The Aviators by Winston Groom
Overnight, communists, socialists, and their fellow travelers reversed their antipathy toward the Nazis and began agitating for Germany and against England and France. The next week Hitler invaded Poland, and in response Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. World War II was on.
That same summer Anne began some sort of brief affair with the dashing French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who swept her off her feet by writing an introduction to her new book Listen! The Wind. Anne’s publisher had sent him the manuscript in hopes of getting back perhaps a few lines of praise, but Saint-Exupéry, author of the estimable Wind, Sand and Stars and his most famous work, The Little Prince, wrote at length a penetrating analysis of Anne’s book that left her giddy. When she heard he was in New York she invited him to the historic farmhouse that she and Charles had leased near Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. She even drove into the city and picked him up. Saint-Exupéry was already burdened with a wife, family, and mistress back in France, but somehow he managed to seduce Anne Lindbergh in a single afternoon with his talk (he spoke only French so she was forced to as well) of poetry, art, novels, and so forth—or was it the other way around? What precisely happened will never be known, but from Anne’s diaries we learn that something did, and if she did not fall in love it was fairly close to it; Saint-Exupéry spoke to her in the language of literature in a way Charles was never able to. Later, in 1942, Anne recounts to her diary in a fashion that can only be described as obtuse, how she asked Charles for “forgiveness” (presumably for being unfaithful) to which he replied, “If you want to be forgiven, then you are forgiven,” but it’s unclear if he actually knew what the hell she was talking about.16
At the end of August, while heavy war clouds hovered over Europe, the news commentator Fulton Lewis Jr. and some Republican Party officials approached Lindbergh about giving a speech on national radio against American intervention in the European situation. Lindbergh asked Hap Arnold about the matter and was told that he’d best go off active duty in the Air Corps before doing so. On September 15, Lindbergh received an “urgent message” from Truman Smith, now a colonel, who was serving in military intelligence in Washington. Smith wanted him to know that the Roosevelt administration was “very worried” about his proposed speech, and in exchange for him not giving it the president would create a special cabinet position for him as secretary for air. Lindbergh merely laughed at this smarmy bribe.
That evening, before a bank of microphones representing every broadcast network in the country, Lindbergh gave his anti-interventionist speech, which was generally well received (except by the diehard interventionists and the administration). In the speech he traced the history of fratricidal conflicts, from the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta that had destroyed ancient Greece to World War I that had nearly destroyed Europe. It was the first of many such speeches he would give in the coming days. In response he received tens of thousands of letters—about 90 percent of them supportive, though the others contained the usual insults and threats to murder him and his wife and children. Lindbergh also endured the public slings and arrows of a growing number of interventionists in the media, such as the columnist and radio commentator Dorothy Thompson, who called him a “cretin” and “pro-Nazi.”g Secretary of the Interior Ickes chimed in with his usual bile, branding Lindbergh a “Nazi,” and the New York newspaper PM identified Lindbergh as “the spokesman for the fascist fifth column in America.” The FBI, which had opened a file on Lindbergh during the kidnapping, now began to investigate him for his “nationalistic sympathies.”17
It was not as though Charles had no support; in fact, polls routinely showed a majority of Americans to that point were against involvement in the European conflict. Dozens of U.S. senators, mainly from the West and Midwest, and such luminaries as Frank Lloyd Wright, Avery Brundage, John Foster Dulles, Walt Disney, and Chester Bowles, plus up-and-comers such as Gerald Ford, Potter Stewart, and Sergeant Shriver, were among his staunchest allies.
Anne herself became embroiled in the controversy when she wrote an unfortunate book called The Wave of the Future, which postulated that the isms—fascism, socialism, communism—seemed to have swept up the European masses so completely that it was merely a matter of time before they began to erode the democracies. The message in the book was vague, but it leaned toward the conclusion that if democracy was conquered, fascism was the better choice of the three—minus, of course, the Hitlerite touches of persecuting citizens and disturbing the peace. The book rose to the number one spot on the best seller lists and just as quickly Anne found herself on the receiving end of a firestorm of criticism—most of it ugly, and much of it obscene—accusing her of treason, along with her husband. Since she had never found herself an object of national controversy it was upsetting to Anne, the more so because she was pregnant again.
Like Charles, Anne thought universally. Both Lindberghs had a detached, deeply philosophical worldview that perceived the Europeans’ problems from a height next only to God—or at least so abstractly that the fact that Hitler was murdering Jews, or that Great Britain might be having trouble keeping its empire together, had little to do with the science of their far-flung political and sociological equations. The Lindberghs thought in terms of centuries, of continents, of entire races of people and what would be for the better good. What they misunderstood was that this could not be squared with the sentiments that were building in America over the European war, which had become so passionately inflamed that detached logic no longer applied. For an increasing number of Americans, you were either “for the war and intervention” or a “callous coward and/or anti-Semite Nazi traitor.” There was little or no middle ground.
Through the autumn and winter of 1939 Hitler consolidated his gains and regrouped in what became known as the so-called Phony War, during which there was little action. When the spring of 1940 arrived and the weather cleared, Hitler struck a sledgehammer blow through Belgium and into France, which capitulated after a humiliatingly halfhearted resistance of less than three weeks. Now it was England alone against the Nazi war machine, and as Hitler’s bombers opened the Battle of Britain it began to look as if Lindbergh’s predictions of German air superiority were correct. There was every indication that Göring’s Luftwaffe was in the process of bombing England back to the Stone Age.
IN THE SPRING OF 1940 STUDENTS at Yale began to agitate for an organization that would keep America out of the war. In response to Roosevelt’s signing of the Neutrality Acts—which allowed the United States to sell arms to England and the Free French, “including all aid short of war”—they began a group to preserve the nation’s strength by keeping U.S. armaments in the United States. This effort morphed over time into the America First Committee.
America First was an inclusive organization, counting among its members Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Socialists, and a surprising number of influential Jews, who also supported the group with their bankbooks. Also backing the organization were the powerful American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, studded with World War I heroes including the likes of Eddie Rickenbacker.
After his reelection in 1940, and despite having campaigned on a platform of nonintervention, Roosevelt used the occasion of his inaugural address on January 6, 1941, to ask Congress to pass a lend-lease bill, which would effectively allow Great Britain to “borrow” U.S. warships and other armaments on credit while allowing the United States to lease British bases abroad. It was a giant step toward entering the war.
Lindbergh was asked to testify on the bill in Congress before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He arrived to face a battery of microphones and newsreel cameras and an audience of a thousand spectators shoehorned into a space designed for half that many. Lindbergh clearly stood out as the star that day, “serious, smooth-cheeked, a little gray over the ears,” according to Life magazine, though technically the junior witness among a gallery of powerful administration men such as Secretary of State Cordell Hull
With spectators alternately hissing or cheering, interventionists on the committee unsuccessfully tried to shake Lindbergh out of his posture of resolute neutrality, but he would not bend. When Representative Wirt Courtney of Tennessee asked him “Who do you want to win the war?” Lindbergh responded, in essence, “Nobody.” Because he had shown not even the tiniest interest in seeing England win the war, Life characterized him as representing “the far spectrum of isolationism,” and a new wave of anti-Lindbergh publicity hit the streets and airwaves. But that was a mischaracterization of Lindbergh’s position. He wasn’t against England and for Germany but—looking down from way up in the clouds—he saw Germany as a bulwark between western Europe and the evil intentions of the Soviet Union, which was what he’d been saying all along.
Two weeks later, in a similar hearing before the Senate, Lindbergh testified against the lend-lease bill on grounds that sending vast quantities of U.S. armaments abroad dramatically weakened America’s ability to defend herself against an enemy attack from any quarter—including the Pacific. But his refusal to take sides in the present conflict, with most of Europe occupied and England under heavy attack, made him sound unpatriotic. The only moment of levity in the proceedings came when Florida’s senator Claude Pepper, who considered Lindbergh a “fifth columnist” and was a little dotty even then, began his questioning by asking stupidly, “Colonel, when did you first go to Europe?”
When Lindbergh replied, “Nineteen twenty-seven, sir,” the gallery erupted in hilarious jubilation.18
THIS PERIOD, JUST BEFORE America’s entry into the war, marked the beginning of Lindbergh’s fall from grace. He had become so hostile to the press that he’d developed a kind of “tin ear” when it came to anything that was written about him.
The more public criticism that Lindbergh received, the more intransigent he became, until it appeared that he was almost as callous as his accusers charged. Time after time critics pointed out that Lindbergh had never taken a moment to publicly denounce Hitler’s atrocities against the Jews, nor the violence toward the Poles, Gypsies, recalcitrants in France, Belgium, Holland, Greece, Norway, and the other occupied countries, nor the indiscriminate aerial bombing of London, which ultimately cost the lives of more than forty thousand British civilians and destroyed or damaged a million London homes.
As Nazi aggression proceeded and German cruelties unfolded, the tide in what had come to be known as the Great Debate was beginning to turn. Even late in 1941, while polls still showed more than 60 percent of the U.S. public was against intervention, American sympathies clearly lay with the British and other oppressed nations. The public increasingly saw Lindbergh’s “staunch neutrality” as heartless.
Lindbergh nevertheless kept up his agitating against American involvement, drawing crowds of up to eighty thousand in such venues as Madison Square Garden, Chicago’s Soldier Field, the Hollywood Bowl, and points in between. At the Madison Square Garden speech, the left-wing New York newspaper PM described the crowd as “a liberal sprinkling of Nazis, Fascists, anti-Semites, crackpots and just people.” By then, organizations had sprung up to counter the America First Committee and other isolationist groups. One of these sent ten thousand of its members to heckle the AFC attendees at the Garden rally. A group called the Friends of Democracy distributed a twenty-eight-page pamphlet titled Is Lindbergh a Nazi?, which included practically every accusation, true or false, linking Lindbergh to Göring, Hitler, and the British fascist Oswald Mosley.
Even Roosevelt got into the act. During a press conference on Friday, April 25, 1941, he compared Lindbergh to a “copperhead,” a Civil War term for anti-Union northerners who sympathized with the South.
Lindbergh was once again incensed at Roosevelt for implying that he was a traitor. A “point of honor” was involved, Lindbergh wrote in his journal that night. His Commander in Chief had used the fact that he was a colonel in the army to fashion his insult.
It was the bitterest of pills for Lindbergh, who wrote in his journal, “My commission has always meant a great deal to me.” What he opposed, he said, was “a war I don’t believe in, when I would so much rather be fighting for my country in a war I do believe in … There is no philosophy I disagree with more than that of the pacifist, and nothing I’d rather be doing than flying in the air corps.”
He weighed the decision over the weekend, and he talked it over with friends such as Truman Smith, who advised against it. But on Sunday evening, with a heavy heart, he wrote to the president that he felt “no honorable alternative” but to resign his commission as a colonel in the U.S. Army Air Corps. He could not serve under a president who would call him a traitor.
AS JAPAN WAS MAKING BELLICOSE threats in the Pacific, Lindbergh made a speech in Des Moines, Iowa, entitled “Who Are the War Agitators?” in which he enumerated for the first time the forces that he believed were behind the clamor to go to war with Germany. When Anne found out what he was going to say it threw her into “black gloom.”19
The three groups “pressing the country toward war,” Lindbergh said, were “the Roosevelt administration, the British, and the Jews.” The last reference caused Anne to blanch. “I hate to have him touch the Jews at all,” she wrote, “even though what he had said was true,” but “I dread the reaction on him. The price will be terrible. Headlines will flame ‘Lindbergh Attacks Jews.’ He will be branded anti-Semitic, Nazi. I can hardly bear it, for he is a moderate.”
She tried to talk him out of it but of course that did no good. The point, he told her, was not what effect it would have on him, “but whether it is true and whether it will keep us out of the war.”
In his speech, Lindbergh said, “It is not difficult to see why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany … No person with the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany. But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy both for them and us.”
As the crowd of some eight thousand gave a standing ovation, Lindbergh went on to say that, “Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be the first to feel its consequences.”
As Anne had feared, Charles had set into motion a dreadfully acrimonious argument that would bring him to the low point of his career. Lindbergh’s speech seemed to insinuate that Jews were not Americans. At least that’s the way it was taken by the critics next day, and they were out for blood. Lindbergh had long insisted that America’s entry into the war would only exacerbate the persecution of the Jews, whom Hitler would blame, and it was those Jews—the German Jews—that he meant when he referred to “them and us.” The harshest critics accused Lindbergh of inciting anti-Semitism by blaming the Jews for pushing the United States into war—when blame had clearly not been his intention, and he said so in the speech.
The public reaction was swift and furious; the news media became nearly unhinged. Lindbergh was called everything from a Hitlerite to a fool. The terms “anti-Semitic” and “Nazi” were freely applied. The Des Moines Register called the speech “intemperate … unfair … dangerous in its implications.” The San Francisco Chronicle wrote, “The voice was Lindbergh’s but the words are the words of Hitler”—and that from a Hearst paper! Roosevelt’s press secretary compared the talk with “outpourings from Berlin.” Wendell Willkie, the Republican standard-bearer, called it “the most un-American talk made in my time by a person of national reputation.”
There was worse. The general consensus was that Lindbergh had gone too far, to say the least. In towns and cities across the country, Lindbergh’s name was removed from streets and schools. TWA even expunged the phrase “The Lindbergh Line” from its official stati
Was Lindbergh anti-Semitic? The answer is yes, to the same extent that many if not most Americans of his era were anti-Semitic, including many black Americans who often resented Jewish ownership of property in what came to be called black “ghettos.” Most Americans in the 1940s had been raised that way; it was as simple as that.
Seventy-five years ago, for most of the U.S. population, it was one thing to look on Jews as different, to exclude them from clubs, apartment buildings, hotels—as was regularly done and chronicled in many books and such movies as the 1947 Gentleman’s Agreement—and to impose Jewish quotas, as Harvard and other Ivy League schools did, but to the vast majority of Americans it was another thing entirely to hate a group of people to the point of persecution and elimination as the Nazis were doing in Germany. Lindbergh’s longtime friend Harry Guggenheim said both publicly and privately, “Slim has never had the slightest anti-Semitic feeling,” but for years afterward his Des Moines speech “was enough for history to record Lindbergh as a strident Jew-hater.”20 The fact remains that what he had said was true, that as a group Jews were lobbying for the United States to go to war with Germany. But as Lindbergh’s friend former president Herbert Hoover instructed, “When you had been in politics long enough, you learned not to say things just because they are true.”21
Lindbergh, though, was a self-described “stubborn Swede.” He stubbornly refused to retract his statements. Even Lindbergh’s family was mortified by the incident. Betty Morrow was an interventionist (as she was certain her late husband would have been), but she also thought that the less said about it around Charles, the better. Charles’s cousin Admiral Emory Land was furious with him, and his sister-in-law Constance—who by then had married the Welshman Aubrey Morgan, widower of her dead sister Elisabeth—lamented that Lindbergh had “gone from Jesus to Judas.”