The Last Empire (19 page)

It was the not unnatural view of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that in a time of crisis there could not be two heroes in the United States at the same time. As a mere governor, he had asked Slim for an autographed picture. But in 1932, when the mandate of Heaven was bestowed upon FDR, he became the embodiment of a nation’s fears and hopes. He was alone . . . well, almost. Unfortunately, the Lone Eagle could always draw a bigger crowd. Fortunately, for FDR, Lindbergh genuinely hated the limelight, and after the death of his child, he vanished as much as he could within the New York laboratory of Dr. Alexis Carrel, where he worked on the perfusion pump, far from the rabid eyes of the press. With hindsight, one now sees how dramatically inevitable it was that the two largest figures on the national stage must eventually confront each other. To that end, the great dramaturge in the sky carefully set the scene, using Gene, at times, as third character.

The Hoover administration had awarded airmail contracts in a somewhat questionable manner, favoring rich conglomerates over independent airlines. When Gene Vidal’s Ludington airline was passed over in favor of a conglomerate, Gene went public to denounce “Hoover socialism,” something truly new under the sun. Once in office, FDR saw a neat way of scoring points off the Republican Party. He got the postmaster general to accuse his predecessor of “conspiracy and collusion” in the awarding of contracts, then, on February 9, 1934, by executive order, FDR canceled all airmail contracts. The Army had flown the mail in 1918; they would do so again. The Director of Air Commerce objected. Army pilots did not have the wildcat skills of mail pilots. Gene knew. He was an Army pilot. But FDR would not budge. I’ve always suspected that Gene got secretly to Lindbergh, who was both an Army pilot and an ex-mail pilot, and urged him to speak out before things got even worse—if that was possible:
by the end of the first week, five Army pilots were dead, six critically injured, eight planes totaled. Meanwhile, airlines without mail contracts faced abrupt ruin.

Lindbergh sent off a 275-word telegram to the President while, simultaneously, releasing a copy to the press. This was
lèse majesté
. The White House attacked Lindbergh. The Senate called him before one of its committees. The hero was accused of publicity-seeking. This occasioned the only genuine laugh in the whole mess. Privately, Gene observed that FDR’s state of denial over his blunder now required that Lindbergh be made the villain of the piece. In this the President was aided by another paladin of air, General Billy Mitchell, the apostle of military air power. Mitchell thought FDR should have taken over TWA to fly the mail until new—“honest”—contracts had been awarded. Meanwhile, Mitchell smeared Lindbergh as “a front of the Air Trust” and, worse, identified him as “that son-in-law of Dwight Morrow.” So C.A., enemy for life of the Money Trust and the House of Morgan, now had a son said to be in thrall to the moneyed powers of darkness. Luckily,
C.A. had died before his son married Anne Morrow.

As Army pilots kept falling from the skies, Roosevelt backed down. The mail, he declared, would be flown by any commercial airline that had not benefited from the previous regime. The old TAT, now Transcontinental and Western Air, became Trans World Airlines. Lindbergh found this semantic solution “reminiscent of something to be found in
Alice in Wonderland
.”

The obligatory Schilleresque scene between the antagonists did not take place until April 1939. Lindbergh had been impressed—hoodwinked, some thought—by the German air forces. He had also, for the American military, gone to the Soviet Union, where he was appalled by the general military incompetence; and depressed by the political system. Like so many American conservatives of the day, he feared “Asian” Communism more than he did Nazi efficiency. In any case, after nearly four years of exile, he came home to ask for a military buildup by the United States, just in case; he had also come home to preach against involvement in the approaching European war. On the buildup, as the two heroes were wary allies, they met for the first and last time.

From Lindbergh’s diary:

I went to see the President about 12:45. . . . He was seated at his desk at one end of a large room. There were several model ships around the walls. He leaned forward from his chair to meet me as I entered, and it is only now that I stop to think that he is crippled. I did not notice it and had not thought of it during our meeting. He immediately asked me how Anne was and mentioned the fact that she knew his daughter in school. He is an accomplished, suave, interesting conversationalist. I liked him and feel that I could get along with him well. Acquaintanceship would be pleasant and interesting.

But there was something about him I did not trust, something a little too suave, too pleasant, too easy. Still, he is our President, and there is no reason for any antagonism between us in the work I am now doing. The airmail situation is past—one of the worst political maneuvers I know of, and unfair in the extreme, to say the least. But nothing constructive will be gained by bringing it up again at this time.

Roosevelt gave me the impression of being a very tired man, but with enough energy left to carry on for a long time. I doubt that he realizes how tired he is. His face has that gray look of an over-worked businessman. And his voice has that even, routine tone that one seemed to get when mind is dulled by too much and too frequent conversation. It has that dull quality that comes to any one of the senses when it is overused: taste, with too much of the same food day after day; hearing, when the music never changes; touch, when one’s hand is never lifted.

Roosevelt judges his man quickly and plays him cleverly. He is mostly politician, and I think we would never get along on many fundamentals. But there are things about him I like, and why worry about the others unless and until they necessitate consideration. It is better to work together as long as we can; yet somehow I have a feeling that it may not be for long.

Thus the great dramaturge keeps the plot aboil. Also, Lindbergh’s impressions are as interesting and “accurate” a take on FDR as anything written by a contemporary. Certainly, it is unique in Lindbergh’s diary because he—who was observed constantly by everyone else—seldom observes anyone, not so much due to lack of interest but of opportunity. Happily, for gossips, he did note how astonishingly boring the Duke of Windsor was at dinner when he discussed at length how much higher the Etoile was than the Place de la Concorde, plainly an all-time room-emptier.

The truce with FDR was short. That summer, Lindbergh worked with the commanding general of the Army Air Force, H. H. Arnold; research and development was the Lindbergh assignment. On September 1, the Germans invaded Poland. The European war had begun. On September 15, Lindbergh took to the airwaves to speak on “America and the European Wars.” Of this, he writes, “An interesting incident relating to the address had occurred earlier in the day.” A colonel had been sent to him to say “the Administration was very much worried by my intention of speaking over the radio and opposing actively this country’s entry into a European war. [He] said that if I did not do this, a secretaryship of air would be created in the Cabinet and given to me! . . . This offer on Roosevelt’s part does not surprise me after what I have learned about his Administration. It does surprise me, though, that he still thinks I might be influenced by such an offer. It is a great mistake for him
to let the Army know that he deals in such a way.”

This is very prim indeed, but Lindbergh knew that, from Arnold on down, the President had been told Lindbergh wouldn’t accept. “Regardless of the fact that [FDR] had publicly advocated a policy of neutrality for the United States, it seemed to me apparent that he intended to lead our country into the war. The powers he influenced and controlled were great. Opposing them would require planning, political skill, and organization. For me, this meant entering a new framework of life.”

For nearly three years, the son of C.A. galvanized the country with his speeches and rallies. The first and, thus far, last great debate of the “American Century” was now engaged. Although Lindbergh had many formidable allies, the President had not only great skills and powers, he had, as we now know, the British secret services at work throughout the land, and their first task was the deconstruction of a hero.

To swing American opinion towards war, the British knew that they could count on the wily Roosevelt only up to a point. He had a third term to win in 1940; he also had a country with an isolationist majority, and a Lone Eagle pecking away at him. He could still launch trial balloons like his 1937 “Quarantine the Aggressors” speech, which was, according to Canada’s Governor-General, Lord Tweedsmuir, “the culmination of a long conspiracy between us (this must be kept secret)!” Unfortunately, that balloon burst and FDR retreated, for the moment. He always had the same advice for enthusiasts whose aims he shared but dared not support openly in the absence of a political majority. “You must
force
me to act,” he would say blithely. When a denunciation of his inaction was being prepared by the interventionists, he suggested “pusillanimous” as a nice word to describe his cautious public policies.

C.A.’s son was now beginning to see, if not the covert hand of the British in our affairs, the overt hand of the House of Morgan, not to mention his own father-in-law, Dwight Morrow. Lindbergh had never much minded the Money Trust that had so incensed his father. He had gone from being a farm boy, to stunt flier, to Army flier and then to world hero. Social injustice seemed never to have concerned him. After all, he had looked after himself and everything had turned out rather more than well. He had allowed himself to be taken up by Dwight Morrow and the Morgan partners who invested his money for him and made him rich without ever commercializing his name. Incidentally, Berg made a gentlemanly treaty with Anne Morrow Lindbergh (still alive in her nineties) to use her diaries and correspondence. One
quid
for this
quo
is that Berg never mentions the fact that the brilliant, self-made Morrow was an alcoholic. It is here that Milton is much more interesting than Berg about the family that Lindbergh married into.

One fact of the national condition that can never be dis-cussed with candor is the class system. At the peak of the American pyramid—the one with that awful unblinking eye in it—is the WASP eastern establishment. Mahl notes that C. Wright Mills took considerable flak when

he identified [it] in his book
The Power Elite
(1956). The United States, wrote Mills, was controlled not by the mass of its citizens as described by democratic theory, but by a wealthy Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite from Ivy League schools. In a flurry of caustic reviews, critics, often Cold War liberals, heatedly denied that there was such an elite. That debate now seems over, as Douglas Little noted in a recent review article in
Diplomatic History
: “Far from rejecting the idea of a power elite . . . [the books under review] celebrate its short lived Periclean age during the quarter century after 1945. . . .”

The British had never displayed any similar doubts about the existence of an American “power elite.” As early as 1917, Lord Robert Cecil in Cabinet noted that “though the American people are very largely foreign, both in origin and modes of thought, their rulers are almost exclusively Anglo-Saxons, and share our political ideals.”

The Swedish Lindberghs were as foreign to this establishment as the Sulzbergers. But in the instance of war or peace the Sulzbergers sided with the WASP elite, while Charles Lindbergh missed the point which Anne swiftly got the moment he showed her the medal that Goering had unexpectedly handed him at dinner in Berlin. “Your albatross,” she said. Lindbergh seems never to have got it.

Meanwhile, between WASP elite and British agents, the United States was being totally transformed. From President Washington’s day to Pearl Harbor, isolationism was the honorable, if sometimes opportunistically ignored, national creed. But by 1940, one of the two leading isolationist senators, Arthur Vandenberg, had been converted to war and, later, to global hegemony, by three enchanting ladies in the pay of the British. Mahl gives names, addresses. One of them, wife to a British diplomat, code name “Cynthia,” was the heroine of an eponymous study by H. Montgomery Hyde in 1965. Finally, just in case FDR was defeated in 1940, the other great isolationist, Senator Robert A. Taft, was overwhelmed at the Republican convention by the British candidate, the previously unknown Wendell Willkie.

After Pearl Harbor, Lindbergh offered his services to the Air Force. FDR, never one to forgo an enmity, took pleasure in turning him down, despite the
New York Times
editorial to the effect that he should be used as “he is a superb air man, and this is primarily and essentially an air war.” But Roosevelt could not allow his competition to regain hero status, which, indeed, despite the best efforts of many interested parties, he never did lose for most of the people. Lone Eagles tend to outsoar presidents, no matter how bad the weather. As it was, Lindbergh got to the South Pacific, where he flew clandestine combat missions with men half his age. As he was only an observer, this was illegal, but commanders in the field were delighted to have so consummate and useful an airman in their midst.

Once the war was over, Lindbergh continued his travels with Anne; they also raised their five surviving children. It appears that Lindbergh was a conscientious father, with a tendency to reinvent the wheel when there was something to be explained. He was also a bit of a martinet with checklists (yes, he invented that pilot’s routine) for each child. He was alert to the utility of things. Reeve records a hilarious (to read, that is) lecture on “punk design”:

He also had a normal-looking flashlight with an ugly hexagonal head, to which feature he drew our attention every time he put the flashlight down on a flat surface.

“You see that?” He would point. “It doesn’t move.” We saw. The flashlight lay there on the shelf, or the table, or the floor, exactly as he had placed it. It didn’t move a bit. Nor did we, as he fixed us with his penetrating, instructive blue eyes.