The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (35 page)

Eddie visited German automobile showrooms, which seemed shoddy, and the cars were “too high and heavy,” old-fashioned and uninspired. Adelaide was bored because there was no place worth shopping. They had been there only a day, and were intending to leave, when Eddie had a surprising visitor.

It was Ernst Udet, the German Ace of Aces, who had learned that Rickenbacker was in town and sought him out with an invitation to dinner with a group of German fighter pilots, among whom were Hermann Göring and Erhard Milch who, along with Udet, would one day rise to the very top of the Nazi regime. “Naturally I accepted,” Rickenbacker said.

Dinner was in a secret room under a small café. Eddie was introduced to about a dozen of the German airmen but only Udet, Göring, and Milch spoke English. Milch “was on the slender side; he was dignified and well educated.”
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Udet, according to Eddie, was “short, stocky and jovial.” Göring, who had commanded the Flying Circus after the death of von Richthofen, was conspicuously in charge. “He was then a fine figure of a man, positive and dedicated to the rebirth of the fatherland,” Eddie would write.

Göring became expansive as the wine and the evening wore on and they reminisced about the war. Then, surprisingly, Göring laid out a chilling blueprint for the resurrection of a rearmed imperial Germany.

“Our whole future is in the air,” Göring said, as Rickenbacker recalled, in his harsh, guttural accent. “It is by airpower that we are going to recapture the German Empire. To accomplish this, we will do three things. First, we will teach gliding as a sport to all our young men. Then we will build up a fleet of commercial planes, each easily converted to military operation. Finally we will create the skeleton of a military air force. When the time comes, we will put all three together—and the German Empire will be reborn. We must win through the air.”

As astounding as this information was, the conversation ended on a cordial note, as Udet and Milch each weighed in on the need to save Germany from its current plight.

Next day Eddie and Adelaide returned to Paris for a breath of fresh air at the horse track at Longchamp with Mr. and Mrs. Harry Crosby. Crosby was an alcoholic pervert and scapegrace son of a Boston Brahmin family, but in the meantime he was also a brilliant editor, poet, and founder, along with his wife, of the notable Black Sun Press, which published among others James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and Ezra Pound.
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Heaven knows how the Rickenbackers got mixed up with that outlandish couple—history doesn’t tell us—but the Crosbys must have been on their better behavior that day because Eddie found the encounter pleasant. Next day they went out to Le Bourget, which Eddie described as the “finest airport he had ever seen.”
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It was just then under construction and Eddie was stunned by the size and concept of the project, with its capacious runways and row after row of enormous hangars, interspersed by offices, warehouses, baggage rooms, and a plush new hotel for passengers arriving on commercial airliners from Amsterdam, Brussels, and London. There was nothing remotely like it in the United States.

Toward the end of October the Rickenbackers embarked on the remainder of the Grand Tour, hitting Nice, Monaco, Rome, and Naples in a chauffeured Packard, and returning by Florence, Venice, Turin, Avignon, and Lyon. Adelaide did so much shopping it was said that their excess baggage amounted to well over a thousand pounds on the flight from Paris to London. In Naples they had a glimpse of the future when thousands of armed Blackshirts began to assemble for Mussolini’s victorious “March on Rome.”

In London, on November 11, 1922, the celebration of the fourth anniversary of Armistice Day included a splendid formal dinner and dance at the Savoy, where the Rickenbackers were staying. Eddie never did learn to dance very well, though he had taken lessons in New York at a dance studio for several months after his return from the war. “He knew the two-step,” Adelaide said, “and then one step back. That was about it.” Eddie was reminded of the time he stayed at the Savoy in 1916, and he stood at the window watching squadron after squadron of British warplanes flying over the Thames.

During their last days in Paris there were auto and air shows to attend and at last, on November 22, the Rickenbackers boarded the
Majestic
for the seven-day voyage home, with Hermann Göring’s threatening concept of a rearmed Germany still ringing in Eddie’s ears. During the voyage he sketched out a design he thought of as the Rickenbacker Plan for World Peace, which he took to Washington at the first opportunity and gave to various politicians he had met after the war and on his speaking tour.

Rickenbacker deplored the poverty in Germany and concluded it could lead to no good end, so the first part of his proposal was for a reduction in the amount of the German indemnity for the war forced on her at the Versailles Conference, as well as an extension of the terms that would “make it possible for her to pay the balance.” The second part of the plan consisted of a bridge loan from the U.S. government that would allow Germany to meet her immediate indemnity payments, as well as “stabilize the government and get the currency on a firm basis.”

He saw it as a no-lose scheme that would allow Germany to repay the European Allies, which, in turn, would allow them to repay the war loans made to them by the United States, so that “it would be merely a matter of bookkeeping,” and everyone would settle up and live happily ever after. He released this manifesto to the press, which gave it widespread coverage, but that’s where the matter ended. Nobody in Congress wanted to fool with it and the general public didn’t care. The war was over and Europe was a long way off.

When the Rickenbackers returned to Detroit they moved into an apartment at Indian Village Manor, an exclusive new building overlooking the Detroit River and Lake St. Clair. There, with the antique furnishings and artwork she had purchased in Europe, Adelaide created a tasteful and sumptuous home for dinner parties and other obligations of an automotive company executive.

Eddie had taken the position of vice president in charge of sales for the Rickenbacker Motor Company. He took his work seriously, and soon the company had some five hundred dealers in the United States and about three hundred abroad. Profits were steady, if not huge, but the company paid dividends, increased its stock issue, and by the end of 1923 reported a profit of $511,060.
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Then, to his eternal regret, Eddie pressured the directors to include four-wheel braking on all models for the next year.

The system had been considered too innovative for the first models, but Eddie had driven the European race cars that used it and insisted they were the wave of the future. Unfortunately, all he did was set a trap for himself.

Rickenbacker Motors announced with great fanfare and a national advertising campaign that its 1924 automobiles would include a reliable, state-of-the-art, four-wheel braking system. This caught the other auto companies by surprise, because they had large inventories of cars and it was too late for them to change for the model year.

Their response to the Rickenbacker announcement was immediate and devastating. Led by the prominent automaker Studebaker, full-page ads were taken out charging that the four-wheel braking system offered by Rickenbacker was inherently unfeasible and unsafe. In rain, these rival attack ads claimed, the brakes would cause a car to skid out of control. Further, the ads said that oftentimes the front-wheel brakes would lock up and hurl the passengers into (or through) the windshield. Also, it was widely suspected by many Rickenbacker dealers that these same competitors had backed a whispering campaign
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to start rumors that a huge number of accidents, many with broken necks and other terrible injuries, were being kept out of the papers by Rickenbacker bribes.
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Here was the dilemma Rickenbacker Motors was caught in: even though the unfavorable publicity was affecting sales, the company couldn’t go back to two-wheel brakes after making its announcement of the superiority of four-wheel brakes. All the company could do was hunker down and try to move the cars they had.

At the same time, in 1925 the American economy went into recession. Many of the Rickenbacker dealers were going broke, and Eddie put all of his own considerable savings into shoring them up. Then he borrowed more from banks or got credit from suppliers.

But the recession became worse. One of the directors of the company, a man respected for his knowledge and wisdom, was killed in a car accident. The company stock dropped. Then a new competing automobile appeared, a Chrysler, with a fashionable design, dependable engineering, and a reasonable price. There were more than one hundred U.S. automakers in the 1920s, and dozens of them foundered, including, at last, Rickenbacker Motors. The owners began quarreling among themselves and Eddie resigned his position as vice president, hoping that might inspire some miracle that would bring the company back.

In 1927 the Rickenbacker corporation filed for bankruptcy. Eddie was thirty-six years old, broke, unemployed, and $250,000 in debt. It is the ultimate measure of a man what he does under tremendously adverse circumstances such as these, and Rickenbacker was no piker. Friends advised him to file for personal bankruptcy, but he would have none of it. His own words bear repeating: “I owed the money, and I would pay it back if I had to work like a dog to do it. I was not ashamed and not afraid. Failure was something I had faced before and might well face again. I have said it over and over: ‘Failure’ is the greatest word in the English language. Here in America failure is not the end of the world. If you have determination, you can come back from failure and succeed.”

It was certainly a test of Rickenbacker’s character. He was a man of his times, and of his country. He had come up from nothing, an immigrant family’s child of the streets who’d sold rags and bones at the age of six and climbed up the ladder, rung by greasy rung, a Horatio Alger story without the pervasive helping hand. Though he couldn’t know it then, his severest trials lay in the future, with only the barest hank of hair or piece of bone between himself and eternity. Without a winning mind-set such as he had, Eddie Rickenbacker never would have made it.

I
N THE MEANTIME
a showdown was brewing in the court-martial of General Billy Mitchell. Mitchell had accused the Army Air Service hierarchy of behavior that was in his estimation criminal in its neglect of planes and pilot training. He reasserted his demands for a separate air force—or at least one that was controlled by flying officers—ideas that did not sit well with the twelve generals who sat on the court-martial jury, including General Douglas MacArthur, who thought Mitchell was insubordinate.

The highlight of the trial came when Rickenbacker, who had once been Mitchell’s driver in France—and was still the most famous airman in America—took the oath to testify in Mitchell’s behalf. As the final witness in the trial, he told the court that the United States ranked an embarrassing seventh in aviation power, behind France, England, Italy, Germany, Russia, and Japan. He had some sharp clashes with the court-martial officers, including Major General Hugh A. Drum, who insisted to Rickenbacker that he could defend Washington with a dozen antiaircraft guns.

Eddie responded with a tirade, pointing out that when the United States entered World War I there was no American aircraft industry, and that hundreds of pilots lost their lives needlessly flying obsolete foreign planes. He excoriated the military brass for denying pilots parachutes in the war.

“This nation owes General Mitchell a debt of gratitude,” he told the court, “for daring to speak the truth. He learned his lesson from the only true teacher—experience. It is pathetic to think that military leaders can destroy the life of a man who has done us the service Mitchell has … It is a crime against posterity. This nation will pay the price of its selfishness. Not perhaps in this generation, but in that of the boys who are growing up today, or their sons.” In the end it all came to naught. Billy Mitchell was found guilty of conduct prejudicial to the military service and suspended from active duty for five years without pay. “I might as well have been talking to a stone wall,” Rickenbacker said bitterly.

E
DDIE RETURNED FROM THE TRIAL
to the cutthroat world of big business with a splash. The first thing he did was to buy the Indianapolis Speedway, home of the Indianapolis 500.

Of course it wasn’t quite as simple as that. But Eddie’s very name was leverage. He had investigated buying a small company in Indianapolis, Allison Engineering, which manufactured auto and airplane parts, but its owner, who was also looking to sell the Speedway, talked Eddie into buying it instead of the engineering plant. It hadn’t taken much talking. Eddie had many fond memories of his glory days on that track, and the alternative was that the property—which was now surrounded by the fast-growing city—would have been broken up and sold off in real estate parcels.

A banker acquaintance of Eddie’s in Detroit had told him after the bankruptcy of Rickenbacker Motors that if he ever had a business proposition to come to him with it for financing. Eddie had been profoundly grateful that such an offer had been made when he was broke, unemployed, and deeply in debt. Now Rickenbacker went to him with a plan to finance the Indianapolis 500. The bank floated a $700,000 bond issue—the purchase price for the property—and within a few months Rickenbacker held a 51 percent interest in the Indianapolis Speedway, with the bank holding the other 49 percent as its fee. He was back in business.

First off, Eddie resurfaced the track, putting asphalt over the old bricks of what is still known in car racing circles as the Brickyard, making it smoother and safer. Since the race was only a one-day-a-year event, he added an eighteen-hole golf course to generate more revenue. Moreover, he persuaded the National Broadcasting Company to begin airing the entire race on its nationwide radio network—a huge coup.