18
“Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization.”
—C.A.L.
“C. IS NOT GOING TO CHANGE HIS PATTERN OF BEING AWAY from home most of the time,” Anne explained to her diary on February 12, 1959. “I must plan—as a widow—to augment my life.” She realized this meant more than gardening, shopping, and spending additional time with her family to “gay up life.” She would have to get a new dog for protection and start collecting single men who could escort her to dinner, the theater, and ski slopes. “It is all rather hollow,” Anne admitted, facing her Hobson’s choice of an occasional husband or none at all. Since the beginning of their storybook romance, the Lindberghs had never been so estranged.
As each of the children left his dominion, Charles became increasingly independent, footloose. Barnstorming the world, he had not seemed so vigorous since his youth. Psychiatrist John Rosen believed he was “running away from old age” and “intimacy.” Having completed her therapy with Dr. Rosen, Anne felt generations of Lindberghs had kept themselves in perpetual motion to keep from examining their feelings. She believed Charles’s compulsive need to travel was related to the loss of their firstborn, whose death he never fully mourned.
In the spring of 1959, Anne considered an offer from Kurt and Helen Wolff, who were then being eased out of Pantheon Books. Temporarily retiring to Zurich, they asked Anne to spend a quiet summer with them. “One should be pampered from time to time,” Helen wrote her, “the soul needs it as much as the body.” Before she could commit, Charles coopted the plan. He proposed instead that they rent their own chalet together in Switzerland, which had become central to his European inspection tours for Pan American. Anne figured she stood a greater chance of being with her husband away than at home.
On July ninth, Lindbergh met his wife at the Geneva airport in a Volkswagen he had bought, then drove almost four hours, north around the lake through Lausanne and Montreux and down the Rhone Valley into the mountain village of Les Paccots sur Châtel St. Denis in the canton of Vaud. It was too dark for Anne to see much as they twisted through vineyards, orchards, and dark streets of tiny Swiss villages. Then Charles took an even more obscure back road to their house through a barnyard, getting stuck in a manure pile. Exhausted from a long day of travel and a wilting European heatwave, Anne squeezed out of the car into a new cement “apartment-house” of a chalet. The Lindberghs were on the third floor, a few simple rooms with a modern bath across the hall. It all seemed a high price to pay just to spend some time with her husband; but when Anne woke at noon her mood instantly brightened. The breathtaking view out her window revealed the deep valley in which they were nestled, between the Rhone below and snowcapped mountains above. Before the day had ended, Anne had visited the castle where Rilke had written his final poems and the little churchyard in which he was buried.
The Lindberghs had not been ensconced in “balcony living” a week before the Wolffs invited them to meet one of their authors, the renowned Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. “The great old man rather likes distinguished visitors, particularly Americans,” they wrote Anne. “And I am sure you and Charles would find him fascinating.” Both Lindberghs eagerly accepted the invitation. Anne was especially interested in his departure from Freudian analysis and his theories of the collective unconscious as manifested in archetypal images and symbols.
They met the “old wizard,” as Anne described him, at his lakeside home in Bolligen. Charles at once felt “elements of mysticism and greatness about him—even though they may have been mixed, at times, with elements of charlatanism.” Sitting in his small drawing room, Lindbergh asked the seventy-five-year-old Jung why he chose to live down by the water instead of up in the mountains. Jung explained his connection to the lake at their side, how its depths brought to mind different levels of the human subconscious. Helen Wolff was as interested in the question as in the answer. She thought to herself: “the eagle and the fish.”
Jung abruptly changed the subject to flying saucers. “I had expected a fascinating discussion about psychological aspects of the numerous and recurring flying-saucer reports,” Lindbergh later recorded. But he found, to his astonishment, that Jung believed all the reports and was no more interested in the psychology of the phenomenon than he was in learning any facts about it. When Lindbergh told him that the United States Air Force had investigated hundreds of reported sightings without finding a shred of evidence of supernatural phenomena, Jung indicated he did not wish to pursue the discussion much further. He referred to a book about flying saucers by Donald Keyhoe, the very pilot who had flown alongside Lindbergh on his forty-eight-state tour of the United States in 1927, which reported numerous sightings of unidentified flying objects. When Lindbergh said he had heard recently that Keyhoe had, in fact, experienced several nervous breakdowns, Jung replied, “I dare say he has.”
Lindbergh added that he had discussed with Chief of the United States Air Force General Spaatz the recent flurry of UFO reports. “Slim,” Spaatz had said, “don’t you suppose that if there was anything true about this flying-saucer business, you and I would have heard about it by this time?” Jung was not impressed. “There are,” he said, ending their conversation, “a great many things going on around this earth that you and General Spaatz don’t know about.”
Although Anne saw only a little more of her husband that summer than she would have had she stayed in Connecticut, the Helvetian getaway at least prepared her for Charles’s startling suggestion that they temporarily abandon their house in Darien for a chalet of their own in Vaud. With two children married and the next two college-bound, Anne had come to see the increasing impracticality of their big suburban home. She hoped that the “unfamiliar setting of a foreign land” might provide her with “a fresh perspective on our lives, and the next turning of the road, life without children.” She agreed to put the Darien house in the hands of a caretaker and return to Vaud for much of 1960.
The Lindberghs still spent much of their year apart, seeing each other only on the occasions when their separate itineraries crisscrossed. As a result, he missed several tormented romantic relationships in Ansy’s life; and he failed to appreciate her need to rush off to emergency sessions with Dr. Rosen or to study the flute in France before returning to Radcliffe. He missed Scott’s graduation from Darien High School and the decisions regarding his higher education, which resulted in his entering Amherst College. And he missed his son Land’s wedding to Susan Miller, a cousin of Jon’s wife.
Despite his poor attendance record, Anne had always assumed Charles would be there for her in sickness if not in health. In the spring of 1960, she learned otherwise. She had to undergo knee surgery, which proved to be more complicated than anticipated, and she was bedridden for several weeks at Harkness Pavilion under Dr. Atchley’s watchful eye. Although Charles knew about the operation, he never showed up. “Where are you?” she cried out in a pathetic letter to her husband two weeks after the procedure. “I know I made light of the operation but I did hope you’d get here in time to take me home. Of course, I can arrange … a limousine but I wanted it to be you. It would help so…. Please come home as soon as you can. This is a time when I need you.”
Lindbergh returned weeks later, “astonished” not to find his wife in Darien. The next morning, he called the hospital, asking only, “Aren’t you ever coming home?!” She was two months on crutches and several more on a cane, during which time he lent almost no support. His rages returned, as he repeatedly exploded in irritation at her for “making mountains out of molehills,” at her “heavy way of doing everything,” at how badly she managed her life, at how much time she wasted. His “sermons” contained enough truth to muzzle her. But she bristled at his insensitivity to the fact that it was her constant presence at home that enabled him to lead his supercharged life orbiting the globe. He had all the time in the world, for example, to tend to his dying uncle, Charles Land.
While placing eighty-two-year-old “Brother” in a sanitarium in Luzern, Charles had, in fact, searched for a place to build a chalet in Switzerland for Anne. Ten days after inspecting an unsatisfactory site recommended by some Swiss friends, he saw several acres on the southern slope of Monts de Corsier, not twenty minutes above the town of Vevey, and bought them on the spot for $20,000. More than eight hundred meters above sea level, the secluded site offered a commanding view of Lac Leman, the Rhone valley, and the Alps. The property, surrounded by fields full of crops and cattle, backed onto a green pasture, which ran to the base of a steep cliff and was topped by a forest of beech and fir. “I need your help in … designing a chalet,” Charles enthusiastically wrote Anne back in Darien, though he had, in fact, already drawn it in his mind and consulted with a builder.
Construction of the simple two-story structure began in the summer of 1962. The twenty-three-by-twenty-four-foot main floor consisted of a bedroom, bath, and a combination living room-kitchen; below were the garage, two small bedrooms, and a half-bath. Renting a chalet in the neighboring canton of Fribourg while their own was being built, they watched their new house progress.
Lindbergh’s blueprints did not end there. Consumed with streamlining his life, he had recently written old General Wood, “the less I have, the most satisfied I am.” In that spirit, he wanted to divide his four and one-half acres at Scott’s Cove, sell the house, and build a smaller one for himself and Anne next door. He drafted two pages of specifications, the essence of which was: “emphasis on smallness of appearance, simplicity of construction and upkeep, proportion, texture of materials, appropriateness to woods, tides, and informal surroundings.” His checklist was detailed enough to include cork stoppers in the tubs and basins instead of mechanisms that would wear out and a hook on the roof for block and tackle, for hoisting large pieces of furniture upstairs.
Anne tried to sort out what these sudden changes might mean to their lives. “We can’t all move back to Europe,” she thought, “when we’ve just come home to America. This is no family homestead we are contemplating, not even a summer one. It would be too small and too far away. Is it our old-age home, when the children leave us? Is it a European perch for C.? A place to write for me?” Just when she thought she was being forced to enter a phase of “living for oneself,” she went along with the Swiss plans, buying into a dream that she and Charles might reclaim a part of their marriage that they had obviously lost. Moving from the present house in Scott’s Cove into a smaller one seemed only a scaling down of her old life. “The chalet,” she wrote, “sounds like an extension of life—perhaps even a new life.”
By the spring of 1963, the chalet was habitable. Charles and Anne moved in with sleeping bags and air mattresses, two card tables and four wooden chairs. Within weeks some basic furniture arrived. Charles marveled at Anne’s transforming the plaster-and-wood lodge into a cozy home—with books on the shelves, weavings by Land’s wife on the wall, and objets d’art carefully placed among antique chests and cabinets. She soon had geraniums and petunias blooming in pots on the balcony. (In a few years, the Lindberghs would build another one-room chalet higher up their cliff, an even simpler, thick-planked abode to which Anne could retreat and write.)
By the end of the year, the Darien house was finished as well. With its three small bedrooms, a modest living room, and an efficient kitchen, it cost $60,000, plus another $20,000 for its only extravagance—a bomb shelter, which Lindbergh had spent weeks researching and designing, right down to a drainpipe large enough to accommodate any tidal waves caused by a mega-tonnage underwater burst along the coastline.
“For a man who wanted a simple life,” Land Lindbergh later observed, “it kept getting so complicated. Father was so busy setting up these little houses—enclaves really … but he found he couldn’t stay in them. After a few weeks at most, he’d have to take off. The life he set up for his family just didn’t work for him.” While the new chalet afforded everybody in the family a European base, it only encouraged the instability that made Anne feel insecure. “Chalet living,” she wrote, “showed us how free life can be in the smaller, barer setting: how burdened we had become at home by the accumulations and traditions of 20 years in our old family house.” But the addition of this small house further subjected her to that aspect of her husband’s routine that she detested most, having to uproot herself whenever she felt she was settling in.
Leading lives on two continents increased the lack of communication between them. Although they now made two carbon copies of every letter they still regularly wrote to each other—one sent to each house—the Lindberghs seemed to miss more signals than they received. “I can see that in a few years I shall be living alone most of the time,” Anne wrote her friend Mina Curtiss in 1961. She was already adjusting by looking out for herself. Charles called from Germany one night hoping to spend the weekend skiing with Anne, then in Switzerland; but she had already booked herself into a hotel in Locarno for two weeks. Though she was disappointed to tears over the “dream of a shared joy,” she did not change her plans. “It was quite sad to come back & find you gone,” Anne wrote Charles during one of her returns to Connecticut, “with only the suit-to-be-cleaned sitting on your side of the bed!”
In late 1963, young Anne sorted out her romantic life enough to leave Radcliffe and return to France, where she had fallen in love with a French student, the son of a Paris university professor. She and Julien Feydy married in a civil ceremony in the town hall of Douzillac, in the Dordogne, where Professor Feydy owned a castle. Although Lindbergh had great reservations about his twenty-three-year-old daughter’s marriage—what with her history of unstable love affairs—he stood at his wife’s side at the wedding. After the young couple had settled into married life in France, the bride’s mother presented some provocative new thoughts on marriage, specifically her own. “I do not really think happiness is the point of marriage,” she wrote Ansy, emphasizing other qualities, such as challenging one another and never being bored. “Actually, I think I am just beginning to understand your father, after all these years, & he perhaps, me. (Understanding is a very different thing from the deep bond between us which has always been there.)” Now that he was living his life completely by his own rules, even their friends who were privy to their marital strains found Charles more at ease than they had seen in years. Anne, having stopped trying to conform to his every wish, exuded a new sense of equanimity as well.
Lindbergh had long since concluded that “the only way I could concentrate on my fundamental interests, and live the type of life I believed in,” required him to stop giving addresses or taking part in public ceremonies. His new itinerancy, on top of his penchant for privacy, made it all the easier to reject invitations of any kind, especially the institutional affairs—a gala celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Time from Henry Luce, a dinner honoring fifty years of Pulitzer Prize winners, and Senator Barry Goldwater’s personal invitation to attend a rally sponsored by the Young Americans for Freedom, whose theme was “world liberation from Communism.” When Adlai Stevenson invited Lindbergh to serve on the host committee of a tribute for their mutual friend Robert Hutchins, Lindbergh replied, “I like and admire Bob Hutchins too much to be willing to take part in inflicting a formal dinner upon him.”
Nobody was more eager to entertain the Lindberghs than John F. Kennedy, whose father had held him in such high regard. Although Lindbergh had halfheartedly voted for Richard Nixon in the 1960 election, the young President issued Lindbergh a blanket invitation to visit the Oval Office. In April 1962, he formally invited the Lindberghs to a state dinner in honor of the French Minister of State in charge of Cultural Affairs, André Malraux. So eager was the President to have Lindbergh attend, the Kennedys asked him and his wife to spend the night at the White House. At Anne’s insistence, they accepted. Charles grumbled not only that he had to buy a tuxedo but that he would no longer be able to answer invitations saying, “[I]t is seven years since I have gone to a formal dinner!”
Anne and Charles flew from New York and took a taxi to the White House. Their bags were whisked away at the pillared entrance, and they were escorted upstairs. At the end of a long corridor filled with historical pictures and mementoes, Mrs. Kennedy’s secretary threw open a door and said, “The Queen’s room for Mrs. Lindbergh”; then gesturing across the hall, “and the Lincoln room for Mr. Lindbergh.” Anne cried out, “So far away!”
They were both put into the Queen’s room, which they found plenty spacious, “sunny and welcoming.” A maid entered with tea; and the Lindberghs perused the list of guests they would be joining that night, more than a hundred people from the worlds of art, music, theater, dance, and literature. They also received a penciled note from Mrs. Kennedy, asking them to cocktails before dinner.
Ushered down the hall to the Oval Room, they joined the Vice President and Lady Bird Johnson, members of the French Embassy, and the Malraux for drinks. They could not help being impressed by the easy charm of the President and the regal beauty of Mrs. Kennedy, who swept into the room in a long stiff pink gown, bare-shouldered, her hair done up high with a diamond star. A few minutes later, the Lindberghs and the other guests were escorted to the main reception hall, which was filled with the cultural elite. Many they knew—Archibald MacLeish, David Rockefeller, and Thornton Wilder; many more they but recognized—Leonard Bernstein, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Julie Harris. Anne had not been so giddy at a social affair in years, gushing in admiration as she was introduced to Adlai Stevenson and suddenly seeing his jaw muscles freeze, the same paralysis she had seen countless times as people had rushed to her husband over the years. Lindbergh adopted his standard party air, reserved but polite. He was as famous as anybody in the room but unrecognized by many who had no idea that the tall, lean gentleman with the wisps of white hair combed over his mostly bald head was Charles Lindbergh. He was seated at the President’s table, next to the French Ambassador’s wife, along with Madame Malraux, Agnes de Mille, Edmund Wilson, Andrew Wyeth, Geraldine Page, and Irwin Shaw.
After dinner, toasts were exchanged—Kennedy saying this would be the first speech in the White House about French-American relationships that would not mention Lafayette. The guests then withdrew to the large reception room which had been transformed into a concert chamber, with rows of chairs. Amid the nation’s most famous names, Lindbergh was suddenly swarmed by members of the press. He politely explained that he never gave interviews and that he had no comments; but many persisted, and he grew uncomfortable. Upon learning from an usher that they had been assigned front-row seats—facing a battery of cameras—for a performances of Isaac Stern’s trio, Lindbergh balked. He arranged for a pair of seats several rows back. Anne found it difficult to lose herself in the Schubert that evening, feeling “too conscious of C.’s tense alertness beside me.”
After the concert, as the guests dispersed, the Lindberghs were taken upstairs to rejoin the small group that had assembled before dinner. Charles conversed with Malraux, who spoke of his days as a military pilot and how he used to shoot from an open cockpit with a pistol. After a few minutes, the Lindberghs excused themselves, learning the next day that Isaac Stern had played the violin late into the night for those who had stayed.
After breakfast in their room, the Lindberghs met Mrs. Kennedy in the informal alcove at the end of the hall. She brought her two young children. “Although talking chiefly to us,” Anne wrote in her diary, “she never forgot or brushed them aside…. This kind of confidence and closeness between mother and child cannot be faked. I was impressed that Mrs. Kennedy could maintain it in the midst of her public life and surroundings.” At the President’s suggestion, the Lindberghs departed by way of his office. Not only did it save them from the gauntlet of photographers waiting at the front door, but it allowed them to have a few private words with him.
“We left with a deep feeling of gratitude and—even more—with encouragement,” Lindbergh wrote in his bread-and-butter letter. “There was a quality to the occasion, and the character you managed to weave through it, that brought out fundamental values at a time when such values seem to be disappearing in modern ways of life.” The whole occasion, and rereading parts of Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, gave Lindbergh “confidence that the presidency of our country is held by someone who senses well beyond the more obvious problems of the days and year.” Anne sent an autographed copy of North to the Orient to young Caroline Kennedy, and Charles inscribed a copy of The Spirit of St. Louis—“in memory of an early meeting”—for her eighteen-month-old brother.
As he suspected, that one public appearance prompted invitations for dozens more. Lindbergh withdrew into his shell. He refused to appear at the Fiftieth Anniversary dinner for the Boeing Company (“Many years ago I found that time consumed by dinner, ceremonies, etc., made it impossible for me to carry on the kind of life I wanted to lead …”); a reunion of his fellow Missouri National Guardsmen in the 110th Observation Squadron (“To me, reunions are pretty awful; they always detract from qualities of memory which I prefer to leave to the past where I think they belong and have the greatest value”); the American Astronautical Society’s award presentation (“I am deeply appreciative of the honors I have received in the past; but I feel that I have had far more than my share of them”); being installed in the Aviation Hall of Fame (“… personally I do not like the idea of enshrinement—it seems to me to separate one too much from the earth and its people”). He continued to ignore the commemorations of his flight to Paris which the National Air and Space Museum held every five years. He steadily declined offers for print interviews and was more resistant than ever to the pressure from television networks to appear on their programs. (“I am most anxious to continue living and working quietly, and I can think of nothing that would prevent this more than my appearance on television …”). Except to see occasional news events, he never even watched television.
He still received thousands of fan letters each year, mostly from autograph-seekers. One day he calculated that if he handled one letter a minute, working eight hours a day, it would take him over five years just to handle such correspondence. As a result, during his layovers in Darien, Lindbergh gave himself time only to flip through the return addresses on the envelopes that had arrived, opening but one out of every ten or twenty letters. The rest would be opened by a secretary and filed, ultimately sent to Sterling, Memorial Library at Yale University, where his papers would become permanently housed. Even a mimeographed letter from the Easter Seals campaign would be placed in his archives … and, in the next folder, the sheets of Easter Seals themselves.
Anne became less shy about accepting invitations on her own. Having struck up a friendship with Lady Bird Johnson at the Malraux dinner, she received several invitations from the Vice President’s wife for luncheons in Washington, which she attended. When the Johnsons moved into the White House, the Lindberghs remained high on Presidential guest lists. In 1964, Lindbergh voted for LBJ, marking the second time he had cast a Presidential ballot for a Democrat. (While he considered Goldwater “a well-intentioned, courageous, and honest man,” he found in his political rhetoric “a basic naiveté that I think would be highly dangerous, especially in international affairs.”) Lindbergh was “on the road” when two invitations from the LBJ White House arrived—one to meet Princess Margaret, the other the Shah of Iran. Anne sent their regrets to both—“because of the absence of Mr. Lindbergh from the country and Mrs. Lindbergh’s lack of knowledge of the date of his return or where to reach him.”
By the mid-sixties, Lindbergh was roaming freer than ever. He let lapse his membership on most of his boards—including the Ballistic Missile Committee of the Department of Defense, which helped develop the Atlas, Titan, Thor, Minuteman, Polaris, and Jupiter missiles. He even turned down an invitation from Najeeb E. Halaby, Administrator of the Federal Aviation Agency, to assist the aviation industry in the development of an economically competitive, commercial supersonic transport aircraft. Not only did he not wish to be pinned down to fixed dates for committee meetings, he was also apprehensive about the wisdom of developing such a plane. “I have never before felt as little enthusiasm about a forward step in transport design,” he wrote Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara in 1966; “and yet, under existing circumstances, I see no wise alternative to taking it.” Calling himself a “low-cost, mass-transportation man,” Lindbergh hoped the developers of an SST might make its seat-mile cost feasible; but he was more disturbed by the potential problem of sonic booms. “I think we have enough noises and distractions without filling the sky with louder ones,” he said. “I am literally alarmed about our civilization’s infatuation with scientific developments, and the delicate complication of life thereby created.”
Lindbergh felt that commercial aviation had already found the right balance of speed, safety, and passenger comfort. The trip from New York to Paris that had taken him thirty-three and a half hours was then being flown in Boeing 707-331s in six hours, forty-five minutes, sometimes an hour faster. The single-engine Spirit of St. Louis with its 450 gallons of gasoline had been replaced by Super Jets powered by four Pratt & Whitney JT4A-9 turbojet engines—with a gross weight of 302,000 pounds, sixty times their predecessor. Where one man had filled cockpit and cabin, squeezing in a sack of sandwiches and some emergency equipment, the 707 could accommodate twenty first-class passengers and 120 economy passengers—who were treated to hot gourmet meals and cocktails—a crew of twelve, 18,000 pounds of baggage, freight, and mail. Before the end of the decade, the Boeing 747, the first of the jumbo jets, would begin transporting five hundred passengers at a time. Its fuselage was 231 feet long, almost twice the distance covered by the Wright brothers’ first flight.
On May 16, 1965, Lindbergh was elected to the Board of Directors of Pan American World Airways. He had served the company as a technical consultant for so many years that he had never considered the possibility of taking a directorship; but when his old friend Juan Trippe had asked if he might propose him for the position, he realized how perfectly it fit in with his vagabond life. The regular board meetings in New York and the frequent directors’ trips—two-week, round-the-world steeplechases—became the only appointments by which he fixed his calendar and set his watch. Increasingly, however, his global inspections disturbed him. As he confessed that year to Father Joseph T. Durkin, S. J. of Georgetown University, with whom he worked in collecting Dr. Carrel’s papers, “My recent trip, involving, mostly, discussions about coming types of transport aircraft, does not leave me less apprehensive about the complexity, tempo, and standards of success our civilization is achieving.”
Nobody had a broader perspective on the earth’s physical changes over the past four decades than Charles Lindbergh. In making his forty-eight-state tour in 1927, he had seen the expanses of North American wilderness in a way no man had before. “The crushing impact of modern science and industry was only getting under way,” he would later note; but “civilization” rapidly encroached upon the land and the sea. What was more, Lindbergh increasingly shouldered the blame: “The primitive was at the mercy of the civilized in our twentieth-century times,” he would write, “and nothing had made it more so than the airplane I had helped develop. I had helped to change the environment of our lives.”
As bad as the expansion which had overtaken most of the world’s great cities, Lindbergh found, was the standardization. “New buildings in Beirut, Rio, and Chicago looked the same,” he wrote. “Riots and crime in Washington were not unlike riots and crime in Manila.” He became “alarmed by the exponentially mounting complication, luxury, and cost of cities—not by the cost in money, but by the cost in irreplaceable resources of the earth.”
“In the midst of the fascinating life I have led,” Lindbergh wrote in his early sixties, “taking part in man’s conquest of air and space, I have often asked myself whether aeronautics and astronautics were actually a boon to the human race.” To date, he concluded in a letter to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, “I have been forced to the negative conclusion. While aircraft have brought peoples closer together in peaceful intercourse and understanding, they have more than counteracted this accomplishment through their ruthless bombardments in war—a killing that seems to have little or no relationship to evolution’s selectivity. While missiles have opened to our knowledge unexplored reaches of space, they have made our civilization subject to extermination within hours.”
Believing that “an overemphasis of science weakens human character and upsets life’s essential balance,” the boy who had once worshiped technology admitted that were he just now entering adulthood, he would choose a career that kept him in contact with nature more than science. His new god became Thoreau, all of whose works he read and whose most inspiring passages he copied out. One phrase from Thoreau especially resonated for him: “… in wildness is the preservation of the World.” Lindbergh would thenceforth dedicate all his future journeys to his growing obsession with the survival of the planet. Increasingly, these voyages would take him into more primitive realms.
Lindbergh’s longtime friend Jim Newton unwittingly set some of his new pursuits into motion. During the late spring of 1961, while the Lindberghs were in the mountains above Vevey, Newton was just across the valley in Caux-sur-Montreux, at the international conference center of Moral Re-Armament. A devout adherent of the movement, Newton invited Lindbergh to a number of its meetings, plays, and panel discussions. After attending several MRA functions, Lindbergh found himself in utter disagreement with what he considered a fanatical ideology and got in a long, unresolved argument with Newton saying as much—a healthy debate that only deepened their respect for each other. “But sometimes,” Newton would later note, “the Almighty works in unusual ways.”
While Lindbergh had no interest in any future MRA events, a meeting on Sunday, June eleventh, at Caux, affected him deeply. Delegates from Africa were on the platform that day—businessmen, white planters, a leader of forty thousand Mau Mau, and a striking ebony-colored member of the Legislative Council in Kenya, dressed in a business suit, who belonged to a tribe whose “admission to manhood” required killing a lion with a spear. Newton introduced Lindbergh to the delegate, Jilin ole “John” Konchellah, a warrior of the Masai tribe. The following Thursday evening, in the salon of the hotel in Caux, Lindbergh met alone with the imposing African—with his black moustache and beard and enlarged, contorted ear lobes, which were pierced for disc ornaments. Konchellah had never heard of Lindbergh before Newton briefed him.
Lindbergh wanted to learn everything he could about civilization’s impact on Konchellah’s semi-nomadic tribe, which roamed the Rift Valley along the Kenya-Tanzania border, in the shadow of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Konchellah said civilization had brought his “pastoral” tribe of three hundred thousand medicine, wheels, and literacy, which allowed them to read history and send letters to each other; but he emphasized that there had been education before the white man came. He knew, for example, the different kinds of trees and their uses, the rivers, animals, trails, and jungles. “That,” said Konchellah, who had been taught in African mission schools and from correspondence courses, “is education.” A modern primitive, Konchellah—thirty-two and the father of five—became secretary of the Masai United Front and a member of Kenya’s parliament.
Konchellah told Lindbergh that the Masai prayed to their own god, (which did not have human form), worshiped the mountains, and sang to the sun and moon. Warriors rose at dawn to thank God for the light. These young men of the tribe were meant to protect the others from animals and human enemies, who often raided for oxen. When Lindbergh asked if he thought the promise of future products of civilization would make life better, Konchellah hesitated, then replied that he thought the traditional tribal way of life was best. He invited “the great white flyer” to visit him in Kenya, where Lindbergh had never been.
At the end of 1962, Lindbergh cleared enough time to make such a trek worthwhile. He had no intention of going on an organized safari, but of renting a car and driving himself. As this promised to be the most exotic location he had ever visited, Lindbergh was grateful for a friend’s letter of introduction to Major Ian Grimwood, the Chief Game Warden in Kenya. “I like to travel quietly so I can see, think, and write,” he wrote Grimwood. “I can shoot fairly well, but I don’t like to kill things. I hate tourist procedures and first-class hotels. I can live on most any kind of food, and enjoy sleeping on the ground.”
Grimwood permitted Lindbergh to make rounds with Denis Zaphiro, the warden in the Southern Game Preserve in the Kajiado District. Flying and camping together for close to two weeks at the end of 1962, they traveled most of the Kenya-Tanzania border, inspecting parks from Mara in the west to Lake Amboseli.
Lindbergh’s greatest thrill, however, came when he drove into Tanzania and arrived at a Masai boma as the guest of John Konchellah. For several days he lived as one of the tribe. According to custom, he was assigned to the small thatched hut of the oldest woman, who entertained him at night, singing and dancing, shaking her necklaces. He did not figure out how far her favors extended; but he charmed her by fashioning earrings for her out of paper clips. The gray-haired woman prepared his meals, which included a kind of yoghurt—milk and blood from the same cow mixed in a gourd that had been rinsed with its urine, which served as a coagulant; the concoction was placed near a wood fire, from which it drew a smoky flavor. For days, Lindbergh joined a Masai cowherd, several men and boys with dark-red blankets slung over their naked bodies, carrying long-bladed spears. Another day he drove John Konchellah to a political meeting in a clearing a few miles north of Mount Kilimanjaro, where he was the only white man standing among several hundred blacks, their spears planted in the ground while they conducted tribal business in Swahili and Masai. After only two weeks in Africa, Lindbergh found it difficult to leave.
In parting, Konchellah presented Lindbergh with a shield he had specially made for him. Although they had known each other a short time, Konchellah had discerned the basic elements of Lindbergh’s character; and, accordingly, he had the shield painted with a design reserved for the bravest Masai warriors. “A man carrying such a shield could never turn back in battle,” Konchellah informed him, “regardless of the odds against him.” Lindbergh treasured the gift.
He returned to Nairobi in February 1964, again alone. During this visit, Ian Grimwood guided him in his Land Rover through Masai country near Selengai. While driving one day, they passed another Land Rover with a flat tire, which turned out to belong to Dr. Louis S. B. Leakey, the British archaeologist and anthropologist. They loaned Leakey their spare; and the grateful scientist suggested that he and Lindbergh arrange a more proper meeting. Days later, Lindbergh arrived at Leakey’s Centre for Prehistory and Palaeontology in Nairobi, where he spoke of his recent excavations in the Olduvai Gorge. He showed Lindbergh a cast of the skull of a “pre-man” two and a half million years old, which he had recently discovered and was about to make public. That week Leakey’s wife, Mary, guided Lindbergh through their Tanganyikan excavations; and two months later the Leakeys visited the Lindberghs in Connecticut. Having difficulty raising funds for the many projects they supervised— which included work in India and Israel as well as research in primate behavior by Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey—Leakey hoped to enlist Lindbergh’s support in encouraging Pan American to promote travel to Africa, where the Leakeys were organizing “caravan trips.” Lindbergh urged Juan Trippe to make Nairobi one of their gateways.
One year later, Lindbergh heard the call of the wild again. By this, his third, trip to East Africa, he felt capable of serving as guide to his wife. He and Anne met in Paris, where Charles attended a conference on jet-powered civil aircraft, then escorted her to a formal dinner worthy of Louis XVI. From there they flew to Nairobi, rented a four-wheel-drive Land Rover and drove into Masai country. They pitched their tent that first night between acacia trees near the edge of a ten-foot cliff, while elephants across the dry riverbed watched. Animal noises—howling hyenas, galloping zebra, clomping rhinos, and roaring lions—filled the air. “That night,” Lindbergh would write afterward, “we became a part of the jungle, living as primitive man lived in ages past. I felt as separate from my civilization as I had felt from East African animals at the formal Paris dinner a few days before.” The next morning, the night-prowlers had been replaced by a docile herd of cattle at the nearby water hole, tended by Masai spearmen wearing only their red shoulder blankets. The Lindberghs spent close to two weeks alone in this animal kingdom. Then Charles lingered in Europe for two weeks of business before joining his wife back in America.
When he returned to Darien on April 3, 1965, he found his wife running a 105-degree fever. He rushed Anne to Harkness Pavilion in New York and put her in the hands of Dr. Atchley, who diagnosed that she was suffering from viral pneumonia. During her hospitalization, Charles read to her each evening; and after three weeks he drove her home, where he served her breakfast in bed. His attentiveness surprised Anne and underscored a great lesson she had extracted from the last few months. “This Spring is one of the first times in my life that I have been able to live next to C.A.L. and not get drawn into his rhythm or feel guilty about staying outside of it,” she wrote in her diary. Then she made an admission that was thirty-five years in coming: “The illness and convalescence gave me the excuse to stay in my own rhythm and live at my own pace (for the most part). And I must preserve this integrity of rhythm in health—for though I will—I hope—be able to do more than I can today—I will never be able to keep up to his rhythm again—in fact, I never really was able to—but I tried.”
In October 1965, Lindbergh invited each of his children and their spouses to join him for several weeks camping in southern Kenya. He and Anne offered to cover most of the costs. Lindbergh flew ahead, on the new weekly Pan American flight from New York to Nairobi, arriving on December eleventh. Over the next few weeks, Jon and his wife, Barbara, left their five children behind on Bainbridge Island, Washington, where they had settled; Anne and Julien Feydy flew down from Paris with Scott, who had transferred to Cambridge University; and Anne arrived with Reeve, a student at Radcliffe. Only Land—with his wife and two children on their four-thousand-acre ranch on the Blackfoot River in Montana—politely declined the offer, anticipating several strained weeks marching to the relentless beat of his father’s drum. “I’m not going,” he told his wife, “—too many people and too tight a schedule.”
The “patriarchal safari” was as rigorous as it was wondrous. For a month, the Lindberghs lived out of their two Land Rovers, meticulously packed with four tents, forty gallons of drinking water, and enough preserved food to last ten days at a time. After leaving Nairobi, they spent two nights on the Dry Selengai, a week in the Kimana swamp area, and two days in the Shimba Hills, where Denis Zaphiro joined them. They traveled as far east as the Indian Ocean, where they spent three sweltering days on a beach north of Mombasa. With special permission from John Owen, the Director of the Tanzania National Parks, the Lindberghs spent some of their nights at Lake Manyara, in the Ngorongoro Crater, and on the Serengeti—where they drove twenty miles across the plains right through the heart of the great animal migration. “It was so strenuous,” a weary Anne later reported to her friend Lucia Valentine, “that we all lost weight but Charles who seems to be impervious to heat, flies, dust, bad roads, long hours, canned food, ticks, and lack of washing water!”
Charles exulted in all the challenges, becoming physically and mentally stimulated by the powerful forces of nature he saw at work. The struggles for survival he witnessed in East Africa would provide him with more material for his next decade of autobiographical writing than anything else he experienced. “For me, in East Africa, more than any other place on earth,” he would later write, “the strange and the familiar interweave. Nowhere else do I gain a comparable perspective on evolution, time, and space.”
In September 1962, Lindbergh had received a form letter from a board member of the recently established World Wildlife Fund in Washington, which articulated many of his current feelings. “Too few people realize that hundreds of species of living creatures are in danger of extermination,” it read. “Modern processes are destroying the natural habitat of many birds and mammals. Wildlife is menaced through the development of towns and cities which cover the land, through the multiplication of roads and industrial installations, through the pollution of streams due to industrial and human wastes, and through the destruction of wetlands.” It spoke of two hundred species already extinct because of man and another two hundred fifty on the “Danger List”—including the American whooping crane, the Asian rhinoceros, and the Arabian oryx.
Lindbergh met with the head of its parent organization, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN)—which oversaw some two hundred sixty organizations in more than sixty countries—at their offices in Morges, on Lac Leman, not fifty miles upshore from the Lindberghs’ chalet. During subsequent visits to Switzerland, Lindbergh offered his services to the organization’s leadership, volunteering to bird-dog endangered species during his global rovings. Circling the world as many as six times a year, Lindbergh found new purpose in all his travels, a reason to penetrate each country. Less than a year after the World Wildlife Fund’s initial solicitation, Lindbergh was sending reports to the IUCN, cataloguing each country’s exotic fauna and the names of people in the government who were sympathetic to the cause of protecting it. By the following year, ecological matters consumed practically all his reading and writing time.
Lindbergh debuted as an advocate for conservation in July 1964 with an article he wrote for Reader’s Digest called “Is Civilization Progress?” With the Atlantic’s having been crossed tens of thousands of times since 1927, Lindbergh asserted that flying no longer represented adventure to him, only progress. Now he questioned the very yardsticks—such as speed—by which he had long measured progress. He could offer “no proof whatever that the five or six thousand years of civilization, here and there on earth, have improved man’s fundamental qualities, or that in his essence civilized man is a being superior to primitive man.” He came to believe certain fundamental truths, “facts that man should never overlook: that the construction of an airplane, for instance, is simple when compared to the evolutionary achievement of a bird; that airplanes depend upon an advanced civilization; and that where civilization is most advanced, few birds exist. I realized that if I had to choose,” he proclaimed, “I would rather have birds than airplanes.”
Over the next few years, Lindbergh’s involvement with the IUCN and the World Wildlife Fund intensified. Even more than his and Anne’s generous contributions—five-figure donations each year and all the earnings from his writings on conservation—Lindbergh lent his name. He wrote his own solicitation letters, targeting people who could “exercise an influence on conservation activities” as well as write checks. In 1965, he suggested sending a letter to every federal and state legislator, every governor, several dozen foundations, and several hundred selected individuals. Although he knew the number of letters could run as high as ten thousand, the man who refused to give autographs to strangers intended to sign each one personally.
Some, particularly Jews, found Lindbergh’s newfound passion disconcerting, especially when he flung around such phrases as, “I don’t want history to record my generation as being responsible for the extermination of any form of life.” Longtime editorial writer Max Lerner, for one, wondered, “Where the hell was he when Hitler was trying to exterminate an entire race of human beings?”
Lindbergh immersed himself in the movement. He accepted membership on the WWF board; he presented “sales talks” on behalf of the cause; and he used his pull to get articles published by like-minded authors. With access to transportation—anywhere Pan American flew—and powerful people, Lindbergh became the conservation movement’s most effective roving ambassador. Dealing with heads of state or birdwatchers trying to save their local woodpecker, Lindbergh also became ombudsman for the movement, the one name to whom even complete strangers felt they could turn.
Whales were the first animals Lindbergh helped save. Upon learning in 1964 that only a few hundred great blue whales remained in the earth’s oceans, and that there were not many more great finbacks, Lindbergh began fighting this “depressing example of man’s destructiveness.” He engaged the interest of the editors of Reader’s Digest in the gigantic mammals; he attended meetings of the International Whaling Commission as the official representative of IUCN; and he wrote Prime Ministor Eisaku Sato of Japan and President Fernando Belaunde Terry of Peru, warning them that even one more season of harpooning could result in extinction. He wrote ambassadors and cabinet members urging the United States government to apply pressure on these countries, encouraging a ban until such a time as the whales had a chance to reproduce in sufficient numbers. In order to get publicity for the cause, he even permitted a photographer from Life to accompany him and his son Jon on a two-week, gray-whale-watching voyage along the coasts of Baja California.
When he learned that the company killing blue and humpback whales off the Peruvian coast was actually owned by Archer Daniels Midland, headquartered in Minneapolis, he fired off a letter to Erwin A. Olson, the chairman of the ADM board. Lindbergh’s argument was economic as well as ecological; and Olson issued a ban against catching the endangered species for two years.
Other animals and their habitats soon commanded his attention. When Lindbergh learned that the island of Aldabra—one of the great breeding grounds in the Indian Ocean of such rare species as the giant land tortoise, the green turtle, and the flightless rail—was being considered as a site for an air base, he wrote the Secretary of Defense, urging an alternate location. Upon hearing that American soldiers in Vietnam were sending ivory and animal skins back to the United States, Lindbergh telephoned the Army Chief of Staff, who told him that General Westmoreland was issuing orders that “no wild game was to be shot.” So impressed was High Chief Tufele-Faiaoga with Lindbergh’s concern for his island of Ta’u in Samoa, he bestowed upon him the ancient supreme title TUIAANA-TAMA-a-le-LAGI, “a Son of Heaven.”
The wider he traveled, the deeper Lindbergh delved into primitive life. Accordingly, no place intrigued Lindbergh more than Indonesia. His passion for the developing island nation drew him there three times in 1967 alone. While in Jakarta in February, Lindbergh met with members of the Indonesian government and found they failed to realize the significance of the Udjung Kulon, an extraordinary game-filled peninsula on the southwestern tip of Java. Returning in May on Pan American business, Lindbergh met with Presidium Minister of Political Affairs Adam Malik, who arranged for Lindbergh to visit the area along with the Indonesian directors of forestry, nature conservation, and wildlife management. All the way down the coast, Lindbergh spoke of the importance of conservation in Indonesia in general and in the Udjung Kulon in particular, where the last two dozen Javan rhinoceroses remained. Before the boat turned around for its return on Sunday evening, Lindbergh swam ashore to Peutjang Island to talk to a Swiss professor and his physician wife doing research there. They invited him to stay with them.
For the next two weeks, Lindbergh remained off the coast of the Udjung Kulon. His ground base, where he slept on a split-bamboo floor of a guardhouse at night, was a two-minute walk to a white-sand beach and a three-minute swim to a coral bed of spectacular forms and colors. Immediately inland, Lindbergh entered tropical jungle, where python-thick vines and densely leafed branches crawled over multi-trunked trees. Besides the multitude of strange screeching birds, he was surrounded by wild pigs, giant lizards, bats, swinging monkeys, herds of banteng—wild oxen—and the occasional leopard. By the time he had returned to Jakarta, Lindbergh was informed that the government had issued orders increasing penalties for poaching and that further conservation measures were already under discussion. “I have never visited a more attractive area of jungle, sea, and wild life,” Lindbergh wrote the Minister of Economical Affairs and Finance afterward, noting that his fortnight in the jungle had given him the feeling “that I existed not in the 20th century but in epochs past.”
Thus, Lindbergh spent the sixties in a time warp of his own making, in a primeval forest one week and ultramodern laboratories the next. For no sooner would he be back in civilization than the medical community would call on him to discuss the future. When Dr. Theodore I. Malinin and Lieutenant Vernon Perry, who were expanding the study of organ perfusion, informed Lindbergh that his 1935 pump was still practical but limited in the new field of cryobiological perfusion research, Lindbergh developed a new machine of glass and plastic which could accommodate larger organs and withstand colder temperatures—a necessary step in developing a storage bank of human organs for transplantation. Dr. William W. L. Glenn of Yale University demonstrated for Lindbergh the most modern heart-lung machines at his hospital as well as some of the latest work on the remote stimulation of tissue by radiofrequency in exchange for his addressing a small group of doctors about his work with Carrel. Dr. Denton A. Cooley invited Lindbergh to the Texas Medical Center in Houston to watch him perform heart surgery and solicited his suggestions and advice.
“Diseases have been conquered, suffering minimized, infant mortality reduced, longevity extended,” Lindbergh wrote of the physical sciences; but mindful of an overpopulated world, he urged new technologies to develop “agricultural machinery, hybrid crops, synthetic foods, artificial fertilizers, oceanic products—a lengthening list of techniques for increasing the world’s … productivity.” Increasingly, Lindbergh found the answers lay in maintaining balance. As he wrote in an article in the Christmas 1967 issue ofLife, “The primitive emphasizes factors of survival and the mysteries beyond them. Modern civilization places emphasis on increasing knowledge and the application of technology to man’s way of life. The human future depends on our ability to combine the knowledge of science with the wisdom of wildness.”
Lindbergh sorted out many of his thoughts about “balance” in a voluminous correspondence with Harry Guggenheim on such sociological topics as leadership, dominance, competition, and the abolition of war—all as part of a “Man’s Relation to Man Project” sponsored by Guggenheim’s foundation. Inevitably, his thinking kept rebounding to the single issue he believed underlay most of the world’s concerns—eugenics. It was a loaded word; but he believed in its literal meaning and positive possibilities. Guggenheim’sfriends periodically dredged up the old charges of racism and anti-Semitism against Lindbergh; but Guggenheim found them ridiculous. He took Lindbergh at his word when he wrote, “the idea of racial inferiority or superiority is foreign to me.” One of the few men on earth to live among primitive people of all skin colors, Lindbergh asserted, “I can’t feel inferior or superior to another man because of race, or in any way antagonistic to him. I judge by the individual, not by his race, and have always done so. I would rather have one of my children marry into a good family of any race than into a bad family of any other race.”
Obsessed with improving the quality of life for future generations, Lindbergh never tired of discussing reproduction. He encouraged all his children to have healthy sex lives, which included understanding the “critical importance of genetic inheritance.” Coming of age in the Lindbergh family involved numerous lectures about natural selection: the boys heard countless warnings about women who might entrap them by becoming pregnant; the girls were cautioned not to let emotions blind them to the qualities they really sought in men.
“If I had to choose but one thing I could impress on my children from whatever wisdom I have gained in life,” he wrote his youngest, Reeve, in 1966, shortly before she became engaged to a Harvard-educated photographer named Richard Brown, “it would be the importance of genetics in mating.” Overlooking the facts that at least two generations of Lodges and Morrows had been afflicted with mental illness, and that both Reeve’s grandfathers had died prematurely of natural causes, he wrote her, “You have a good inheritance both physically and mentally. Preserve it and pass it on to your children, together with the realization of the importance of passing it on to them. Nothing attainable by man has as great value.” That included the trust funds Lindbergh had established for his children, to which he had by then surrendered more of his wealth than he had maintained for himself.
“Advice should always be listened to and seldom followed,” Lindbergh often told his children. But it generally proved easier to heed their father’s words than to defy them. The sheer relentlessness of his ensuing arguments on matters of finance, romance, careers, or politics was usually enough to silence his family members though not necessarily convert them. (“I am most anxious that you don’t become one of those Cambridge intellectual and scatter-brained faddists who talk so intensely and loosely about important subjects with which they have neither had much personal contact nor spent much time objectively investigating,” he wrote Reeve as Vietnam was flaring up—one of the few issues in his lifetime which he did not see in black-and-white terms. Off the record, Lindbergh called Vietnam a “bad battlefield badly chosen,” an engagement America should have avoided, despite his belief in “any operations which prevent the spread of Communism in Asia.” Once committed, however, he believed America should have invaded with full force, even though he deplored the defoliation of the country.) Lindbergh invariably imposed his will on all his children—except one.
Through the sixties, Lindbergh and his youngest son seemed to disagree on everything, except their means of argument. At that, Scott inherited his father’s ability to bore in on a matter without letting go of a point until the other had conceded. In practically every visit and letter, Lindbergh took Scott to task for some infraction involving his money, his sports car, his education, or the condition in which he left the chalet. Scott responded with letters longer than he received, matching his father point by point, often with disarming candor. “Granted I have been, I still am, irresponsible,” he wrote in 1963. “I follow the prompting of my dreams to an excess. I assert immature statements, sometimes out of genuine belief, sometimes out of pure perversity. I have made a thousand suggestions, procreated dozens of plans, most of which I have been unable to fulfill.” Over the next four years, tensions only mounted, as Scott’s behavior became increasingly provocative. With the threat of fighting in Vietnam hanging over every young American male, General Lindbergh’s youngest son told his family in 1967 that he was renouncing his American citizenship.
His father reacted with predictable anger, his dialectics becoming diatribes. “At twenty-five,” he wrote his son, “you are a man. Unlike your brothers, you have not shown much realization of the fact. You claim to stand on your ideals; but you have conducted yourself in anything but an idealistic manner. You accept your living income from the United States; but you refuse to take your part in the support of your country. You have made of yourself an example that argues for increasing the legal minimum age for drivers, witholding [sic] the outright gift of money from parents to their children; and the enactment of laws in relation to a country’s support of individuals who refuse to support their country. As far as I am concerned, you convince me that I gave you too much confidence and freedom before you were of legal age, and that it was a mistake for me to arrange that you be financially independent thereafter.” He called his son an “ass.”
“You are not the first, but the fourth generation of Lindbergh ‘rebels,’” Lindbergh wrote Scott in January 1968. “I actively opposed ways of life my country was establishing, and my father before me, and his father before him. I like and admire your rebellion, and up to a point it makes me feel even closer to you. What worries me most is that I feel elements of irrationality in your rebellion that can destroy both your effectiveness and you.” Scott maintained his citizenship but withdrew into a life of his own in Europe, studying animal behavior in France, and falling in love with Alika Watteau, a Belgian writer-painter-actress—fifteen years his senior—who was also an animal-rights activist with two rare pet monkeys. (Charles had not met her, but had gathered from family members who had that she was not an ideal mate for Scott.)
After sending letters to his son every few weeks for several months without a reply, Lindbergh conceded “there is not much use in my continuing to write to you.” He reminded him of the jams he had helped him through and the independence he had created for him. “What strikes me hardest is my loss of confidence in you and respect for you,” he wrote Scott that March, “and my realization that if you were not my son you would be the kind of a fellow I wouldn’t want to have much to do with…. It seems to me you are already in the early stages of disaster as far as your life is concerned.”
Scott responded with a volley of letters that spring. “I am going to marry Alika in a few days,” he announced on April 1, 1968, not giving his father time to respond or even to meet the bride. Lindbergh took this sudden action as a personal slight, which initiated a period of estrangement between father and son.
Anne felt she had failed Scott in not protecting him more from Charles, that she should have supported him more in his choice of schools and in his desire to seek psychiatric help. She also knew she never could have succeeded in countermanding his father. Scott “prefers to learn from the world than to learn from you,” Anne had tried to explain to Charles. “It may be the harsher way to learn but it may be the best way for Scott to learn.” And so the rift not only put a strain on all the Lindbergh children but it also wedged their parents further apart. Anne’s heart still melted whenever her husband telephoned from some distant land to announce his return home; but she came to find his presence an intrusion and his absence an insult.
Abandoning the one family house that had felt like hers and moving into two new houses, seeing her children marry and her grandchildren born, Anne had further lost the ability to concentrate on her literary work. The last decade had allowed her to publish but one thin novel—Dearly Beloved, an occasionally forlorn look at marriage—and a few articles. Often feeling at loose ends while her husband patrolled the world, she felt up for little more than traipsing through her diaries and contemplating a book on middle age. “No news from C.A.L.!” she wrote her sister in January 1968. “I now am beginning to feel harassed—not knowing what I’m doing … I wish I knew. It makes everything else uncertain & wavery & unreal not to know. I have been expecting him every day for a week.” She felt taken for granted, useless—depressed, as she wrote in her diary, by “the sense of getting older, the slowing down of my writing … and a general sense of not being needed by anyone—child or husband.”
Charles had long planned to take Anne on a three-week vacation at winter’s end to the Hawaiian Islands, as guests of his friend Sam Pryor, a retired Pan American executive. Once at Pryor’s garden spot on Maui, both Lindberghs found themselves caught up in efforts to preserve a park on the island and in discussions relating to the establishment of ocean wilderness and park areas in the Pacific. Charles planned to go from there to Japan to address the whale crisis.
Just when they hoped to settle down for a few days of rest, Lindbergh overheard a telephone conversation between Pryor and his daughter in Alaska. She was lamenting the fact that a bill protecting Arctic wolves, which her husband, State Senator Lowell Thomas, Jr., was trying to get the legislature to pass, appeared headed for defeat. When Lindbergh learned the entire contents of the conversation, he turned to Pryor and said, “Let’s go up and help him.” Because Lindbergh had not made a public speech in nearly fifteen years, Pryor puzzledly looked at his guest and asked when. Lindbergh said, “Let’s go tomorrow.”
They flew into Juneau on March seventeenth, keeping Lindbergh’s appearance secret from all but the state’s top officials. Governor Walter J. Hickel invited Lindbergh to be his guest in a private upstairs apartment at the Governor’s Mansion. Rumors of his presence circulated around the capital the next day, but few believed them. At 10:15 on the morning of the nineteenth, Thomas and House Speaker Ted Stevens escorted him into the House chamber. The startled legislators and spectators welcomed him with a standing ovation, and he offered a shy smile in return.
Lindbergh spoke extemporaneously that morning, apologizing for being a little “rusty” at speech-making. His humility quickly won the crowd over. After recalling his first visit to Alaska in 1931, in the Sirius with Anne, he proceeded to the purpose of his address, the importance of conservation in Alaska—because “what you do here,” he said, “is going to be watched closely by the entire world.” He spoke of pollution and erosion in the south of the state and the need to protect the animals in the north, even if that meant the elimination of bounties on predator animals. The brief appearance electrified the audience and received extensive press coverage. Representative Thomas described his guest’s impact on conservation in the state as nothing short of a “miracle.” He wrote Lindbergh that his presence inspired the legislature to pass immediate protective legislation. One of his colleagues said, “Seeing him today was like seeing someone come back from the dead. I’ll never forget it. This was one of the most important moments of my life.”
The next day, Lindbergh left for Tokyo, keeping an eye on the calendar because of a Pan American board meeting in New York in early April and engagements in Europe shortly after that. He would stop first in Hawaii, however, not only to collect his wife but also because he had fallen in love anew there—with Hana.