The Rise and Fall of Charles Lindbergh: Chapters 27–33

Charles felt galvanized. The next time he emerged from his study, it was with a radio speech he’d written. He showed it to Anne. He would speak directly to Americans about the war in Europe, he told her, make them understand why the United States should never take sides.

The press called him “a somber cretin,” “a man without human feeling,” and “a pro-Nazi recipient of a German medal.”

And across the Atlantic, his old friend Harold Nicolson scathingly wrote, “Charles Lindbergh...is and always will be not merely a schoolboy hero, but also a schoolboy.”

To Americans, Germany’s Blitzkrieg, or “lightning war,” seemed unstoppable.

They no longer felt immune to events in Europe, and the ocean they had once believed protected them no longer seemed inviolable.

Simply put, Germany should be allowed to seize territory until it satisfied its hunger for expansion. Once full, it, too, would settle into complacency like the Allies.

“Carrel is still able to discuss the war objectively and sees the causes clearly,” he wrote that night in his journal.

Finally, Carrel got around to his request. In his next radio address, would Charles add a “friendly reference to France?” It would mean so much to the beleaguered French people.

As he spoke, the enthusiastic crowd broke in again and again. For a man who detested chaos and spontaneity, he liked the clapping and cheering.

She urged Americans to leap onto the wave of Nazism. It didn’t have to be Hitler’s brand. It could be uniquely American, “crisp, clear, tart, sunny, and crimson—like an American apple,” or as homespun as “baseball and blue jeans.”

As one historian later summarized Anne’s argument, all the citizens of the United States had to do was “simply skim off the scum of Nazism and let the pure and sparkling waves of fascism wash up on the shores.”

“I am hurt, not by the reviews exactly, but by the growing rift I see between myself and these people I thought I belonged to,” Anne wrote in her diary. “The artists, the writers, the intellectuals, the sensitive, the idealistic—I feel exiled from them.”

“The pall of war seems to hang over us,” Charles wrote in his journal when he heard the poll results.

By April, he was refreshed and once again ready to take on any and all warmongers—and that included the president of the United States.

Anti-Semites particularly bedeviled the organization. Some chapter leaders spewed anti-Semitic accusations, while others invited anti-Semitic speakers to address their members.

In Charles’s tone, many heard a new bitterness and contentiousness that hadn’t been there before.

There was much Betty Morrow disliked about her son-in-law. But his refusal to show any sympathy for victims of the Nazi regime particularly rankled her.

An ardent supporter of aid to England, she was active in several private organizations providing help to Europeans.

Couldn’t her son-in-law muster up even a “little revulsion” for the Germans’ methods? she asked Anne one day.

But Anne remained adamant. Later, she would even refuse to help her mother put together bundles of clothes for refugees. It would be a violation of her “personal neutrality,” she said.

An indignant Betty would stomp away.

As the driver steered to the curb, throngs surrounded the vehicle.

But Charles stood unflinching, supported by the stone foundation of his convictions. Unshakable. Implacable. And absolutely sure he was right.

Just that day, FDR had issued his “shoot on sight” policy, authorizing the US Navy to fire at any hostile vessel. Now Charles prepared to fire his fiercest salvo back at the war agitators.

He’d put them on notice that America’s tolerance was tenuous. That if they supported intervention, they would be punished.

Practically every newspaper in the nation echoed these sentiments, even the ones that supported isolationism, like the Chicago Tribune.

It called Lindbergh’s address “intemperate,” “intolerant,” and “repugnant.”

Before he came along, “anti-Semites were shoddy little crooks and fanatics....But now all that is changed....He, the famous one, has stood up in public and given brazen tongue to what obscure malcontents have only whispered.”

Anne recoiled from the rumors, but Charles seemed unperturbed.

For weeks, he put the new aircraft through rigorous exercises, searching for design flaws and creating emergency procedures.

He longed to stay in the Pacific, flying with his fighter group, weaving through black puffs of smoke and strafing enemy barges, but he knew he couldn’t.

They’d been joined by hundreds of other newly released and homeless prisoners of the Nazis, mostly Russians, Poles, and Czechs. Camping out in the crude wooden barracks, they lived in overcrowded, squalid conditions.

But their odor! It assailed Charles’s nostrils.

He had, after all, been committed to the idea of race betterment and had advocated for the propagation of “superior genetic material.”

He believed in the intrinsically racist theories of survival of the fittest and natural selection as they applied to human beings, and had stared with both fascination and awe into Dr. Carrel’s mousery.

By the fifteenth, war in the Pacific had ended, and Charles’s ruminations about God and science had reached a crisis point.

He also criticized the war trials just beginning at Nuremberg for their “vengeance” against Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust.
The next morning, the press excoriated him.

The only person who knew the truth, of course, was Charles, and he left no inkling.

With the sun on his face and dust on his boots, in the prick of thorns and amid the yelling of hyenas and the bark of zebras, the sixty-year-old had yet another epiphany.

Jovanovich read what Charles had given him that night, and the next day they drew up a contract. Charles left the shaping and editing of the material to his publisher. It would be published posthumously in 1978 under the title Autobiography of Values.