PART TWO

7

ONLY A MAN

“I was astonished at the effect my successful landing in France had on

the nations of the world. To me, it was like a match lighting a bonfire.”

—C.A.L.

AROUND ONE O’CLOCK ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, MAY 22, 1927, Charles Lindbergh awoke in his room at the American Embassy in Paris. Ambassador Herrick had sent in his valet, Walter Blanchard, who drew a bath and raised the curtains at the windows overlooking the Trocadéro Gardens and the Seine. As Lindbergh opened his eyes, he noticed for the first time the splendor of his surroundings. Standing by the bed, Blanchard held open a bathrobe, announced that the bath was ready, and asked how the pilot liked his eggs. Then he left the wide-eyed young man to the tub of warm water and a large cake of yellow soap.

Feeling as though he were awakening into a dream, Lindbergh had no idea that the fantasy was just beginning. Unbeknownst to him, the modern wonders of communication had transformed the twenty-five-year-old “boy” into the most famous man on earth.

While Lindbergh slept, all other news—a massive flood in the Mississippi Valley, rising tensions between Japan and China, Britain’s severance of diplomatic relations with Russia, appeal efforts in the Sacco-Vanzetti Case—disappeared from the front pages of most American newspapers and from most people’s minds.

After several false alarms, the first authentic report of Lindbergh’s landing came through to The New York Times at half-past five in the afternoon, six minutes after the Spirit of St. Louis had touched down. A bulletin was posted on a window of the Timesbuilding; and from there, word spread like wildfire—setting off a chain reaction of cheers and horn blasts. “Ferryboats, tugboats, liners, all the little boats and all the big boats that ply the waters of New York Harbor did honor to the man who had flown continuously over the largest stretch of water ever covered by an aviator,” reported the Times. Every fire company in the city joined in, sounding their sirens and rolling their trucks out on to the streets to spread the word. Several Broadway matinees interrupted their performances to announce that Lindbergh had landed; and later that night, orchestras played “The Star-Spangled Banner” before launching into their overtures. Radio stations played the “Marseillaise.” Six thousand patrons at the second show at the Roxy Theatre that night saw—and heard—the Fox Movietone footage of Lindbergh’s plane taking off from Roosevelt Field, which brought them to their feet, cheering, stamping, and hugging each other. People shredded telephone books and other papers into confetti and threw it out their windows. Preachers hastily rewrote their Sunday sermons. At the Glen Cove Community Hospital on Long Island, Detective Gordon Hurley announced the birth of his son, Charles Lindbergh Hurley; he would be the first of countless babies to be given the same Christian names. Under a three-line banner headline (“LINDBERGH DOES IT! …”), The New York Times devoted its entire front page to articles related to Lindbergh and his flight, as it did with every other column inch of text on the following four pages.

Because it was a Saturday afternoon when Lindbergh landed, there was little celebration in St. Louis’s downtown business district; but in its suburbs and rural areas, carillons spread the word from steeple to steeple, including the big bells of Christ Church Cathedral, which were rung only on “civic occasions of high importance.”

So it was in every city and town in America, each looking for its own special connection to Lindbergh. In Detroit, the hero’s mother ended her day of seclusion, coming out to greet the press in a green hat and green dress. Under her cherry tree in the frontyard, she smiled as tears filled her eyes. “I am grateful,” she said. “There is no use attempting to find words to express my happiness.” She said that she had felt nothing but confidence; but even so, “I am happy that it is over, more happy than I can ever tell…. He has accomplished the greatest undertaking of his life, and I am proud to be the mother of such a boy.” When word reached San Diego, remembered young Douglas Corrigan, “the whole town went wild, because the people knew that the plane was a local product.” In Little Falls, Minnesota, “[P]andemonium broke loose” in front of the newspaper office; a “blaring band,” reported the AP wire, “added to the din, whistles shrieked and bells rang.” In chronicling the Jazz Age, F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the era’s pinnacle by writing:

A young Minnesotan who seemed to have had nothing to do with his generation did a heroic thing, and for a moment people set down their glasses in country clubs and speak-easies and thought of their old best dreams.

A man in Aberdeen, Washington, got so excited by Lindbergh’s success that he dropped dead on the street reaching for one of the newspaper extras that afternoon.

Lindbergh captured the attention of people everywhere. Theater audiences and hotel patrons in Berlin burst into applause upon hearing the news; and in Buenos Aires people demanded to know the whereabouts of the kitten alleged to have made the trip. A Hindi periodical outside Bombay observed, “Few things have so deeply stirred the hearts of India and evoked such huge admiration as the marvelous feat of … Lindbergh. The triumph he has achieved is a matter of glory, not only for his own countrymen, but the entire human race.” The Times’s Rome correspondent signaled by wireless that all Italy followed Captain Lindbergh’s flight “with breathless interest” because it showed “with what proud contempt man can defy the adverse forces of nature and hurl defiance at destiny.” Even the British got caught up in the excitement, shifting their attention from the two Royal Air Force fliers still attempting to reach India. “Well done!” exclaimed the Prince of Wales upon hearing the news. “Lindbergh is no ordinary man,” wrote The Sunday Express. “He is the stuff heroes are made of. He defied death and snatched his reprieve and pardon. His daring dazzles the world. It is difficult to imagine anything more desperately heroic than his solitary flight across the ocean.”

Although feeling a little “stiff,” Lindbergh did not soak in the tub for long, as he realized that he had missed his eleven o’clock interview with Edwin L. James and Carlyle MacDonald of The New York Times. Ambassador Herrick put his guest at ease, assuring him that all of Paris expected him to sleep for twenty hours and that the Times correspondents could easily wait with the two hundred other newspapermen milling on the ground floor of the embassy. Meantime, twenty-five motion-picture camera operators and another fifty photographers set up their equipment outside in the courtyard.

As transatlantic “radio telephone” service did not yet extend to Paris, Lindbergh said he would like to “fly over to London in my machine” so that he could call his mother. “Oh, no more flying for you, my boy, for a little while anyway,” Ambassador Herrick replied. But he promised to arrange for a telephone hookup between Paris and Detroit.

Of most immediate concern, Herrick thought, was the matter of clothing, for Lindbergh had packed none and events were already being scheduled that would require more than flying togs. Blanchard came to the rescue with a business suit he had borrowed from a tall friend—who was evidently broader of shoulder and shorter of leg than Lindbergh. The outfit would be temporary as a London tailor with a shop in Paris was summoned to assemble a complete wardrobe—from daywear to tails—as quickly as possible. Nobody around the embassy had feet as large as Lindbergh’s, so he padded about in a pair of clean socks, as two servants polished his tan flying boots. While dressing, Lindbergh invited the men from the Times into his bedroom.

They talked as he ate his first substantial meal in two and a half days—grapefruit, bacon and eggs, toast, and coffee. While he worked his way through all the plates on the big tray, congratulatory telegrams arrived from several heads of state, including President Calvin Coolidge, who cabled: “The American people rejoice with me at the brilliant termination of your heroic flight. The first non-stop flight of a lone aviator across the Atlantic crowns the record of American aviation …”

Outside No. 2, avenue d’Iéna, a huge crowd had been forming under the horse chestnut trees since early morning, its rumblings audible through the thick embassy walls. After Lindbergh sat with the two Times reporters and a stenographer in an upstairs salon for the better part of an hour, Ambassador Herrick felt impelled to intrude. Taking the young man by the arm, he ushered him to the front balcony, where masses chanted “Vive Lindbergh! Vive l’Amérique!”

Lindbergh was struck dumb, unsure how to react. “The idea of exhibiting myself embarrassed and disturbed me,” Lindbergh would write almost fifty years later. “I had never been asked to do that before.”

“Just say you’re glad to be in France,” somebody suggested; but Lindbergh found the words too trite. Impulsively, he blurted out three of the few words of French he knew—“Vive la France!” The crowd cheered again, which further embarrassed him. Herrick’s daughter-in-law, Agnes, approached the balcony with a French flag, which Lindbergh and the ambassador held before them, and the cheering increased. Only then did it dawn on Lindbergh that his flight “had taken on significance extending beyond fields of aviation,” and that his notion of spending a few weeks leisurely touring the Old World would have to be changed. “I had entered a new environment of life,” he realized, “and found myself surrounded by unforeseen opportunities, responsibilities, and problems.”

Shortly after returning inside, Lindbergh was informed that telephone operators were ready to patch him through to Detroit. Although the press would give the impression that mother and son spoke directly to each other, they communicated through an interlocuter in London, who was connected by telephone wire to Paris and radio airwaves to New York, the words finally delivered by telephone wire to Detroit. “Hello, Mother,” Charles said. “The trip over was wonderful. I am feeling fine; do not worry about me.” Evangeline prescribed “plenty of rest, for you have gone through a tremendous strain.” The connection was full of static, but the precise words of their small talk did not much matter—either to the Lindberghs or to the public.

The “conversation” made Lindbergh want to pay his respects to Charles Nungesser’s mother. While this outing was being arranged, Lindbergh met with the press and posed for pictures with Myron Herrick. By the end of the day, the photographs and newsreels were flown to all the capitals of Europe. Upon entering one salon of the Ambassador’s residence, Lindbergh was shown a huge arrangement of flowers. “Well, that’s nice, and I am glad I am able to receive it personally,” he said with a laugh. “You know flowers sometimes come in the wrong way and you aren’t able to appreciate them.” The newspapermen thrilled at the unexpected joke and broke into a cheer.

After a few minutes, Lindbergh left the embassy with Myron Herrick and an entourage for the Boulevard du Temple, across Paris, where Mme. Nungesser lived in one of the city’s oldest apartment buildings. Although the visit had not been announced, ten thousand people had gathered outside her residence by the time Lindbergh arrived. Several young women lunged at him in hopes of stealing a kiss; and, Herrick observed, he was “scared to death.”

Up six flights of stairs, Mme. Nungesser received Lindbergh’s party, kissing the American flier on both cheeks before embracing him. With tears streaming down her cheeks, she said, “You are a very brave young man. I congratulate you from the bottom of my heart. I, too, have a brave son, who I have never ceased to believe is still fighting his way back to civilization.” Although it had been more than two weeks since anybody had seen her son, Lindbergh held her hand and told her not to give up hope. Returning to the Embassy by way of the Rue de la Paix, Lindbergh was surprised to see American flags everywhere, even more startled when Herrick explained they were displayed in his honor.

A dinner at the Embassy had long been planned for that night. Because it was “a rather young affair,” Ambassador Herrick thought Lindbergh might enjoy himself and chose not to cancel it. Lindbergh’s behavior was conspicuous only in its extreme courtesy, which he had acquired during his childhood in Washington. Agnes Herrick had asked some fifty people to arrive after dinner that night to meet the pilot, and every one of them wanted his autograph. The guest of honor smilingly obliged. Lindbergh excused himself early—a little after nine—and retired to his narrow bed, where he was unexpectedly joined by Herrick’s wire-haired terrier, Max.

“The next day,” Herrick would later write, “serious business began”—what became the official apotheosis of Charles Lindbergh. Salutations would no longer be extended from individuals, but from institutions and entire nations.

After an early breakfast and a brief meeting with a haberdasher—selecting shirts, shoes, scarves, and spats—Lindbergh asked to see his plane at Le Bourget. He arrived at the field courtesy of the diplomatic cabriolet a little after ten o’clock, unprepared for the ovation he would receive from the airport staff and 34th Aviation Unit. Having braced himself for the sight of holes in the fuselage, his inspection proved more favorable than he had expected. The exhaust pipe had been loosened but not taken, and the motor needed nothing more than some clean oil. A few hours of repair would make the Spirit of St. Louis as good as new.

Lindbergh’s car returned to Paris for a noon appointment at the Élysée Palace. A military commander greeted him and Ambassador Herrick, ushering them past the cheering crowd. In his borrowed blue suit, Lindbergh was presented to the President of France, Gaston Doumergue, who was in full evening dress. The President pinned the Cross of the Legion of Honor—a gold decoration hanging from a scarlet ribbon—on his lapel. Never in history had the President of the French Republic personally conferred his nation’s highest honor, for acts of military bravery or civil achievement, upon an American. Lindbergh bowed politely and returned to his car, which forged through blocks of cheering Parisians.

After Lindbergh and Herrick lunched at the Embassy, the Ambassador urged his guest to nap until their next appointment at the end of the day. But rest was impossible with the steady stream of journalists and emissaries from every country in Europe, each proffering formal invitations to visit their nations. By then several thousand cables and telegrams had arrived. The French Post Office Department announced that it was establishing a special service for his mail alone, which would thenceforth be delivered in sacks. Scores of visiting cards were left at the Embassy, through which Lindbergh would barely have time to run his fingers. One read, “You’re a God—Hercules an infant.”

At five o’clock Lindbergh appeared before the Aéro-Club of France. Its members presented him their gold medal. Champagne corks rocketed, and Paul Claudel, France’s poet-Ambassador to Washington, offered a toast in two languages—“to the happiest woman in America—the mother of this boy.” A bewigged waiter bowed low as he offered Lindbergh a slender stemmed glass from his tray. Lindbergh looked for assistance from Herrick, who whispered, “Oh, go ahead and drink it. A toast to your mother is only indirectly to you.” And with that, Lindbergh tasted his first sip of champagne. The hall full of Frenchmen cheered and twice brought him to the window, which stoked the hysteria of thousands of Frenchmen waiting outside.

Inside, Lindbergh responded modestly, making his first public address. He said he lacked the words to express his feelings about the wonderful reception in Paris, and he praised Nungesser and Coli “who attempted a greater thing in taking off from Paris for New York than I have done in accomplishing the trip from New York to Paris.” Ambassador Herrick pounced on this moment of camaraderie to proclaim, “This young Lochinvar from out of the West brings you better than anything else the spirit of America.” Everybody recognized that Lindbergh had become a bridge between the two great nations.

The Aéro-Club offered Lindbergh a gift of 150,000 francs—almost six thousand dollars—which he refused. He asked that the money be used “for the benefit of the families of French aviators who have laid down their lives for the progress of aviation.”

Lindbergh was whisked to the Ministry of Finance in the Louvre, where they called on Premier Raymond Poincaré for his congratulations, then back to the embassy for more press conferences with the several hundred journalists who had descended on the avenue d’Iéna from all over the world—twenty-five from Sweden alone, eager to claim him as their own. He sportily answered even the most personal questions—revealing that he liked girls but did not know any and that he thought he would like dancing, though he had never tried it. He was happiest talking about aviation. “Lindbergh never seemed to weary,” observed one reporter, “of talking about his earth induction compass …” At an appropriate moment, Ambassador Herrick interjected that this “boy is a human being, although we have sort of come to regard him in a much higher light.” With that, he led his guest upstairs for a private dinner. They chatted until eleven.

Only when he was alone in his room did Lindbergh sample his first bad taste from any of his recent experiences. Before going to sleep he read that day’s New York Times, which contained the first of the articles based on material he had been feeding Carlyle MacDonald. In two double columns, covering half the front page, he discovered that MacDonald had transformed his description of the flight into a first-person diary under a Charles Lindbergh byline. “I was shocked and disappointed,” Lindbergh remembered more than forty years after reading the account. The long piece was written in a smarmy, aw-shucks style, a poor imitation of Will Rogers. “It was neither accurate nor in accord with my character and viewpoint,” Lindbergh recalled. “In other words it made me into quite a different fellow than I was or wanted to be, and it gave quite a distorted picture of the flight itself.”

It was an isolating moment for Lindbergh, one in which he realized the press had an agenda all its own. From then on, Lindbergh was suspicious, wary of anybody who would write about him. He saw that the press might forever use him for its own purpose, making him into what it thought the public wanted him to be; he saw that even the one newspaper he held up as the nation’s “journal of record” could not be trusted to tell his story accurately. He could only imagine greater distortions that might follow. Lindbergh’s parents and grandparents had long saved their important documents; now he resigned himself to save his as well—every shred of evidence that might document all that he did in his life and all that he did not do.

Without realizing that his words would be twisted into the first person, Lindbergh had agreed to an entire series of articles; the second such piece would be appearing stateside in the morning’s Times. As there was no time for him to write them himself, he could only express his displeasure to MacDonald and hope he would modulate the articles. The journalist complied, not wishing to upset the flow of exclusive interviews Lindbergh would continue to grant. At the soonest possible moment, however, Lindbergh hoped to begin writing the stories himself. He vowed never again to authorize the use of his byline on anything he did not write.

At 12:30 on Tuesday, the American Club in Paris threw a luncheon in Lindbergh’s honor. Five thousand members of the American colony vied for the six hundred admission tickets to the dining room at the Hotel Ambassadeurs on the Boulevard Haussmann. Although the event was for Americans, several French luminaries sat at the head table with Lindbergh, including André Citroën, the automobile magnate. Upon Lindbergh’s entrance, the luncheon guests exploded into ten solid minutes of applause. A guard stood by his place at the table so that Lindbergh could eat.

Moments later, Ambassador Herrick heard that two hundred French masons and carpenters constructing a building across the street had laid down their tools, striking until they caught sight of Lindbergh. Upon learning this, Lindbergh offered to greet them from the hotel balcony. He left the dining room and stepped onto the balcony, where twenty-five thousand Parisians greeted him. The construction workers threw their caps into the air and tooted their steam whistles. Lindbergh’s return to the dining room prompted another ovation. Lindbergh then addressed the crowd, detailing some of the actions that preceded his flight. Summoning Nungesser and Coli once again, he added, “The name of my ship, the Spirit of St. Louis, is intended to convey a certain meaning to the people of France, and I sincerely hope it has.” The demand to see Lindbergh that day was so ardent that some of the hordes outside smashed the huge plate-glass windows of the hotel in an effort to see their hero. Before he was able to leave the Ambassadeurs, a hundred cooks and scullery boys insisted on greeting him, kissing his hand, while he stood there blushing.

The next day, Lindbergh lunched privately with Louis Blériot at his house, joined only by a few of France’s ministers and leaders in French aviation. “I shall always regard you as my master,” Lindbergh told the gray-haired man who had flown across the English Channel only eighteen years earlier. “Ah, but you are my son,” granted Blériot, “you are the prophet of a new era …”

The luncheon party proceeded to the French Chamber of Deputies, where the parliament officially received Lindbergh. The president of the Army Commission of the Chamber praised Lindbergh for accomplishing “the most audacious feat of the century.” He added, “It is not only two continents which you have united, but the hearts of all men everywhere in admiration for that simple courage of a man which does great things…. Your victory is over nature, over that obstinate trio of time, space and matter, against which man’s fight must be incessant if he is to progress.”

Between official engagements, Lindbergh continued to meet with members of the world press and diplomatic corps. The deluge of correspondence had been so great that he finally had to appoint the Bankers’ Trust company to receive the incoming correspondence. He would actually see but a small fraction of the offerings—the praise from the President of Argentina, Mussolini, and Pope Pius XI … and the offer from a Texan to pay the taxes on the Orteig Prize. “There is a hundred and twenty million people in America all ready to tell Lindbergh what to do,” wrote Will Rogers in his column four days after the flight. “The first thing we want to get into our heads is that this boy is not our usual type of hero that we are used to dealing with. He is all the others rolled into one and then multiplied by ten, and his case must be treated in a more dignified way.” He recommended that the government provide Lindbergh with a pension and a high government position in the American aviation program. “He is our Prince and our President combined,” Rogers wrote, “and I will personally pay benefits for him the rest of my life to keep him from having to make exhibitions out of himself. We only get one of these in a lifetime.”

America clamored for Lindbergh’s return. Major cities spontaneously established welcoming committees, and the whole country was going “air- crazy.” James Dole, president of the Hawaiian Pineapple company, offered $25,000 to the first aviator to fly nonstop from the West Coast to Hawaii; Sid Grauman, the Hollywood theater owner, put up $30,000 for a nonstop flight between Los Angeles and Tokyo; the National Aeronautic Association announced $33,000 in prize money for a series of cross-continental flights: the starting dates of all the contests would remain unfixed until Lindbergh’s return, as everybody hoped he would enter if not win. At President Coolidge’s direction, the Secretary of the Navy offered transportation home for both Captain Lindbergh and his plane.

“From the moment I woke in the morning to that when I fell asleep at night,” Lindbergh recounted of his first days in Paris, “every day was scheduled.” One day when he thought he had found a few minutes to himself, he was brought one hundred pictures to autograph. Even if he had the time to wander the streets of Paris, he found that he no longer had the “freedom of action” to do so. “I was a prisoner of the ceremonial life that had been arranged for me,” he reflected almost fifty years later, “with uniformed officers always outside the door of the building I was in and, always, newspaper reporters and photographers.” Ironically, he had felt closer to Paris while flying above it.

Thursday was Ascension Day, a religious holiday for the nation; but Paris continued to celebrate Lindbergh. After meeting informally with the former Commander in Chief of the Allied Armies, Marshal Foch, and lunching with Foreign Minister Briand, Lindbergh rode in an open car down the Champs Élysées, through the Place de la Concorde, and along the Rue de Rivoli to the City Hall. The route was lined with over five hundred thousand—some estimated one million—people. It was the greatest reception Paris had ever accorded a private citizen, rivaling that of President Woodrow Wilson after the war. In the public square at the Hôtel de Ville alone, thirty-five thousand spectators jammed within the police lines.

Lindbergh entered the hall for a brief ceremony, at which he accepted the small gold key to the city. He offered thanks and brief remarks, noting that “I believe my flight is the forerunner of regular commercial air service uniting my country with yours in a manner in which they have never been united before.” All through the ceremony the crowd outside could be heard chanting, “Au balcon, au balcon”; and the moment the remarks inside were concluded, Lindbergh rose from the golden chair in which he sat and made his way to the balcony, from which he waved an American flag and smiled his now famous grin. Within the week the City of Paris had designed, struck, and presented a special gold medal to Lindbergh.

He turned in early that night, contemplating offers from around the world—including $300,000 from Adolph Zukor to appear in a motion picture for Paramount Studios which he refused—and invitations from King George of England and King Albert of Belgium—which he accepted. He still mused about touring Europe, especially Sweden, before flying home by way of Greece, Asia, and the Pacific. Those dreams were dashed, however, as his own government pressed for his return.

The next morning, Lindbergh arose at five for a date that he had kept secret from practically everybody. A car drove him to Le Bourget, where the commander of the airport showed him a black Nieuport 300 h.p. fighting plane. After a quick lesson in the controls, Lindbergh took off, heading back toward the city. He flew on his own private tour of Paris, before the city had awakened. After twenty minutes of sightseeing, he returned to the airdrome, where he presented an impromptu half-hour performance of aerial stunts for the French aviators below. Upon landing, he looked in on his own plane and discovered that it had been completely repaired. The French crew had stripped the fuselage of all its fabric and recovered it like new.

After breakfast at the airport restaurant with a few of the fliers, Lindbergh returned to the city and his public duties: lunch at the Ministry of War, where General Pershing joined him; a reception of the French Senators at the Luxembourg Palace; a tour of the Citroën factory; a garden party at the Ministry of Commerce; a reception at the Airmen’s Club in the Bois de Boulogne. Ambassador Herrick had invited Raymond Orteig, the hotelier whose prize had inspired Lindbergh’s flight, for a private dinner at the embassy. The money would be awarded at a formal occasion in America. For now, Lindbergh wished to discuss his next-day’s departure for Belgium and how he could best bid Paris adieu. Lindbergh thought of dropping a message from his plane addressed to the entire city in care of Orteig.

Later that night, Lindbergh got his first taste of Paris after dark, though it too was an institutional affair—a gala performance at the Champs Élysées Theatre for the benefit of the airmen’s relief fund. The social elite of Paris turned out en masse. When Lindbergh and Herrick entered the center box, the orchestra struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and everybody rose and cheered. “Poor kid was so embarrassed,” observed a young woman from Little Falls who happened to be present that night, “he blushed scarlet.” American diva Mary Garden appeared onstage dressed as Liberty to sing the national anthem; and when she reached the final phrase—“and the home of the brave”—she thrust her index finger toward Lindbergh, and the theater shook with applause. French actress Cecile Sorel read a poem dedicated to the flier and at the end collapsed to her knees, crying, “Leendbear! Leendbear!” The auctioning of Lindbergh’s signature that night fetched $1,600.

Lindbergh was at Le Bourget at 7:30 the next morning, getting grease on his hands for the first time in a week. For three hours he tuned his plane. At eleven, Ambassador Herrick arrived with a cold lunch, which they shared in a hangar. To avoid a recurrence of the hysteria that greeted his arrival, Lindbergh had announced that Paris would be the best place to witness his departure. Most of the city took him at his word.

A few minutes before one o’clock, the Spirit of St. Louis took off from exactly the point at which it had landed seven days prior. He headed for Paris, whose streets were lined with hundreds of thousands looking skyward. Lindbergh flew toward the Eiffel Tower, circled it twice, then buzzed low over the Arc de Triomphe; following the Champs Élysées, he looped twice before reaching the Place de la Concorde. “Nothing seemed to be dropped from the airplane,” Orteig remembered; “we were rather disappointed, trying to guess what had happened.” Then the plane returned, and, as Orteig told it, “my hopes came back and very soon I saw Lindbergh dropping the promised message, tied to a beautiful French flag.” Weighted with a little sandbag, the tricolor landed at the foot of the obelisk in front of Orteig’s hotel, the Crillon. The crowd rushed to grab the parcel, but it practically fell into the hands of a friend of Orteig, who safely handed it over. “Goodbye! Dear Paris,” read the note. “Ten thousand thanks for your kindness to me. Charles A. Lindbergh.”

Lindbergh flew toward the center of the city, over which he performed some of his old barnstorming spins and rolls, thrilling the crowd. Then he headed northeast toward Belgium, flying over miles of war-scarred country. “This week will be a kind of a dream to me all my life,” read Lindbergh’s next New York Times piece, written just before his departure in the new style leaning more heavily on his dictation. “I feel I want to go somewhere quiet and think it over.”

That was no longer possible. He had less than two hours to himself before reaching the Belgian airdrome at Evere. King Albert had issued orders that the crowd must allow Lindbergh and his plane to land undisturbed. In addition to most of the police force of Brussels, five thousand troops stood guard with fixed bayonets. By three o’clock that afternoon, more than twenty-five thousand people, some said as many as seventy-five thousand, awaited his arrival. Only the Prime Minister stepped forward to welcome the aviator, while everyone behind him cheered. Lindbergh was chauffeured to the American Embassy, where he changed clothes. On his way to the Royal Palace, he was taken to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier of Belgium; then King Albert and his family received him. After a few minutes of conversation in English, the King pinned the Badge of a Knight of the Order of Leopold on his lapel. An appearance before the Belgian Aero Club followed, with the awarding of a plaque.

The next morning Lindbergh kept a private engagement with the King and Queen back at Evere, where he showed them his plane and answered questions about his great flight. He returned to the city for a day of receptions. The gilt buildings and even the old gray stone of the magnificent Grande Place in front of the Hôtel de Ville shimmered under a bright sun. The square was packed to capacity with thousands of cheering Belgians, the chimes of St. Gaudule Cathedral filled the air, and American flags waved at every turn. Inside the gothic Guild Hall, before a select group of aldermen, veterans, and the American colony, the highly regarded Burgomaster Max welcomed Lindbergh. “In this City Hall, where I have had the honor to receive so many great and illustrious men,” he said, “I am proud to salute a real hero … your victory is the victory of humanity. In your glory there is glory for all men.” Amid the cheers and handshakes, the Burgomaster handed Lindbergh a leather pouch, which contained a gold medal from the City of Brussels. After the leading baritone of the Brussels Opera sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Lindbergh asked that he close the ceremony with the Belgian national anthem. Upon its conclusion, the Burgomaster and Lindbergh stood at the balcony to acknowledge the exultant crowds.

After a week of sixteen-hour diplomatic days, Lindbergh was exhausted. His hours in the air seemed to be the only time he could be by himself. He returned to Evere and pressed on toward England. Over the cemetery at Werington, near Ghent—a final resting place for many American soldiers—Lindbergh flew low. He dropped a wreath of flowers onto the vast sea of white crosses, circled the graveyard twice, and flew under clear skies across the Channel.

From what he knew of British reserve, Lindbergh expected nothing less dignified than the reception he had received in Belgium. In fact, American Ambassador Alanson B. Houghton had arranged a proper ceremony for the flier, in which he would land at Croydon, thirteen miles south of Parliament, taxi around the airdrome in a victory lap for the cordoned-off crowd to see, then leave the plane in a recess close to where he would be presented to British officials. Two and one-half hours after leaving Belgium, the speck of a monoplane was sighted over the towers of London. Despite all the preparation for Lindbergh’s reception, nobody had anticipated a crowd of one hundred fifty thousand Englishmen.

That first glint of silver in the sky was enough to throw them into chaos. In an instant, everybody rushed past the ropes onto the field where Lindbergh was meant to land. Above their cheers, the Spirit of St. Louis circled, touched the ground, and started to taxi … only to take to the air again. Lindbergh had in that instant looked out his window and feared plowing into the masses of people. Those on the ground knew to clear a path for him; and to the sound of a second wave of cheers, he landed just beyond the grasp of the crowd. Not until the police had roped off the plane did Lindbergh exit and make his way to an official car. The Ambassador and Air Minister were lost in the melee, while Lindbergh’s driver managed to push through to the control tower. Women fainted, silk hats were crushed, canes and umbrellas went flying, while twelve hundred bobbies helplessly blew their whistles.

The aviator climbed a ladder to the top of the tower and with a megaphone shouted down with glee, “I just want to tell you this is worse than I had in Paris.” The thousands of people at his back insisted he address them as well, so Lindbergh crossed to the other side of the tower platform and screamed, “I’ve just said this is a little worse than Le Bourget, or, I should say, better.” After the cheers died down, everybody broke into “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Upon its completion, Lindbergh pled with the crowd to allow the Ambassador to pass so that they all might be able to leave. The formal reception was abridged in favor of a retreat to the city. Thousands lining the roads cheered him into London.

Lindbergh’s next three days were filled with events to which he had grown accustomed—meals at the embassy with special guests, press conferences, a visit to the tomb of England’s “unknown warrior.” On his second night in London he was the honored guest at a large banquet of journalists in the Abraham Lincoln Room of the Savoy Hotel. At Lindbergh’s place were five sandwiches and a half-gallon jar of water; and when he took his seat, the evening’s toastmaster announced, “Captain Lindbergh will now partake of his customary meal.”

The next day held more pomp. By then it had been decided that Lindbergh and his plane would return to America by boat. Ambassador Houghton informed him that President Coolidge had “ordered” a warship for his passage. And so, a little before four o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, May thirty-first, Lindbergh was motored to Croydon, where he flew his plane to an airfield in Gosport, near the port of Southampton. There it would be crated for its return home. After explaining how the Spirit was to be dismantled and packed, Lindbergh borrowed a plane in which he returned to London, all in time to change into a blue suit for his next round of ceremonies.

After a brief stop at Number 10 Downing Street for Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s personal congratulations, Lindbergh arrived at Buckingham Palace at 10:45. Presented to King George V, they withdrew to one of the palace salons and sat together, just the two of them. “I was flattered to find his questions showed he had read a great deal about [my flight] and understood it perfectly,” Lindbergh “wrote” afterward in the next installment of his travelogue for The New York Times. “And interestingly enough, I was able to observe that what interested the King about flying over the Atlantic was just about what interested every one else. The conception of a King as a personage of great aloofness and coldness certainly is belied by King George, who treated me in a straightforward, democratic style.” What Lindbergh diplomatically elected not to record was the early fragment of conversation in which His Royal Highness leaned forward and said, “Now tell me, Captain Lindbergh. There is one thing I long to know. How did you pee?”

After fifteen minutes of private conversation, Queen Mary entered with her personal congratulations. She watched while her husband decorated Lindbergh with the Air Force Cross, the highest peacetime honor that may be conferred “upon persons not in the service of the British crown who are credited with great flying achievement.” Before leaving the palace, Lindbergh entered a vestibule where he was introduced to the baby Princess Elizabeth, the King’s granddaughter. Lindbergh bent down, shook her hand, and patted her cheek. The large crowd that had amassed outside the palace cheered as his car pulled away.

At 11:15 Lindbergh called on the Prince of Wales at York House. He noticed that the charming prince “seemed less interested in my flight itself than the King was, but he displayed great interest in me personally.” When the man who would become Edward VIII asked Lindbergh what he was going to do in the future, he replied that he was going to “keep on flying.” The press—which would caption the pictures of this meeting “The two most popular young men in the world”—asked Lindbergh what they had talked about. “Oh, about ten minutes,” was his reply.

That afternoon Lindbergh visited the House of Commons as the guest of Lord and Lady Astor. The Speaker’s welcome inspired a great ovation, and Lindbergh was escorted to the “distinguished strangers gallery.” He listened to a few minutes of debate before retiring to the terrace. Upon taking his leave, he received a most unusual display of admiration, some believed the only such demonstration ever extended to an American: the entire House stood as one. On the terrace, Lindbergh had a few minutes with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill; and the next day in Parliament, Churchill offered a few words about the nation’s distinguished visitor. “From the little we have seen of him,” Churchill said, “we have derived the impression that he represents all that a man should say, all that a man should do, and all that a man should be.”

The British tried to maintain their reserve at all the events Lindbergh attended—the British Air Council luncheon at which he received the Daily Mail’s gold cup, the Royal Aero Club dinner at the Savoy, the Derby eve ball at Albert Hall, and the Derby itself—but they could not restrain themselves. Wherever he went, bands spontaneously burst into “Yankee Doodle,” men on the street cheered and waved handkerchiefs and beseeched him for autographs, and women rushed up to kiss him.

Just as the first boat from Europe containing films and photos of Lindbergh’s arrival in Paris reached New York—with special provisions by the Treasury Department that would speed the cargo through customs, so that the images could be transmitted nationwide within hours—there was a change in plans for transporting Lindbergh home. Admiral G. H. Burrage’s flagship, the cruiser Memphis, which had enough deckspace to carry the Spirit as well as room below for the crew of correspondents who wished to make the voyage, was “assigned” to bring him from France.

After two weeks of punctual arrivals at dozens of events, Lindbergh was delayed for the first time, trying to cross the English Channel. While the Memphis stopped in Southampton to pick up the two huge crates that held the Spirit of St. Louis, fog and rain kept Lindbergh in England one night longer than had been scheduled. He had braved worse weather, but the diplomats refused to let him fly. On the morning of Friday, June second, he left Kenley Airdrome in a borrowed plane and arrived at Le Bourget, where thousands had turned out again to see him. After a few small ceremonies in Paris, Lindbergh quietly left the next morning for Cherbourg to meet the Memphis.

Even in the gray cold, ten thousand citizens of Cherbourg stood in the public square, which was dressed with American flags. A plaque was unveiled, commemorating that spot in France over which Lindbergh first flew. As he shoved off in the launch that delivered him to the U.S.S. Memphis, a voice cried from shore, “Come back soon.” Lindbergh replied, “You bet I will.”

Just as the Memphis reached the open sea, another voyage across the Atlantic commenced. After weeks of disputes, the Bellanca Columbia finally took off from Roosevelt Field with Clarence Chamberlin as pilot. To everybody’s amazement, at the last minute, the unannounced copilot turned out to be none other than Charles Levine, the man who months earlier had refused to sell that very plane to Lindbergh. For further dramatic effect, Chamberlin and Levine were keeping their destination a surprise. Forty-six and one-half hours later, the plane was forced down in Eisleben, Germany, one hundred ten miles short of its intended destination of Berlin.

For days Chamberlin and Levine received boldfaced, front-page coverage, for they had in one swoop smashed two of Lindbergh’s records—distance (3,905 miles) and time in the air. Many journalists, especially the correspondents in Berlin, tried to outdo the rhetoric about Lindbergh; but neither diction nor distance made any difference. From the outset, the two flights hardly seemed comparable to the public. Lindbergh remained the first to connect the continents by airplane, and he did it alone—arriving exactly where he intended. The articles about Chamberlin and Levine battling the elements to reach Europe ended up sharing space with Lindbergh in repose, sailing home. As Lindbergh approached American shores, news of the preparation for his arrival edged Chamberlin and Levine out of the public consciousness.

For the next nine days, Lindbergh rewound the fantastic memories of the past two weeks. He caught up on his sleep, and he worked several hours every day with Carlyle MacDonald, dictating the details of his flight and life for a book he had agreed to deliver based on the Times articles. “After the receptions at Le Bourget and Croydon,” Lindbergh said, “… I find myself wondering what sort of reception I will get at New York.”

No previous event had ever inspired such a spontaneous outpouring of song, by amateurs and professionals alike—at least two hundred of them, mostly marches and hymns, but also the occasional waltz and fox trot, even a stomp and a mazurka. Most were soubriquets—“Lucky Lindy,” “The Lone Eagle,” “Eagle of Liberty,” “Lindbergh, the Eagle of the U.S.A.,” “The Monarch of the Air,” “The Flying Idol,” “Lindy, the Bird of the Clouds,” “America’s Son,” “Columbus of the Air,” “Eagle of Liberty,” “That Airplane Man.” Even America’s songwriter laureate, George M. Cohan, composed a tune for publication in all the Hearst newspapers—“When Lindy Comes Home.” More serious works came to be composed as well. Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht would soon collaborate on a cantata—“Der Lindberghflug”—fifteen scenes for soloists, chorus, and orchestra in which a tenor portraying Lindbergh sings of his preparations for the flight, and later faces such antagonists as the Fog, the Snowstorm, and Sleep.

The night Lindbergh had landed in Paris, the excitement reached all the way into the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, where a number of patrons were dancing the latest variations on the Charleston. The whole joint was jumping, people elatedly screaming, “Lindy’s done it, Lindy’s done it.” One fellow on the sidelines, “Shorty George” Snowden, looked over at some young people doing swing-outs, breakaways, and “shine steps,” and was alleged to have commented, “Look at them kids hoppin’ over there. I guess they’re doin’ the Lindy Hop.” Both the dance and the name caught on.

Thousands expressed themselves in verse. The New York Times alone received more than two thousand poems within a single week. To stanch the flow of unsolicited material, the paper published an editorial stating that “no poem worthy of the event” could be written until at least six months had allowed for “adequate perspective for imaginative treatment.” But doggerel continued to arrive, with similes likening him to Gutenberg, Hippocrates, Columbus, and often to Christ.

When publisher Mitchell Kennerley offered cash prizes for the three best poems on the subject of Lindbergh and his flight, he received six thousand entries. Entire books were printed of Lindbergh verses. Effusions in seemingly every language were sent to Lindbergh—classroom assignments scrawled in pencil, housewives’ musings written in calligraphy, stanzas privately printed, some even decorated in gold leaf. For months it was difficult for any magazine or local newspaper to go without a poetic offering that rhymed “boy” with “joy,” “chance” with “France,” “night” with “light,” “prayer” with “dare,” and “youth” with “truth.”

The popular French dramatist Sacha Guitry wrote a play called Lindbergh, which would succeed his other theatrical treatments of Pasteur and Mozart. And before Lindbergh had even reached American shores, a dozen biographies of him were in the works, each more hagiographic than the last. No American had been so instantly mythologized, the tales meant to inspire youth and capitalize on patriotism. One successful volume, The Lone Scout of the Sky, would be written by James E. West, the Chief Scout Executive of the Boy Scouts of America. The book most eagerly awaited, however, was being written aboard the U.S.S. Memphis.

While Lindbergh had as little intention of returning to flying the mail as he had of keeping the Orteig Prize (which he felt belonged to his backers), he had wasted no time considering how he might earn his living. His June second article in the Times announced that his criterion in sorting through the many offers coming his way would be simple: “Whatever will aid aviation will interest me. Whatever does not mean help to aviation will not interest me at all.” The Christian Science Monitor ran a cartoon that showed the aviator holding at bay a group of promotors offering contracts for lectures, theater tours, movies, and books while he cast a pensive eye on the setting sun, which spelled out “achievement.” It was the common glorified image of Lindbergh, for newspapers reported that he had already turned down over one million dollars’ worth of contracts and product endorsements. But, Lindbergh would later recount, “it was essential that I find ways of earning more money that would leave me as free as possible to pursue the development of aviation.”

“The closer we get to the shores of America the more radio messages I receive from cities, towns and persons who want to entertain me,” read one of Lindbergh’s Times columns, radioed from aboard ship. “I suppose I would have to dine out for a year if I were to accept them all, but I am awfully anxious to get back to hard work again just as soon as the receptions are over, and I know the public will help me out on this proposition.” In the meantime, he admitted finding it a relief to be able to sleep eight or nine hours and work on his book and “know there are no speeches ahead of me the next day.” At the start of his ocean crossing Lindbergh wrote, “I will be ready for anything when I step on dry land again.” Six days later that proved to be an idle boast.

At five o’clock in the afternoon of June 10, 1927, the cruiser passed through the Virginia Capes, and Lindbergh got his first taste of the reception that lay ahead. A convoy of four destroyers, two Army blimps, and forty airplanes accompanied the Memphis up Chesapeake Bay. Standing on the ship’s bridge, as scenes of his lonely childhood approached, the twenty-five-year-old Army captain turned to Admiral Burrage and said, “It is a great and wonderful sight, and I wonder if I really deserve all this.”

In Washington, Evangeline Lindbergh arrived as the guest of the President of the United States. Calvin and Grace Coolidge invited her to spend the night on the third floor at 15 Du Pont Circle, their temporary residence while the roof of the White House was being repaired. The only other guest that night was the President’s friend Dwight W. Morrow, a partner of J. P. Morgan and Company, who had recently chaired a presidential Aircraft Board. Shortly after dinner, the Coolidges had to excuse themselves for another engagement, leaving Morrow alone to entertain Mrs. Lindbergh. He was grateful for the opportunity, “greatly impressed by her simplicity, dignity, and spirituality.” Into the night she regaled Morrow with “countless stories about her son,” all “exalting.”

It was already hot at dawn that Saturday when the Memphis entered its homestretch up the Potomac. The temperature would rise to eighty-eight degrees. A noisy greeting of whistles, horns, bells, and sirens as well as waves and cheers came from most of the citizens of the sleepy town of Alexandria. As the ship passed, heads tilted back to see the aerial escort of eighty-eight planes and the dirigible Los Angeles scudding over the Memphis.

With the cruiser slowly rounding the bend before the naval yard, Cabinet members and heads of the armed services strained to get their first glimpse of the tall, slim young man in the blue suit on the bridge, holding his hat with one hand and waving with the other. A volley of gun salutes cracked the air, punctuating the roar of the crowd. As the anchor was dropped and the gangway fastened, Admiral Burrage led Lindbergh to the bow for a long welcoming cheer. At a word from Burrage, Lindbergh disappeared inside the ship.

The Admiral ran down the gangway where two White House aides presented a woman dressed in shades of brown and wearing a large, black straw hat. Without saying a word, Burrage offered his arm and escorted the proud Evangeline Lindbergh up the ramp. Once the public realized who it was, every whistle, siren, and cannon in the vicinity sounded. Everyone was overcome with emotion, thinking of that last meeting in Long Island, when nobody knew if mother and son would ever see each other again. Grown men cried.

After a few minutes, the Lindberghs appeared together. To the boom of saluting guns, Lindbergh stepped forward to greet the secretaries of War and the Navy. Then he and his mother stepped into the backseat of the President’s touring car, which made its way toward the back of the Capitol. Down the hill to the west, the entourage met up with a cavalry escort on Pennsylvania Avenue, which slowly led them to the Washington Monument. Columns of soldiers and sailors, interspersed with dignitaries, fell in behind. While Lindbergh was abroad, Postmaster General New had touted the use of airmail by encouraging the public to send Captain Lindbergh an airmail letter greeting him home; now three screened mail trucks, carrying over five hundred thousand packages and letters, brought up the rear of the parade. Spectators all along the route waved and cheered and threw their hats into the air. “No returning hero was ever escorted with greater dignity,” observed The New York Times. Political Washington took no sides that day.

More than two hundred fifty thousand people stood shoulder to shoulder in the hazy heat around the base of the great obelisk and down into Potomac Park, where a grandstand had been erected. Beneath a simple white canopy sat the Coolidges and their guests, including the nation’s political, military, and business leaders. The moment the audience spotted Lindbergh, their minute-long demonstration drowned out the huge brass band. Then, most uncharacteristically, the man known as “Silent Cal” orated for several minutes, tracing Lindbergh’s personal history right through his royal receptions in Europe. “And now, my fellow citizens,” Coolidge said, “this young man has returned. He is here. He has brought his unsullied fame home.” With that, the President bestowed upon Lindbergh the first Distinguished Flying Cross—“as a symbol of appreciation for what he is and what he has done”—and announced his promotion to Colonel of the United States Reserve Corps. A demonstration ensued for minutes as Lindbergh stood there—neither bowing nor smiling, just modestly facing the crowd.

Stepping up to the microphones, he spoke plainly in his slightly clipped, boyish voice to the hushed crowd and to another thirty million radio listeners across the country. Some five hundred photographers captured the moment as well, while special trains, planes, and automobiles waited to speed their film to laboratories for worldwide distribution. Lindbergh spoke but one hundred and six unscripted words, the gist of which was that he was a messenger between America and Europe, and that the attention lavished on him was “the affection of the people of France for the people of America.” The crowd stood for a moment in absolute silence, stunned by the brevity and the humility of the remarks. The world would little note, nor long remember what he said there, but many people likened his speech to Lincoln’s Address at Gettysburg. In lieu of shouts came only sustained, reverential applause. One radio broadcaster sobbed. Under the blazing hot sun, a display of daylight fireworks burst in the sky.

Lindbergh and his party made their way to Du Pont Circle for an early dinner with the Cabinet, followed by a presentation of honors before six thousand at a meeting of the National Press Club in the Washington Auditorium. The Secretary of State handed Lindbergh a bound memorial volume of diplomatic exchanges between the State Department and the Foreign Offices around the world concerning the flight. Dr. Charles G. Abbot, Acting Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, announced that the Institute was awarding him its distinguished Langley “Medal of Pioneers.”

The grandest gesture that night came from the Post Office Department, which announced that it had neither titles nor medals to bestow, and that the department had long labored under the rule that the likeness of a living American could not appear on a postage stamp. But there was nothing to stop them from using his name. And so, Postmaster General New announced that night that his department “has issued a stamp designed for special use with the airmails, which bears your name and a representation of the other member of that very limited partnership in which you made your now famous journey across seas. It is,” New declared, just before handing Lindbergh and his mother the first two copies of this issue of five hundred sixty thousand ten-cent stamps depicting theSpirit of St. Louis, the “first time a stamp has been issued in honor of a man still living—a distinction which you have worthily won.”

Lindbergh began the next day by attending church services with the Coolidges, then laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, visited wounded veterans at Walter Reed Hospital, and appeared at a celebration on the Capitol steps of the sesquicentennial of the American Flag. It turned into a celebration of Lindbergh instead, as former Secretary of State and soon-to-be Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes presented him with the Cross of Honor of the United States Flag Association. Hughes commended Lindbergh as “America’s most successful messenger of good-will.”

On Monday, June thirteenth, Lindbergh appeared at a 6:45 breakfast reception in the ballroom at the Mayflower Hotel, where the National Aeronautic Association conferred a lifetime membership upon him, an honor held by the Wrights, Chanute, Langley, and Edison. The most magnanimous speech of the morning came from Commander Richard E. Byrd, Lindbergh’s former rival on the runway of Roosevelt Field. “When we built the America for a transatlantic flight,” he said, “it was our object to attempt to help the spirit of good fellowship and the progress of aviation. Colonel Lindbergh has done these two things in a far better way than we ever hoped. We think it very fortunate for the world that Lindbergh got there before we did, and we are glad of it.”

Lindbergh went to Bolling Field, where he climbed into the wicker chair of the Spirit of St. Louis. The plane had been tuned and given a fresh coat of silver paint; but when Lindbergh heard the engine, it did not sound right. Reluctantly, he borrowed a Curtiss P-1 biplane. He put the crowd at the airfield at ease by offering them a breathtaking display of stunts, showing off with an Immelmann turn, soaring almost straight up and over until he was flying upside down. Flipping into a few barrel rolls, he set off for New York with an escort of the First Pursuit Group of Selfridge Field, Michigan, commanded by Major Thomas G. Lanphier. Commander Byrd rode in one of the planes.

Lindbergh flew at three thousand feet, above his escort, probably too high to see the demonstrations below. In every city along his route—Balti-more, Wilmington, Philadelphia, Trenton—tens of thousands of people filled the streets and the rooftops, waving to him. He landed at Mitchel Field on Long Island, where he was rushed into a waiting car and taken across the field to another plane, the amphibian San Francisco, a deep-blue plane with golden wings. The captain volplaned Lindbergh down to the water near Quarantine, the station on Staten Island, where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Narrows.

More than four hundred boats waited in the water, a Marine Parade representing every type of boat in the harbor. One of them, a police launch, pulled over to the San Francisco to receive its passenger. Upon the realization that it was Lindbergh, every boat whistled and tooted. The fanfare was loud enough for the twenty thousand people standing along the Palisades of the Hudson River—ten miles away—to hear without straining. Lindbergh was shuttled to the Macom, the yacht of the Mayor of the City of New York. A committee welcomed him aboard, but it was too noisy for anybody to hear much, even at the press conference below deck. When one journalist asked if he was wearying of all the receptions, Lindbergh replied, “That’s hardly a query I could answer now.” For much of the hour it took to reach the Battery, Lindbergh stood on the bridge of the Macom, while twenty-two planes flew over in battle formation, dropping fifty thousand blossoms.

When the Macom reached Pier A at 12:40 that afternoon, Lindbergh found three hundred thousand people waiting in the Battery. New York City’s offices, schools, stock exchanges, and most of the nation’s principal financial markets were closed for “Lindbergh Day,” as “a mark of respect”; and, at first glance, it seemed that Manhattan’s entire population had forced its way to its southern tip. In fact, another four million people were waiting farther uptown, lining the route that lay ahead. Lindbergh’s mother met him at the pier, and they entered separate cars. One overpowering roar sustained the entire hour in which Lindbergh rode the mile up Broadway from Battery Park to City Hall, people filling every inch of sidewalk and every window along the way. Through the canyon of buildings, past Wall Street, the ticker tape and other shredded paper was so thick that few could even see Lindbergh or the skyline through the “snowstorm.”

More than ten thousand soldiers and sailors led the parade, up to the Mayor’s two grandstands, which were filled with three thousand city officials and special guests. Gloria Trumpeters—three women in white robes—sounded the arrival of Lindbergh’s car, setting off the vociferation of the one hundred thousand standing outside City Hall. Lindbergh stepped up to the platform, where Grover A. Whalen, Chairman of the Mayor’s Committee on Reception, introduced him to Mayor James J. Walker.

“Let me dispense with any unnecessary official side of function, Colonel,” said “Gentleman Jimmy” to the young man in the blue suit, “by telling you that if you have prepared yourself with any letters of introduction to New York City they are not necessary.” He praised Lindbergh for being a “great grammarian,” for introducing to the English language the world’s first “flying pronoun”—the “aeronautical ‘we.’”

Speaking on behalf of his six million constituents, Mayor Walker said that Lindbergh had “inscribed on the heavens themselves a beautiful rainbow of hope and courage and confidence in mankind.” With that, he added, “Colonel Lindbergh, New York City is yours—I don’t give it to you; you won it.” He pinned the specially made Medal of New York City on Lindbergh’s lapel. It was an elaborate decoration, with Lindbergh’s plane and the word “We” struck in platinum and set into the gold medal.

Lindbergh approached the microphones and spoke of his receptions in Europe and the mounting pressure for him to return to America. “The Ambassador in London said that it was not an order to go back home,” Lindbergh said, “but there would be a battleship waiting in a few days.” He paused for the great wave of laughter to subside, then added that while he had departed with regrets, coming up the Potomac had made him not so sorry that he had taken the Ambassador’s advice. “After spending about an hour in New York,” Lindbergh added, “I know I am not.” His trademark “I thank you” triggered applause that could be stopped only by the singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

The parade continued uptown on Fifth Avenue, Lindbergh in the first car with the Mayor and Grover Whalen. They paused at the “Eternal Light” at Twenty-fourth Street so that Lindbergh could place a wreath of roses in memory of New York’s fighting men who had made “the supreme sacrifice” in the War. Big American flags billowed along both sides of the avenue, above the steadily thickening crowd. Only children—ten thousand of them, most waving small flags—were given access to the great steps, windows, and front lawn of the Public Library between Fortieth and Forty-second streets. At Fiftieth Street the parade paused again, so that Lindbergh could step out of his automobile to greet Cardinal Hayes of New York, who was seated in a special chair placed in front of the center door of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Upon seeing Lindbergh exit from his car, the Prince of the Church descended the steps to welcome him. “I greet you as the first and finest American boy of the day,” said the elderly Cardinal. “God bless you and God bless your mother.” Lindbergh bowed slightly and returned to the parade.

At times, Lindbergh and his escorts had to bail confetti out of their car. “I guess when I leave here,” Lindbergh yelled to Mayor Walker, “they’ll have to print another edition of the telephone book.”

“Well, before you leave,” the Mayor replied, “you’ll have to provide us with another Street Cleaning Department.” In fact, two thousand street cleaners were called up to remove what amounted to close to two thousand tons of paper that were tossed that day, the most that had ever rained on the city.

Four hours after arriving in the Battery, Lindbergh faced the three hundred thousand people who had emptied into Central Park’s Sheep Meadow for the official honors of New York State. Overhead a skywriter sprayed the words “Hail Lindy.” Mayor Walker introduced Lindbergh to Governor Alfred E. Smith, who draped a blue ribbon around Lindbergh’s neck, from which hung the Medal of Valor from the State of New York. The medal, created by Tiffany and Company and presented for “intrepidity and courage of the highest order,” had never before been awarded to a nonresident of the state. “You are hailed in the Empire State,” said Governor Smith, “as an ideal and an example for the youth of America.” After a thirty-minute review of the tail end of the parade, Lindbergh and his mother were taken to an apartment at 270 Park Avenue, which had been loaned to them by a friend of the Mayor for the duration of their stay in the city. At the apartment, Lindbergh ate his first food since leaving Washington early that morning. It was also his first quiet moment in ten hours.

Hundreds in New York City had collapsed that day. Many were trampled by the crowd and the mounted police, and one twenty-three-year-old woman suffered a fatal heart attack watching the parade from the roof of the Hotel Seville. By 8:15 that night, a revived Lindbergh was driven to the Long Island estate of Clarence Mackay—head of the Postal Telegraph Company, one of the city’s most prominent social leaders, and the disapproving father-in-law of Irving Berlin. At Harbor Hill, his fifty-room mansion in Roslyn, Mackay hosted a dinner for eighty in Lindbergh’s honor with several hundred more guests arriving later for dancing. Lindbergh did not return to Park Avenue until after midnight.

By then, Charles Lindbergh had become the most photographed man in the world. Impossibly photogenic, there was not a bad picture to be taken of him. When he smiled, he radiated the endearing innocence of an American farmboy; if caught frowning, his countenance assumed the strength of a Nordic god. Hollywood screenwriter and producer Lamar Trotti said, “Women saw in him the perfection of man, what they conceived their husbands to be and what still constitutes their dream. The men, in turn, experienced quick pulses of the heart and thought wistfully of the things they might have done, things they would like to do, things they wish they had the nerve to do.” Although he was barely known but three weeks prior, after the first day of his reception in New York, an estimated 7,430,000 feet of newsreel film had recorded his movements, already two million more feet than existed of the Prince of Wales, previously considered the subject of more frames of documentary film than anybody in history. Where Lindbergh’s flight had filled the first five pages of The New York Times, his reception accounted for every article for the first sixteen pages. Newspaper stands and tobacconists offered his picture for a quarter. “Welcome Home, Lindy” signs with his picture appeared on the window of practically every taxi. Army recruiting posters had his face pasted on, with the words “Lindbergh the Bold—He was Army trained.” Lindbergh kept his head from being turned. As Paul Garber, the Smithsonian’s aviation historian noted, “Even more impressive thanLindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic was the way in which he comported himself afterwards.”

Over the next four days, the residents of Gotham and the rest of the globe would concur. Speeches dwelled as much on his character as on his achievement. With little more than the most measured thanks, Lindbergh faced screaming fans and laudatory remarks at one reception after another—including the official dinner of the City of New York, which the Hotel Commodore bragged was “the largest ever tendered to an individual in modern history”—thirty-seven hundred guests feasting on six thousand pounds of chicken, two thousand heads of lettuce, one hundred twenty-five gallons of peas, and eight hundred quarts of ice cream. Only the nation’s most stately Charles Evans Hughes could do justice to the grandeur of the evening: “We measure heroes as we do ships, by their displacement,” he explained. “Colonel Lindbergh has displaced everything.”

Wednesday night, after a full day of receptions and a midnight benefit performance of Rio Rita—the Ziegfeld musical he had missed weeks earlier, when the weather over the Atlantic had suddenly cleared—Lindbergh took the wheel of a car himself and sped out to Mitchel Field on Long Island. The colonel in charge of the field was apprehensive, but at three o’clock in the morning, he gave Lindbergh an Army pursuit plane with enough gasoline to get him to Bolling Field. He made the trip in a little more than two hours; and within a half hour he was returning to Long Island in his own repaired plane. At 7:40 A.M., Lindbergh flew toward Roosevelt Field, grazing over the runway from which he had made history one month earlier, then landed at Mitchel Field. A car took him to Park Avenue, where he showered and changed from his evening clothes into a blue suit to attend Charles Lindbergh Day in Brooklyn.

The entire borough was closed for the holiday, so that Lindbergh could ride in a parade twenty-two miles long. He was greeted by seven hundred thousand people, one-third of its residents. There were ceremonies at Prospect Park—for two hundred thousand people—and a luncheon, before another ceremony at Roosevelt Field—for twenty-five thousand—where he parked his plane. He was rushed to the Bronx, where the Yankee fans had been promised a visit, but Lindbergh had time only to drive up to the stadium before heading downtown for the six o’clock presentation of the Orteig Prize at the Hotel Brevoort on Fifth Avenue at Eighth Street. There he received a magnificent scroll, a medal, and his check for $25,000. He noted that Orteig’s offer had been his impetus to enter the race, for it was “nothing more nor less than a challenge to pilots and engineers in aeronautics to see whether they could build and fly a plane from New York to Paris. I do not believe any such challenge, within reason, will ever go unanswered.”

Back at his apartment he changed into evening clothes for a reception of University of Wisconsin alumni and a dinner of the Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce. Later, he dropped in on a party given by William Randolph Hearst, which was also attended by the Mayor and Charlie Chaplin. He returned to the apartment at midnight. At 8:17 the next morning, the wheels of the Spirit of St. Louis left the turf of Roosevelt Field for the city that had launched him to fame.

It was a showery nine-hour flight over the Midwest, but that did not dampen the enthusiasm of those below. He circled the cities of Columbus, Dayton, and Indianapolis, where he was joined by aerial escorts, before reaching St. Louis. Five thousand people stood in the drizzle at Lambert Field to welcome him—including his former flying buddies, most of whom could not get past the guards to greet him. He and his mother, who had taken the train to St. Louis, spent the night at the home of backer Harry Knight.

The next day, the sun broke through just as a seven-mile parade through the streets of St. Louis began. Five hundred thousand people lined the way. American flags and pennants with Lindbergh’s picture hung everywhere; “Slim did it” was the slogan of the day on lapel pins and hatbands. Although Lindbergh was visibly tired, with dark bags under his eyes, St. Louis kept him awake with the most cacophonous parade he had yet experienced. At the official dinner for thirteen hundred, Lindbergh was presented a scroll and the keys to the city inside a gold jewel box with a raised representation of a map showing the route from St. Louis to Paris. The next day Lindbergh performed aerial acrobatics for one hundred thousand in Forest Park and placed a wreath at the statue of St. Louis.

On Monday, June twentieth, Lindbergh partook in absolutely no public program or ceremony in his honor. For the first time in the month since his departure for France, nothing Lindbergh did that day was especially news-worthy. In fact, when he drove downtown St. Louis in a new car which he had been given, few people even recognized him without all the trappings of ceremony surrounding him. It was only when somebody pointed him out that he found himself running from a crowd intent on grabbing at his clothes and his body.

Evangeline Lindbergh traveled by train to Detroit, so that she could return to her classroom. Her son remained in St. Louis, sifting through some of the congratulations, gifts, and offers among the 3,500,000 letters, one hundred thousand telegrams, and fourteen thousand parcels which had been addressed to him since his return. Western Union had a selection of prepared messages which customers could order—“America’s heart goes out to you” or “Time will not dim the splendor of your achievement,” for example. Among the thousands of requests for autographs and photographs came scores of marriage proposals and hundreds of thousands of “welcome home” messages from professional organizations, chambers of commerce, and boys’ clubs. Cities—such as Boston, Nashville, Sacramento, and Seattle—printed pre-addressed invitations to visit, which required only the sender’s signature and a ten-cent airmail stamp.

To honor Lindbergh, thousands rendered his and his plane’s likeness in oil paints, watercolors, pencil, charcoal, crayon, and gold as well as tapestries, needlepointed pillows, woven mats, and hooked rugs; one woman crocheted a model of the plane. His bust was sculpted in silver, bronze, ivory, plaster, and soap. He received rolls of Swedish wallpaper with his image repeated, an ivory inlaid billiard cue, a Persian manuscript of the Koran, a Gutenberg Bible, and a stickpin with the Spirit of St. Louis cut from a single diamond. Aviation clubs in the Netherlands, Turkey, and Czechoslovakia all conferred lifetime memberships upon him—with a gold medal, a diamond brooch, and a bronze plaque, respectively; and the Masonic Lodge, whose initiation ceremonies Lindbergh had never completed, issued him a Gold Life membership card. The Licensed Newsboys of Springfield, Illinois, chipped in and bought a fountain pen for their hero, a small token for the extra newspapers he helped sell. The Shubert Theatre Corporation issued him a gold and diamond Lifetime Pass to all their theaters throughout Europe and America; the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs sent a gold Lifetime Pass to any of their games.

Then came the wave of requests for his endorsement of products—not just from cigarette and cereal companies but from: Thomas D. Murphy Company of Red Oak, Iowa, which manufactured calendars and offered him two cents on every one of its fifteen-cent items; the Chicago company that was selling $200 busts of the aviator for schools, libraries, and museums; the German firm selling Lindbergh Razor Blades in Turkey; the New York outfit producing bronze Spirit of St. Louis letter openers; the Hookless Fastener Company of Meadville, Pennsylvania, which wanted to boast that Lindbergh’s new flying suits would use their zippers.

Countless manufacturers did not wait for his approval. Clothiers could outfit men and women from head to toe in Lindbergh fashions: The Bruck-Weiss Company, for example, manufactured the “Lucky Lindy Lid”—a lady’s hat of gray felt trimmed with black felt, with flaps on the side simulating plane wings and a gray felt propeller appliquéd in the front; a company in Haverhill produced the “Lucky Lindbergh” shoe for women, which featured the design of the Spirit of St. Louis sewn in patent leather with a propeller on the toe and a photograph of Lindy inserted in a leather horseshoe on the side. One of the salesmen of the Thompson Manufacturing Company in Belfast, Maine, realized they could move their boys’ breeches faster if they started calling it the “Lindy” pant. A baker in Elkhart, Indiana, renamed his product “Lucky Lindy Bread.” Toys and games, watches and clocks, pencils and rulers, and almost any paper product could be adapted to include a Lindbergh theme; anything packaged—from cigars to canned fruit—became fair game for a logo of a single-engined monoplane. Major businesses and institutions advertised in newspapers, welcoming Lindbergh home as a way of drawing attention to themselves. Lucrative proposals came from the deepest pockets in aviation, businessmen who wanted to build an airline around Lindbergh.

As Lindbergh’s fame escalated, so did the demand to see him. Alexander Pantages guaranteed Lindbergh $105,000 for fifteen weeks of appearances on his circuit of vaudeville theaters. A French theatrical agent bettered that—$250,000 for five appearances in South America. The Recording Division of Thomas Edison, Inc., wanted Lindbergh to cut a phonograph disk describing his flight, the royalties of which would easily reach six figures. A rival talking-machine company guaranteed a flat $300,000 for such a narration, opening with “The Star-Spangled Banner” and closing with “The Marseillaise.” Upon Lindbergh’s landing in Paris, Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal Pictures, had offered $50,000 for the flier’s appearance in two pictures, one of which he thought could be “The Great Air Robbery.” Shortly after seeing the meteoric rise of Lindbergh-mania, he upped his offer to $700,000 for a one-year contract. Yet another company offered $1,000,000 for him to appear in a film in which he would actually marry.

The most extravagant offer came from William Randolph Hearst, whose media empire included Cosmopolitan Pictures. He wanted to star Lindbergh in a motion picture about aviation opposite his mistress, Marion Davies. Hearst had offered Lindbergh $500,000 plus ten percent of the gross receipts. Those extra points in the film would probably have been worth at least as much as his salary—leaving him financially set for life.

Hearst invited Lindbergh to his sumptuous New York house on Riverside Drive, where he handed Lindbergh the motion-picture contract all ready for signing. Lindbergh explained that he never had any intention of going into films, and he felt uncomfortable about signing the document. In order to lure Lindbergh, Hearst assured him that this would not be a moving picture “in the ordinary sense of the word.” It would not be a fiction story, but the actual story of Lindbergh’s life—“an historical record of a fine life and a great achievement to be preserved in pictures for others to see in years to come.” He urged Lindbergh not to consider it merely for himself, “but as an inspiration to others.”

“I wish I could do it if it would please you,” Lindbergh demurred, “but I cannot, because I said I would not go into pictures.” What Lindbergh did not say—until many years later in a book of memoirs—was that he objected to Hearst himself. The mogul, Lindbergh noted, “controlled a chain of newspapers from New York to California that represented values far apart from mine.

They seemed to be overly sensational, inexcusably inaccurate, and excessively occupied with the troubles and vices of mankind. I disliked most of the men I had met who represented him, and I did not want to become associated with the organization he had built.

“All right,” Hearst said at last, “—but you tear up the contract; I have not the heart to do it.”

More embarrassed than ever, Lindbergh attempted to hand it back to him. “No,” said Hearst quietly, sizing up the young man, “if you don’t want to make a picture, tear it up and throw it away.” Double-dared, Lindbergh tore the pages in half and tossed them into the fireplace. Hearst watched with what Lindbergh would long remember as “amused astonishment.”

As he was leaving, Lindbergh stopped at a table to admire a pair of silver globes, fourteen inches high; one was terrestrial, the other celestial. The silversmith was unknown, but they were thought to be crafted in Hanover around 1700. It was the only known pair in existence, valued then at $50,000. The next day, a messenger arrived at Lindbergh’s apartment on Park Avenue, bearing the two silver spheres as a gift.

Within the first month of his return, Lindbergh received more than five million dollars’ worth of offers—at a time when income taxes would have taken less than five percent of his earnings and a most lavish rooftop triplex apartment on Park Avenue cost $100,000. The propositions seemed like fool’s gold to Lindbergh alongside some vague offers coming from the United States government. Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover and Aviation Secretaries William P. MacCracken, F. Trubee Davison, and Edward P. Warner, of the Commerce, War, and Navy departments, respectively, hoped Lindbergh might come to Washington to discuss what role he might play in the expansion of commercial aviation. There was talk of creating a new Cabinet post of Secretary of Aviation just for Lindbergh.

After a week of conferences in the capital and New York City, several ideas for promoting aviation emerged, as did a team of advisers who could actualize them. From different backgrounds, these well-educated men of great wealth were all consumed with the notion of public service.

Among them was perhaps the most important but least known figure in the development of American aviation, Harry Guggenheim. His grandfather Meyer Guggenheim was a Jewish peddler who had emigrated from Switzerland to Pennsylvania and parlayed money he had made from a stove-cleaning solvent into a copper mining and smelting empire. Few in America had ever made so much money so quickly, amassing in a few years one of the nation’s vastest fortunes.

None of the great Jewish families who had immigrated to America assimilated faster than the Guggenheims, promptly abandoning their orthodoxy, even marrying outside the faith. Meyer’s seven sons chose different fields in which to grow the money and different charities in which to re-sow most of it. Daniel Guggenheim became the family’s leading industrialist; and among his many philanthropies was a Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics, which he established in 1926 with $500,000. It could not have come at a more propitious moment, for aviation was then struggling through what Lindbergh would call the “period of transition between invention and commerce.” While Guggenheim supplied the money, he left the task of dispensing it to his son, Harry.

A blue-eyed Navy aviator from the War, he and his gentile wife, the former Caroline “Carol” Morton, had recently moved onto an estate adjacent to his father’s on the north shore of Long Island. His duties, as described by the Fund, were: “to promote aeronautical education throughout the country; to assist in the extension of aeronautical science; and to further the development of commercial aircraft, particularly in its use as a regular means of transportation of both goods and people.” With the rest of his board—which included Air Secretary Trubee Davison and Dwight Morrow—Guggenheim felt “that no man could demonstrate more satisfactorily to the American public the progress of aeronautics than Colonel Lindbergh.” In fact, after three weeks of receptions in America, Guggenheim considered him nothing less than a godsend to aviation, a natural generator of only the most positive publicity. The Fund invited Lindbergh to embark on a three-month tour that would take the Spirit of St. Louis to all forty-eight states in the Union.

Lindbergh accepted. While planning the trip, he even hired Guggenheim’s attorney, Henry Breckinridge—a Princetonian who had served as Woodrow Wilson’s Assistant Secretary of War—to act as his personal adviser, to sort through the hundreds of offers coming his way and to challenge the hundreds of illegal abusers of Lindbergh’s name in promoting products.

“Col. Lindbergh’s airplane tour will be undertaken for the primary purpose of stimulating popular interest in the use of air transport,” read the Guggenheim Fund’s press release on June 28, 1927. “It will enable millions of people who have had an opportunity only to read and hear about the colonel’s remarkable achievement to see him and his plane in action.” The fund had two other goals:

… first, to encourage the use of our present air transport facilities for mail express and passenger carrying purposes, aerial photography and other services, and thereby foster the growth of this means of transportation, and second, to promote the development of airports and air communication services.

While Guggenheim, Breckinridge, and the Air Secretaries prepared the itinerary, Dwight Morrow devised a scheme to benefit the flier and his original backers, which would also allow Lindbergh to keep the Orteig Prize. So as not to steal any thunder from the men who had paid for the winning plane, Morrow diplomatically raised $10,000 from his Morgan partners, which he sent to the backers, reimbursing them for their expenses above their initial investments in the plane. He also saw that Lindbergh’s own $2,000 share was quietly replaced in his bank account. Finally, Morrow recommended to Harry Guggenheim that the Guggenheim Fund pay Colonel Lindbergh $50,000 for his upcoming tour.

His affairs in the most responsible hands in the nation, Lindbergh could at last devote himself to his most pressing obligation, his book. While Lindbergh had been on public display, Carlyle MacDonald had holed himself up with a staff of secretaries in publisher George Putnam’s house in Rye, New York. No sooner were the pages typed than they were rushed to the Knickerbocker Press in New Rochelle, where extra printers had been laid on. “MacDonald did a good job,” Putnam later stated, “and a quick one. The crescendo of incoming orders from book-sellers was music to a publisher’s ears.” The fastest book produced up to that time, a complete set of galley proofs was ready for Lindbergh’s approval in less than two weeks of his return to America.

On Saturday, June twenty-fifth, he drove into the city from the Trubee Davison estate on Long Island to read them. He was appalled. MacDonald had not only written the book in the first person, but he had reverted to the bombast Lindbergh thought they had abandoned back in Paris. Lindbergh began blue-penciling the purplest prose, but the task seemed hopeless. More annoying than the factual errors, the entire book struck him as false in tone, “cheaply done.” Lindbergh knew he could not renege on his contract, especially as Putnam’s had already begun to publicize the book, promising copies by July first. At the same time, the book’s editor, Fitzhugh Green, pointed out, “It is your book: we wouldn’t want to publish it if it weren’t.”

Lindbergh saw only one solution—that he would write the book himself. That was more than acceptable to the publishers, until they learned that Lindbergh did not intend to address the job until the autumn, after his crosscountry tour. “At that juncture high blood pressure pretty nearly overcame us,” George Putnam later recalled. “We were only publishers, to be sure, and he was Lindbergh; but at that a contract was a contract and irate customers were stalking us with knives.” At last, Lindbergh figured that if he could hunkerdown in absolute peace during the month that remained before his tour, he could deliver a complete manuscript. He would use MacDonald’s draft as an outline and write ten thousand words a week, a prodigious effort for even a seasoned writer. Lindbergh agreed to start work right after the Fourth of July, which he had promised to spend in Ottawa as part of the diamond jubilee of the Confederation of Canada. There he faced more crowds and received a specially engraved gold medal bearing the profiles of King George V and the Prince of Wales.

Upon his return, Lindbergh settled into Falaise, Harry Guggenheim’s twenty-six-room manor house in Sands Point. It had been built in 1923, but upon entering the brick-sheltered courtyard, guests felt transported back to medieval France. The château was complete with high oak-beamed ceilings, detailed work on every door and window, a Norman tower, and an arcaded loggia in the rear practically at the edge of a cliff that dropped to the Long Island Sound. Its topography was reminiscent of Lindbergh’s house in Little Falls; but the similarity ended there. Falaise was the epitome of luxurious living, replete with fine antiques and artwork—especially saints and Madonnas.

Lindbergh moved into the northeast bedroom, which had a small balcony and windows looking across the Sound to Connecticut. His suite afforded him complete privacy. The Guggenheims kept visitors at a minimum that July, because whatever time Lindbergh could take from his book went into discussing his forthcoming tour. He worked most of every day—sitting alone at the inlaid wooden desk in his room or at a wooden table outside on the grounds east of the house. He wrote in blue ink with a fountain pen on plain eight-by-ten-inch white bond in his largest, most readable script. Mindful of his contract to deliver at least forty thousand words, he counted his output and ran the total at the top of each page.

As soon as he had a few pages under his belt, Lindbergh read them to Fitzhugh Green over the telephone. “I was much pleased,” Green wrote him afterward. “It was clear, precise and well-balanced narrative. My only suggestion is that you might brighten it up a little by a personal touch now and then. But it showed me beyond a doubt that you are quite as competent to write a good book as to fly the Atlantic.”

Less than three weeks later, Lindbergh delivered the last of his pages, just under the agreed length. Nobody complained. Lindbergh recorded his life story, from birth to Le Bourget, in serviceable prose, mostly simple sentences; and his calm, objective voice proved especially effective in understating the more melodramatic incidents of his flight. Without Lindbergh’s knowledge or approval, Putnam’s selected what struck them as an obvious title for the book—“We.” Lindbergh would forever complain about it, that his use of “we” meant him and his backers, not him and his plane, as the press had people believing; but his frequent unconscious use of the phrase suggested otherwise.

With a foreword by Myron Herrick—linking him to Joan of Arc, Lafayette, and David, three other exemplars of youthful idealism—a long afterword by Fitzhugh Green—recounting the triumphant marches from Paris to St. Louis—and forty-eight photographs, Putnam’s published a highly respectable book of more than three hundred pages. They offered special autographed editions for $25 apiece, all of which were sold before publication. When the typesetters had finished their work, George Putnam had the original manuscript bound in two leather volumes, for which a collector offered $50,000.

Putnam considered accepting the money. He even explained to Colonel Breckinridge that a reading of the contract suggested that he technically owned the pages; and he offered to split the $50,000. Lindbergh considered the suggestion and said, “No. If it’s yours, you do as you wish. If it isn’t, I want it.” Humbled by Lindbergh’s rectitude, Putnam backed off. After the author received his pages, he donated them to the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis.

Lindbergh had not even had the time to reread most of his handwritten manuscript; and the scheduled first flight for the Guggenheim Fund precluded his waiting for galleys. Amazingly, in less than two weeks, books were in the stores. Within a month, “We” had sold close to two hundred thousand copies, and sales showed no signs of letting up before Christmas, for which Putnam’s prepared a special boxed edition for boys. It lingered at the top of bestseller lists well into the next year, netting more than six hundred thirty-five thousand copies. It was translated into most major languages in the world and sold in large numbers from Germany to Australia. “We” earned more than a quarter of a million dollars for its author, most of which was paid to him the following year.

Part of the book’s success must be credited to the fortunate timing of the Guggenheim Fund tour, which proved to be the most exhaustive author tour ever scheduled. The coinciding of the two events created a publicity storm that resulted in the entire country’s becoming obsessed with Lindbergh. Until then, he had been a marvel people outside a few cities could only experience secondhand. The summer of 1927, however, afforded every American the opportunity to become part of the phenomenon, as the frenzy at each stop only fueled the enthusiasm at the next.

The tour began July twentieth at Mitchel Field, Long Island. From there, Lindbergh flew the Spirit of St. Louis over Niantic, Connecticut, to Hartford, where he was greeted by one hundred thousand people. The Department of Commerce supplied an advance man named Milburn Kusterer, who had co-ordinated receptions at each stopping point. Commerce also provided Lindbergh with a personal aide named Donald Keyhoe, who flew in close pursuit with a mechanic from Wright in a plane piloted, at Lindbergh’s request, by his friend since Kelly Field, Philip Love. The tour continued with hardly a pause until October twenty-third, zigzagging northward to Portland, Maine, west across the northern half of the country to Seattle, south to San Diego, east to Jacksonville then north to New York again. No American was more than four hundred miles off the Lindbergh route; most lived within fifty miles.

It was three months of ceaseless adulation, a tour that wavered between the historical and the hysterical. For most of the places Lindbergh flew over, touched down, or spent the night, it was the biggest event people had ever seen. He had already learned not to make eye contact with individuals but only to see the crowds; and experience quickly taught him to let somebody else order his breakfast from room service, because his calls were usually met with long silences and giggles from the telephone operators. He stopped sending laundry out under his name because it never came back.

Most days on tour began with a short flight to a city for a parade, lunch, and a meeting with the press. Then he would fly over four or five large towns—dropping greetings in a muslin sack with an orange streamer—en route to the next major city for a dinner, reception, and more press. Major cities staged elaborate welcoming ceremonies. Wherever possible, he inspected sites for airports and talked to engineers and the leading state and local dignitaries. Spare time was consumed by visits to hospitals and orphanages, then more press.

Lindbergh never failed to put on his best face. He lost his patience only when the press grilled him about his personal life. Donald Keyhoe remembered Lindbergh’s being asked, “Is it true, Colonel, that girls don’t interest you at all?”—to which Lindbergh replied, “If you can show me what that has to do with aviation, I’ll be glad to answer you.” He did no stunting on this tour, and he limited his remarks to one simple message—“that aviation had a brilliant future, in which America should lead.” He insisted to his entourage that no matter how early they had to leave, they must never arrive late anywhere. Although Lindbergh grew to dread the daily routine, he thrilled at seeing America as, in his words, “no man had ever known it before.”

While Lindbergh found the adoring response “quite similar regardless of the state,” the receptions in some cities could not help standing out because of their personal significance. In Detroit, he went to the Ford Airport, where he took Henry Ford, crouched into the cockpit, for his first airplane flight; Ford’s son Edsel got a ten-minute ride as well. After receiving the plaudits of close to five hundred thousand in the Twin Cities, Lindbergh piloted his small plane over Melrose, Minnesota—hovering over the very land where Ola Månsson had built a new life for himself in 1859. He flew on to Little Falls, whose streets had been filling since six o’clock that morning. All businesses were closed that Thursday, and there was even restricted postal delivery. Thousands waited at the large pasture three miles north of town where their local hero was meant to arrive. An estimated fifty thousand people from all parts of Minnesota converged upon the small town for the festivities, highlighted by a long parade that featured a dilapidated old heap on which somebody had painted “Lindbergh’s First Plane.” It was the Saxon Six in which Charles had driven his mother and “Brother” to California and back only ten years prior.

In southern California, the Pacific Electric Railway offered special rates to downtown Los Angeles to watch the parade and hear Lindbergh’s speech at the Coliseum; almost one hundred thousand people attended. That night, the city threw a banquet in his honor in the Fiesta Ball Room of the Ambassador Hotel, at which Hollywood royalty paid court. The motion-picture community presented Lindbergh with a gold loving cup, engraved with thirty-six facsimile signatures of the most famous film stars in the world. In less than a month, the first talking picture, The Jazz Singer, would put even the biggest names on that loving cup out of business.

Lindbergh’s fame kept spreading, etching itself deeper into the public consciousness. He was, parents explained to their children, “living history”; and a worshipful nation paid homage and tribute. Official gifts and citations were presented wherever he stopped—ornate scrolls as well as medals, keys, badges, cups, and plaques, usually in gold. Hartford presented a cane carved of wood from a tree in the Mark Twain Garden, and Nashville presented another made from a tree planted by Andrew Jackson. A Choctaw Indian of Oklahoma conferred upon Lindbergh the name “Tohbionssi Chitokaka,” meaning the greatest white eagle.

Lindbergh began to appear in textbooks; schoolchildren wrote essays on him and dedicated their yearbooks to him; and many schools were named for him. The Pennsylvania Railroad rechristened its “St. Louisan” the “The Spirit of St. Louis,” and the Milwaukee Railroad named a parlor car “The Lindbergh.” Reading, Pennsylvania, named its viaduct after him; Los Angeles named the great light at the apex of City Hall “Lindbergh Beacon.” Mountains, lakes, parks, boulevards, islands, bays, and beaches across America and beyond were renamed in his honor.

Lindbergh returned to Mitchel Field on October 23, 1927, his tour having covered 22,350 miles. He had stopped in eighty-two cities, spending the night in sixty-nine of them, where he had been honored at gala dinners and had sat through countless renditions of “Lucky Lindy”—a song he never liked but which bands felt compelled to play whenever he entered the room. Only once on the entire tour had he arrived late, and that was in Portland, Maine, where the fog was so thick he could not find the airfield. He had flown 260 hours, delivered 147 speeches, and had ridden in 1,285 miles of parade. An estimated thirty million spectators had turned out to see him, one-quarter of the nation.

And Lindbergh’s popularity kept growing. When the supervisor of schools at Belleville, New Jersey, asked the local boys what living person they wished to emulate, Lindbergh was the runaway winner, garnering more votes than all the other heroes combined, including Coolidge, Ford, Edison, and General Pershing. “Five centuries have been required to make a saint of Joan of Arc,” observed American journalist Marquis Childs, “but in two years Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh has become a demigod.”

People behaved as though Lindbergh had walked on water, not flown over it. People sought out patches of cloth from the Spirit of St. Louis; old pistons and any other parts from the Wright engine were preserved as relics; the Vacuum Oil Company sent Lindbergh three ounces of the original oil drained from the reservoir of the plane upon its arrival at Le Bourget, which was marked and sealed in a glass ampule for display. One man who had met Lindbergh camping years earlier spent decades searching for the jug from which he had once drunk. And decades later, in 1990, a man in Maine paid $3,000 for the crate in which the Spirit of St. Louis had been shipped home, so that it could be enshrined. A Lindbergh Birthplace Association was formed to purchase by public subscription the house at 1120 West Forest Avenue in Detroit. The house in Little Falls was looted of practically anything that was not nailed down. With trophies and gifts for Lindbergh flooding into St. Louis, one man volunteered to guard them for no pay—simply because “Col. Lindbergh is a messenger from God … sent here to inspire the people, risking his life every day for the betterment of mankind.” Paul Garber asserted, “After the flight, Charles Lindbergh … literally became all things to all men.”

So long as Lindbergh remained neutral on controversial topics, that remained true. He served as a blank screen onto which each person projected his own best images of man. Nowhere did that become more apparent than in an artifact that dogged Lindbergh for the rest of his life. Of unknown origin, it was a list of “Lindbergh’s Character Factors,” fifty-nine personality traits in alphabetical order—from Altruism to Unselfishness—which Lindbergh allegedly marked each night with a red cross for those he had fulfilled satisfactorily and a black cross for those he had violated. Constant self-improvement was the obvious purpose, perfection the goal. For fifty years, it circulated around the world reprinted by church groups, boys’ clubs, even in dictionaries. It was, as Lindbergh assured the Religion Editor of the Cleveland Press in 1973, “pure bunk.” While on tour, it was reported that he smoked a cigarette in front of hundreds of people, commenting to Philip Love, “I won’t be played for a tin saint.” Alas, such behavior only exhibited such checklist virtues as Firmness, Modesty, and Sense of Humor. When it turned out that he did not smoke the cigarette, he won more points for Clean Conduct and Self-Control.

“I feel sure,” Harry Guggenheim wrote Lindbergh in late October, “that nothing has so much contributed to the promotion of aviation in America, with the exception of your own historic flight to Paris, as this tour, which you have just completed.” Statistics already supported the statement. Within weeks of Lindbergh’s flight, Ryan Aircraft had twenty-nine orders for new airplanes—mostly their five-place cabin model—and their workforce had increased from twenty to one hundred twenty. By fall, they were manufacturing three airplanes a week. Airplanes had carried ninety-seven thousand pounds of mail in April and more than one hundred forty-six thousand pounds in September. That year saw a three hundred percent increase in the number of applicants for pilots’ licenses in the United States and an increase of more than four hundred percent in the number of licensed aircraft. America’s one thousand landing fields and airports would practically double within three years, a third of them with lights.

“It is impossible to predict what the future of aviation will be,” Lindbergh had said during his tour, “but I confidently believe that it will become one of the largest industries in the country. Aviation today is in the same position that the automobile was twenty-five or thirty years ago.” He believed, as he had since he began flying, that St. Louis was destined to become the nation’s “aerial cross-roads”; and within weeks of his tour’s conclusion, the City Administration of St. Louis declared its intention to acquire and develop a municipal airport, incorporating General Lambert’s field. Cities voting on bonds for airports invited Lindbergh to visit just before elections. Lindbergh Fields began cropping up.

“Lindbergh’s significance to business seems greater than that of any mercantile or financial magnate on either side of the Atlantic,” wrote Forbes that year.

Progressive bankers, merchants, manufacturers and the public generally, already almost have forgotten that recently it was impossible to get letters of inquiry, money orders, or any other commercial papers across the continent in less time than a business week…. After Lindbergh we shall have transocean airmail.

Lindbergh returned from his tour no closer to having decided on his future. While in New York, he became the “catch” of the social season, with invitations every night. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., hoped Lindbergh might “take a family dinner” and meet his five sons—“who, like every other American boy, are very eager to know you.” One small stag dinner put him in the same living room with George Gershwin, who mesmerized Lindbergh with a showy rendition of Rhapsody in Blue, then stopped playing to ask him about the dangers of his epic flight—specifically, why, at the most dangerous moment, he had not turned back.

During the next month, Lindbergh remained in a tailspin. He put his money in the hands of J. P. Morgan & Co., just as his adviser there, Dwight Morrow, officially terminated his highly lucrative banking career to accept the ambassadorship to Mexico. In thanking Morrow for his past assistance, Lindbergh wrote, “if, by any chance, an opportunity should arise where I might be of any aid to you, please call on me.” Almost immediately, Morrow did.

Before assuming his post, Morrow considered ways in which he could lessen the severe tensions between Mexico and the United States. With heavy American investment in Mexican land and petroleum plus a considerable Mexican debt, one newspaper wrote, “After Morrow, come the marines.” Instead, Morrow invited Lindbergh to his apartment in New York and asked if he would be willing to fly the Spirit of St. Louis south of the border at the end of the year. “I think it would be an excellent thing for Mexico, for aviation, and for the Foundation,” Morrow wrote Harry Guggenheim, “and for him.”

“I wanted to make another long distance non-stop flight before retiring the plane from use and placing it in [a] museum,” Lindbergh recalled. “The plane and engine were practically new and in a number of ways the Spirit of St. Louis was better equipped than any other plane for long flights.” Such a high-minded mission would also allow him to postpone any of the more mundane possibilities before him. Morrow had expected Lindbergh to tour the Caribbean in stages, making Mexico his “central point,” but the thrill for Lindbergh was in attempting another giant leap.

Upon arriving in Mexico, Ambassador Morrow immediately began mending fences between the two countries, proving himself both fair and friendly. His casual air and informal meetings contributed to an unexpected easiness between him and President Plutarco Elías Calles, which the press in both countries happily referred to as “Ham and Eggs Diplomacy.” But nothing enhanced America’s reputation there more than the announcement that Charles Lindbergh was coming to visit. Lindbergh had grown savvy in diplomatic matters and suggested that his flight would be more symbolic if he flew nonstop between the capitals of the two nations. The cautious Ambassador balked at anything so dangerous until Lindbergh said, “You get me the invitation, and I’ll take care of the flying.”

He spent the second week of December in Washington, where Chief Justice Taft presented him with the Langley Medal from the Smithsonian Institution and Congress voted to award him the Congressional Medal, previously reserved for military heroes. On December 13, 1927, the Spirit of St. Louis was rolled onto Bolling Field, across the Anacostia River from Washington. The flight to Mexico was two-thirds the distance of the New York-to-Paris run, but that still meant twenty-four hours in the air.

Lindbergh lifted the heavily laden plane off a soggy field at 12:25 that Tuesday afternoon, flying down the east coast of Texas then doglegging toward Mexico City. Upon entering the Valley of Mexico, he realized that he had lost his way while flying over a sea of fog. Navigating from a rudimentary map, he could not get his bearings. Hoping to match railroad lines on the ground with those on the map, he roamed the skies for hours. He finally chose to follow some tracks, flying low enough to read the sign at each station. Tired, he could not make sense of town after town being called “Caballeros.” He was already late in arriving when he realized that he was reading the signs for the mens’ rooms. At last he flew over a city with a wall marked “Hotel Toluca.” He located Toluca on his map, thirty miles to the west of his target.

Under a July-like sun, 150,000 people waited at Valbuena Airport that afternoon. Ambassador and Mrs. Morrow had been there since mid-morning; and much of the crowd had slept overnight on the field. Lindbergh had been sighted over Tampico and Toluca, but as the aviator was more than two hours late, Morrow and much of the crowd grew anxious. At 3:16, according to Mrs. Morrow’s watch, he arrived, and it was “perfectly thrilling when that plane came to earth.” Morrow presented him to President Calles, who handed him the keys of the city. His flight had taken twenty-seven hours and fifteen minutes; and tardy though he was, Lindbergh noted that it had taken the Morrows almost a week to make the same trip.

There was no holding the Mexicans back in their admiration. Guiding Lindbergh from the grandstand to their waiting car, Mrs. Morrow felt the screaming throng was going to rip off his clothes. All the way into the city, the masses threw flowers at him and shouted, “Viva Lindbergh!” Over the next several days—at receptions, dinners, parades, bullfights, folkdancing exhibitions, and rodeos—the Mexicans displayed more exuberance than Lindbergh had seen anywhere. But the Ambassador deliberately blocked out most of the calendar so that Lindbergh could vacation.

He settled into the Embassy for the yuletide. Evangeline Lindbergh accepted the Morrows’ invitation to spend the holiday with them and flew down from Detroit. The Morrows, who had been living there with their fourteen-year-old daughter, Constance, and their nineteen-year-old son, Dwight Jr., were joined by their two older daughters, Elisabeth and Anne. For the first time since he had become famous, Lindbergh had a few days at a time in which to relax; for the first time since he was a small child, he enjoyed an old-fashioned family Christmas, surrounded by a large loving family; and for the first time in his life, he spent hours in the quiet company of female contemporaries. Although he often lowered his head in their presence, he could not help noticing how each of the Morrow daughters stood in contrast to the others—Elisabeth, the eldest, beautiful and elegant, socially at ease; Constance, the youngest, vivacious and witty, not afraid of teasing their famous guest; and Anne, twenty-one years old and self-conscious. Sometimes he caught her averting her glance so as not to embarrass him. She felt more comfortable watching from afar, then running upstairs to confide in her diary.

“I saw standing against the great stone pillar … a tall, slim boy in evening dress—so much slimmer, so much taller, so much more poised than I expected,” she wrote after laying eyes on him for the first time. “A very refined face, not at all like those grinning ‘Lindy’ pictures—a firm mouth, clear, straight blue eyes, fair hair, and nice color.” Over the next week, she marveled at his extreme youth and lack of affectation. For Christmas, Mrs. Lindbergh gave Anne and Elisabeth antique Spanish fans, accompanied by cards with her son’s signature.

During the week, Anne seldom came out from behind her present long enough to learn much about their special visitor. And once Christmas had passed, Lindbergh became consumed with the next portion of his journey. During his stay in Mexico, Ambassador Morrow and the State Department had arranged for Lindbergh to continue touring around Central America and the Caribbean Sea.

The Morrows saw him off at 5:30 on the morning of December twenty-eighth, as he left for Guatemela City, seven hours away. By the middle of February, he had flown 9,390 miles in 116 and a half hours in and around Latin America—traveling from Guatemala to British Honduras, Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, the Canal Zone, Colombia, Venezuela, St. Thomas, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Cuba. The crowds in most places proved too unmanageable for the police; the receptions were usually the greatest those nations had ever seen. The press consistently applied the term “good will” to these Gulf-and-Caribbean flights; but Lindbergh would later insist, “good will was a very welcome result, but it was not even a major element” in planning the flights. His interest lay primarily in “the adventure of flying, in demonstrating the airplane’s capabilities, and in the development of aviation in general.” He financed the trip himself.

Lindbergh became the world’s first Ambassador of the Air and his nation’s youngest emissary. In each of the sixteen countries he visited that winter, he was decorated with their highest honors and presented with extraordinary gifts—a gold watch from Guatemala, a gold Indian idol from the Canal Zone, a gold brooch from the Dominican Republic, a gold chest of native gold nuggets from Honduras, and a paperweight set with a piece of iron from the anchor of Columbus’s flagship Santa Maria from Haiti, where they also named a street Lindbergh Avenue. More than anywhere he had ever been, donkey-paced Central America reaffirmed for Lindbergh how indispensable aviation was to the progress of mankind.

Lindbergh himself wrote up his Latin American tour for The New York Times. The internationally syndicated pieces, each with a different dateline, had something to interest everybody. As spellbinding as tales of Aladdin on his magic carpet, Lindbergh’s dispatches combined adventure with high society, history lessons with visions of the future. One minute he was flying over tropical mountains, the next he was at a Presidential palace—all told with modesty and awe. This real-life action hero had become a regular feature in people’s lives.

After two months of being worshiped in “El Dorado,” Lindbergh returned to the United States, flying from Havana to St. Louis. The city closed the schools at noon that Tuesday so that every student could gather by the Mississippi and greet him as one. Sixty thousand children, each with an American flag, waited for him—as did almost as many adults—filling the levee for ten city blocks. Lindbergh provided a half-hour stunt show before landing at Lambert Field. With that, he decided that this was to be his plane’s last hurrah, and he announced that he was retiring to private life. In the spring, he would fly his plane to Washington—a remarkable flight of 725 miles in less than five hours—where he would donate the plane to the Smithsonian Institution for permanent exhibition.

But the kudos did not stop coming. Just skimming off the cream of the offers, he accepted an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Laws from the University of Wisconsin, out of which he had flunked but six years earlier; he accepted the Congressional Medal of Honor from President Coolidge in a ceremony at the White House; and he accepted a medal and $25,000 from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation “for contributions to international friendship.” Lindy Clubs, complete with their own oath, laws, and salute, sprang up. Press coverage did not abate, as each event fostered the next. In an attempt to lure readers, a new magazine called Time tried boosting sales at the end of 1927 by naming a “Man of the Year.” The first such honoree was Lindbergh.

He tried to concentrate his attention on the development of commercial aviation, entering into conversations with airlines, the Pennsylvania Railroad, even Henry Ford—all of whom were interested in the future of transportation. He also became a paid consultant of the Daniel Guggenheim Fund and the United States government’s Bureau of Aeronautics. Still unsettled, he kept himself in constant motion, flying all around the country. “Reporters and photographers had crowded in at every airfield,” Lindbergh later recalled of that period. “Automobile-loads of people followed them. The hotels where I stayed at night were watched. I could not walk along a street without being followed, photographed, and shouted at.” He had become the first person to be constantly stalked by the media.

And then one day flying westward, Lindbergh crossed the Rocky Mountain ranges of southern Wyoming and eastern Utah and saw desert ahead. The sun was setting in front of him, and he knew a gang of journalists was waiting to ambush him in whichever town he decided to land. Instinctively, he brought his plane down right on the desert floor. “What peace I found there,” he later remembered, “on that warm but cooling surface of our planet’s sphere!”

Lindbergh spent the night on the dried lake bed and experienced an epiphany. He realized he had been sentenced to a life as a public figure on a scale to which no man before him had ever been subjected. Feeling overexposed, overextended, and overexalted, he wished to “combine two seemingly contrary objectives, to be part of the civilization of my time but not to be bound by its conventional superfluity.”

The solution was to simplify. “I would reduce my obligations, give away some of my possessions, concentrate my business and social interests,” he later wrote of his new objectives. “I would take advantage of the civilization to which I had been born without losing the basic qualities of life from which all works of men must emanate.”

The Missouri Historical Society had asked Lindbergh if they might exhibit his trophies at Forest Park. He agreed to a ten-day display—during which time eighty thousand people visited. He extended his permission to show the prizes indefinitely; and during the next year, one and one-half million people peered into the display cases that took up most of the first floor of the west wing of the Jefferson Memorial Building. Lindbergh never asked for the return of his treasury; in fact, a few years later, he formally deeded the entire lot to the historical society.

While he could share the trophies, he had nobody with whom to enjoy the celebration. Except for the occasional company of his mother, Lindbergh had experienced his entire year of accolades alone. Among the myriads who had glorified “the Lone Eagle,” there was only a handful of people he even wanted to see again. Living constantly in the public eye, it was difficult to imagine a personal relationship with anybody ever unfolding naturally. Friendships seemed difficult, a romance out of the question. Solitude seemed the most he could wish for, and that would have to be a hard-fought achievement. The fame he had never sought threatened to turn him into a freak.

In the spring of 1928 Lindbergh grew lonely, longing for intimacy. At the age of twenty-six, he decided “it was time to meet girls.” Unconsciously, his mind kept returning to one young woman he had encountered among the millions of his admirers, Ambassador Morrow’s daughter—the shy one who always seemed to be looking away. Anne had been taken with him as well, as she revealed only to her diary upon his departure:

The idea of this clear, direct, straight boy—how it has swept out of sight all other men I have known, all the pseudo-intellectuals, the sophisticates, the posers—all the “arty” people. All my life, in fact, my world—my little embroidery beribboned world is smashed.