America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation (28 page)

After Germany attacked France and Britain, the aviator told a stunned congressional committee that he did not believe it was necessarily in the best interests of the United States for England to defeat the Germans. As the public face of the America First Committee, an antiwar coalition established in September 1940 by a group of Yale law students including future president Gerald Ford and future Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, Lindbergh emerged as the most influential opponent of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s pro-British foreign policy. During an America First rally in Des Moines, Iowa, in September 1941, Lindbergh blasted American Jews, making sensational claims about “their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our Government.” Even more alarming, he declared that “leaders of both the British and Jewish races…for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in this war.” Lindbergh’s speech was immediately denounced by dozens of prominent Americans, including Wendell Willkie, Roosevelt’s Republican challenger in the 1940 presidential election, who called it “the most un-American talk made in my time.” A week later, Luther Patrick, a Republican congressman from Alabama, waved a copy of
Mein Kampf
on the floor of the House, saying “it sounds just like Charles A. Lindbergh.” The America First Committee did not dissociate itself from Lindbergh, but simply urged him to stop attacking the Jews. A few months later, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the organization folded, ending Lindbergh’s brief flirtation with politics. “Now that we are at war,” he wrote in his diary on December 12, 1941, “I want to do my part.”

In January 1942, the thirty-nine-year-old went to Washington to ask Secretary of War Henry Stimson if he could assist the Army Air Corps. With several cabinet members opposed—in a memo to President Roosevelt, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes described Lindbergh as “a ruthless and conscious fascist motivated by…a contempt for democracy”—the administration quickly rejected his offer. “What you say about Lindbergh,” the president wrote to Ickes, “and the potential danger of the man, I agree with wholeheartedly.”

Lindbergh turned to the private sector, testing planes first for the Ford Motor Company and then for United Aircraft; this second gig took him to the Pacific theater, where he flew on dozens of combat missions as a “technical advisor.” Itching to get into the action, he eventually persuaded the Marines to ignore the limits of his official duties and let him dive-bomb enemy positions. “Lindbergh was indefatigable,” recalled Colonel Charles MacDonald, the commander of “Satan’s Angels,” the acclaimed 475th Fighter Group. “He flew more missions than was normally expected of a regular combat pilot.” He also taught the fighters of the 475th various ingenious ways to conserve fuel, which allowed them to extend their missions much deeper into enemy territory. Back up in the air, Lindbergh was doing what he did best.

Like Carrel, Lindbergh would have been much better off had he not strayed from his forte and ventured into social philosophy and politics. The aviator understood what made machines tick, but not human beings, much less nations. While it seemed as if he were taking directives from Berlin, his various Teutonic tributes never did amount to treason, as the Roosevelt administration contended. Lindbergh could not have been a good Nazi, even if he had so desired; he lacked the social skills. While he revered organization, he was too much the alienated loner to work within one. (He never would stick to a regular day job in corporate America.) The Lone Eagle’s allegiance was not to National Socialism, but to Isolationism (both upper and lower case). “[My mother] said,” his daughter Reeve wrote in
Under a Wing
, her moving memoir of growing up Lindbergh, “that the very qualities that made him a success as an aviator doomed him as a politician. Isolationism…was a quintessentially personal characteristic…and a politically hopeless cause.” While Lindbergh never renounced his racist rants, he did succeed in rehabilitating himself by his activities during the war; in fact, to commemorate his admirable service to his country, President Eisenhower would later make him a brigadier general.

In contrast to Lindbergh, Carrel kept pursuing his elitist utopia. In 1941, the surgeon set up a research foundation in Vichy France that was designed to “create a civilization that, like science, will be infinitely perfectible.” After his mentor’s death in 1944, Lindbergh continued to idealize him; decades later, he would call Carrel’s mind “the most stimulating I have ever met.” Their cocreation, the Lindbergh pump, while never leading to immortality per se, would have offspring such as the heart-lung machine, which can keep patients alive during open-heart surgery, and the artificial heart designed by Robert Jarvik in the 1980s. Likewise, contemporary efforts at biomedical engineering—particularly tissue engineering, where scientists create, for example, replacement urinary bladders out of a patient’s own stem cells—can be traced back to “the men in black.”

As he moved away from biology in the late 1930s, Lindbergh urgently sought a new focus for his compulsive energy. He was also on the lookout for new daily companions, which could replace his string of beloved machines—namely, his planes and pumps. The manuscripts that he began toting around in manila envelopes on his worldwide travels would meet both needs. The former engineering student who could not hack freshman English was now determined to become a writer. And his subject would be himself.

Lindbergh’s perfectionism had first driven him into the writing business a decade earlier. A few days after his arrival in Paris, he began collaborating with a
New York Times
reporter on a book about his famous flight. When shown the galley proofs in late June 1927, he was outraged by the journalist’s looseness with the facts. “It was highly inaccurate,” he later noted, “and out of character. I decided immediately that I would not permit it to be published over my name.” He decided to redo the entire book himself, even though that meant knocking out the forty-thousand-word manuscript in just three weeks in order to meet the deadline. He worked at a furious pace, delighting in the daily tally of his words. “My record for a single day,” he noted proudly, “was thirty five hundred words.” But while both his publisher and the public were more than satisfied with the workmanlike prose of the megaselling
We
, which eventually earned its novice author more than $250,000, not so Lindbergh. In October 1928, ten days after his first “air date” with Anne Morrow, he admitted to his future wife, the recipient of several writing awards during her days at Smith College, “I
wish
I could write.” Living up to her literary promise, she would eventually pen thirteen bestsellers, starting with the Number 1 nonfiction book of 1935,
North to the Orient
, which described her flights with her husband in the early years of their marriage. She would also teach an eager Charles Lindbergh, who copyedited her literary debut, how to use the English language.

In November 1937, following in the footsteps of his wife, who would later publish several volumes of her diaries, Lindbergh began keeping a daily journal. At the time, as Lindbergh later recalled, he was thinking not so much about publication as about keeping “a private record” of his experiences, particularly his meetings with world leaders that his international celebrity had made possible. The following year, he also began a do-over of his do-over, vowing to complete a thorough hour-by-hour account of his trip across the Atlantic “without the pressure of time.” Once again, he was concerned about creating “a record that was accurate.” After discontinuing his diary at the end of the war, he moved full steam ahead on his revamped memoir,
The Spirit of St. Louis
. Over the next several years, this obsessive would write and write in an attempt to get everything just right. He would end up cranking out six complete drafts, rewriting some sections as many as ten times.

Lindbergh was as persnickety about his writing implements as about his prose. The former airmail pilot wrote his new book with Number 2 pencils, which he sharpened with a penknife, on pads of blue airmail paper. “He liked his erasers green and he chopped them up to specific lengths,” his daughter Reeve told me. He would mark his location at the top of the page; these “geographical positions,” as he later noted, included the Carrels’ home off the coast of France, New Guinea jungles, and air bases in Arabia and Japan. After slaving over his words for a dozen years, he finally summoned the courage to show them to his wife. Anne would help him find his voice, encouraging him to adopt a conversational, yet precise prose style. “She functioned as his first editor, getting him to trim things, particularly the hyperbolic,” added Reeve. And there were many more rounds of tweaks after he placed the book in the hands of his editor at Scribner’s, who insisted that he cut another seventy pages. “He was the most fussy of authors, living or dead,” observed publishing executive Charles Scribner. “He would measure the difference between a semicolon and a colon to make sure each was what it ought to be.”

The result was what Orville Prescott of the
New York Times
called an “extraordinary experiment in autobiography.” Lindbergh had turned his thirty-three hours in the air into a fast-paced and moving adventure story. Weaving in flashbacks from his past, including scenes from his childhood in Minnesota, Lindbergh conveyed both his thoughts as he headed to Paris as well as what it felt like to fly. While praising “this superb feat of writing,” the
Times
reviewer did have one peeve: “excessive detail.” And that was after years of slicing and dicing; his original stack of blue sheets was larded with minutiae about aviation mechanics and logistics.

  With few critics expecting the middle-aged Lindbergh to pound out a literary masterpiece, rumors circulated that Anne had been his ghost writer. While his remarkable drive had powered his success—in addition to the ubiquitous raves, royalties amounted to $1.5 million—her influence was everywhere. Just as the writers of the 1930s who visited poet Ezra Pound in Italy were said to have attended the “Ezuversity,” this University of Wisconsin dropout could be said to have finished up at the “Annuversity.” “I don’t think Anne will ever understand,” Lindbergh wrote to John Marquand in early 1952, “how much part she has taken in the chapters of
The Spirit of St. Louis
. She taught me to see as I never did before, even to look back on past experiences.” To Marquand, Lindbergh also mentioned how much he had absorbed by reading the books she left lying around the house as well as her manuscripts. “In the deepest sense,” he added, “[it was] as if a lot of the pages had been done with her own pen.”

Though proud to have completed the definitive account of his flight, Lindbergh was far from done setting the record straight. In the mid-1950s, he immersed himself in another massive autobiographical manuscript, at which he would plug away until his death. Over the next two decades, he produced a thousand typed pages of text as well as another two thousand pages of notes. He continued to go back over key events, eager to fill in new details and draw out new shades of meaning. To organize his mountain of words, he naturally came up with a list, “on writing autobiography,” that outlined six steps, including one that required him to jog his memory to create another list—that of “scattered incidents.” About a third of Lindbergh’s pages would make it into the posthumously published
Autobiography of Values
(1978). His American mistress, the Pan Am stewardess Adrienne Arnett, was the muse who inspired him to relate his “moral perceptions” in this memoir, which never did quite fly. In this case, his lists seemed to work to his disadvantage. The
New York Times
called this follow-up memoir “jerky [as it]…sometimes repeats the same episode or point with only variations in emphasis.”

Lindbergh would also study the dozens of books written about him, compiling long lists of factual inaccuracies. His jottings on
The Hero: Charles A. Lindbergh and the American Dream
(1959) by historian Kenneth Davis, which his friend publisher William Jovanovich considered “a sympathetic biography,” came to seventy-six typed pages. Like a dissatisfied moviegoer yelling back at the screen, Lindbergh talked back to the text. He did not like the author’s emphasis on his shyness around women as a youth. “I was definitely interested in girls,” he protested, “but never saw one I was sufficiently attracted to date until I saw the girl who became my wife.” Paradoxically, the anti-introspective Lindbergh, who reacted scornfully when Anne or any other family member turned to psychotherapy, did not hesitate to put his biographers on the couch, based solely on what they said about him. “The author of this book,” he wrote of Davis, “gives me the impression of being a confused and unhappy man. It seems to me he is dissatisfied with the world in general, and particularly with himself.”

 Enraged with what he perceived to be constant misrepresentations of his character, in 1969, Lindbergh decided to work up his decades-old diary for publication. In the introduction to
The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh
(1970), William Jovanovich, now also his publisher, explained the “exceptional precaution” that “General Lindbergh took…to authenticate the fact that the journals were not rewritten at later times.” Lindbergh passed on the leather-bound diary notebooks first to a transcriber, who, in turn, gave her handwritten pages to a typist. For each subsection—typically containing a week of entries—both secretaries would sign a statement, “It was copied from and carefully checked with the original,” which Lindbergh would then initial. All this cross-checking was spelled out to prove to the world that he had not doctored anything in his text. But while Lindbergh did not add any new words, his emendations were not all cosmetic. Chopping down his manuscript by a third so that it could fit into a thousand-page book, as biographer A. Scott Berg reported, “he intuitively deleted many [of his anti-Semitic comments]. His admiration for Germany’s accomplishments got soft-pedaled.” Ultimately, this autobiographer was less concerned with accuracy than with control; what he sought was the ability to shape his own public image. But even with the effusive odes to the Third Reich removed, the diary did not strike a chord with readers; sales were anemic.