9

“WE”

“I still expected to devote the greater part of my life that was spent

apart from my family in developing fields of aviation.”

—C.A.L.

SUMMERY WEATHER WELCOMED THE MOUETTE AS IT CRUISED up the Long Island Sound; and the honeymooners enjoyed smooth sailing for most of a week, in complete privacy. Their fourth day at sea, the Mouette pulled into the harbor at Block Island for fresh water.

With the world speculating as to where its most famous newlyweds had disappeared, Charles prepared a disguise for coming ashore. A stubbly beard growing in, he pulled a black-checked cap down over his eyes and wore a pair of dark glasses. While his costume seemed to have deflected attention, his boat did not. When some fishermen on the wharf asked about his large cruiser, he kiddingly told them that he was Lindbergh. Eavesdropping from behind the green curtains in the cabin, Anne delighted in the cleverness of his ruse.

Within a few days, they reached Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where the press, at last, discovered them. The Lindberghs spent the next four days pushing their way to the coast of Maine as hard as they could. One morning, a reporter in a launch persisted in circling the Mouette, hoping the chop of his boat would make the Lindberghs seasick enough to come topside. They never gave him the satisfaction. After eight hours, Lindbergh decided to get away by gunning the engine, dragging the anchor until they lost the reporter on the open sea.

Each day filled Anne with wonder as she learned the rules of being Mrs. Lindbergh. Four years younger and in the thrall of her new husband, she went along with his every desire, trying to figure out his periodic inconsistencies. She was more than a little surprised, for example, when they pulled into York Harbor, at the southern tip of Maine, where they found a crowd of reporters and townspeople awaiting them. Charles was unusually cheerful, seeming to enjoy showing Anne off to the crowd. Then the chase resumed, as they headed for the cluster of tiny islands that dotted Penobscot Bay.

It was Lindbergh’s first visit to the North Haven area, and he adored it on sight—“passing island after island with its deep-green forest and spray-dashed rocks.” They both especially liked one of the wildest of the group—Big Garden Island—which Dwight Morrow had just given his daughter as a wedding present. After a few days of complete peace together, they retraced their route, slipping unnoticed into Room 1802 of the Berkshire Hotel on East Fifty-second Street in Manhattan.

While their first three weeks of marriage had been far from the splendor they could afford, it had provided the greatest luxury they could find anywhere—time alone. Living on canned goods and ginger ale and a Kellogg’s breakfast food called ZO, Anne had surprised herself with her own resiliency. She had found pleasure in the physical labor of their trip and in the rigors of seamanship. “I think it is perfectly thrilling to navigate—use a parallel rule and the compass rose and find magnetic, true, and compass course—and keep the needle on that number—and actually get there!” she wrote her brother Dwight, still under doctors’ care. “Of course with my usual carelessness at the end of the trip I discovered that I had been counting the wrong lines in the compass rose. Charles made terrific fun of me and said I did it because those lines were ‘prettier.’” Just days short of her twenty-third birthday, Anne sent her mother a glowing report of her honeymoon—explaining that it was “all so natural & not a bit terrifying—not a terrific change or even strange—and—a great deal of fun!”

No sooner were the Lindberghs back on land than they took to the air. Transcontinental Air Transport had announced the inauguration of its crosscountry service; and as Chairman of TAT’s Technical Committee, Lindbergh insisted on spending the night at each stop so that he could make a final inspection of equipment and personnel. His bride accompanied him on this transcontinental dry run; and with each new city, Anne accustomed herself to the rituals of being the hero’s wife.

After spending one night in Columbus, the next in Indianapolis, and the next in St. Louis, she realized everywhere they went and probably ever would go, “Charles is Charlemagne”—complete with royal treatment (and giggling telephone operators) to which he no longer even took notice. She could not understand why people now asked for her autograph. To her surprise, she cottoned to all of Charles’s friends, down to the grease-monkeys at the airfields. She was startled to discover Kansas City was in Missouri and that Waynoka, TAT’s port city in Oklahoma, was little more than five paved roads and a hotel. Lindbergh, of course, was the guest of honor at the dedication of the town’s new airfield—the biggest crowd, said one townsman, “since the dedication of the pavement!” Upon arriving in California, Lindbergh authorized TAT to commence its transcontinental service.

At 6:05 P.M. on July 7, 1929, The Airway Limited left Pennsylvania Station in New York for Port Columbus, Ohio. Several of its passengers would continue westward for the forty-eight-hour air-and-rail trip to Los Angeles, mostly journalists given free tickets. The next morning Charles and Anne Lindbergh went to the Grand Central Air Terminal in Glendale, in the San Fernando Valley. The large trimotored City of Los Angeles, made of corrugated aluminum alloy that looked like tin, shimmered in the summer sun. Five thousand spectators and a band were on hand for the ceremonies. Several dignitaries spoke, including Governor Frank Merriam of California. Then “America’s Sweetheart,” Mary Pickford, stood on a ladder and cracked a bottle of grape juice over the nose of the flower-festooned ship. The Lindberghs posed with Miss Pickford for the newsreel and newspaper photographers, then Charles excused himself.

A select group of ten, including Anne, boarded what the newsmen were calling “The Tin Goose.” While the copilot revved the engines, Charles Lindbergh came from the cockpit into the cabin and shook hands with each passenger. He would be their pilot that morning. Despite his reassuring grin, some found him looking “tired and tense.” The press was already building public suspense, writing at length how Lindbergh had staked “his name and future on the venture,” noting that “the slightest mishap would be disastrous.”

Anne became TAT’s unofficial hostess, showing the other passengers that they too could relax in the air. To her family and friends she raved about every detail of the flight—starting with the cool gray-green of the cabin with its green curtains at each window and blue-shaded lights over each of the adjustable green leather chairs. A white-uniformed attendant provided stationery, maps and postcards, and a small aluminum table for each passenger. After two and one-half hours, the plane touched down in Kingman, Arizona, where everyone disembarked and walked under a long awning on rollers, which connected the plane with the “station.” The passengers re-boarded after a fifteen-minute stop and, once in the air, partook in a meal which had been specially prepared by the local Harvey House. The attendant set up each passenger’s table, covering it with a lavender linen tablecloth. They dined off metal plates on cold meats, salad with sliced pineapple, white and brown bread, sliced grapefruit, cake, and hot coffee poured from a large thermos. Less than two hours later, they had crossed the great Southwestern desert and landed in Winslow.

The City of Los Angeles continued east with a fresh crew and without the Lindberghs. They spent the night in Arizona so that Charles could fly the first passengers on the incoming City of Washington. Amelia Earhart—who had become world-famous the year before, as the first woman to fly the Atlantic (Newfoundland to South Wales, along with pilot Wilmer Stultz and a mechanic)—was among them. The success of the new operation quickly found others willing to pay the cross-country fare of $290.

Seeing how wearying it was for Anne to wear a public mask, Charles took her to northern California for a weekend alone in a log-cabin camp in a valley of tall redwoods. They canoed and swam in a mountain stream that ran past their door. Anne’s writings from this period were extremely romantic, full of magical images at every turn. “I kicked up golden dust when I opened the gates for C. as we drove through fields and farms today,” she wrote her mother from upstate California after a day of simple pleasures. “Maybe it’s just the way we feel, C. and I, when we get off together, alone—all gold, that extra golden bloom over everything!”

But Anne was quickly learning that time alone with her husband would always be rare. Aviation, like Wall Street, was booming that year; and Lindbergh’s public presence was essential to that industry. Once TAT had completed its foundation line, with hub cities across the country, other airlines in various corners of the nation could connect their routes, creating a web of airlanes that united all the states. The next year, more airlines would span the continent; and Lindbergh would play a part in the growth of all of them, especially as they tried to maintain their footing after that October’s stock market crash.

With the addition of new routes, each month saw an increase in passengers taking to the air. But more essential to the survival of a new airline was the presence of a United States mailbag. In fact, most companies fortunate enough to secure a mail contract subsisted on that alone. The most influential man in commercial aviation thus became the man who awarded those contracts—Postmaster General Walter Folger Brown.

A Republican mover and shaker, Brown became an authority on commercial aviation and put that knowledge to both personal and public use. He was blindly ambitious and a visionary who looked out for the public good. With the onset of the Depression, Brown believed the fledgling industry needed a few large, strong companies, not many small, weak ones to see it through hard times and into financial stability. He assumed extraordinary powers, consolidating routes and revoking route certificates at his own discretion.

Lindbergh shared many of the same views about the business of aviation as Brown. Seeing the need to build a broad airline network as quickly as possible, he regarded Brown’s energetic reforms as enlightened capitalism. Toward that end, Lindbergh had several meetings in California with Jack Maddux, a maverick businessman who had started his own bus line and automobile business in the Southwest. His aviation company had been in operation for two years. In 1929 alone, the Maddux Line flew more than a million miles, linking Los Angeles with San Diego and San Francisco as well as the Imperial and San Joaquin Valleys and Baja California. On November sixteenth, the company would merge with TAT.

American Airways received one of the two transcontinental air routes Brown put up for bids in the summer of 1930—the southern route—Atlanta to Dallas to Los Angeles. Then, instead of simply awarding the second contract for a more central route to a bidder, Postmaster General Brown chose to form a new company, all but forcing a merger between TAT-Maddux and Western Air Express. He turned the marriage into a ménage à trois, folding the Mellon-controlled Pittsburgh Aviation Industries Company (PAIC) into the deal not only because of its ability to fly the northeastern leg of the route but also to reward a few friends. The new Transcontinental and Western Air—T&WA—would be run by an executive from PAIC named Richard Robbins. The company would gradually drop its ampersand and make increasing use of its motto, “The Lindbergh Line.”

In September 1929, “The Lindbergh Line” suffered its first major catastrophe when one of the TAT trimotor transports disappeared en route from Albuquerque to Los Angeles. The Lindberghs were about to go to Maine; but Charles explained to Anne that it would seem “brutal” to the public—especially to those related to the passengers on the ship—if it appeared that he had gone off on vacation. Charles tried to answer as many questions as he could about the plane’s disappearance. Then, despite bad weather, he and Anne took a small fast plane, a Lockheed Vega, out West to join the search party. Even if there was little for Lindbergh to do, the gesture of his flying to the rescue—accompanied by his diminutive wife—was essential to the image of both the company and commercial aviation. After the Lindberghs’ arrival in the Southwest, the crashed plane was found on Mount Williams, with no survivors.

Lindbergh visited two other crash-sites during the next eighteen months. Paul Garber, the Smithsonian’s first curator of the National Air Museum, said that these public displays were practically as important to commercial aviation as his flight to Paris. “It took Lindy’s big smile to get those first passengers into planes, especially after those crashes,” he said. “He made it all look so easy … and safe enough to take his pretty, young wife along with him.”

The Lindbergh name became part of America’s daily parlance. Even after the public novelty of their marriage had worn off, Charles and Anne performed a succession of newsworthy deeds which kept them in the headlines. The nation found them more glamorous than movie stars because their romantic adventures together were real. Lindbergh allowed a certain amount of professional exploitation, but he refused to answer questions about his personal life, talking about Anne only insofar as she was becoming an increasingly active partner in aviation.

Over the next year, Charles privately taught Anne to fly, and she studied navigation. “The instructor comes every morning at 10 and we, or I (when C. is at the Lockheed factory) work until lunch,” Anne wrote her mother-in-law. “Then he leaves us problems and we work part of the afternoon. Then he comes back right after supper at 7:30 and we work until we drop asleep…. It is very interesting work in itself and very wonderful to me that you can get your exact position in a few minutes with a watch, a sextant, a few tables (of spherical geometry) & a little addition and subtraction—that is if you can see two stars or the sun & the moon…. Charles makes great fun of me because I can only add and subtract dollars and cents—and get all mixed up with degrees and minutes.” During one of their visits to California, she and her husband took up gliding, and Anne became the first licensed female glider in the country. “Women are just as well-fitted to operate a plane as men,” Lindbergh told one reporter, “and the physical difference between them that may handicap women in other lines of work need not do so when it comes to flying.”

The preceding year, Lindbergh had returned from his Pan American Airways business in Central America via the Yucatán. In the midst of the Mexican jungle he had noticed the ruins of an ancient temple. When he had reached Washington, he telephoned Dr. Charles G. Abbot, Secretary of the Smithsonian, who informed him that he had seen the recent excavation of the Temple of the Warriors at the great Mayan city of Chichén Itzá. His interest in archaeology whetted, Lindbergh read up on the pre-Columbian civilization; and he met Dr. John C. Merriam, president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, who was supervising other excavations of primitive civilizations. Lindbergh suggested that the airplane could be a valuable tool not only in reaching remote places but in providing “the eyes of birds to the minds of men.”

Dr. Merriam told Lindbergh of two archaeological camps near America’s Four Corners, not far off TWA’s Southwestern route. That summer, Charles and Anne flew from California in an open-cockpit Curtiss Falcon biplane over the Canyon de Chelly, several hundred miles west of the main camp in the area. There they saw a number of small ruins perched so high as to be virtually invisible from the canyon bottom. The Lindberghs made several flights over the long-abandoned community—unmarked on archaeological maps—taking hundreds of photographs of terrain and ruins. They climbed the cliffs and examined the ruins, which, according to the Carnegie Institution’s News Service Bulletin, had “never before been visited by white people.”

The Bulletin praised the Lindbergh expedition for several reasons. Above all, the airplane allowed an observer to cover in a few hours territory that might require months on the back of an animal. Their photographs also showed “much better than in any other way, topographical features in proximity to the ruins which must have affected in a vital way the life of the inhabitants.” The Lindbergh survey’s impact on archaeology was incalculable. Media coverage of this latest adventure spawned a new interest in both the science and the early civilizations.

The Lindberghs explored Central and South America that fall as well. When Charles had flown there just before his marriage, he had been surveying and organizing air routes. In September 1929, Lindbergh returned to those waters with his wife, along with Juan and Betty Trippe. Linking the Gulf and Caribbean countries to the United States was an important step in the development of global transportation in and of itself, as they opened passenger and mail service linking the Americas. In just ten days at the end of September, they stopped in Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, and Nicaragua. “There were mobs of people at every airport,” remembered Juan Trippe.

Before each takeoff, Lindbergh walked the dirt airfields, testing its hardness. “One of the fields was a sea of mud,” Trippe remembered. “Slim trudged through the mud from one end of the field to another, and after we had taken off, he hung his socks out of the cabin window to dry … but one of them blew away. So at the next stop in Curaçao, there was the usual crowd of well-wishers, the band, and the reviewing stand, and there was Slim greeting all the dignitaries wearing only one sock. But that flight marked the first air mail delivered to South America. It opened up a continent.”

Lindbergh had been warned that “it would be foolhardy to attempt a flight around the Caribbean, that the weather was too bad and unpredictable, the rain squalls frequent and too heavy to fly through.” But the successful 1929 tour by the Lindberghs and the Trippes paved the way for permanent air routes in that territory. More than that, as Trippe would later recount, “The Caribbean was our first laboratory for overwater flying operations. Lindbergh, from his first Caribbean flight on, was in on virtually every decision of a technical nature that Pan American made, and from the very start he showed an understanding also of the economic and political hurdles that had to be surmounted.”

Having enjoyed their archaeological sorties in the southwestern United States so much, the Lindberghs concluded their Pan American swing with a visit to the Maya region. With the blessing of Juan Trippe—who encouraged any activity that promoted interest in the skies he serviced—they flew from Nicaragua to Belize. In a Pan American twin-motored amphibian—the S-38—the Lindberghs covered most of the Yucatán peninsula in five days. Accompanied by Dr. A. V. Kidder, they flew from Tikal to Uaxactún in six minutes—what would have been a long day’s journey by mule-train. Over Chichén Itzá, Lindbergh himself took what many still consider the finest photograph of the entire city. They explored the southeasternmost state of Quintana Roo. “The greatest thrills of our five days’ flying came, of course with the finding of groups of Maya ruins indicating the presence of ancient cities,” Dr. Kidder wrote afterward. In less than a week, they discovered as many as six lost sites which might otherwise not have been reached for decades.

Despite the press’s embellishing of Lindbergh’s archaeological work, he always kept its value in proportion. More than once he was approached by admirers who asked him to tell about the lost Mayan city he had “discovered,” to which he would reply, “As a matter of fact I located a small ruined wall almost covered by tropical vegetation.”

While spending much of his time exploring the past, Charles Lindbergh’s most far-reaching scientific investigations that year were aimed toward the future. Months earlier, on a solo flight in his Ryan monoplane between New York and St. Louis, his mind had begun to wander. Bucking a strong headwind at eighty-five miles per hour, he considered the great human milestones in transportation. “Through the centuries,” he realized, “man had developed the wheel to travel over land, the hull to sail across water, and the wing to fly through air.” Advancing his thought, he asked himself if man could ever enter space. “If so,” he thought, “obviously we would have to overcome the need for wings and the limitations of propellers.” Lindbergh wondered from whom he could learn the essentials for sending man into space.

The Lindberghs relaxed for a day in August 1929, at Falaise on Long Island. There occurred one of those serendipitous moments which, in Lindbergh’s words, “so often bend the trends of life and history.” While Anne had excused herself to write letters upstairs, Charles and the Guggenheims retired to the large living room, where the men invariably discussed aviation. Lindbergh was standing by a window—looking at the Sound and comparing an airplane’s speed with a slow string of barges—when Carol suddenly exclaimed, “Listen to this!” She proceeded to read aloud from an article in Popular Science Monthly about a recent explosion in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Robert Hutchings Goddard, the forty-seven-year-old Chairman of the Physics Department at Clark University, had spent his sickly childhood reading the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. Finding physics a creative outlet for his own active imagination, he became obsessed with formulating a method of reaching extreme altitudes. He studied at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, earned a doctorate locally at Clark University, and did postgraduate research at Princeton. He kept his thoughts about rockets under his hat as much as possible. But, he quickly learned, experimentation in this nascent field of study cost a lot of money and inevitably attracted a lot of local attention.

The press superficially summarized his work as an attempt to reach the moon. Worse for Goddard than being dismissed as a lunatic was the undue attention being placed on his experimentation, which stripped him of the privacy necessary for trial and error. Cadging grants in a new field of study was difficult enough without having ridicule attached to his work.

Goddard had won a $5,000 grant from the Smithsonian Institution, and a few thousand dollars more from Clark University; but his experiments with gasoline and liquid oxygen quickly burned through his funds. The year Charles Lindbergh first dreamed of flying from New York to Paris, Robert Goddard had launched a ten-foot-tall contraption of steel tubing forty-one feet into the air in 2.5 seconds over a trajectory of 184 feet. Three years later, on his Aunt Effie Ward’s farm, in Auburn, he sent another slightly larger model soaring—twenty feet above its sixty-foot launching tower, at which point it veered right and rose another ten feet, landing 171 feet away. This was the projectile—only some 200,000 miles short of the moon, he told journalists in an attempt to lead them from covering his experiments—that Carol Guggenheim had read about.

Upon hearing about the missile, Lindbergh called on the Du Pont Company, among the world’s largest manufacturers of chemicals and explosives, and arranged a private audience. On November 1, 1929, he flew to Wilmington, Delaware, where Henry Du Pont had gathered twenty of his organization’s leading executives, engineers, and scientists. “Might rockets,” Lindbergh asked, “be used to get far out into space or as power- plants for aircraft?” The scientists were skeptical, explaining that the necessary fuel would be too heavy, the temperatures too high, the combustion time too short.

Realizing that his vision was beyond their present horizons, Lindbergh left the group with a simple problem to keep their minds on the subject of rockets. As aviation was just emerging from a period marked by frequent engine failures, he asked if a small rocket could not be devised, one that could be “attached to an airplane for emergency use in case of engine failure on take-off.” A single minute of such reserve power, Lindbergh indicated, might be enough to avert a serious crash. Du Pont’s chemical director conducted an investigation of the problem which led Henry Du Pont to conclude that it was not worth further consideration. Lindbergh still had not encountered anybody who shared his belief that “rockets would be practical either for aircraft or for flights into space.”

In the meantime, he learned that Professor Goddard was a highly regarded physicist, not the mad scientist many had suggested. On a gray afternoon at the end of November, Goddard answered his telephone only to find Charles Lindbergh at the other end. Lindbergh proclaimed interest in Goddard’s work in rocketry and asked if they might discuss it in person. Goddard waited until dinner that night before nonchalantly telling his wife, Esther, of his unusual call. “Of course, Bob,” she replied. “And I had tea with Marie, the Queen of Rumania.”

On Saturday, November 23, 1929, Lindbergh drove to Worcester in his 1927 Franklin sedan. The wary Goddard trusted his visitor on sight, showing him his laboratory and taking him back to his house, where Esther Goddard brought out some milk and a homemade chocolate cake. They sat on the porch for hours, while Goddard did most of the talking—disclosing results of his experiments with paper-thin Duralumin combustion chambers instead of firebrick and liquid fuel instead of explosive powder. “I was tremendously impressed with Goddard,” Lindbergh recalled forty years later, “his accomplishments, his knowledge, and his confidence in the future of rocket flight.” When Lindbergh asked if he thought it possible to build a rocket that could reach the moon, Goddard said yes, by building a multistage missile, a patent for which he already held. But, Goddard added with a grin suggesting an even wilder concept, “it might cost a million dollars to do so.”

Short of that, Lindbergh asked Goddard what he would require to reach more immediate goals. With $25,000 a year for four years, Goddard replied, he could set up a laboratory and launching tower somewhere far from neighbors’ complaints, police restrictions, or snooping journalists. He could then accomplish in four years, he said, “what might otherwise take him a lifetime.” By the end of the day, and Esther’s chocolate cake, Lindbergh was determined to secure that backing.

A few weeks later, Lindbergh met Goddard in Wilmington, where he had arranged another meeting. Lindbergh thought the people at Du Pont would be interested in Goddard’s projects; and he knew that the Du Pont Company could easily appropriate $25,000 a year for further research in what he considered “a fascinating and little-known field.” The meeting was a dud, as Goddard hesitated to reveal details of his liquid-fueled rocket to people more interested in gun-powder. Lindbergh gave Goddard a lift north, his first plane ride.

After arranging a meeting with the Carnegie Institution, which yielded $5,000, Lindbergh concluded that Goddard would probably find support more readily from a single investor than from an institution, a wealthy benefactor who would not have to answer to a board. In the back of his mind, he kept thinking of Daniel Guggenheim, but he hesitated because Daniel’s son, Harry, had become one of his close friends. “Also,” Lindbergh later recalled, “I felt that Daniel Guggenheim had done much more than his share in supporting scientific progress when he had contributed five million dollars to set up a philanthropic fund for the promotion of aeronautics.”

Revelations of Germany’s recent experiments with rockets quickly dispelled Lindbergh’s reluctance. Concerned that the United States maintain its postwar position of global supremacy, he went to Hempstead House, a gray stone castle, statelier than Falaise, which sat on a neighboring bluff in Sands Point. Daniel Guggenheim, then in his mid-seventies, met him in the entry hall, where Lindbergh started blurting his interest in rockets and Goddard even before they had sat down. “Then you think that rockets have a future?” Guggenheim asked. “One can’t be certain,” said Lindbergh; “but if we advance beyond airplanes and propellers, we’ll probably have to turn to rockets.”

Guggenheim asked Lindbergh to assess Professor Goddard’s ability and his financial needs. Lindbergh replied, “I think he knows more about rockets than any other man in the country,” and that proper expansion of his knowledge would require $100,000. Guggenheim asked Lindbergh if he thought such research was worth so large an investment. “Well, it’s taking a chance,” Lindbergh replied, pausing before committing himself, “but—yes, I think it’s worth it.” Guggenheim said he would back the venture, asking only that an advisory committee be formed and that Lindbergh join it. Lindbergh telephoned Goddard with the news, telling him to start planning the future.

The bulk of Goddard’s first two-year budget would pay for machinists and assistants and setting up shop. He allotted himself $5,000 a year in salary. A meteorologist at Clark directed him to a high plateau in the barren southeast corner of New Mexico which promised little fog, few clouds, and mild temperatures. In the summer of 1930, just a year after Lindbergh had first heard Goddard’s name in the living room at Falaise, the professor and his wife set up a home and laboratory in the little city of Roswell. Twenty miles away, Goddard and a small team erected a rocket-launching tower made from the galvanized-iron framework of a windmill.

The press release about Daniel Guggenheim’s patronage of Goddard’s work was couched in the most mundane terms possible, to make the research sound levelheaded. “Perfection of Professor Goddard’s rocket,” the statement said, “will mean that thermometers, barometers, electrical measuring apparatus, air traps to collect samples of air and other instruments may be sent to extreme altitudes to bring back much-needed information.” But Lindbergh already knew that Goddard was laying the foundation for launching a rocket that could reach the moon.

When the Depression began to corrode even the Guggenheim fortune, the Foundation’s support for Goddard crumbled, forcing the physics professor back to Clark University. As a result of Lindbergh’s importuning, however, Guggenheim restored full funding to Goddard, letting him return to New Mexico. Within a few years he was launching fifteen-foot rockets weighing eighty-five pounds as high as seventy-five hundred feet, gyroscopically controlled, veering off their vertical course by only two degrees.

To keep Guggenheim funds flowing, Lindbergh flew his friend Harry out to Roswell so that they might see an actual launch. But during their visit, two rockets misfired, leaving Goddard “as mortified as a parent whose child misbehaves in front of company.” Lindbergh’s enthusiasm, however, kept Guggenheim’s interest stoked. He even convinced the secretive Goddard to publicize some of his latest results, which not only helped alter public perception toward rockets but also—in the words of G. Edward Pendray, one of the founders of the American Rocket Society—“brought the rocket forcibly to the attention of reputable scientists and engineers as a possible instrument” for reaching high altitudes.

IT WAS DIFFICULT to mark exactly when the Lindberghs’ honeymoon ended, as one trip blended into another. They never rested in a single place longer than a few days. At first, life on the road agreed with Anne. Strangely, it took the pressure off their period of adjustment, forcing them to work together. But in exchanging her “insulation of conventional upbringing” for his “insulation of fame, publicity, and constant travel,” Anne felt that she and her husband were not breaking down the barriers of intimacy, allowing them to explore what she called the “real life” of human relationships.

There were the odd days when they were at least able to move into somebody’s house; but even family visits were coordinated with professional duties. What appeared to be a social invitation from the White House, for example, resulted in Lindbergh’s being appointed to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. A trip to Cleveland to see Anne’s grandmother was scheduled so that Charles could appear at the Cleveland Air Races, where he performed as a member of the Navy “High Hat” aerobatic team. At the races he also met Ernst Udet, the German flying ace, and Jerry Vultee, an engineer from Lockheed, with whom he placed an order for a low-wing monoplane for future survey flights.

After five months on the move together, Anne gave her husband good reason to settle down. “I have felt miserable for a week or more—nauseated all the time & throwing up,” she wrote her mother from New York in late October. A week later, the Morrow family doctor confirmed that she was pregnant. “Charles is such a darling about it all,” she assured her mother, “—I am terribly lucky to have him.”

Their travel lessened over the next few months but hardly came to a standstill. They remained the most peripatetic couple on earth, their flights now having the additional purpose of finding a place to live. The Berkshire, on East Fifty-second Street in New York City, remained their base as they looked for permanent lodging—searches by air that took them to Long Island, the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, the Alleghenies in Pennsylvania, and upstate Connecticut. Like the rest of the Morrow family that year, they found themselves coming home to Next Day Hill to roost. At the urging of the Republican party, Dwight Morrow left his post in Mexico to run for the United States Senate, an election he won by two hundred thousand votes. His wife was thrilled to return to New Jersey, where she would reign over the social life of the community. Their son would also be joining them, still convalescing from his breakdown. And though she was often fatigued and at the mercy of her chronic heart disease, Elisabeth came back to Englewood as well, where she and a friend opened The Little School, a progressive nursery school for two- and three-year-olds in a white frame house behind a white picket fence on Linden Avenue.

During the queasy first months of her pregnancy, Anne was happy to be at Next Day Hill, grateful for the luxury of a staff serving her breakfast in bed and for afternoons reading and walking through the gardens. Charles appreciated the proximity to his business dealings in New York, but he never felt comfortable amid the grandeur of the Morrows’ estate. By the start of 1930, the Lockheed company informed him that it had nearly completed the plane he had ordered at the Cleveland Air Races; and, after several weeks under the same roof as his in-laws, he eagerly left for Los Angeles. Surprisingly, so did Anne.

The Lindberghs spent the first months of the new year up and down the West Coast, making the Madduxes’ house in Los Angeles their base. They visited Will Rogers and his family at his Pacific Palisades ranch. And in April, Lindbergh took delivery of his low-wing monoplane for $18,000.

All according to Lindbergh’s specifications, the plane featured the latest developments in technology and comfort. He had requested a tandem cockpit to permit full vision to either side, the narrow fuselage allowing free use of parachutes in an emergency. An unpatented sliding isinglass canopy of Lindbergh and Vultee’s design could be drawn to enclose the two cockpits, the first of its type to be used on an airplane. The plane had dual control, to permit flying, navigating, or photography from either cockpit. Lindbergh also had a small generator installed in the ship, so that they could plug in their new flying suits, which were electrified for warmth. After a few days of testing, Lindbergh pronounced the Lockheed Sirius ready for a transcontinental flight.

At sunrise on Easter Sunday, April 20, 1930, Lindbergh entered the front cockpit of the Sirius and revved the 450 h.p. Pratt & Whitney engine. His wife—seven months pregnant—settled into the rear, organizing her navigation equipment. Most people expected Lindbergh to prove the value of his new plane by filling the gas tanks and flying low and slowly across country. Instead, he secretly made plans to stop once along the way to refuel, thus allowing him to carry less gas and fly at full speed the entire distance, above the weather. “C. feels (very sensibly),” Anne wrote her mother, “that the object of such a flight is not the non-stop element but simply the speed across the country.” The Lindberghs left Los Angeles, stopped in Wichita and continued eastward at full throttle all the way, often as high as fourteen thousand feet, in search of the most favorable winds. They landed in New York fourteen hours, forty-five minutes, and thirty-two seconds later—breaking the transcontinental speed record by three hours.

Reporters awaited their arrival at Roosevelt Field. By the time the plane came to a stop, however, the pregnant Anne was too nauseous—from the altitude, engine fumes, and an entire day of noise and vibration—to leave the aircraft. Although her head had been throbbing with pain for the last four hours of the trip, Anne had suffered in silence, afraid of spoiling the record flight. Charles faced the press alone, covering as best he could for his wife’s remaining onboard. After the reporters had dispersed, however, she was spotted being helped out of the plane and into a limousine, looking ashen except for her red, tear-stained eyes. Some reported that she had suffered a nervous breakdown.

The Lindberghs withdrew to Next Day Hill. Anne’s seclusion prompted more shocking canards. One day in May she answered the telephone, only to have a reporter from the London Daily News ask about the “widespread rumor in New York that the ‘heir’ was born in April and something happened to it!” Anne pretended to be the secretary and calmly responded, “There is no information being given out.” An army of reporters and photographers stood vigil at the Morrows’ gate. “Their intrusiveness became so objectionable,” Lindbergh later commented, “that it became necessary to employ special guards both day and night.”

Charles and Anne imposed a news blackout for as long as possible. Because neither telephone nor telegraph operators were above accepting bribes—indeed, Lindbergh heard of a new standing offer of $2,000 for any “secrets of the household”—Charles devised a coded message to wire his mother when the baby arrived: “Advise purchasing property” if it was a boy; “advise accepting terms of contract” if it was a girl. Charles would send the message using the name of an outlaw ancestor, Reuben Lloyd.

Next Day Hill practically became a sanitarium, what with doctors also checking on Dwight Jr. and on Elisabeth, who, in the excitement of opening The Little School, had suffered a mild heart attack. A delivery room and nursery were set up for Anne, and Charles stepped up his search for a homesite, now focusing on New Jersey.

“PURCHASING PROPERTY,” “Reuben Lloyd” wired Evangeline Lindbergh on June 22, 1930, Anne’s twenty-fourth birthday. A nurse and three doctors had attended the birth. Charles stood by his wife during the entire eleven-hour labor, holding one of her hands while Betty Morrow held the other. When the pain became too excruciating for her to bear, the anesthetist put her completely under. For Charles’s sake, Anne was happy to have delivered a son, even though he said the sex of the infant did not matter to him. When she first saw the healthy seven-pound, six-ounce newborn, she thought, “Oh dear, it’s going to look like me—dark hair and a nose all over its face.” Then she recognized Charles’s mouth and the “unmistakable” cleft in the chin and happily fell asleep.

Lindbergh and his in-laws argued about releasing the news. Betty Morrow was able to wrest permission only to inform the household staff, so long as she did not reveal the baby’s gender. After the diplomatic Dwight Morrow persuaded him to present the barest formal statement, Lindbergh dashed off a short script for Arthur Springer, Morrow’s secretary, to read to the wire services. “Mr. Springer calling from the home of Ambassador Morrow,” he was instructed to say. “A son was born today to Mr. and Mrs. Lindbergh. This is for your information. Mr. and Mrs. Lindbergh are issuing no announcement.”

Telegrams and letters and flowers and presents and poems and songs poured in from all over the world—mostly from complete strangers. Parents Magazine sent the Lindberghs a free subscription; the director of the Florentine Choir of Italy composed a lullaby; chambers of commerce across the country sent silver cups and brushes. A Boston company printed special cards for the occasion—“Congratulations to the Happy Lindberghs”—hundreds of which arrived at Next Day Hill. Headlines referred to the infant as “Wee Lindy,” “Baby Lindy,” or simply “Eaglet.” Countless editorial cartoons portrayed a baby eagle in flight with the stork. Numerologists and astrologers made public predictions, one pronouncing him a genius, another asserting, “The Lindbergh heir will earn a name for himself, through his own ability.”

Desperate for information and a picture of the baby, the press knew how to smoke out the reluctant parents. Stories appeared that the baby was deformed or, worse, had been stillborn. Everybody walked around Next Day Hill in a state of anxiety, suspecting everybody else of selling out to the newspapers.

At last, Lindbergh called a formal press conference in New York. He barred five newspapers, including Hearst’s, because of their “contemptible” journalistic practices. He called upon a policeman to eject one reporter from the room before he proceeded to give details about the baby—whose name, he announced, was Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr. When asked what career he might choose for his son, Lindbergh replied, “I don’t want him to be anything or do anything that he himself has no taste or aptitude for. I believe that everybody should have complete freedom in the choice of his life’s work. One thing I do hope for him, and that is when he is old enough to go to school there will be no reporters dogging his footsteps.”

Lindbergh distributed a photograph of his son that he had taken himself. He told the “constructive press” to copyright the prints and asked them not to give them to the five newspapers he had excluded. Within a day, every newspaper in the world had a copy of the picture, including the five on the blacklist—one of which stole it from the Associated Press. When a journalist reported this fact to Lindbergh, he replied that that did not matter to him so much as the point that he had not cooperated with them. “My stand,” he said, “is a matter of principle.”

For the first time since he had become famous, Lindbergh received negative press. The masses still worshiped him. Indeed, New York’s Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt had recently asked for an autographed picture of him, St. Louis wanted to erect a statue in his honor, and there were already whisperings of drafting him to run for President (even though he was Constitutionally underage). And the birth of his son uncapped a geyser of people with the best of intentions who also hoped to cash in on the Lindbergh name: an unemployed candymaker in Boston wanted permission to produce “Lindy Jr. Pure Honey Kisses”; the Magyar Evangelical Reformed Christian Church of Gary, Indiana, named their new church the Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr. Cathedral Chapel; and the stream of requests for interviews for articles and books had hardly abated since his flight. But now many members of the press who felt they had helped create this hero felt unfairly dismissed by him.

That summer The New Yorker suggested that for all Lindbergh’s posturing on behalf of aviation, he had not contributed a single new idea other than his observation that the one light that penetrated fog was blue. “His technical advice to the companies which pay him bank president’s salaries,” wrote a columnist out of Toronto, “has been negligible…. He has cashed in on the name of Charles Lindbergh and the almost imbecile adoration of the American public.” Although Lindbergh claimed the occasional spattering of mud onto people awaiting him on runways was the unintentional result of trying to avoid running into them, journalists were noting that it was happening all too often. Some spoke of his “violent temper.” The writer from Toronto asked, “Does Lindbergh really dislike publicity, or does he realize that the best way to get it is to pretend that it is objectionable to him?”

Feeling the strains of the Depression, many did not think the Lindbergh baby should be afforded any special attention. Letters to newspaper editors reflected this shifting attitude of the shattered economy. “How much longer do your readers have to look at pictures of the Lindbergh family?” wrote a reader signed “Disgusted” to one newspaper. “It isn’t enough to shove Lindbergh in every day, but now his baby has to cover the front page.” Another reader concurred: “… the kid is no better than a longshoreman’s, and perhaps not as good as some.” Letters to the Lindberghs also reflected the hard times. What had once been requests for autographs became appeals for money. More than two hundred new parents asked for the baby’s outgrown clothes.

That summer, Lindbergh found 425 acres for sale ten miles north of Princeton, New Jersey, in the Sourland Mountains. Supposedly so named because there was so little lime in the ground, this ridge of the Sourlands ran the intercounty line, separating the majority of the property in Hunterdon County from the front yard in Mercer County. Five hundred feet above sea level and one of the highest points in the state, the hill had its own brook, a few open fields, and woods of old oaks. This pocket of New Jersey was “practically inaccessible except by air,” reported one wire service, and difficult even for locals to find. The town of Hopewell was less than three miles away; other than that, the area was uninhabited, except for a few poor farmers. Within weeks, the Lindberghs had bought the parcel, and he had ordered a quarter of the land to be cleared and leveled for a landing field. They engaged Chester Aldrich, the architect of Next Day Hill, to draw plans for a house.

As it would be another year before it would be erected, the Lindberghs rented an old farmhouse on ninety acres between their new property and Princeton. New York City was an hour away by train, two hours by car. White with green shutters, the three-story, eight-room house sat behind a white picket fence on Rosedale Road. It came furnished and had a field large enough to land the blue-winged Bird biplane in which Charles was still teaching Anne to fly. A butler, cook, and baby nurse moved in with them; but they ate their meals “farm-fashion,” not served, just as Charles had as a boy. “Our own home—imagine it!” Anne exuberantly wrote her mother-in-law.

Anne settled into motherhood, though she did not feel that the motions came to her naturally. She read the latest books on child-rearing, which for all their modern theories of psychology still maintained a Victorian attitude against the display of affection. Lindbergh seemed too frightened of the baby to have any physical contact with him. By the end of the year, the child’s hair was growing in curly and golden, and he took to lifting his arms to be picked up. Lindbergh at last gave in to taking him “ceiling flying,” which would make “Little Charlie” laugh. The Lindberghs continued to go out almost every night, leaving the baby in servants’ care. Charles seldom set foot in the nursery.

In February 1931, the Lindberghs hired a new baby nurse, Betty Gow, right off the boat from Scotland. She had heard about the position from another Scot, who worked at Next Day Hill. Betty was Anne’s age, intelligent, and seemed responsible; and she moved in, along with Elsie and Aloysius “Olly” Whateley, the English couple. Anne’s only concern about her staff was their inexperience with the press. “They have none of them been over here very long,” she wrote Charles’s mother, “and so are not so familiar with many U.S.A. customs. The baby is not quite in the same position as most other babies. I am thinking of the emergency situations that arise out of publicity. The house is rather unprotected. The baby sleeps outside. Unless he is watched every second, anyone could walk in and photograph him etc.”

Anne worried that her family’s movements could be followed by anybody who read a newspaper. Her sister Constance had already been the target of a failed kidnapping attempt at school; an insane woman had already come to their door insisting on seeing the baby as a matter of “life or death”; and another had been sending obscene letters before postal authorities arrested her in New York. Persistent rumors of the Lindberghs crashing somewhere put photographers on the alert at all times to capture the first picture of the “maybe orphan.” Before spring, the foundation of their new, more private residence was being dug. Charles spent many afternoons chopping down trees around where the house would be built.

Until its completion, Anne felt most comfortable at Next Day Hill. But even there, legions of curiosity-seekers invaded their privacy. One day, a carload of sightseers sped into the front court, and, in haste, hit Anne’s West Highland white terrier, Daffin, then screeched off, leaving the howling dog to die.

MORE THAN THE PRESSURES of fame—the omnipresence of the media and the masses—drove Lindbergh to more interior pursuits. Indirectly, his marriage had as much to do with his shifting aviation, as he put it, “from a primary to a secondary interest”—as he embarked on an intellectual journey into the realm of biology. In fact, Lindbergh had considered becoming a doctor in his youth, in the tradition of Lodges and Lands. “But,” Lindbergh later wrote, “I was told that in carrying on his profession, a doctor had to be able to read and write Latin. My first contact with high-school Latin convinced me that the requirements of medicine lay beyond my intellectual desires and capacities.” Still, Lindbergh used many of his flights to ask himself questions about the mysteries of life. If man could take to the skies, Lindbergh mused, why could he not remain on earth forever?

In 1928, he had become interested enough in biology to purchase several textbooks. “I decided then,” he later recalled, “to reduce my activities in aviation sufficiently to permit the devotion of a reasonable amount of time to biological studies.” In 1929, he bought a good microscope and thought about setting up a laboratory if he ever settled down. Once married, he could not help paying attention to his sister-in-law’s deteriorating health. He even obtained permission from Princeton’s president, John Grier Hibben, to visit the university’s laboratories in his search for answers.

One day, Lindbergh asked Elisabeth’s doctor why an operation could not be performed to repair her damaged heart. The physician replied that the organ could not be stopped long enough for the surgery to be performed. Lindbergh asked why a mechanical pump could not circulate the blood during an operation and was “astounded” that an eminent doctor could not answer the question. “Knowing nothing about the surgical problems involved,” Lindbergh recalled, “it seemed to me it would be quite simple to design a mechanical pump capable of circulating blood through a body during the short period required for an operation.” The prospect of this “artificial heart” spawned a new series of questions: “Why could not a part of the body be kept alive indefinitely if a mechanical heart was attached to it—an arm, or even a head? … Why would not a mechanical heart be valuable for certain surgical operations?”

Dr. Paluel Flagg, Anne’s anesthesiologist, could not answer Lindbergh’s questions either, but he said he knew a man at the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research who could. On November 28, 1930, at the imposing complex of edifices built atop its own promontory between Avenue A (York Avenue) and the East River in the East Sixties, Charles Lindbergh and Dr. Flagg met the legendary Dr. Carrel, if not the Institute’s most brilliant figure, certainly its most controversial.

Alexis Carrel was born in Lyons in 1873. The grandson of a linen merchant, he grew up learning the fine points of stitchery. Graduating from the local university at seventeen, he entered medical school there and proved himself unusually gifted, mentally and manually. He practiced sewing with a needle and thread on paper until he was able to make stitches that would not show on either side. In his twenties, he published his first paper on vascular surgery, a radical treatise at the time. He often espoused mystical views, which further alienated him from the scientific community. Temperamental and energetic, the small surgeon with penetrating eyes emigrated to Montreal, where he published a controversial paper on anastomosis (joining) of blood vessels. In 1905 he transplanted a puppy’s kidney to the carotid and jugular of an adult dog and watched the kidney function for several hours.

Carrel’s work attracted the attention of America’s medical community, including Simon Flexner, the founding director of the Rockefeller Institute. This brilliant Jew from Louisville, Kentucky, who had little formal education, understood the importance of so unorthodox a mind as Carrel’s to a facility interested in making quantum leaps in medical research. Carrel joined the Institute in 1906, becoming one of the new main building’s first occupants. Designing his own very sharp, curved needle, and coating it as well as his thread with Vaseline, which rubbed off in the puncture holes, Carrel developed a new method of blood-vessel anastomosis which became standard operating procedure. For his work on the suturing of blood vessels and the transplantation of organs he became, in 1912, the first surgeon to receive the Nobel Prize.

A devout Roman Catholic, Carrel addressed each scientific problem from both the outside and from within, serving as metaphysician as much as physician. With his holistic approach, he linked the particles of the cosmos with the soul of man, always considering the balance between heredity and environment in his quest for enriching mankind. “The human body is placed, in the scale of magnitudes, halfway between the atom and the stars,” Carrel would write. “Man is gigantic in comparison with an electron … when compared with a mountain … he is tiny.” Genetic defects and man’s adaptations to his environment fascinated him, leading him to spin numerous theories. One was the dangers to human beings of excessive light. “We must not forget,” he wrote by way of illustration, “that the most highly civilized races—the Scandinavians, for example—are white, and have lived for many generations in a country where the atmospheric luminosity is weak during a great part of the year. In France, the populations of the north are far superior to those of the Mediterranean shores.”

His work in the laboratory was as bodacious as many of his statements. While studying the healing of wounds in Lyons, he had considered the possibility of restoring and reconstructing injured tissues—by removing the unhealthy tissues, growing them successfully in a different medium, then substituting that new tissue for damaged tissue. Toward that end, on January 17, 1912, he removed a minute piece of heart muscle from an unhatched chicken embryo and placed it in fresh nutrient medium in a stoppered Pyrex flask of his design. He transferred the tissue every forty-eight hours, during which time it doubled in size and had to be trimmed before being moved to its new flask. Twenty years later, longer than the average lifetime of a chicken itself, the tissue was still growing. Every January seventeenth, the doctors and nurses at the Rockefeller Institute would celebrate with Carrel, singing “Happy Birthday” to the chicken tissue.

In 1913, on a visit to France, Carrel married Anne de la Motte, widow of a marquis. She was said to be blessed with mystical powers, and theirs was a spiritual—and childless—union. The following year, as war broke out, Carrel enlisted in the French Army Medical Corps, becoming a major. With chemist Henry D. Dakin, he developed the Carrel-Dakin germicidal technique for bathing infected wounds, which earned him the Cross of the Legion of Honor. After the armistice, Carrel returned to the Rockefeller Institute, leaving his wife in France for months at a time. Through the twenties, his work advanced from the problems of culturing pieces of tissue to whole organs.

Dr. Flagg could not have timed his introduction of Charles Lindbergh to Dr. Carrel any better. At one of the long tables in the Institute’s dining room, Flagg witnessed the instantaneous connection between the surgeon and the aviator, each of whom was favorably predisposed toward the other. Carrel believed in the psychological importance of heroes, for they played a role in “promoting the optimum growth of the fit.”

In Dr. Carrel, the hero found a hero—the first since his father; and Carrel found a son. Lindbergh promptly recognized that he was sitting with a Renaissance man dedicated to both enlightenment and the occult, a scholar who accepted the existence of powers unknown. “Carrel’s mind,” Lindbergh would later state, “flashed with the speed of light in space between the logical world of science and the mystical world of God.”

Carrel listened to all of Lindbergh’s questions. He patiently explained that a mechanical pump could not be used to circulate blood through the body while surgeons operated on Elisabeth Morrow because “blood soon coagulated in contact with surfaces of glass or metal … and its delicate cells could not withstand the hammering of mechanical valves.”

After lunch, Carrel escorted Lindbergh and Flagg through the laboratories of his department of experimental surgery on the top two floors of the main building of the Institute. He explained that years before he had experimented with transplantation of limbs and organs, and he showed Lindbergh photographs and specimens of the work he had done in which the grafting had failed entirely. In no instance had a graft from one individual to another been successful. Dr. Flagg observed that as the three of them passed through each laboratory, activity stopped, the scientists standing in “silent tribute” to their special guest.

At last, Lindbergh asked if whole organs could be kept alive outside the body just as the fragment of chicken heart continued to pulsate with life. Upon hearing one of the very questions Carrel had been wrestling with himself, he opened a cabinet to show him an apparatus that had been built in his laboratory several years earlier. It was a perfusion pump—for circulating the nutrient media over tissue cultures, which was necessary to keep them alive. As Lindbergh looked at it, Carrel shook his head. “Infection,” he said, “always infection.” He had hoped to perform experiments on isolated living organs, but nobody had been able to build an operable perfusion pump that did not introduce infection.

Lindbergh gave this delicate but complicated contraption of glass tubes, electric wires, magnetic coils, and valves the once-over. It was so crudely designed that he felt he could improve upon it. Carrel said that if Lindbergh wished to design a new pump, he could have complete access to his facilities. The offer was irresistible. “Here was the possibility of working with a great surgeon and biologist, a man overflowing with ideas and philosophical concepts,” Lindbergh later wrote of the opportunity, “in laboratories far better equipped than any I could dream of establishing in the basement of my New Jersey home.” What was more, he would be able to pursue his work in private.

Lindbergh made sketches that night of a Pyrex perfusion pump. It was a simple design, which Carrel passed on to Otto Hopf, an extraordinary glass blower with a workshop in the basement of one of the Institute buildings. Carrel first experimented with this pump by inserting a section of a cat’s carotid artery in the petri dish organ chamber. “We were for the first time in the history of experimental perfusion,” Lindbergh proudly recalled, “able to avoid infection.” They successfully perfused one tissue sample for a month. But when it came to perfusing whole organs, they discovered that the perfusing pressure was too low, and that when the organs were attached to the cannulae—the metal tubes used to introduce and draw off fluid—infection set in.

Lindbergh put in long weeks in Carrel’s laboratory. He used the two-hour drive over New Jersey roads and through the Holland Tunnel “for contemplation on both conscious and subconscious levels,” to rethink and redesign. If he could not put aside a day to get into the city, he would work in one of the laboratories at Princeton. (Although he continued to refuse offers of awards and honorary degrees, he did accept an honorary Master of Science degree that June sixteenth from Princeton University for “[leading] us in our conquest of the air.”) Between his airline survey flights and business conferences, he often worked well past midnight with his microscope and textbooks, building and discarding one apparatus after another. “I learned,” Lindbergh wrote, “about the problems of infection, the sensitivity of blood, the complicated character of living tissue, the hereditary qualities in every cell.” He became absorbed watching through his microscope the slow movements of living cells—“especially after I had designed and constructed flasks containing tissue fragments embedded in quartz sand through which a nutrient fluid circulated, allowing individual cells to migrate or form group structures.” One night, he examined his own sperm.

Carrel put each new apparatus Lindbergh designed to the test. The protégé found his mentor “untiring in his willingness to adopt surgical techniques to the requirements of my constantly changing apparatus. No matter how often infection developed or a mechanical breakdown occurred, he was ready to schedule another operation.” For his part, Carrel was impressed with Lindbergh’s industry as much as his ingenuity, marveling at the way this unschooled mind grasped this sophisticated discipline. “My friends,” Carrel slyly said one evening to a former ambassador and an attorney, “the world will hear from this young man some day.”

Lindbergh found Carrel himself “even more fascinating” than any of the projects he was pursuing in the Department of Experimental Surgery. “There seemed to be no limit to the breadth and penetration of his thought,” Lindbergh recalled. He always looked forward to sitting at Carrel’s lunch table in the large dining room, because of the stimulating conversation. “One day he might discuss the future of organ perfusion,” Lindbergh would recall. “On another, he would be talking to a professional animal trainer about the relative intelligence of dogs and monkeys, and the difficulty of teaching a camel to walk backward.” At another lunch, he expressed his concern over “the environmental effect of white bread on French peasants, and the effect of civilization in general on our human species. ‘No one realizes,’ he said, ‘how many genetic defects modern man contains.’” One never knew if Carrel might launch into one of his tirades—ranting that “all surgeons are butchers” and that “all people are fools”—or if he might quietly withdraw to write—formulating some such notion as: “We must liberate ourselves from blind technology and grasp the complexity and the wealth of our own nature.” Lindbergh once looked up from his work to see Carrel step into the room with Albert Einstein, discussing extrasensory perception.

Lindbergh recognized that Carrel had a “blunt tactlessness that created many enemies.” But he also found in this fifty-seven-year-old doctor “character that attracted the love of those who knew him well.” Nobody in Charles Lindbergh’s adulthood affected his thinking more deeply than Alexis Carrel. Their relationship would intensify over the next decade; and Lindbergh would come to conclude at the end of his own life that Carrel had “the most stimulating mind I have known.” And so it was that in recalling the winter of 1930–31, Lindbergh began to balance in his mind an “interest in aircraft” with an “interest in the bodies which designed and flew them.”

IN THE THREE YEARS since Lindbergh’s flight to Paris, teams of pilots had flown from northern California to Honolulu, the Fiji Islands, and Brisbane. Rear Admiral Byrd and pilot Bernt Balchen flew over the South Pole; Frenchmen Coste and Bellonte completed the first successful flight from Paris to New York; and another team flew from Newfoundland to Tokyo, with stops across Europe and Asia. Falling for the first time into a commonplace routine of commuting between home and a job made Lindbergh itch for another great expedition of his own. Before he became tied down to his new work, and before Anne became too attached to their new baby, Charles plotted a journey that would take him and his wife to Japan by way of the northernmost reaches of the Pacific.

He had his new Lockheed land plane modified into a seaplane. At a cost of $4,000, he ordered two Duralumin pontoons—each with a 150-gallon fuel tank—from the Edo Aircraft Corporation in College Point, Long Island, to replace the landing gear. Because more power would be necessary to lift a heavier load, he asked the Wright Aeronautical Corporation for their new 575 h.p. Cyclone engine and a more effective propeller. For the first time, Lindbergh also installed a lightweight, long-range radio, one designed by the Communications Department of Pan American Airways. Anne—who had just received her pilot’s license—would serve as radio operator.

From May to July 1930, the Lindberghs prepared for the trip, she putting their homelife in order while he nailed down the details of the flight. Fascinated, Anne watched Charles turn packing into a science of prioritizing. Mindful that every pound must equal its “value in usefulness,” he stacked up the vitaminic benefits of canned tomatoes against the nutritionless but filling qualities of hardtack, warm bedding if they were forced to land in the North against an insect-proof tent if in the South. Using the baby’s scale, Charles weighed the six pounds of a shotgun and two ounces for each shell against the birds they could kill if they needed food. Generally, a balance was found by packing a little of everything. He left the rifle at home, taking two revolvers instead. Lindbergh “conceived, organized, and financed” the flight personally; but as a consultant to Pan American, he intended to share all information and conclusions with them.

With an itinerary that included Eskimo villages as well as Asian capitals, Charles and Anne would have to pack for wilderness subsistence and embassy banquets. Each had an eighteen-pound personal allowance, suitcase included. The most “weight-expensive” item was footwear, and Anne found a pair of shoes that could double as slippers in both the bedroom and the ballroom. The Lindberghs spent their early July nights rearranging the three piles that covered their room at Next Day Hill—necessities, discards, and those items still being considered. While Charles corresponded with the Canadian Air Force about using their gasoline caches in northern Canada, with Nelson Rockefeller about Standard Oil providing fuel on their Siberian stops, with the Lomen Reindeer Corporation about supplies in the Northwest Territory of Canada, and with explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson about the aberrations of weather in the Arctic, Anne brushed up her Morse code.

“I would have been content to stay home and do nothing else but care for my baby,” Anne would later write of 1931. “But there were those survey flights that lured us to more adventures. I went on them proudly, taking my place as a crew member. The beauty and mystery of flying never palled, and I was deeply involved in my job of operating radio.” The greater—unspoken—lure was the rush of being alongside her husband. “Oh, how she loved her Lindy!” remarked the baby nurse, Betty Gow, more than sixty years later. “She’d have gone anywhere and done anything for him … even leave that beautiful little baby behind.”

After a year, Anne was warming up to motherhood. She felt more comfortable with little Charlie in her arms, and she delighted in his growing to look like his father. Two new dogs had joined the Lindbergh household, a fox terrier named Wahgoosh (after Charles’s childhood dog) and a fearless Scotch terrier named Skean, neither of which strayed from the baby.

On a hot Monday, July 27, 1931, Charles and Anne arrived at College Point, Long Island, to begin their excursion. Their black Lockheed Sirius with orange wings sat upon its shiny pontoons at the end of a wharf in Flushing Bay. A small crowd pressed against the gates as the Lindberghs loaded their plane with its final provisions. Until their return, Charles and Anne would be in the world’s newspapers almost every day, often on the front page. Sunday rotogravure sections were filled with photographs of their trip, practically turning their lives into comic-strip adventures.

They flew south for a day in Washington, gathering visas and clearances, before splashing down in The Thoroughfare at North Haven on the night of the twenty-ninth. The baby had already arrived by train with Betty Gow; and his parents had a few minutes to play with him before Anne put him to bed. Then she pulled Betty aside to give her special instructions: “I was told not to cuddle him,” the baby nurse recalled, “—or to make him fond of me.” The next afternoon, a little after two, the Lindberghs took off, heading over the pine trees toward the Camden hills.

From that moment on, Little Charlie became Betty Morrow’s baby, with complete run of the place at North Haven. Before the Lindberghs departed, they had discussed Charlie’s spending part of the summer with his other grandmother. But Evangeline reluctantly begged off, asserting, “Police protection is almost nil in Detroit; there is far too great a number of unemployed; conditions here are much like Chicago which, as you know, is in a bad way.”

Surrounded by Morrows all summer, Charlie played on the beach, swam in the pool, and went on boating trips to neighboring islands. He took food only from his Grandma Bee or Betty Gow, both of whom recited poems, read books, and sang to him. When the baby’s hair grew too long for a boy, they cut it, saving every “snip of gold.” That summer little Charlie began putting words together, and he took his first steps. As the Morrows returned to Englewood at season’s end, an epidemic of infantile paralysis struck New York City. It was decided that Charlie and Betty Gow should remain in Maine until the crisis had passed.

Meantime, Charles and Anne had flown from Ottawa up the western coast of Hudson’s Bay, from Moose Factory to Churchill and onto Baker Lake. The country was barren there, except for a few houses and a church on the bare shore. At Baker Lake, a Canadian Mounted officer in his red coat, a few other white men, and some Eskimos greeted them. Two Eskimo boys could not take their eyes off Anne, for she was the first Caucasian woman they had ever seen.

The Lindberghs flew an entire night from Baker Lake to Aklavik, the northwesternmost point of the Northwest Territories. Throughout the flight—as they slipped between white cloud banks hovering over the Arctic ice pack to their right and the gray, treeless coast to their left—it never grew dark. They found a settlement of thirty houses and stayed with the region’s only doctor, who made rounds on some of his patients just once a year by dogsled. They witnessed the excitement of the supply boat arriving the following afternoon.

Lindbergh piloted to Barrow through a storm, with Anne at the radio, securing the weather information they needed to land. They stayed for three days, enjoying a “Thanksgiving dinner” that ran into the early morning with most of the town in attendance—including the doctor, the minister, the nurse, the schoolteacher, and an old Scotch whaler. As cold in August as New England in November, this northernmost point in Alaska treated the Lindberghs to a banquet of reindeer meat, wild goose, cans of sweet potatoes, peas, and beets, even some canned celery. Charles and Anne left Point Barrow for Nome, a small mining town on the Bering coast.

Crossing the Bering Sea from North America to Asia—from Nome to Karaginski on the Russian island of Kamchatka—the Lindberghs felt as though they were returning to civilization. But only the most expert piloting enabled them to land in the fog at the harborless, uninhabited island of Ketoi. A typhoon also hit the area, grounding them for a day. Anne and Charles gave thanks throughout this trip for his training as an airmail pilot. After thrashing through seaweed, the Lockheed Sirius developed mechanical problems, which Anne broadcast on her radio, leading a Japanese naval vessel to come to their rescue, towing them into Buroton Bay.

One month after they had left New York, they arrived in Nemuro, Hokkaido, Japan, where they enjoyed their first bath since Nome. For over a week, they had been able to wash themselves only out of a basin; now they shared a tub, pouring basins of hot water over each other. The next day, they flew to Kasimigaura Naval Base in Tokyo. As the Lindberghs’ journey was covered in front-page detail around the world, Japan had prepared for their arrival.

“Bouquets, cameras, reporters, crowds …,” recorded Anne, understanding for the first time what the throngs must have been like when her husband returned from Paris to New York. A car drove them to the Embassy in town, pushing its way through one hundred thousand people, most dressed in white, shouting “Banzai! Banzai!” The media reported that it was “one of the greatest demonstrations ever seen in the ancient capital.” Scores of letters and cards in beautiful Oriental writing, attached to Embassy translations, awaited them. Most congratulated the Lindberghs on their safe arrival across the Pacific, assuring them that their visit would promote aviation as well as friendship between the United States and Japan. For many Japanese, Lindbergh’s arrival was tantamount to a religious experience, thus furthering his cult following. Missionary groups of all sects throughout eastern Asia hoped he might visit them. The Prime Minister received them.

The Lindberghs spent more than two weeks in Tokyo—indulging in tea ceremonies and banquets when Charles was not inspecting air bases and roughing out the continuation of their expedition. They expected to fly to Nanking and Peking for two weeks, then on to the Philippines. Beyond that Charles was vague, though he was leaning toward returning home by way of Africa and South America. Not only was that the “best-weather route,” but it had become traveled enough to have developed radio communication. It would also allow the Lindberghs to visit South American countries they had not yet seen—Argentina, Brazil, and Chile.

Anne was homesick. She had counted on returning by fall and confessed in a letter to her mother that she dreamed about “The Baby” every night—“almost.” But she said little on the subject to her husband, feeling it was “such poor sportsmanship—when this isa marvelous experience.” Besides, she had to admit, she did want to see Peking before returning. Mid-September they flew to the southern part of the main island of Japan.

After the Lindberghs said their sayonaras to the officials in Osaka, Charles made his final baggage check. He was so particular about the order of the equipment in the Sirius that Anne was not allowed to do the final packing. He noticed that the water canteens were out of place, and in setting things straight he discovered an eighteen-year-old Japanese boy stowed away, cramped into the space of the two two-gallon canteens. The Lindberghs asked the officials to be lenient with the boy, who had explained that life was not happy at home, and that he had hoped this great aviator from America would take him there.

After one more stop in Japan—in Fukuoka—the Lindberghs flew over the Yellow Sea. Miles before they reached the mainland, the color of the sea changed, mud from the Yangtze River besmirching the blue waters. The Yangtze was in high flood, the worst it had been in decades, leaving an estimated fifty million people homeless. The Lindberghs landed in Lotus Lake, just outside Nanking, where the river threatened the city’s great wall.

As their plane was the only one in all of China with enough range to survey the outer limits of the floods, the Lindberghs offered their services to the National Flood Relief Commission. They met with the Chinese president, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, and his Wellesley-educated wife for tea; but they canceled all other social functions so that they could devote themselves to the emergency at hand. The Lindberghs surveyed the lower Yangtze valley and found vast lakes among the narrow strips of rice fields, only to discover that those lakes were actually overflow from the river. Weighing the value of each pound of supplies that they could carry, the Lindberghs decided that medical supplies and a doctor who could service many were more valuable than food they might bring to a few.

On September twenty-first, while trying to carry out his mission, Lindbergh experienced one of the most terrifying moments of his life. He took off from Nanking with Dr. J. Heng Liu, Director of the Department of Hygiene and Sanitation, and Dr. J. B. Grant, from the Rockefeller Institute of Peking. They were to inspect the larger cities in the flood area north of the Yangtze, delivering packages of serum and vaccine.

Lindbergh splashed down on what had been rice fields, a few hundred yards from the wall surrounding Hinghwa. The entire city seemed to be sinking. A few sampans approached once they anchored, and Dr. Liu boarded one of them. Suddenly, hundreds of sampans skittered toward them from all directions. Lindbergh then made what he later realized was “the fatal mistake” of handing Dr. Liu one of the medicine packets. The Chinese, hungry and desperate, thought it contained food or money. An old woman grabbed one of the foot-square packages wrapped in white cloth and sat on it.

By then the boats were jammed so close that one could jump from one to another—more than an acre of floating skiffs. Several Chinese bounded their way toward the plane. Dr. Liu got lost among the hysterical throngs, as Lindbergh turned all his attention to his plane. One boat with a partly open fire pushed directly beneath the plane’s left wing, which was made of wood. Dr. Grant yelled to Lindbergh to get a gun. He grabbed the Smith & Wesson .38 he had wedged beside his seat cushion, but he resisted showing it—“to draw one gun against hundreds of sampans, crowded with desperate people,” he thought, “seemed a fool’s move.” It would no doubt incite the mob, which possibly included somebody who would shoot back. When at last some Chinese, looking gaunt and grim, started to climb onto the pontoons and wings of his plane, Lindbergh feared damage beyond repair.

He withdrew his revolver and fired once in the air. The people slowly pulled back, clearing a twenty-foot space around the plane. Dr. Liu was finally returned to the Sirius by sampan. As Dr. Grant pulled the anchor onto the wing, Lindbergh started the engine. He took off, with all the sampans attempting to follow. Fearing further episodes of uncontrollable hordes, Lindbergh and the doctors returned to Nanking. They all agreed not to mention the shooting, as “a false impression might have been given of the Chinese people.”

Instead of dispensing medicine, the Lindberghs restricted the rest of their mission to gathering information. Anne flew while Charles sketched and mapped whole areas larger than the state of Massachusetts that were immersed. They moved upriver to Hankow, alongside the British airplane carrier Hermes, which served as their temporary home. Because the current of the river was too great for mooring the Sirius, the Hermes had offered to hoist the plane up from the water as they did their own seaplanes. On the day of their last survey flight, the Lindberghs sat in the plane as it was being lowered into the river. There proved to be too little slack in the cable to detach the hoisting hook as the current began to push the plane downstream. Lindbergh gunned his engine to maintain the plane’s equilibrium while they tried to release it from the hook, but he could not correct the situation. In the struggle between the current and the cable, one of the plane’s wings dipped into the water, flipping the plane onto its back. Charles shouted at Anne to jump in the river. After weeks of carefully brushing her teeth in boiled water, she found herself swallowing “buckets of this Yangtze mud.” A lifeboat downstream rescued them both from the river.

The plane held up remarkably well, though its fuselage and one of its wings suffered enough damage to bring the Lindberghs’ journey to a halt. The Hermes offered to take them and their plane to Shanghai, where they planned to have the Sirius repaired so that they could continue around the world.

On October fifth—sixth across the date line—while still aboard the carrier, Anne received a telegram from her sister Elisabeth that changed all their plans. Senator Dwight Morrow had died in his sleep of a cerebral hemorrhage. He had returned to Next Day Hill after speaking to the Federation for the Support of Jewish Philanthropic Societies of New York and had suffered a stroke in his sleep. He succumbed the next afternoon.

Betty Morrow wanted the funeral ceremonies as simple as possible—without a formal procession, honorary pallbearers, or even a eulogy. Even so, her husband’s service at the First Presbyterian Church in Englewood, two days after his death, was attended by Vice President Curtis, along with Morrow’s Amherst classmate Calvin Coolidge, a quarter of the United States Senate, Ambassador Harry Guggenheim, Judge Learned Hand, Adolph Ochs, and Bernard Baruch. Four thousand mourners stood outside the church. A graveside service included only family members, including Evangeline Lindbergh, who came to Englewood to represent her son and daughter-in-law. Newspapers ran laudatory editorials and reverential cartoons. Local schools closed, many stores shut, and flags were lowered to half-mast.

Elizabeth Morrow declined the Governor’s offer to complete her husband’s term in the Senate. After several large bequests to both Amherst and Smith and paying almost $1,000,000 in estate taxes (which reportedly put the debt-ridden state of New Jersey in the black), she inherited the bulk of the estate—close to $9,000,000, which yielded an annual income in interest and dividends from stocks and bonds of some $300,000. That was approximately what she needed to maintain the Morrow residences and to continue making extremely generous contributions to her favorite charities. With renewed vigor—often saying, “It’s what Dwight would want”—Mrs. Morrow would emerge as a national figure, one of the prime exemplars of twentieth-century women who devoted their lives to public service through volunteerism.

Lindbergh arranged the return journey, sending a coded message (working back three words in a pre-designated dictionary) that he and Anne would arrive in three weeks. The Chinese government was so grateful for the Lindberghs’ work in China that Chiang Kai-shek awarded them the National Medal, observing that they had been the first aviators to fly from the New World to China. Japan had been just as elated with the Lindberghs’ visit. The American Ambassador wrote them, “Your coming at that time and the way that you and Mrs. Lindbergh comported yourselves as simple unassuming Americans left the happiest impression and made both of you, in the finest sense, ambassadors of good will.” Over the next few weeks, the Lindberghs received hundreds of letters and gifts from the Orient, including kimonos, rare dolls, lacquerware, bronzes, swords, china, vases, scrolls, carved ivory, and carved bamboo. The New York Times praised them lavishly on its editorial page.

Instead of leaving their plane to be repaired in Shanghai, the Lindberghs had the China National Aviation company crate and ship it directly to Lockheed in Los Angeles. Meantime, they boarded a fast boat for Nagasaki, from where they trained across Japan to Yokohama. There they boarded the liner President Jefferson, which arrived at Vancouver on the evening of October twentieth. They flew commercially across country, arriving in New Jersey on October twenty-third.

“It is good to be home,” Anne wrote her mother-in-law upon settling back into Next Day Hill, “—and oh, the baby! He is a boy, a strong independent boy swaggering around on his firm little legs.” The toddler did not recognize either of his parents; but they made up for the time they had lost with him. Anne seemed surprised at how attentive her husband was to little Charlie—“playing with him, spoiling him by giving him cornflakes and toast and sugar and jam off his plate in the morning and tossing him up in the air. After he’d done that once or twice the boy came toward him with outstretched arms,” crying “Den!” (“Again!”). Charles went so far as to say he found his son “good-looking” and “pretty interesting.”

Lindbergh was soon off on two weeks of Pan Am business again, flying in the southeast and Caribbean; but Anne decided to stay put for a while. She wanted to spend as much time as she could with Charlie. Even though he was six months younger than any of the other pupils at The Little School, the boy’s aunt Elisabeth insisted on his enrolling. She took him to school for a few hours every day, where the other children were drawn to his golden curls.

While their new house still needed a few months of work, Anne and Charles took the baby on Halloween to spend their first night in Hopewell. Along unmarked, occasionally unpaved, roads they drove into the hills. It was a tricky route to navigate even in daylight. Approaching a little stone bridge over a brook, they turned left onto their property. The driveway serpentined for a kilometer to a clearing, where the house, with steep gables reaching three stories high, sat behind a low stone wall.

The whitewashed fieldstone house with its thick slate roof had two wings running perpendicular to and projecting slightly in front of the central section. Through the front hall, one entered the living room, paneled in dark wood. To the left were a library with a dark stone fireplace and a guest room; to the right were the dining room and kitchen, which led to servants’ quarters and the large garage. Upstairs were the master bedroom, three guest rooms, and, in the back corner farthest from the entrance, the nursery. Pretty blue tiles decorated its fireplace; and a table, chair, and crib were already in place. The house had built-in closets and shelves and four bathrooms. There was enough architectural detail to make it attractive without being fancy. The electricity, plumbing, heating, and air conditioning in the house were all top-of-the-line, bringing its total cost to almost $80,000. For all that, none of the rooms had the spaciousness that the towering exterior suggested.

They spent the weekend there, playing with Charlie on the terrace, which looked onto woods. As construction would continue until the end of January 1932, the Lindberghs continued living at Next Day Hill. But they drove to Hopewell almost every Saturday afternoon, returning to Englewood on Monday mornings. Although the idea of landscaping was still a few seasons off, Anne could not resist planting some special white tulip bulbs around the house before the ground froze.

The Lindberghs did not go to the Hopewell house at all in the last part of December. Charles’s mother joined them in Englewood for Christmas, which everybody enjoyed. Charlie was especially happy with a present from Anne’s mother, a Noah’s Ark filled with pairs of animals. “He and Charles played with it for a long time,” Betty Morrow recalled, “making a great procession of the animals across the floor.” His father scarcely let a day go by after Christmas without testing him on their names; and by the new year, he could correctly select thirty animals from the ark.

The day after Christmas, Charlie was playing with rubber toys in the bathroom when Betty Morrow heard a splash and a “spluttering howl.” He had fallen into the tub. Betty Morrow flew into a rage at Charles, sure that he had been ducking him “to test his courage.” Although she learned otherwise, Mrs. Morrow was right to feel concerned. Nurse Betty Gow had gotten to the baby before his grandmother, and she found “Colonel Lindbergh laughing his head off. He saw that the baby wasn’t hurt, just frightened. Still,” she remarked decades later, “there was something about the Colonel—that little bit of sadism.”

It was the same kind of toughening he had received from his own father. When the boy began to suck his thumb, Lindbergh insisted he wear specially made thumbguards at night, metal devices like wire hoods over the corks of champagne bottles, which had fasteners that were pinned to the crib’s bedsheets. And one day that winter, Lindbergh built a huge pen of chicken wire outside their wing of Next Day Hill. When he had finished, he told Betty Gow to bundle Charlie up, to select one of his toys, and to place him in the pen “to fend for himself.” For hours, the little boy stayed there alone, sometimes crying. Betty Gow went to Anne, insisting they rescue him. Although Anne was close to tears, she said, “Betty, there’s nothing we can do.”

On February 4, 1932, Charles Lindbergh celebrated his thirtieth birthday. The news about Lindbergh that week was that there was no news about Lindbergh—except that he was thankful to have slipped off the front page for a little while so that he could carry on with his business. “The world is left to guess whether there’ll be a frosted cake at the Lindberghs’ New Jersey home for Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., now a toddling youngster, to admire,” wrote one article. At last, Lindbergh felt that he was settling down to the kind of “real life” Anne had yearned for, the kind he had never known. While in the last year alone he had gathered twenty thousand miles’ worth of adventure, his twenties closed on a note of calm.

After the trip to the Orient, Lindbergh’s popularity had risen again. Fifteen thousand people a day still admired his trophies in St. Louis—which now included his recent acquisitions from the Orient; five million people had paraded through the exhibit since its opening five years earlier. More than ever, he preferred that the public’s admiration remain from afar; and so he spent most of his days sequestered at the Rockefeller Institute. Despite the Depression, the Lindberghs were receiving almost $65,000 a year from interest and dividends and his consultancy fees. They had so successfully brought the boiling publicity pot down to a simmer, the press had not yet suspected that Anne was pregnant again.

Anne had even housebroken her husband, ridding him of the only habits of his she could not abide—spitting and blowing his nose without a handkerchief. He now preferred to spend his evenings quietly at home, reading and listening to music. He adored being with his son, whom he addressed with a big “Hi! Buster” every time he saw him.

For the first time in his life, Charles Lindbergh found joy in his family and comfort at home.