Press v. Lindbergh

(See Cover]

Behind the creamy buff walls of the rambling Munitions Building on Washington's Constitution Avenue he finds life as he likes it. He strides down the long halls and nobody pays attention. Officers in mufti scarcely glance at his tall, lean figure, a trifle stooped; preoccupied clerks with sheaves of papers do not even look up as he goes past. In the Air Corps section on the third floor he waves a hand at flier friends, flashes a white-toothed grin, heads for his office. Hour after hour he sits earnestly in an endless succession of technical conferences, usually breaks the day to lunch with a friend or two at the staid Army & Navy Club. There, too, nobody pays attention to him.

To Colonel Charles Augustus Lindbergh, digging into a job he knows and loves, this is pretty near heaven. But it is not heaven. In heaven there would be no autograph hunters, newspaper reporters and jumping-jack photographers lurking around the corners. There would be no cranks, columnists and newshawks to beset him from a distance. There would be no need for an armed guard around the Morrow estate in Englewood, N. J. where his wife and two sons live. And in heaven he would not have to endure his own unyielding but logical resentment against it all.

For twelve years Charles Lindbergh has been a hero, and twelve years is too much. Today, however, it is almost certain that his relationship with the world is coming to a turning point. There is the possibility that by staying in the U. S.--where he wants to live--he may get the public to stop persecuting him as a hero. Although he is willing to try it, he is grimly dubious of the result. There is no cynicism in his still boyish makeup, but with the logic of a pragmatic mind he has dovetailed his experiences of the past twelve years into a picture as discouraging to him as the sound of a missing engine to a pilot in bad weather. For the fact is that the relation of Charles Lindbergh to the U. S. people is a tragic failure chalked up against the institution of hero worship.

There has been no time when Lindbergh and the public ever fully understood each other. The supreme irony is that if they had understood, there would have been no difficulty. Lindbergh is a kind of man whom Americans instinctively appreciate and like: practical and resourceful, with a mechanical turn of mind, an extraordinary competence in his business, full of animal spirits, empty of all pretension, built around a steel-tough core of reserve and self-respect.

To most of the public Charles Lindbergh did not exist until one May day in 1927 when he was flying the North Atlantic. By the time he set foot again in the U. S. three weeks later the public had not stopped to consider what the son of a radical Congressman from Minnesota, and of a high-school chemistry teacher, was probably like. It had made up its mind that Lindbergh was a sort of automaton of modesty, a creature, boyish and noble, of heroic stature.

The picture of "Slim" Lindbergh that U. S. people should have had was of a rawboned farm boy with a fine, useful mind and a rare way with airplanes. He had an infectious grin that made vertical wrinkles up & down his weatherbeaten cheeks (as it still does). Around St. Louis, where he flew the St. Louis-Chicago mail run in fair and foul weather with calculated cunning, he had got along well-with reporters, had figured often in the news and liked it.

When he had a story to tell, he gave it to newspapermen succinctly, clearly, with a photographic eye for detail and colorful incident. More than that, he was an authentic, native character. When he had done something worth while he smiled for photographers. Once, when there was no particular reason for taking his picture, he was asked to smile. As Calvin Coolidge might have, he asked: "At what?"

When he was not flying the mail he was instructing students. He seemed never to tire of the air. On the ground he studied airplane and engine design, or poked around the flying field shops. He ate prodigiously (as he still does) and had a prodigious love for practical jokes (as he still does). For his practical jokes, which were often rough, occasionally cruel, he got many a rough return from other fliers, but was never discouraged.

Had Lindbergh been a man like Admiral Byrd, had he courted glory, the public would have grown complacent about him soon enough. But because he had an honest literal personality and no need for glory, he was doomed to it.

When he landed in Paris--equipped with letters of introduction so that he would not be stranded--he had his first taste of public adulation and it was good. He had done something which, after it was done, his logical mind could perceive, was reasonable occasion for acclaim. He had the time of his life standing on the Aero Club balcony with Ambassador Herrick and waving flags at the crowd below. When he returned to the U. S. after visiting the capitals of Europe and rode, up Fifth Avenue in a paper shower, he knew that he had hit the jackpot, and he was willing to enjoy it while it lasted. He had no idea that he would have to be a hero for twelve years.

As the hero worship went on, slowly, almost imperceptibly, Lindbergh began to freeze up. People wanted to paw him and he did not like to be pawed. Women wanted to kiss him and he angrily pulled away. Because he kept a distance, the public became more hysterical. In St. Louis, after he had left an outdoor table where he had eaten--as heartily as usual--with fellow officers of his old squadron, he finally saw what he was up against: women broke through the lines and fought for the still damp corncobs which he had chewed clean and left in a small mountain beside his plate.

He knew he was a good flier and had been pleased to have the public acknowledge it, but matter-of-fact Lindbergh could no more understand the public's mass hysteria than the public could understand him.

For this the U. S. press was largely responsible. Its original sin was omission--failure to tell what kind of man he was, to treat him with the customary cynicism with which it keeps public characters in perspective. Instead the press succumbed to mob psychology, augmenting it beyond belief. In Lindbergh's mind, however, the press became something far worse: a personification of malice, which deliberately urged on the crazy mob and printed lying stories about him.

First open hostility in the press showed itself on a rainy day in 1927 when Lindbergh took off from Washington for Mitchel Field, N. Y. As he swung his ship around, his propeller blast picked up pools of muddy water and showered it over newshawks.

Few weeks later Lindbergh was in Mexico, received with Latin enthusiasm by people who cheered him but did not want to paw him. At the U. S. Embassy, far from the maddened mob, he met earnest, poetic, adventurous Anne Morrow. With earnest, adventurous (but not poetic) Charles Lindbergh she had much in common. After their wedding at Englewood his war with the press grew more bitter. Newshawks and cameramen hounded them on their honeymoon. A few weeks later in a mass interview, a reporter asked Lindbergh whether his wife was pregnant yet. He whitened with anger.

Three years later when tragedy struck -- 20-month-old Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. was kidnapped and murdered--newshawks assigned to one of the biggest stories ever to break on Page One felt there was no need to consider Lindbergh's feelings. He did not expect it, but the final act of the tragedy was also his final embitterment. The night after he had identified the body of his son in the Trenton morgue, two photographers got into the building and attempted to take pictures of the body.

After that other incidents meant little. Once photographers in an automobile crowded the Lindbergh car off a New Jersey road trying to get a shot at Baby Jon Lindbergh. Once there was another kidnap alarm because a canvas-covered truck, parked in front of the Morrow home in Englewood, drove away hastily when it attracted attention--police later discovered that it contained movie photographers. Finally on a December night in 1935 Charles Lindbergh and his family left the country. When they were at sea, his friend "Deke" Lyman of the New York Times broke the story of their exile. The U. S. press heaped ashes on its head, too late.

In England, after two weeks of pursuit by British newspapermen, the Lindberghs found peace. They went freely to the homes of friends, found they could go to London for dinner and the theatre without being mobbed. In Paris, where they moved after living for a time at Illiec, a secluded Breton isle, life was just as calm. At dinner in the Crillon, at the theatre, no one except an occasional American tourist gawked at them. There were no autograph hunters.

Working with Dr. Alexis Carrel on the mechanical heart (a job which he now regards as completed), Lindbergh found time for many a flying trip, to India, Russia, Germany. For three years he enjoyed peace.

Last year when that peace was broken, Lindbergh again blamed the U. S. press. After the Munich agreement, a radical mimeograph published in London the charge that a semiofficial report made by Lindbergh at a banquet of the Cliveden Set influenced Britain's decision to assent to the CzechoSlovak grab. The story got more attention in the U. S. than in Europe. Liberals denounced him.

Actually, Lindbergh, who has seen many a Russian military airplane, is convinced that their performance is inferior, their construction too involved for mass production. He has also had a good look at the German Air Force, and is convinced that Germany has the air supremacy in Europe, will hold it for some years to come. He expressed his opinions privately to friends, including Lord and Lady Astor, and some in the U. S. (like Dr. Joseph Sweetman Ames of NACA), But there was never any banquet of the Cliveden Set, and Lindbergh does not think it likely that British foreign policy was shaped by one man's casual conversation.

A second storm blew up in the U. S. press when Lindbergh went to Germany after the Munich agreement and was decorated by Field Marshal Hermann Goering with the Order of the German Eagle. Friends tried to explain that the decoration was forced on him and he could not gracefully refuse. But that was not the case. He knew that he was to receive some honor, requested that there be no ceremony. At a dinner party one evening, Marshal Goering, the last guest to arrive, gave Lindbergh the medal in a case, saying simply, "By order of the Fuehrer I give 'you this." Lindbergh frankly says he was as glad to get it as the decorations of other nations. Ideologies in international politics are not his meat.

The newest chapter in Lindbergh's history began this April when he returned to the U. S., and went on two weeks' active duty with the Air Corps to explore the U. S. aeronautical research facilities. He is still working daily in Washington, without pay, as an Air Corps technical adviser. As luck would have it his ship docked on the night of the newspaper photographers' annual ball and the ball was at a standstill while cameramen fumed on the dock for an hour and a half until Lindbergh, his face frozen in the glum glower into which it falls when he sees a news camera, showed himself. The photographers were naturally resentful, but Lindbergh did not know about the ball, did not know the ship had docked because he was talking to his friend, Dr. Carrel.

There have been two recent incidents of another kind:

>In St. Louis Lindbergh found himself facing a news cameraman he knew and liked--Edward J. Burkhardt of the Post-Dispatch, who is a captain in Lindbergh's old National Guard. The result: the old, smiling, agreeable Lindbergh (see cover).

> When Mrs. Lindbergh returned last month to the U. S. on the Champlain, during the voyage an International News photographer aboard, unobserved, took pictures of Jon and Land Lindbergh (born in England). He took to his office a series of shots worth $5,000 to any big U. S. newspaper. Because the Hearst press had been most criticized for its part in harrying Lindbergh out of the country, the pictures were suppressed. Clients were told they would be released only if Lindbergh okayed them for publication.

Now comfortably wealthy from returns from his writings, awards for his nights (beginning with a $25,000 award for his flight to Paris, given by Raymond Orteig who died last week--see p. 55), many another source, Lindbergh sees before him the friendly prospect of a normal life in his own country, but between it and him lies the high fence of misunderstanding. To his old friends he is almost unchanged, still direct, cheerful, frank, a little more mature and self-possessed. To the U. S. public before which he cannot appear without growing gawky, from which he instinctively shrinks, he is still the enigmatic hero.

After twelve years Charles Lindbergh's social status will probably soon be decided. Either the pursuit of the public will drive him to lead an almost monastic life. abandoning the world which other men enjoy, or perhaps now at last hero worship will die a natural death. Some day soon he and his wife may try going to dinner and the theatre in Manhattan. If they are not hounded too much they may do it again and again. They may send their sons to U. S. schools like other boys. If that time comes, twelve long dark years of war between the U. S. people and their hero will end.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.