—who had helped develop the V-1 (a robot bomb that could be ground-launched on a 150-mile predetermined course) and the V-2 (a liquid-fuel rocket used as a ballistic missile)—was about to accept such an offer from the United States government. Messerschmitt would remain in Germany, dying in 1978, never recovering financially or emotionally from the war. Von Braun, on the other hand, became celebrated as America’s most outspoken proponent of rocket development and helped thrust America ahead of its new competitor, Soviet Russia, in the space race.

At every turn, Lindbergh saw destroyed buildings, dispossessed people, and hungry children. “I feel ashamed, of myself, of my people,” Lindbergh wrote in his diary, trying to sort out his feelings, “as I eat and watch those children. They are not to blame for the war. They are hungry children. What right have we to stuff ourselves, while they look on—well-fed men eating, leaving unwanted food on plates, while hungry children look on. What right have to we to damn the Nazi and the Jap while we carry on with such callousness and hatred in our hearts.” Lindbergh felt the worst was still to come once winter set in. “Yes, I know,” Lindbergh told himself; “Hitler and the Nazis are the cause. But we in America are supposed to stand for different things.”

Over the next three weeks, Lindbergh gathered information and collected grievances. “We stopped at demobilization centers; we confiscated documents, interrogated engineers and scientists, and picked our way through litter in looted laboratories,” Lindbergh would later write of the task. In Heilbronn he learned that German prisoners were being held in camps, exposed to the elements. Near Wiesbaden he learned that American troops had given a building full of pregnant women one hour to evacuate. He heard that in Stuttgart the French and the Senegalese were responsible for three thousand cases of rape that resulted in hospitalization—for physical injury. At a detention camp at Freising, he was told that German prisoners were fed only whatever other Germans brought them. Lindbergh considered such behavior not only morally base but also politically unsound, as the camps contained many with experience in rocket development who were hearing Russian radio broadcasts promising better conditions to those who would relocate to the Russian zone of occupation.

On the Sunday afternoon of June 10, 1945, in the company of Navy Lieutenant E. H. Uellendahl, Lindbergh arrived at the underground tunnels of Nordhausen, dug deep into a spur of the Harz Mountains. There the Third Reich had built its factory for the V-2 rockets, a thousand of which had exploded on England.

They approached the tunnels through Camp Dora, part of the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Displaced persons of many nationalities inhabited the vast prison grounds, residing in the crude wooden barracks, from which emanated the stench of inadequate sanitation and rotting garbage. Amid the squalor gleamed hundreds of parts for the V-2 rockets, which refugees had fashioned into shelter. The camp had until recently supplied labor for the assembly lines inside; and Lindbergh was told the only way the souls condemned there would ever come out “was in smoke.”

Lindbergh and Uellendahl entered the massive cavern, driving beside a railroad track. Along the opposite wall of the tunnel sat lathes and jigs, a production line for V-1 buzz bombs. Every so often another tunnel branched off the main artery, leading to a workshop that produced engines or turbo-superchargers. Eerily, while every tunnel of this industrial anthill was devoid of life, it was fully illuminated—“as though,” Lindbergh noted, “waiting only for a change in shift.” The two men explored the tunnels, finding a small hospital here, an office there, V-2s in various stages of assembly everywhere. After exploring for miles, they returned to civilization, spending the night in a large house near the center of Nordhausen.

The next day was even more phantasmagoric. Intimations of what lay ahead came at breakfast, as members of Lindbergh’s party discussed alleged savageries at Camp Dora. “That’s where the Germans had furnaces that were too small to take a whole body, so they used to cut the arms and legs off and stuff ’em in that way,” said one man. “The prisoners were so badly starved that hundreds of them were beyond saving when the Americans came,” added another.

A short time later, Lindbergh and his party had made their way up the mountainside above the camp, off the road so that they might reach a low, factory-like building. The diameter of its brick smokestack was disproportionately large for its height. At one end of the building, he saw two dozen stretchers, soiled and bloodstained—“one of them showing the dark red outline of a human body which had lain upon it.” Upon entering the building they saw a plain black coffin with a white cross painted on it. Beside that, covered in canvas on the concrete floor, lay what was unmistakably a human body. In a moment, Lindbergh realized exactly what kind of “factory” he had entered.

Moving into the main room of the building, Lindbergh saw two large furnaces, side by side, with steel stretchers for holding the bodies protruding through the open doors. “The fact that two furnaces were required added to the depressing mass-production horror of the place,” Lindbergh would note. The sight appalled him. “Here was a place where men and life and death had reached the lowest form of degradation,” he wrote. “How could any reward in national progress even faintly justify the establishment and operation of such a place. When the value of life and the dignity of death are removed, what is left for man?”

A figure walked through the door, something between a young boy and an old man. It was a seventeen-year-old Pole, wearing a striped prison uniform, cinched at the waist but otherwise much too large for his skeleton of a body. Speaking German to Lieutenant Uellendahl, he pointed to the furnaces and said, “Twenty-five thousand in a year and a half.” Then he ushered the two Americans into the room they had first entered, and he lifted the canvas from the corpse on the floor.

“It was terrible,” the boy said, his face contorted in anguish. “Three years of it.” Pointing to the bony cadaver, he added, “He was my friend—and he [was] fat.” As though sleepwalking, Lindbergh followed the boy outside, his mind “still dwelling on those furnaces, on that body, on the people and the system which let such things arise.” He was jerked back to reality by Uellendahl’s translating again: “Twenty-five thousand in a year and a half. And from each one there is only so much.” The boy cupped his hands together, then looked down. Lindbergh followed his gaze and realized they were standing at the edge of a pit, eight feet by six feet, and possibly six feet deep. It was filled to overflowing with ashes and bone chips. Lindbergh noticed two oblong mounds of clay nearby, evidently pits that had been capped. The boy reached down and picked up a knee joint, which he held out for Lindbergh’s inspection.

The horrors were not lost on Lindbergh. “Of course, I knew these things were going on,” he would write in his journal on June 11, 1945; “but it is one thing to have the intellectual knowledge, even to look at photographs someone else has taken, and quite another to stand on the scene yourself, seeing, hearing, feeling with your own senses.” His mind flashed back to the rotting Japanese bodies he had discovered in the Biak caves and the load of garbage he had seen dumped on dead soldiers in a bomb crater. He thought in rapid succession of stories he had heard of Americans machine-gunning prisoners on a Hollandia airstrip, of Australians pushing Japanese captives out of transport planes, of American soldiers probing the mouths of Japanese soldiers for gold-filled teeth, of pictures of Mussolini and his mistress hanging by the feet. “As far back as one can go in history,” he told himself, “these atrocities have been going on, not only in Germany with its Dachaus and its Buchenwalds and its Camp Doras, but in Russia, in the Pacific, in the riotings and lynchings at home, in the less-publicized uprisings in Central and South America, the cruelties of China, a few years ago in Spain, in pogroms of the past, the burning of witches in New England, tearing people apart on the English racks, burnings at the stake for the benefit of Christ and God.”

Lindbergh never considered that his ignoring—or his ignorance of—the Nazi slaughter was tantamount to condoning it. Instead, he stood ready to accept only collective blame, as an American and a member of the human race. “It seemed impossible that men—civilized men—could degenerate to such a level,” he wrote. “Yet they had. Here at Camp Dora in Germany; there in the coral caves of Biak. But there, it was we, Americans, who had done such things, we who claimed to stand for something different. We, who claimed that the German was defiling humanity in his treatment of the Jew, were doing the same thing in our treatment of the Jap.”

Lindbergh could reckon with the horror of this systematic mass genocide only by equating it with other human atrocities. Looking down at the pit of ashes at Camp Dora, he concluded, “What is barbaric on one side of the earth is still barbaric on the other. ‘Judge not that ye be not judged.’ It is not the Germans alone, or the Japs, but the men of all nations to whom this war has brought shame and degradation.” To the end of his life he clung to his impression “that in World War II Japanese and German atrocities averaged worse than ours, but everything considered I don’t feel at all certain about it.” In a letter to a professor who later analyzed his political position before the war, Lindbergh contended that he had no “vengeful wish against the Germans in general,” feeling that “they had suffered enough by the end of the war.” But he was adamant that “we could not let atrocities such as those of the concentration camps go unpunished.” He strongly supported the trials against war criminals that opened in Nuremberg that November.

Lindbergh descended the mountain and spent the next three hours walking through the whitewashed tunnels of Nordhausen, inspecting V-1 and V-2 parts, marvelling at the technology and trying to reconcile the way in which the forces of evil had harnessed it. “The V-2s,” he concluded, “were the last symbol of the mystical drive and dictatorial power of the Nazi Führer, used to advance ‘Nordic civilization’ and his political doctrines.” He thought back to that day in 1936 when he watched Hitler walk across the grass of the Olympic stadium in Berlin while one hundred thousand people cheered, investing their hopes in what he now regarded as “a strange mixture of blindness and vision, patriotism and hatred, ignorance and knowledge.”

“Some irrational quality of the man, his actions, and his oratory enticed the entire German nation to support his ideas,” Lindbergh would write of Hitler with twenty-five years of hindsight. Nowhere did Lindbergh acknowledge, either in the spring of 1945 or anytime after that, that the promise of Hitler had seduced him as well. Anne Morrow Lindbergh would later note that “the worst crimes of the Nazis were not known until after Pearl Harbor and some not until the end of the war or even until the Nuremberg Trials”; but she was also as quick to admit, “we were both very blind, especially in the beginning, to the worst evils of the Nazi system.” Lindbergh never made any such concession. His observations about Camp Dora were his only public acknowledgment that he had misjudged the Third Reich.

Having covered almost two thousand miles during his last two weeks in Germany, Lindbergh returned to Paris. After two days of conferences with military personnel and the American Ambassador, he arranged his journey home. With that, he brought seven years of diary-keeping to an end, closing the book on his wartime experiences.

He returned from his two months in Europe more alarmed about the state of the world than ever. But he knew that the American public no longer gave a hoot for his opinions. In fact, many delighted in rubbing Lindbergh’s nose in news clippings—old ones full of his defeatist predictions, new ones detailing Nazi atrocities. As the extent of Germany’s evils was steadily revealed to the world, letters to newspaper editors invited the Lindberghs to gaze upon the “wave of the future” that had fascinated them so. Bernard DeVoto, in a long column in Harper’s magazine, had recently reminded his readers that “It didn’t seem to matter to Charles A. Lindbergh that the Jews were being exterminated. The Jews didn’t seem to matter nor the Poles nor the Czechs nor the Greeks. The destruction of France didn’t seem to matter, nor the invasion of Russia, nor Holland, Belgium, Norway, Denmark. Massacre, the bombing of Coventry or Warsaw or Rotterdam didn’t seem to matter, the enslavement of millions, the starvation of millions, the slaughter of millions. What the hell? It was just the same old game about the balance of power. If we would only mind our own business we’d be able to get along with the Germans.”

For the rest of his life, Lindbergh cleaved to his theories, insisting that he had been right in his noninterventionist position. More than once he qualified his prewar statements, emphasizing the “vast difference” between vanquishing Germany and winning the war. “Seldom in history has a nation been defeated as completely as Germany,” Lindbergh granted. “Most of her cities are in ruins; millions of her people are dead. Yet the disturbing fact remains that while our soldiers have been victorious in arms, we have not so far accomplished the objectives for which we went to war. We have not established peace or liberty in Europe. There is less security there now than perhaps ever before, and less democracy. The value of truth has never been so low. The ideals of justice and tolerance have practically vanished from a continent. Freedom of speech and action is suppressed over a large portion of the world, especially in the so-called ‘liberated nations,’ many of whom have simply exchanged the Nazi form of dictatorship for the Communist form. Poland is not free, nor the Baltic states, nor the Balkans. Fear, hatred, and mistrust are breeding on a scale that never existed before. In fact, a whole civilization is in disintegration.”

As he had for the better part of a decade, Lindbergh feared the rising power of Soviet Russia. That, coupled with chaos reigning in Europe, made America’s withdrawing its influence on the Continent in the foreseeable future seem impossible. “We have taken a leading part in this war,” he said, “and we are responsible for its outcome. We cannot retire now and leave Europe to the destructive forces which it has let loose. Honor, self respect, and our own national interests prevent that.” He further believed, “No peace will last which is not based on Christian principles, on justice, on compassion allied with strength, and on a sense of the dignity of man. Without such principles, there can be no lasting strength; no matter how great the technical advancement or how large the armies. The Germans found that out.”

Not long after his return to America, Lindbergh visited his mother in Detroit. His letter to her from the train home revealed a changed man. He wrote of “spiritual awareness” and the importance of spending time in the garden, enjoying the sun, listening to the birds. He copied page after page for her of Lao-tzu, a philosopher Anne had given him to read years earlier but whose words had taken on new resonance for him since his trip to Germany. “Think what a different world we would be living in if Hitler had read and understood him,” Charles wrote his mother, quoting the following passage:

One who would guide a leader of men

in the uses of life

Will warn him against the use of arms

for conquest.

Weapons often turn upon the wielder …

A good general daring to march,

dares also to halt,

Will never press his triumph beyond

need….

He now counted Lao-tzu “among the greatest of philosophers”—next only to Christ as a mystic—and quoted him for the rest of his life.

Lindbergh’s report of his European mission, which he submitted to Admiral H. B. Sallada, urged the United States government to immerse itself immediately in all the written material “liberated” from Germany, to bring selected German personnel to America, and to construct research facilities for the development of high-speed aircraft. “German plans for increasing accuracy through radio and television, for increasing range through high-speed catapults, larger rockets, and more efficient design, and for the incorporation of wings and cockpit,” he said, “all indicate the tremendous development rocket aircraft will probably go through in coming years.”

While Lindbergh’s political opinions may have been arguable, his acumen regarding rockets had long proved prescient. It frustrated him to discover that the German V-2 design of 1943 was virtually identical to Robert Goddard’s rocket of 1939, and that even after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the government did not appreciate the value of Goddard’s work. Ironically, the enemy had taken greater interest in Goddard’s accomplishments than had his own countrymen. Indeed, when one German technical officer was being debriefed in May 1945, he blurted out, “Why don’t you ask your own Dr. Goddard?”

Battling cancer along with his chronic tubercular condition, Goddard was eventually employed by the Navy. He worked under a government contract at Annapolis, developing small rocket motors less sophisticated than he had designed years earlier. More than a decade would pass before Washington would grasp the significance of his work, two hundred patents that would radically affect defense systems and help launch America into space. Back in 1945, however, the government was evidently funneling its resources into secret weaponry of another kind. Goddard died on August tenth, living just long enough to learn what it was.

Lindbergh had long predicted that atomic energy would be used to attain much greater speeds in all mechanical modes of transportation; but he was taken aback when, in early August, he learned unofficially that the United States had split the atom and harnessed enough of its power to allow America to drop an “atomic bomb” somewhere over Japan. A group of scientists asked Lindbergh to join them in their attempt to persuade the government not to drop the bomb, “because of its terrible power and the precedent of ruthlessness that would be set.” Lindbergh declined to participate, because he felt, as he later explained, “that under the political circumstances that existed at the time, my participation would do more harm than good.”

On August 6, 1945, a B-29 Superfortress flew over Hiroshima and dropped one of the new bombs, killing almost eighty thousand Japanese. “Nothing before so revolutionary had impacted on the lives of men so suddenly,” Lindbergh would later reflect. “The announcement … that the entire center of a large Japanese city had been leveled by one bomb, bursting as a secret of intellectual development, seemed too fantastic to be earthly.” Lindbergh considered the act a “mistake.” He believed that releasing the bomb “in the way we did will forever remain a blot on American history.” Years later he explained, “I would not have objected to dropping the bomb had it been necesssary to win the war, or even if we had informed the Japanese of its existence and they had thereafter refused to surrender.” Three days later the United States Air Force dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki, and within a week the Japanese had surrendered. The old game boards on which international policy had theretofore been played had to be discarded, as those two blasts completely redefined all concepts of war and power, indeed the modern world itself.

On a visit to the Midwest in September 1945, Lindbergh dined with Robert M. Hutchins, Chancellor of the University of Chicago, whom he had befriended years earlier during their fight against intervention. Hearing Lindbergh’s present concerns, he invited him to stay for an Atomic Energy Control conference which the university was hosting. It was a gathering of both atomic and social scientists—the former group having created this doomsday weapon, the latter discussing its future uses.

Lindbergh considered the issues discussed at the conference the most pressing of their time; and despite all his instincts to avoid reentering the public arena, he would not be able to contain his newfound insights for long. The splitting of the atom had placed science in what he called “the unique position of having challenged God, threatened the existence of man, and scared its own disciples out of their wits all at the same time.” He considered “asinine” the assertions of many that weapons had become “so terrible that World War II would be the last war fought.”

Not two months after the Chicago conference, on November 8, 1945, Lindbergh confidentially addressed fifteen Republican congressmen in a private dining room of a Washington hotel. Although everybody present was sworn to secrecy, his remarks reached the press within a few days, complete with inaccuracies. The New York Times reported that Lindbergh had advised “keeping the atomic bomb a complete American military secret,” that he had advocated “maintaining American air power superior to that of all the rest of the world,” and that he had expressed strong mistrust of Russia: all that was true. But the article proceeeded to state that Lindbergh said “he had changed his views about isolationism during the war” and that he had suggested that he did not feel “America should place confidence in the United Nations Organization but should rely on her own armed strength.”

In the past, Lindbergh had allowed misquotations to go unchallenged, at the cost of further inflaming the national debate and injuring his personal reputation. But now he felt, “These times are too critical and too dangerous to justifying unnecessary division of opinion among Americans on vital international policies.” He telephoned the Associated Press and read them a statement he had handwritten. “I have not changed my belief that World War II could have been avoided,” he said, “but the issue between so-called Interventionists and Isolationists is past except from an academic standpoint. We fought the war together and we face the future together as Americans—a future that is more fraught with danger than the war itself.” With that in mind, Lindbergh emphasized his second point: “In an era which has developed the Atomic bomb, and which will develop trans-oceanic rockets capable of carrying atomic bombs, the necessity for world organization for the control of destructive forces is imperative. The only alternative is constant fear and eventual chaos.” He advocated a world organization backed by military power, “an organization led by the western peoples who developed modern science with its aviation and its atomic bomb.”

One month later, Lindbergh further expounded upon some of his ideas. Invited to address the Forty-second Aviation Anniversary Dinner of the Aero Club of Washington, he thought at first that he might discuss such subjects as turbo jet transports, high-altitude rocket flights, and landing on other planets. But as he composed his thoughts, “such questions became dwarfed by the basic problem of how to keep aircraft from destroying the civilization which creates them.”

“The developments of science, improperly guided, can result in more evil than they bring good. What peaceful men take a thousand years to build, fools can now destroy in few seconds,” he said in the admonitory tones the public had come to expect from him. For the rest of his speech, Lindbergh was less doctrinaire than he had been in the past. “[P]ower alone has limited life,” he said. “History is full of its misuse. There is no better example than Nazi Germany. Power without a moral force to guide it invariably ends in the destruction of the people who wield it. Power, to be ultimately successful, must be backed by morality, just as morality, must be backed by power.” Lindbergh concluded by saying, “We are a Christian people. The ideals we profess are high. We have all the necessary elements to lead the world through this period of crisis.” But, he asked, “can we combine these elements in our daily policies and lives? Whether our civilization is facing new heights of human accomplishment or whether it is doomed to extinction depends not as much on technical progress as on the answer we make to this question.”

The following summer, Lindbergh was asked to join a committee charged with addressing some of the new questions of the nuclear age. As part of the fallout after the atomic bombing of Japan, the Ordnance Department of the United States Army initiated a secret project at the University of Chicago—Chicago Ordnance Research, acronymed CHORE—under the direction of Walter Bartky, Dean of the Department of Applied Mathematics. CHORE’s activities consisted largely of evaluating weapons—machines guns, missiles, and bombs—and their uses. The work was so confidential Bartky hand-delivered his invitation to Lindbergh to become a consultant to the panel. Even CHORE’s name was kept secret … until somebody pointed out that it was printed on the guarded door of its windowless offices on the Chicago campus. Believing “the United States should remain dominant in weapons development,” Lindbergh accepted the offer.

Over the next several years, Lindbergh traveled constantly, gathering information and testing equipment, investigating “potential staging bases for our strategic bombers,” remaining at the vanguard of aviation development. He even flew a Lockheed P-80 jet fighter, the first American jet to enter squadron service.

In the CHORE briefing room, the likes of Fermi, Szilard, and Urey scribbled formulae across the chalkboard walls. “There,” Lindbergh later summed up, “I listened to a mathematics of combat effectiveness and destruction that seemed to leave the human being devoid of his senses. I studied graphs showing the value of ‘scatter effect’ for machine guns, and others indicating probabilities of kill for existing and for improved weapons. There, hour after hour, we discussed calibers, explosives, muzzle velocities, measures of aggression, defense, counterdefense, and counter-counterdefense.” They played war games in which “[m]athematical calculations informed us that future jet-powered warplanes would fly too fast for bullet interception, that pilots of supersonic fighters would not have time to aim and fire in a head-on pass and still avoid colliding with each other, that guns would become obsolete for airplanes and have to be replaced by ‘homing’ missiles, that human eyes and muscles and cognition were too slow for the reaction times essential to success—concepts startling to the experience of a World War II combat pilot. In the next major conflict, electronic devices would be set loose in combat with each other. They would be maintained and monitored by men who would have no sense of wielding weapons, whose very existence would be preserved or snuffed out by the result of the competing intelligence of the synthetic brains to which the human brain would relinquish control of its destiny. In mathematical war games, men were already referred to as ‘bodies,’ and were moved like chessmen according to directions issued by analog computers.”

The mathematics at these colloquiums often went over Lindbergh’s head; but he was riveted by the level of thinking, the extrapolations upon extrapolations. Lindbergh felt his major contribution to the discussions lay in his trying to maintain “a connection between mathematical theory and practical fact.” He would periodically interrupt to say, “Let’s get a check in the field.” Often bringing the most humanistic perspective into the room, one whose actual war experience remained fresh in his memory, Lindbergh argued “that even military aviators are human, that when a bullet hits your airplane some emotional effect takes place, that a coefficient relating to the senses must be included in some combat-effectiveness formulas.”

Lindbergh appreciated both the humor and horror of a story one of the CHORE scientists told at dinner one night about testing the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo. Just before setting off the blast, Enrico Fermi had said, “Now when I press this button, there is a chance in ten thousand it will be the end of the world.”

After the war, the American military engaged in a contentious battle of “unification,” from which a single Department of Defense emerged with a new branch. The Air Force—no longer part of the Army—was eager to secure adequate government funding; and its first secretary, W. Stuart Symington, had hardly moved into his new office before soliciting Lindbergh’s advice.

Lindbergh became a consultant to Secretary Symington and his successor, Harold Talbott, often reporting through Generals Hoyt Vandenberg and Lauris Norstad. His primary mission was to assist in the reorganization of the Strategic Air Command. In his first few months on the job, for which he insisted on neither pay nor publicity, he spent weeks inspecting and conferring with personnel at Andrews, MacDill, Carswell, Walker, Davis-Monthan, and McChord Bases; and he flew one hundred hours in Strategic Air Command bombers. Afterwards, he wrote in his first report to General Vandenberg, it was obvious to him that “the standards of performance, experience, and skill which were satisfactory for the ‘mass’ air forces of World War II are inadequate for the specialized atomic forces we have today. Since a single atomic bomber has destructive power comparable to a battle fleet, a ground army, or an air force in the past, its crew should represent the best in experience, character, and skill that the United States can furnish.”

Lindbergh “believed it essential for SAC to have enough power to win an atomic war,” he later wrote. “Still more important, it should prevent one.” That goal in mind, he refused no Air Force assignment. As each mission paved the way for the next, he was constantly crossing the country or circling the world—sometimes as part of a committee, often alone. He was authorized to fly as a passenger in any Air Force aircraft and to pilot any such plane in which he could demonstrate proficiency; he was granted access to all classified data, up to and including TOP SECRET. His recommendations that “SAC be given top priority in the selection of its officers and crews, that its personnel receive improved terms of tenure, that the construction of air-refueling tankers be accelerated to increase practical bombing ranges, that monthly periods of flight training in emergency procedures be inaugurated to cut down accident rates, and that every SAC pilot fly a basic trainer on occasion in order to maintain proficiency in the ABCs of flying technique” were all adopted, save the last.

Lindbergh flew with the 509th Atomic Bomb Group out of Walker Air Force Base, New Mexico, on simulated bombing missions over Canada, Greenland, the North Magnetic Pole, and various cities in the United States. SAC work combined with a general mission on Air Force morale and proficiency, brought him to Alaska, Guam, Tokyo, Nagoya, Manila, Germany, France, and England, flying P-80s and P-51s.

On January 5, 1948, Lindbergh flew in an Air Force transport plane, a C-47 Dakota, to Japan. At three thousand feet, he circled Hiroshima and marveled at its tranquil beauty, settled between plum-tinted mountain ranges and the inland sea. Lindbergh found it difficult to imagine the hellfire that had devastated it. “There is no sign,” he recorded, “to mark the gigantic mushroom cloud that once towered in the sky, no sign, except, when I look more carefully, the shades on earth below…. the blasted, radiated, and heat-shriveled earth of Hiroshima.” He tried to imagine eighty thousand people inside the gray saucer who perished in the blast and as many again burned and mangled. The visit “forced” Lindbergh, as he wrote his wife, to four conclusions:

1. I do not see how civilization can survive a major atomic war.

2. If Russia continues unchecked, there is almost certain to be one.

3. We must find some way to prevent a second atomic power rising.

4. That this can be prevented by peaceful means is improbable.

Within a few years, Lindbergh would be attending secret meetings in a briefing room at Strategic Air Command headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Nebraska, looking at large-scale maps of major cities, on which a general would place tinted plastic discs and calmly describe the level of obliteration they represented.

“If Soviet armies overrun Europe,” Lindbergh reported to Secretary Symington in November 1949, “much more of Western civilization will be destroyed, and the American military position greatly weakened.” For that reason he felt it was essential to help rebuild Germany, which he considered “the best and possibly the only source from which a major increase in European fighting strength can be obtained quickly.” He further defended his position by pointing out: “her geographical position makes her the natural buffer against a Soviet invasion. Her people understand better than any others the terror of Soviet occupation. Her Communist vote is relatively low. Most of her men above 22 years of age are trained soldiers. Given the opportunity, they would fight bitterly to protect their homes if Soviet armies attempt to move farther westward.”

Lindbergh issued a public statement supporting the anti-Communist Truman Doctrine. As opposed to his prewar stance, Lindbergh now “advocated continued American participation in international affairs, with a consistent foreign policy involving economic aid and the use of military force, if necessary to safeguard peace.” He maintained that the policy he had formerly advocated—“that England, France, and America build their strength but refrain from war while Nazi Germany and Communist Russia fought out their totalitarian ideas”—was sound, and that he had correctly predicted the outcome of the war—“with Western civilization greatly weakened in a world full of famine, hatred and despair,” with a “strengthened Communist Russia, behind whose ‘iron curtain’ lies a record of bloodshed and oppression never equaled.”

Lindbergh’s copious letters home during his Air Force, CHORE, and Pan American inspection flights revealed another change in his attitudes, a diminishing thrill from aviation. “I can’t get used to the ease with which one covers the world today,” he wrote Anne after another polar crossing. “It’s no longer an effort—Pole—equator—oceans—continents—it’s just a question of which way you point the nose of your plane.” Planes flew people, not the other way around. In fact, Lindbergh observed, “The pure joy of flight as an art has given way to the pure efficiency of flight as a science…. Science is insulating man from life—separating his mind from his senses. The worst of it is that it soon anaesthetises his senses so that he doesn’t know what he’s missing.” Hardly a letter to Anne failed to mention how much he missed her, especially when he revisited places they had been the first to survey.

ALONG WITH much of postwar America—then experiencing a baby boom and a move to the suburbs—the still-expanding Lindbergh family settled down for the first time. On October 2, 1945—after a long labor—Anne Lindbergh gave birth to her sixth child, a girl, at Doctors Hospital in New York. Charles was, as with all her previous deliveries, at her side. Anne had been considering non-family names for the baby, born on her sister Ansy’s birthday; but after two months of deliberation, she acceded to Charles’s desire to delineate his children’s background. She was named Reeve, the middle name of both her deceased aunt, Elisabeth, and her Morrow grandmother.

While still renting the Tompkins house in Westport, the Lindberghs decided to make Connecticut their “permanent” home. Just a few miles closer to the city than their present location, the Lindberghs spent $25,000 on a parcel of land and water at the east side of Scott’s Cove, near Darien. The two and one-half acres of undeveloped property, screened from the nearest house by pine, spruce, and hemlock, also included three small islands, connected to each other and to the mainland at low tide by a sandbar. While looking for an interim house to rent, they found an ideal property for sale.

In an area called Tokeneke, on a four-and-one-half-acre promontory jutting into Scott’s Cove, sat a large but unpretentious three-story, Tudor- influenced house. Looking down on the island-dotted coast, the rambling seven-bedroom structure was reminiscent of Illiec. Complete with a foyer opening into a large living room with a fireplace and picture window, a den, library, and sewing room, a screened sleeping porch off the master bedroom, an ample servants’ wing, and a toolhouse, the property was theirs for $41,250.

Lindbergh hired an architect, Charles DuBose, to make alterations, adding a heavy slate roof, fieldstone siding, and a playroom on the second floor. For privacy as much as aesthetics, the Lindberghs paid special attention to the landscaping, planting tall trees, spreading yews, and banks of rhododendrons around the house and its circular drive. Charles transplanted cuttings from his mother’s lilac bushes in Detroit, which had come from her parents’ house at 64 West Elizabeth Street. He parked Anne’s office-trailer deep into their woods.

In Charles’s mind, he and Anne were entering the best years of their lives. With five healthy children and a beautiful house to accommodate them all, they could settle down to their various pursuits. Unfortunately, Charles and Anne’s notions of a home were at odds with one another. “We were ‘nesters,’” Anne’s sister Constance said of the Morrows; “we found our places, and we returned to them year after year, generation after generation.” Charles, on the other hand, commented another family intimate, “was only interested in houses so that he’d have a place to ‘park’ Anne and the children. Once he felt they were safely parked, he felt it was all right for him to fly the coop.”

“C. will always move!” noted Betty Morrow; and that transience kept her daughter unsettled, always wondering in the back of her mind when her husband would, without warning, pack them all up again. Ironic as it was predictable, once the Lindberghs had a place in which to settle down, he absented himself more than ever.

“Take off your coat—are you going to stay?” little Ansy asked her father on one of his returns. Fifty years later, that same daughter commented, “We never really knew whether Father was coming or going; and it didn’t really matter, because whether he was there or not, he always made his presence felt.”

He was in many ways a model father. When he was home, Lindbergh read to his children every night, and he encouraged those old enough to write stories and poems—which he typed and kept. He invented games; and he paid rewards for work he assigned and challenges he issued. The house at Darien was a summer camp unto itself. He taught the children to fish, sail, swim, and hike (with candies “left by elves” along the trail for the younger children to follow). He even rigged up a trapeze. He told his older boys, “Don’t you let me catch either of you coming back [from school] perfect in deportment!” Every Sunday night all the children queued up by the telephone to talk to their ailing grandmother in Detroit, whom they called “Farmor,” Swedish for “father’s mother.”

All that said, he imposed a deliberateness to the playtime, which often depleted much of its joy. Everything required a purpose. He provided little understanding when challenges went unmet, and he would not listen to excuses for work left undone. The creative writing exercises became nagging assignments. As his father had with him, Lindbergh often teased his children to tears. There were hugs but no kisses. And, remembered Ansy of the endless lists of chores and rules left for everybody in the household to fulfill and follow, “There were only two ways of doing things—Father’s way and the wrong way.”

For Anne there were no loud demands, only quiet expectations and complaints when they were not fulfilled. Her duties included keeping precise household books, accounting for the pettiest cash expenditures. It was not strictly a question of being cheap. Indeed, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, with her healthy trust fund, enjoyed shopping for new clothes; and, on occasions, her husband was not above buying her a piece of jewelry from Tiffany’s. It was just that her purchase of a $300 black Karakul coat had to be entered in the small notebooks alongside the thirty-five cents spent on shoe repair, fifteen cents on rubber bands, or the twenty cents on tinsel for the Christmas tree. Each month the accounts were tallied and typed along with the amounts spent on food and domestic wages, then transferred to larger balance sheets, on which they were categorized for grand totaling at the end of the year. Because they had lived in so many different houses, Anne was periodically required to compile household inventories, listing every article of clothing, item of furniture, book title, blanket, and piece of silver they possessed. Their kitchen inventory was always kept up-to-date, down to the tea strainer and the “8 glasses with black design”—which had been cottage-cheese containers.

Anne was a far gentler parent than Charles, ruling by kind example rather than intimidation. In his absences, there was a palpable relaxation at home. “He must control everything,” Betty Morrow observed in her diary, “every act in the house.” Each of the children learned to deal differently with his despotism, as their personalities reflected. Jon was the most deferential, almost always following his father’s rules; as a result, his grandmother observed, “he withdraws into himself.” Land learned to anticipate his father’s demands, finding it easier than rebelling; and his mind often wandered. Even as a preschooler, Scott often escaped into his own world. Ansy was already expressing defiance and exhibiting nervous tics. One of Jon’s schoolteachers commented in a report card on his behavior, which, in fact, summarized the way all the Lindbergh children felt about their father: “The children like him,” she wrote, “but are puzzled by his dreaminess, abruptness, and periodic indifference to them when he is involved in his own plans.”

“They are all apprehensive,” Betty Morrow wrote of her Lindbergh grandchildren, “—never knowing when their father will fall upon them. The atmosphere—the tension in the house is so terrible—that when C. goes off for a day or two—everybody sings!” Increasingly, Anne found herself alone in her room, crying.

Lindbergh hired a series of secretaries, each of whom was given a “policy” statement to study before starting work. “I want to create the impression that I am difficult to reach and away much of the time” was its basic premise. “I will leave posted, by the telephone, the policy to be followed for the day in regard to calls by phone or door, business details, etc.” it read. Even when he was at home, he had what he called “away” days, on which he was to be considered “out” except for those people on the prescribed list.

In late 1946—at age forty—Anne became pregnant for the seventh time. But her morning sickness did not seem the same as with her prior children. Upon the recommendation of her friends Mrs. John Marquand and Mrs. Philip Barry, she visited their physician, a doctor from Englewood who practiced in the city. Renowned as much for his bedside manner as for his medical ability, Dr. Dana W. Atchley discovered that Anne had gallstones. He said the remedial operation was perfectly routine but that it could affect her pregnancy. In the gentlest way, Dr. Atchley asked her to consider an abortion.

After discussing the situation with Charles, Anne elected to proceed with her pregnancy, postponing any surgery until such time that it became mandatory. Then shortly before Christmas—“apparently for no reason at all”—Anne miscarried. “I did nothing consciously to cause it,” Anne confided to her sister Con, “—though I suppose one could make out a good case for it being the subconscious just simply rejecting it. But I cannot help but taking it as an act of mercy.” On Valentine’s Day, 1947, she underwent the necessary surgery—suddenly panicking, thinking she might die.

The operation went without incident, but the experience proved profound in unexpected ways. Anne had discussed her preoperative fears with Dr. Atchley, and he displayed rare qualities of wisdom, humor, and “dry compassion.” When Anne tried to describe these conversations with her husband, he found them difficult to comprehend. “But you’re not the kind of person who needs to go to anyone for help,” he said. “You’re the kind of person other people go to for help.” Anne agreed with him only to end the conversation, for she had long felt otherwise.

During the next few weeks of recuperation, Anne and Dr. Atchley continued their dialogue, which became more intimate—often about Anne’s role as an artist and a woman. He told her that she had “every attribute of an artist except one—& that was the conviction that it was more important to cultivate one’s own garden than anyone else’s.” She countered that she felt that was true of most women; but Dr. Atchley begged to differ, suggesting that this was not about gender so much as about her upbringing—that, as Anne realized, “I had been made to feel that what I did for others was all right but what I did for myself was wrong.” Anne had never met anybody with such piercing insight.

These conversations—usually held during Charles’s long absences—made Anne realize how much she could not discuss with her husband. Having bottled up most of her sorrow and anger for decades, Anne reached out for confidantes. She had long maintained regular correspondences with her mother, sister, sister-in-law, and a handful of old friends. She wrote regularly to her mentor from Smith, Mina Curtiss, and from Cranbrook, Janet de Coux. Like Charles, she kept all their letters and made carbon copies of all her penned replies, which supplemented the diaries she maintained. She received fan letters every week, picking up new followers every time she published a book, article, or poem. Some admirers proved so persistent in either their praise or their pleas that Anne simply could not resist replying. Every now and then, Anne would select one of them and reveal an aspect of her personality long submerged, a doleful little girl who needed a shoulder to cry on.

Shortly after her release from the hospital, Anne left for Phoenix, where she stayed alone in an inn and relaxed. A few weeks later, in April 1947, Charles joined her, and they enjoyed several happy days together. One night, they were invited to Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s desert estate, by the eighty-year-old master himself. In his Autobiography, Wright had recently called Lindbergh “a square American,” praising his integrity and forth-rightness during the prewar years. “And,” he added, “this goes for his brave little wife.” Anne spent her time in Phoenix in constructive thought, sitting at night on top of the flat roof of her cottage, thinking of the mirador in Cuernavaca and how her life had “catapulted” since then. She wondered, “what have I made of it? & will I ever write again? & what I have learned this winter?”

Charles tried to answer her questions by challenging her to write about the changing world. After engaging her with the idea that “contact with post-war Europe was essential to an understanding of all life today, that Europe gave something vital but intangible”—without which nothing less than Christianity, Western Civilization, and Democracy were at stake—he suggested to both Anne and Reader’s Digest, with its ten million readers, that she write a series of articles on postwar Europe, pieces that would require her traveling abroad for a month or two.

Shortly after they returned to Connecticut, the assignment came through. “It is, of course, a wonderful offer—I can go anywhere I want, write what I want, & they take care of all transportation, expenses, etc.—and facilitate everything. It is an ideal way to go,” Anne wrote Farmor. “And yet it is such a decision for me to go & has taken a lot of courage. I hate to leave Charles & the … children … and I feel so shy meeting strange people.” But she knew Charles wanted her to go.

On August 1, 1947, Anne sallied forth, traveling across France, Germany, and England—big cities as well as small towns—for the next nine weeks. It was a depressing journey, as she witnessed destruction and deprivation on a scale worse than she had imagined. “The basic values of our civilization,” she observed in one piece, “are crumbling away like this rubble.” Anne often wrote home of the difficulties of the trip, but her newsy letters revealed a growing inner strength at being able to take care of herself. “I have been lonely,” she wrote Charles just days before boarding the boat home, “it has been difficult. I have made mistakes & yet it has been one of the big things in my life. Of all the things you have given me in life—& you have given me so much—perhaps this is one of the biggest. Your sending me out on this mission alone. (For I should not have done it if you had not pushed me a little & told me I could do it!) I am grateful to you for it. You are always giving me life, life itself. May I make something of it!”

Upon her return, Charles was delighted to see Anne spending so much time in the trailer. She wrote five pieces, which were published in Life, Harper’s, and Reader’s Digest. She even published a poem called “Second Sowing” in The Atlantic Monthly, which drew considerable notice, including a note of praise from Edna St. Vincent Millay. Charles lauded her as well, pleased to see that his plan had helped her flourish as an artist. But he still did not understand his wife’s demons any better than he did before her European trip. He found her subsequent writer’s block—aborting two novels and abandoning her poetry—utterly incomprehensible.

His nagging and all its attendant tension returned, which only set Anne back further. Melancholy often sent her rushing to Next Day Hill, where she divulged to her mother, for the first time, “the difficulties of her life—being married to such a powerful man as Charles who had never known a woman till he married.” Things had been different when Anne did not assert herself. But her growing independence—which, ironically, came from his encouraging her to find her own voice—provoked greater intolerance. Over the next year, conditions worsened. The love Charles professed in his letters when he was away on his many trips for the Air Force, SAC, CHORE, and Pan American was as constant as the criticism he expressed when he was at home. Having missed the last two Christmases himself, Charles had taken to discouraging his sons from attending birthday celebrations at Next Day Hill, on the grounds that “all family celebrations are sentimental.”

In Charles’s absence, Anne sometimes allowed herself to cry through entire days. When he was home, he monitored her so closely as to infantilize her. “I want so much for you to think me a ‘good girl,’” she would admit to him on days she was so frozen with panic that she could not write. That all his efforts were not enough to inspire her frustrated him even more; and he alternated between being her comforting muse and a cruel scourge. Worst of all, he became a shining example:

In Anne’s absence and the months after her return from Europe, Charles committed to paper some of his thoughts of the past few years. “There are times in life when one feels an overwhelming desire to communicate belief to others, to band together with one’s fellow-men in support of a common cause,” he wrote of his latest impulse. Twice in the past he had felt such a desire—when he had been a young pilot and preached aviation, and a decade later when he spoke against American intervention in “Europe’s internal wars.” In 1948, with mankind “in the grip of a scientific materialism, caught in a vicious cycle where our security today seems to depend on regimentation and weapons which will ruin us tomorrow,” he felt compelled to speak out for a third time.

He wrote close to twelve thousand words, which he divided into two parts. The first contained vignettes from his life, each with a moral. The day at Willow Run in 1943 when he almost went down testing a P-47 fighter because of a faulty pressure gage taught him that “in worshipping science man gains power but loses the quality of life.” The day over the South Pacific in 1944 when he almost went down in his P-38 while confronting a Japanese Zero taught him that “without a highly developed science, modern man lacks the power to survive.” And visiting Germany in 1945 taught him that “if his civilization is to continue, modern man must direct the material power of his science by the spiritual truths of his God.” These experiences led to conclusions in the second part of the book, an essay aimed at breaking that grip of a scientific materialism whose values and standards “will lead to the end of our civilization.”

The core of Lindbergh’s argument was that “the quality of a civilization depends on a balance of body, mind, and spirit in its people, measured on a scale less human than divine.” He warned that science had become as much a victim of its technologists as religion had of its fanatics, that just as the “spiritual truths of Christ and Lao-tzu were perverted by the temporal exploitation of Christian and Taoist creeds, the intellectual truths of great scientists are being perverted by the material exploitation of industry and war. Hiroshima was as far from the intention of the pure scientist as the Inquisition was from the Sermon on the Mount.”

Besides preaching his brand of apocalypticism, Lindbergh had other compelling reasons to publish his tract. It would show that he had served in the war, that he had come to recognize the evils of Nazi Germany, and that he had found religion—a sect of his own culled from his understanding of “the sermons of Christ, the wisdom of Lao-tzu, the teachings of Buddha … the Bible of the Hebrews … the philosophy of Greece … the Indian Vedas … the writings of saints and mystics.” He also used the book to preach against “the godless philosophy and armies of the Soviet.” The man once hailed as a deity appeared eager to claim his place as a human entity and nothing more.

Upon completing his manuscript, Lindbergh asked his friend John P. Marquand, the most successful novelist of the day, to recommend publishers who might be open-minded enough to accept the work from a still controversial figure. Lindbergh sent his manuscript to Marquand’s first choice, the firm of Charles Scribner’s Sons. Within a few days, he received a telegram from Charles Scribner himself, expressing his eagerness to publish it. The contract required the author to accept a low ten percent royalty because of the costs involved in manufacturing so small a book without raising its price beyond the $1.50 they hoped to charge.

In consenting to the terms, Lindbergh asked that one clause be added to the contract, the extraordinary stipulation that twenty-five thousand copies of the book be exempt from royalty. He asked that the amount he would normally earn on those copies be added to Scribner’s promotion budget. Unsure as to the prospects of so unusual a book from so recently reviled an author, Scribner’s printed a cautious ten thousand copies.

Of Flight and Life was published on August 23, 1948, and its first edition sold out within a day. Another forty thousand copies were rushed into print and were gone in a few weeks. The overwhelming majority of the reviews were favorable, including mild astonishment at the quality of Lindbergh’s prose; but the book did not completely rehabilitate him. The New York Times Book Review, while praising the book, could not help quarreling with a few sentences in his three-page preface, which suggested that Lindbergh had been less “partisan” during the America First period than he actually was. And so, reviewer John W. Chase concluded, Of Flight and Life “is the honest expression of one man’s evolving responsibility and his new faith in a time of crisis. It carries emotional currents of high tension. For this reason, it should, perhaps, be approached not only with respect but with caution.”

John P. Marquand, who had never been impressed with Lindbergh’s intellect, wrote him that the book “has filled me with respect and amazement—respect for what you have said and for the clarity of your thought and amazement for your literary skill.” Even one Bernhard Goldfarb wrote to tell him that for years, “I hated you like many others,” but that upon reading Of Flight and Life he said to himself, “maybe after all he must be a great man.” Tens of thousands had their faith in Lindbergh restored, thus readmitting him to America’s pantheon. He would forever have his detractors; but so long as he avoided certain sensitive subjects, people generally kept a lid on their sentiments about him, silently deifying him or demonizing him. His mail turned decidedly friendly again.

Honors and favors also came his way. The Secretaries of the Armed Forces reminded Lindbergh that as a Congressional Medal of Honor winner, he was authorized to ride as a passenger on any scheduled military flight “as a further token of the appreciation of your country for the outstanding service you have rendered the Nation.” The Order of the Daedalians, an organization dedicated to “serving the country and the cause of Air Power,” elected Lindbergh an honorary member. The American Ordnance Association, comprised of industrialists who supported national defense, voted to give Lindbergh its highest award, the Crozier Medal. When General of the Air Force H. H. “Hap” Arnold died in January 1950, Air Force Secretary Symington requested that Lindbergh serve as one of a half-dozen honorary pallbearers at Arlington National Cemetery. The Smithsonian asked Lindbergh how he felt about moving the Spirit of St. Louis toward the opposite end of the North Hall of its Arts and Industries Building to make room for the newly arrived Wright brothers’ plane; Lindbergh had helped settle the dispute between Orville Wright and the museum over its place in the timeline of aviation, and so he considered it nothing less than an “honor” for his plane to share airspace with its progenitor.

The Girl Scouts in New Canaan wrote Lindbergh that they wished to name their local “Wing Flight” after him—though he replied that he felt “strongly that it is best not to name such an organization after a living person.” Lindbergh Junior High School in Long Beach, California, wrote that it wished to dedicate its 1947 yearbook to him. In 1951 Little Falls informed him that its newest educational facility was being named Charles Lindbergh Elementary School. Offers of honorary degrees, which he refused, once again streamed in—from such prestigious institutions as Dartmouth College and the University of Notre Dame.

This Lindbergh revival coincided with the twenty-fifth anniversary of his flight. Predictably, Lindbergh refused to participate in any commemorations of 1927; and he declined the many requests for interviews that year. “I hope you will understand,” he politely explained to one reporter, “when I say that I am anxious to continue living quietly with my family, and therefore wish to avoid personal publicity wherever possible.” To the journalist’s executive editor at the Associated Press, he elaborated, “I doubt that it is possible for anyone who has not lived through long periods of intense personal publicity to realize fully the problems it creates and the difficulties involved. I believe that over the years I have come to value the freedoms of privacy as highly as you value the freedoms of the press.”

There was, once again, talk of drafting Lindbergh to run for political office. He could not have been less interested, though politics still concerned him deeply. The night before the 1952 elections, in which General Dwight Eisenhower was expected to walk off with the Presidency, Anne Lindbergh gave her husband copies of several speeches by Ike’s opponent. Lindbergh was so impressed with what he read that he cast his ballot for Adlai Stevenson, the first Presidential vote he had ever cast for a Democrat.

While Lindbergh refused most interviews, he did agree in 1949 to speak with Richard Davis of Newsweek after learning that the writer was favorably predisposed toward him. Davis’s “Special Report” ran three pages, the bulk of which detailed Lindbergh’s war record. That same year, Lindbergh corresponded with Wayne S. Cole, then a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin, who was writing a history of the America First Committee. Cole would write several books on the subject, including one a quarter-century later entitled Charles A. Lindbergh and the Battle Against American Intervention in World War II, which took no sides in discussing the debate but which fully aired Lindbergh’s views.

Lindbergh also accepted two of aviation’s most prestigious awards. The first was the Wright Brothers Memorial Trophy, which he received in 1949 at the Annual Wright Dinner at the Aero Club of Washington. He used the occasion to speak about man’s need to “balance science with other qualities of life, qualities of body and spirit as well as those of mind—qualities he cannot develop when he lets mechanics and luxury insulate him too greatly from the earth to which he was born.” In this lyrical address, he applauded the pioneer spirit of the men they were actually celebrating that night: “The Wright brothers,” he said, “balanced success with modesty; science, with simplicity. At Kitty Hawk, their intellects and senses worked in mutual support. They represented man in balance. And from that balance came wings to lift a world.”

The other prize was the Daniel Guggenheim Medal, awarded to Lindbergh for “pioneering achievement in flight and air navigation” at the Honors Night Dinner of the Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences in New York on January 25, 1954. Lindbergh doubly appreciated the gold medal—first because he admired Daniel Guggenheim’s crucial support of early aviation and rocketry, and second because it was presented by Harry Guggenheim, who was able to demonstrate that their recent political differences had not destroyed their “fast friendship.” Again Lindbergh harped on the themes of materialism in the modern age. “Short-term survival may depend on the knowledge of nuclear physicists and the performance of supersonic aircraft,” he said in accepting the medal, “but long-term survival depends alone on the character of man.”

Weeks later, Lindbergh was notified of an even more startling honor. Air Force Secretary Harold Talbott had recently been considering ways of ensuring his own place in history, of being “remembered by the American people.” His chief of Information Services, Colonel Robert Lee Scott, Jr., suggested, “Sir, it’s very simple. There’s a great man who made the greatest single flight that’s ever been made in this world…. He became a Colonel in the reserves and they hadn’t taken him any higher because he offended President Roosevelt when he came back and told the truth about what the Nazis had ready in the Luftwaffe…. All you gotta do,” Scott said of Lindbergh, “is make him a General.” The awarding of such rank required Presidential nomination and Senate approval. Eisenhower seemed only too pleased to announce the appointment; and with even former enemies in the press supporting it, the Senate followed suit. On April 7, 1954, in a private ceremony in his Washington office, Secretary Talbott swore him in as a Brigadier General.

Later that year, Lindbergh added even more to his prestige when he completed another book. “I have been working a little each day lately on an outline of an autobiography which I hope someday to complete,” Lindbergh had noted in his journals back in January 1939, when he and his family had been living in Paris. “We,” his own hastily composed rendition of his 1927 flight, had never sat right with him; and Lindbergh had been determined ever since to “create a record that was as accurate” as he could make it “without the pressure of time.” In every spare moment across the next decade—aboard transatlantic ships, on commuter trains, in a tent in the New Guinea jungles, in a bomber returning from the North Magnetic Pole, on an air base in Arabia, in a trailer on the Florida Keys, in the Carrels’ house on Saint-Gildas—he crafted the manuscript. He wrote at least six complete drafts of the story, which opened with the historic flight’s moment of conception—while flying the airmail in the skies south of Peoria—and closed with his tumultuous arrival—sitting on the ground at Le Bourget and seeing “the entire field ahead … covered with running figures!”

Parts of the book were rewritten as many as ten times. In the penultimate draft, the manuscript took its most dramatic turn, as the author transposed 260,000 words of memoir in the past tense into a pulsing narrative in the present indicative. Even two dozen sequences that preceded the central story of the memoir and which were scattered throughout—his Minnesota and Washington boyhood, his army and barnstorming experiences—were recast as flashbacks in the new tense.

Not until the 1950s did Lindbergh show a word of the manuscript to anyone. Anne was the first to read it, and her criticisms were of “tremendous help.” Reminding him to maintain his own style by “remaining in character,” she indicated his occasional lapses into overwriting. “Your style,” she told her husband, “is clipped—short sentences, precise—not careless…. Imagine you are speaking to me, not writing at all.” By the fall of 1951, Anne was putting in countless hours of her own editing the manuscript.

Pleased with the way they published Of Flight and Life, Lindbergh submitted The Spirit of St. Louis to Scribner’s. While he had agreed to a lower royalty than usual on the former book, he did not hesitate to ask for a higher percentage than usual on this surefire bestseller. “I know that during the early period of sales, advertising costs are a major item for the publisher,” he wrote young Charles Scribner, who had recently succeeded his father as head of the company. “But if sales are high,” he noted, as was the case with theLindberghs’ other books about flying, “it is due in part to the reputation of the author entirely aside from money spent by the publisher in advertising. Here, I think that the author has a right to a share in the indirect results of his previous accomplishments.” Lindbergh sportily agreed to a $25,000 advance and a fifteen percent royalty from the first copy sold, all proceeds of the book being entered into a trust for his children, with Anne serving as trustee. He knew it was less than he could have received on the open market.

Lindbergh’s editor, John Hall Wheelock, was extremely enthusiastic about the manuscript, even more moved after a second reading—“not only by the way you have unfolded your story,” he wrote the author, “but by the extraordinary beauty of the descriptions of sea and air, of cloud and sky. That passage through canyons of storm, fighting off sleep and death, haunted by voices out of some super-sensory world, is conveyed with the immediacy of reality itself.” He responded to Lindbergh’s request for “severe” criticism by recommending “fairly drastic cutting.” Over the next two months, the author excised seventy pages, mostly from the flashbacks, which Wheelock felt distracted from the central story. Lindbergh did, however, reject Wheelock’s suggestion to omit both a brief afterword that chronicled the rest of the events that occurred on the night of his arrival, and a comprehensive appendix comprised of the log of the Spirit of St. Louis’s subsequent flights and all the engineering data related to the plane’s construction.

By the end of 1952, Lindbergh had engaged a literary agent, George T. Bye, to negotiate the first serialization and motion-picture rights to the book. With little effort, Bye procured a whopping $100,000 from The Saturday Evening Post, which condensed and serialized the work in ten installments under the title “33 Hours to Paris.” The Lindbergh articles generated the largest sales in the magazine’s history, selling out the expanded printings in most cities within two days—gathering almost two hundred thousand readers a week more than usual. The Book-of-the-Month Club chose The Spirit of St. Louis as its main selection for September 1953. And some of the biggest names in Hollywood began bidding for the film rights—Howard Hughes, King Vidor, Hal Wallis, George Stevens, and a hotshot young writer-producer-director named Sidney Sheldon. Samuel Goldwyn wined and dined the Lindberghs, then suddenly withdrew from the competition, never revealing why. In fact, his friend Arthur Sulzberger had warned him that negative press would probably surround the project because of Lindbergh’s purported anti-Semitism.

In the few months before publication, Anne and Charles toiled over the galley proofs. “He was the most fussy of authors, living or dead,” recalled Charles Scribner. “He would measure the difference between a semicolon and a colon to make sure each was what it ought to be. To him, every detail in the book has as much significance as if it were a moving part in his airplane.” Despite all the tinkering, the book never lost its magic.

Up to the end, Anne found she could not read it “without feeling a rush of tears to my eyes and throat.” She asked herself why that should be and concluded, “There is something in the directness—simplicity—innocence of that boy arriving after that terrific flight—completely unaware of the world interest—the wild crowds below. The rush of the crowds to the plane is symbolic of life rushing at him—a new life—new responsibilities—he was completely unaware of & unprepared for. I feel for him—mingled excitement & apprehension—a little what one feels when a child is born & you look at his fresh untouched … little face & know he will meet joy—but sorrow too—struggle—pain—frustration.” Just before publication, Lindbergh dedicated the book: “To A.M.L.—Who will never realize how much of this book she has written.”

Scribner’s wrapped the six hundred pages in a dark-blue jacket that depicted a starry night sky. The book also included maps, fifteen photographs, and endpapers which had been reproduced from an original aquatint by Burnell Poole entitled “The Epic of the Air.” It depicted a mountainous range of ocean waves beneath a forbidding sky, in the midst of which one could discern the familiar lines of Lindbergh’s little plane, appearing as little more than a speck.

The Spirit of St. Louis became an overwhelming bestseller and received only favorable reviews everywhere. By the end of the year, the Book-of-the-Month Club alone had sold one hundred thousand copies. Dominating sales lists everywhere, it sold another several hundred thousand copies in its first twelve months on sale. “A great ovation,” Anne noted in her journals. While she had feared brickbats in the way of personal attacks thrown at him, he received only bouquets. “In consequence,” she added, “there is a wave of excitement about him again.”

The Lindberghs enjoyed their happiest Christmas in years. Charles’s resurrection led to an “expansiveness” that Anne could hardly recall. The following spring, he received another unexpected feather in his already well-plumed cap. The Trustees of Columbia University informed General Lindbergh that he had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Another wave of congratulations ensued.

“Boom days are here again,” a jubilant Anne wrote in her diary. “The Great Man—the Great Epic—the Great Author etc. etc. I am living in the aura of 1929 again. Only I am different….”