Lindbergh: The Heroic Curiosity

By LANCE MORROW

The air above the North Atlantic, so lonely half a century ago that Charles Lindbergh said he communed with ghosts and guardian spirits, is dense now with 747s, the flying auditoriums that are just beginning their summer trade. Passengers doze over their drinks, eat flash-frozen steaks, watch movies through a passage as passive as Muzak. The New York-to-Paris odyssey that took Lindbergh 33 1/2 hours would be a 3 1/2-hour streak for the Concorde.

The phenomenon of Lindbergh, the romantic soloist who dropped out of the darkness at Paris' Le Bourget Airport 50 years ago this week, may be difficult for the world of 1977 to understand. The minute he completed the first one-man flight across the Atlantic, the 25-year-old aviator, boyish yet reserved, became a hero of the world. He hated to be called "Lucky Lindy" -- luck had nothing to do with it, he said, just skill. Yet he had intersected with history at precisely the right moment: technology and public mood conspired to endow Lindbergh with an almost primitive magic.

"Every historical change," wrote Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, "creates its mythology." Lindbergh was the mythic hero of early aviation. In 1927 flying shone with the innocence of its newness and possibility, with the untrammeled zest of lifting off from the earth. Aloft, wrote Lindbergh, "I live only in the moment in this strange, unmortal space, crowded with beauty, pierced with danger." He was a sky lover; his was a rare moment: personal confidence and skill in partnership with a machine, not overwhelmed by it, as would happen later.

Now, of course, Lindbergh is more an item of receding Americana than a hero who engages the popular imagination. Yet the impulse that he represented -- exploration and adventure, pressing toward new physical and psychic limits -- remains lively in many different areas: in space, in the depths of the oceans, in the mysteries of spiritual phenomena.

Both the U.S. and France are celebrating the anniversary of Lindbergh's flight. At "Spirit of St. Louis" banquets in seven cities, the Charles A. Lindbergh Memorial Fund hopes to raise $500,000 for conservation, exploration and aeronautic research. His widow Anne Morrow Lindbergh, along with Sons Jon and Land and Daughter Reeve, is appearing at the dinners. The U.S. Postal Service is issuing a special stamp showing the Spirit of St. Louis in flight. In Washington, the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, where the plane is on permanent display, has assembled a collection of Lindbergh memorabilia -- including his flying outfit, a $25,000 check he won as a prize for the flight, and his barograph, which recorded altitude changes and proved that he made no landings between New York and Paris.

"Here is a hero," Nietzsche wrote many years earlier, "who did nothing but shake the tree when the fruit was ripe. But just look at the tree he shook!" The significance of Lindbergh was as complicated as his personality. His exploit, proclaimed precisely because he achieved it alone, served to promote a new age of aviation technology in which men and women would be increasingly absorbed into teams, into bureaucracies. Lindbergh rode the Spirit of St. Louis on the updrafts of the future, but in many ways he was one of the last individualists. Even in the '20s, he represented a kind of nostalgia. In an era of Teapot Dome and bathtub gin, he seemed to Americans a cleaner, sharper version of themselves, as bright as a new silver dollar, still inventive and vigorous. If, as Historian Frederick Jackson Turner said, the U.S. ran out of frontier in 1890, Lindbergh opened a new frontier in the air -- the U.S. arcing back in triumph to its European origins.

It is possible that from the beginning, Lindbergh was burdened with a bit more symbolism than he should have been made to carry. His flight, for all its significance, was in some ways merely a handsome stunt. It was also one of the first great media events of the century. Frenchman Raymond Orteig had offered $25,000 for the first nonstop flight between New York and France.* Through the winter and early spring of 1927, the newspapers -- then in one of the most aggressively competitive eras of American journalism -- had promoted the race among Admiral Richard Byrd, the polar explorer, and others. In April, Noel Davis and Stanton Wooster were killed during a trial flight. Two other flyers disappeared. Lindbergh was the Midwestern dark horse, caricatured as a Minnesota rube, self-sufficient, spunky as a cowlick. The possibility of another death gave the public a shot of adrenaline: Death v. the Kid.

In many ways, the papers were wrong about Lindbergh from the start. Somehow the myth was always askew; up until his death from cancer on Maui in 1974, Lindbergh remained elusive, difficult. Far from being merely a sort of hayseed genius of mechanics, he was the son of a populist Republican Minnesota Congressman and a schoolteacher, whose father, Charles Land of Detroit, was a distinguished dentist who invented porcelain caps for teeth. Lindbergh had lived in Washington, D.C., and studied at the University of Wisconsin until he dropped out midway through his sophomore year to take a course in flying. At 25, he was tough, intelligent and probably the best pilot in the U.S.

Lindbergh was amazed at becoming a hero. His life changed forever. After the Paris flight, people stole his laundry for souvenirs. When he wrote a check, it would be kept for his signature. Once, after a hearty lunch with some pilot friends, a group of women ran squealing to fight over the wet corncobs he had left on his plate. In 1932 came the kidnaping of the Lindberghs' child. He never forgave the mob of reporters who, he thought, had frightened the kidnaper into killing his son, or the pair of photographers who broke into the Trenton, N.J., morgue to photograph the baby's body.

The Lindberghs bitterly departed for England; Lindbergh thought it too painful and dangerous to be a hero in his own country. While abroad, he began a strange flirtation with Nazi Germany. In a series of visits at the invitation of Hermann Goring, he was dined, toasted, decorated with the Service Cross of the German Eagle and led on carefully planned inspection tours of German aircraft factories. As Goring hoped, Lindbergh came away persuaded that Germany's air superiority was overwhelming.

Early in 1939, Lindbergh returned to the U.S., now as a preacher. Intervention in the European war, he said at the time, was being promoted by something like a conspiracy of "the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt Administration." Relations grew strained with friends and even his in-laws, who favored intervention. His hero's luster dulled. Novelist J.P. Marquand, a friend, explained indulgently, "You've got to remember that all heroes are horses' asses." Lindbergh became the most glamorous evangelist of "America first." Roosevelt compared him to a "copperhead." Lindbergh resigned from the Army Air Corps Reserve, and after Pearl Harbor, F.D.R. refused to take him back. Instead, Lindbergh became a technical consultant for Ford and later for United Aircraft. By 1944, he finagled his way to the Pacific as a consultant and, though a civilian, managed to fly 50 combat missions. On one of them, he shot down a Japanese plane.

Within a decade after the war, Lindbergh's reputation was rehabilitated. Eisenhower reinstated him in the Air Force Reserve and promoted him to brigadier general. He had become a millionaire through his association with, among others, TWA and Pan Am. Lindbergh wandered the earth for Pan Am, trying out its planes, advising on air routes. But his spirit had changed. He felt far closer to nature than to machines. He wanted not so much his old exhilarations of flight as peace for the blue whales and the primitive Tasaday of the Philippines.

Lindbergh was a thorough professional, but he seemed to suggest a wonderful elan, a sense that anything is possible. That deep urge for individual adventure remains. Sometimes it merely involves robust hobbies -- banging down white-water canyons in rubber rafts, hang gliding on the thermal currents, roping up the faces of cliffs. But beyond weekend diversion, there remains a vast array of exploration and adventure. It ranges, says Apollo 9 Astronaut Russell ("Rusty") Schweickart, "from the massive NASA kind of exploration to some intermediary type, such as Jacques Cousteau's efforts, where there is no question that the driving force is a single individual, all the way to individual exploration."

The nature of space exploration is necessarily profoundly different from that of Lindbergh's solitary flight. It costs billions of dollars, as against the $15,000 that Lindbergh spent. Astronauts, however highly trained, are nonetheless essentially cargo as they are flung out of gravity on a rocket's nib. The astronaut, says Sir George Greenfield, a literary agent who has specialized in accounts of explorations, "is more like a bus driver than an adventurer." The Viking spacecraft investigating Mars are made of thinking metal. The only humans aboard the Pioneer 10 spacecraft are the little sketches of a man and a woman that are meant to show extraterrestrial creatures what we look like. Still, says Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on ground other than that of earth, "we are dealing with the spirit of mankind, searching on into infinity."

There are many other frontiers. Exploration of the ocean depths may become a new counterpart of the space program. Scientists are engaged in-a fascinating search into the structure of atomic particles. "This is a new world of muons, of quarks, and we shall have to invent a new language to cope with it," says M.I.T. Physicist Victor Weisskopf. Others are exploring DNA, the stuff of life itself.

Lindbergh's feat was technologically progressive; its trajectory pointed into the future. Much of today's adventuring is essentially regressive -- men employing ever more primitive modes of transportation. Thor Heyerdahl's crew sailed in the papyrus rafts called Ra I and II to show that ancient Egyptians might have discovered America. His 1947 voyage aboard the Kon Tiki was similarly primitive.

In the summer of 1975, William F. Buckley Jr. made an Atlantic crossing -- chronicled in his book Airborne -- aboard his 60-ft. cutter Cyrano. Says Buckley: "All adventure is now reactionary." With loran, radar, autopilot and vintage wines, Buckley was not exactly blown across the ocean on a naked raft. Even the most venturesome solitary sailors today -- men like Sir Francis Chichester, who circumnavigated the globe in 1966-67 in his 53-ft. boat Gipsy Moth IV -- have the advantage of sophisticated hull and sail design. Says Tristan Jones, a small, bearded Welsh sailor who has circumnavigated the globe three times, crossed the Atlantic 18 times under sail, nine times alone: "The boats I sail wouldn't have existed before now. They are fitted with the best technology of our time, from stainless steel to freeze-dried food."

Lindbergh's flight was a kind of adventure with a purpose -- to expand the horizons of aviation. Much of today's adventuring involves mere stunts. Even these can have a cranky grandeur about them, or can prove to the individual something about his limits. Several years ago, an English curate pushed a Chinese wheelbarrow 2,000 miles across the Sahara. Japan's Naomi Uemura, 36, has a gift for feats: alone, he has scaled some of the highest peaks of four continents (Mont Blanc, Kilimanjaro, Aconcagua and McKinley), and he joined an expedition that climbed Everest in 1970. Then Uemura alone dog-sledged all the way from Greenland to Alaska -- 490 days across an icy 7,200 miles. Why? Says Uemura: "In an age when technology enables you even to reach the moon, an adventure is only possible where there is no technology."

Lindbergh and other adventurers proceeded in part out of what W.B. Yeats called "the fascination of what's difficult." The urge to explore, sheer curiosity, is genetically embedded in the human mind. As Ahab said: "This was rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before the oceans rolled." Sailor Tristan Jones is someone Lindbergh would have understood. "Out there," says Jones, "is a very great void. It's full of wonderful phenomena and it all belongs to us. If the single explorer didn't believe that, he would never bother going into the unknown." Lindbergh began as a boyish barnstormer of the new science of flight. "It took me years to discover," he wrote much later, "that science, with all its brilliance, lights only a middle chapter of creation, a chapter with both ends bordering on the infinite, one which can be forever expanded but never completed." That fusion of mystic and mechanic, so American, was what gave Lindbergh his fascination -- the lit eral enactment of a spirit soaring, alone.

* In 1919, John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown had made the much shorter flight from Newfoundland to Ireland.

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