Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (63 page)

A
nne on a trip through the Florida Everglades with Charles and their friend Jim Newton, 1941
.

(Lindbergh Picture Collection, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library)

G
athered in the darkness, the Japanese planes flew toward the island of Oahu. As light drenched the morning sky on December 7, 1941, waves of Japanese bombs pummeled Pearl Harbor. The U.S. Pacific Fleet, caught by surprise on a Sunday morning, was at anchor, off-guard and half-manned. Forewarned but
unprepared, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel marshaled his sleeping men for counterattack, but within hours, 2334 American men were dead and 1347 lay wounded.
²

At their home on Martha’s Vineyard, Anne and Charles along with millions of Americans across the country, sat riveted by their radios as Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on Japan. It was a date, said Roosevelt, “which will live in infamy.”
³

Charles knew better. “I am not surprised that the Japs attacked,” he wrote in his diary. “We have been prodding them into war for weeks. They have simply beaten us to the gun.”
⁴

The next day hysteria took hold. Prewar ambivalence turned to fervor as thousands of men stormed naval recruitment centers.
⁵
In Germany, Adolf Hitler, fearing insurrection, went on a bloody rampage. He issued the Night and Fog Decree, enveloping enemies of the Reich in the folds of a winter night.

Anne hid beneath the bed covers, too weak to lift her head from the pillow. She was pregnant with her fifth child, but this malaise went beyond her pregnancy.
⁶

She wrote to her friend Sue Vaillant that she would never publish anything under her name again and that Charles’s reputation was ruined for good.

Charles would hear nothing of it. The war was on, and there was work to be done. Although he didn’t trust Roosevelt, it was his duty to serve the president in his role as commander in chief.
⁷
Within days of Roosevelt’s declaration, Charles offered his services to the War Department.
⁸
Secretary Stimson replied quickly: there was no way he would be permitted to serve, in any capacity. His loyalty, implied the letter, could not be trusted. Unless he retracted all his statements, his wartime activities would be shadowed by public doubt and fear. And for the most part, the press agreed. The best Charles could do, wrote the New York newspaper
PM
, was to retire.
⁹
The Nation
magazine wrote that a commission to Charles Lindbergh would be “beyond the limits of safety.”
¹⁰

Outraged but adamant, Charles refused to give in to the War
Department’s demands. A statement of retraction was out of the question. He still believed the war was wrong, but serving his country was a matter of honor. If he couldn’t serve in the military, he would support the war through private industry. The problem was, the government was everywhere. No matter where he looked or to whom he spoke, it all came back to the decision by Roosevelt. While the War Department camouflaged its stance with amiable public statements, Charles was barred from company after company—first Curtiss-Wright, then United Airlines, then Pan Am. Discouraged, Charles called on his friend Henry Ford.
¹¹

Ford had instructed the men at his fledgling aircraft division at the plant in Dearborn to begin experimenting with high-altitude bombers. He was pleased with Charles’s offer of help; the expertise would be more than welcome. This time, Roosevelt heartily agreed. Charles Lindbergh was suited to work with Henry Ford.

To the sound of the innocent laughter of her children at play, Anne began a gradual recovery. She sat in the island sunshine of early spring, trying to reconstruct her life. With her name synonymous with the “passive acceptance of totalitarianism,” she feared not only public condemnation, but the loss of her family’s and friends’ good will. She still imagined she could have prevented the kidnapping and dammed the torrents of the war. If only she could achieve a state of grace, Anne thought she would be free of guilt and self-condemnation.
¹²

In her despair, Anne turned again to the work of Saint-Exupéry for comfort. His new novel,
Flight to Arras
, a stream-of-consciousness narrative in the voice of a flier on a wartime mission, seemed to Anne “an act of forgiveness.” He moved beyond the conventional notions of good and evil and beyond the confines of human “sin” to embrace the perversity of human nature. As if echoing Anne’s deepest thoughts, he wrote, “I sat there longing for night, like a Christian abandoned by grace … alone and safely isolated in my beloved solitude. So that I might discover why I ought to die.”
¹³

Once more, his words seemed intended only for her. Anne no longer felt “exiled.” Unlike the words of her husband, these were right and
good and pure. Unlike the punitive voice of Calvinism during her childhood, they held the promise of forgiveness and grace.

In the spring of 1942, Anne was a pilgrim in search of God. She was willing to accept the dark uncertainties of life if only she could reclaim her faith.
¹⁴
But Anne’s “darkness” mirrored the devastation of Europe. As she wrote, nearly a million German soldiers lay dead or wounded on the frigid white battlefields of western Russia. Hitler, confirming his right to rule, demanded that churchbells be taken down and collected. They would be melted to build airplane engines.
¹⁵

Charles at last began to realize that German victory was far from certain, and he was worried. After all, to him “a Russian-dominated Europe would be far worse than German rule.” He wondered how America could possibly win a war when the character of its people was in constant decline. If only we could do away with the “cheapness and immobility” of the motion picture industry, he wrote, America might stand a chance. While his patriotism condemned him to serve in a war he despised, he refused to profit from death and destruction. He would accept a salary of no more than $10,000 a year, he wrote—no matter what job he decided to take. It was the sum he would have received as a commissioned officer.
¹⁶

Like Anne, he felt imprisoned by “fate.” There is nothing worse than a caged animal, he wrote. The glaze in its eyes betrayed the death of its spirit. He, too, felt “hungry” and “deadened,” but he hid his anguish to protect Anne.
¹⁷

Anne believed that Charles was taking the war in stride. Nothing seemed to stop him. He was as tenacious and vibrant as ever.
¹⁸
Perhaps Charles’s vitality came from his reconciliation with his past. It was as if, he later wrote, he sat on a hilltop and threw a beam of light on the road he had traveled. Not wishing for salvation, he hoped, at least, for self-understanding. He began to realize that the visions of his father and grandfather, which had pursued him during those long months before the war, were the source of his values, motives, and politics. He wanted to reclaim them and to make them his own. Using the story of his 1927 transatlantic flight, Charles wrote a narrative that overlaid bare fact
with metaphysical experience and stream-of-consciousness interpretation. It eventually took him seventeen years to write the book; in it, he defined his heroism as a response to the lives and views of his father and grandfather, and to his lonely, discordant, and vagabond childhood. He re-created his young self as a sensitive, frightened, and flawed child, whose desire to rise above personalities and ideologies drove him to seek the objective standards by which he could measure his life. While technology gave him a mechanism of control, flying gave him an almost “mystical” means of transcendence. The personal account of his public victory,
The Spirit of St. Louis
, is as technical and precise a book as it is a lyrical and poetic expression. It reveals his broad knowledge and his literary skill.
¹⁹
Although the story is dominated by masculine mythologies, thus minimizing the powerful influence of his mother—the prime sustaining force of his early years—it is an honest glimpse into the workings of his mind.
²⁰

Immediately, Anne understood the book. After reading the handwritten seventy pages of the first draft, she wrote, “I am humbled.”
²¹
After all her anger and alienation, she could not resist the honest beauty of his words. Charles was “gold” and Anne was grateful—grateful for the luxury of loving her husband. This book was proof of Charles’s integrity—a confirmation of the man she loved behind the maligned public image. And when Charles decided to take the job with Ford in Detroit, Anne could not bear the thought of living alone.

For the moment, pregnant and spiritually spent, Anne felt like a physical shell—a vehicle of nature, an object of someone else’s desire. She felt empty and hollow, without moral or personal integrity. She feared that, left alone, she would crack. Charles’s presence made her whole and “real.” He was the keystone of her psychological survival. Twenty years later, Betty Friedan would call Anne’s reaction a common one: “the problem without a name.”
²²

In a double soliloquy, Anne and Charles grappled with the loneliness of physical separation. Their solitary contemplations suffused their letters with newfound passion and eternal commitment. Each saw in the other an idealized image.
²³

In the confines of a room at the Dearborn Inn in Detroit, Charles, too, tried to gain perspective on their marriage. In a letter to Anne he told her that his life without her would be barren and aimless—she was his window to a better world. He knew he was moving toward something beyond the mechanistic perversions of life, toward “something quite vague and indefinite, but something I know is there.”
²⁴

But the more Anne pledged her undying love and idealized her marriage, the more the emptiness seemed to take hold. The farther she ran from the emotional truth, the more she plumbed the depths of her unhappiness. Again she felt like a prisoner in someone else’s life. But if she was, she had no doubt that she was the one at fault. Charles, with his confidence, had set her free. It was not he, not marriage, that was the enemy. “But where is the real me?” she asked. “It is completely buried … Can one be a good mother and write? … It means disciplining myself—my two selves.”
²⁵
Creative freedom seemed another kind of prison; it cut her off from the mainstream of life. Her present work, she concluded, despite her dread of the months of pregnancy, was to have a child.
²⁶

At the end of June 1942, Anne did at last move with the children to Detroit. They rented a house in Bloomfield Hills, a suburb, Anne wrote, known for its beauty, its artistic interests, and the quality of its schools. Charles, rejoicing in Anne’s arrival, was intent on encouraging her to write. Anne, though tired and worn and feeling out of “season” in her last months of pregnancy, cultivated a moment of optimism. She was hopeful, she told Charles, that he had found an enclave in Detroit—a place where they could begin again.
²⁷

But she felt displaced. Bloomfield Hills—in fact, the whole Midwest—she wrote, had the air of complacency attendant on the nouveauriches. From the garish rented house, to the manicured lawns and hedged gardens, to the insipid conversation at backyard barbecues, life was surrounded by unreality. Didn’t anyone understand the war? Had no one heard of the mass executions? Did they know the Germans were advancing in Russia? How could anyone ever again trust the Germans?
²⁸

In fact, the Germans had accelerated the executions. Following the 1942 Wannsee Conference, where the systematic extermination of the Jews was set out in detail, camps were established in the occupied territories of the east. Bergen-Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Majdanek, all opened in that year, had a combined killing capacity of 60,000 a day. Between 1942 and 1944, the extermination capacity of Auschwitz would increase sevenfold.
²⁹

While Anne recoiled in terror at the news of Hitler’s “final solution,” Charles remained silent and unperturbed. But, then, the systematic destruction of the Jews could hardly have been a revelation. Between July 1936 and January 1938, in the course of Charles’s six trips to Germany, he had witnessed firsthand the trajectory of Hitler’s “eliminationist” goals. While Lindbergh could not have known the details of the plan to exterminate the Jews, their legal, economic, and social exclusion and the violence leading up to Kristallnacht made it clear that the Nazis were working hard to resolve the “Jewish problem.”
³⁰
The possibility of deporting the Jews to slave camps as retribution for their crimes against the state was discussed within the Reich and surmised in the press long before Lindbergh’s decision not to return to Germany. Furthermore, his friendship with Henry Ford would have provided a direct link with the Nazi Reich. While Lindbergh would later state that he was not in contact with anyone in Germany after January of 1939, his friend and employer was a well-placed source of any information he might require.