After the war, Lindbergh inspected air force facilities around the country as consultant to the Secretary of the Air Force. He was also part of a committee that oversaw the development of long-range ballistic missiles. He flew on simulated atomic-bomb missions and quickly realized that a new kind of precision bomber was needed. He was a member, too, of the top-secret organization CHORE (Chicago Ordnance Survey), set up to evaluate the history of weaponry. The work was so secret the invitation to join had been delivered by hand. At one CHORE dinner the scientist sitting next to him told him what it had been like to be at the explosion of the first atomic bomb at Almagordo, part of the White Sands Proving Ground. ‘Now, when I press this button,’ Enrico Fermi – the creator of the world’s first nuclear reactor – had told those assembled, ‘there is a chance in ten thousand it will be the end of the world.’ At 20 seconds after 5.29am on 16 July 1945, ‘and before the astonished military observers could react, Enrico pushed the button’. Anne Morrow Lindbergh had been at the same dinner. She wrote in her diary afterwards: ‘On the whole how ordinary these people are when they come out of the tunnel of their specialty! What children they seem in the field of living & feeling & being aware. How impractical, too, some of them. Like artists – but inarticulate ones. Like musicians, childlike – simple – wrapped in the cocoon of their own world.’
At the end of 1945 Lindbergh had been invited to address the 42nd Aviation Anniversary Dinner of the Aero Club of Washington. It was by then a rare public appearance. At first he had planned to talk about rocket science, but he changed his mind because ‘such questions became dwarfed by the basic problems of how to keep aircraft from destroying the civilization which creates them’. In 1949 at the 46th Aviation Anniversary Dinner of the Aero Club of Washington – another rare public outing – he talked about man’s need to ‘balance science with other qualities of life, qualities of body and spirit as well as those of mind – qualities he cannot develop when he lets mechanics and luxury insulate him too greatly from the Earth to which he was born’.
Lindbergh became increasingly disillusioned with aviation: ‘As my hours in the air increased in number, I lost the keenness of that early vision.’ Flying was now just about pointing the plane in the right direction. ‘The pure joy of flight as an art’ was giving way ‘to the pure efficiency of flight as a science’.
In his youth, science had been more important to him than either man or God: ‘The one I took for granted; the other was too intangible for me to understand.’ He would never have any patience for organized religion, but as he got older Lindbergh began to see science and religion not as inhabiting separate domains but feeding into each other: ‘The shape of God we cannot measure, weigh, or clock, but we can conceive a reality without a form. The growing knowledge of science clarifies man’s intuition of the mystical. The farther we penetrate the unknown, the vaster and more marvelous it becomes.’ During the war he had taken the New Testament with him on his flying missions: ‘That is my choice. It would not have been a decade ago; but the more I learn and the more I read, the less competition it has.’ He wrote that after the war, ‘No peace will last, which is not based on Christian principles, on justice, on compassion allied with strength, and on a sense of the dignity of man.’ He became interested in Eastern religions. His favourite poet was Lao Tze, whom he often quoted. He liked to garden, and listen to birdsong: ‘I realized that if I had to choose, I would rather have birds than planes.’
During the second half of his life Lindbergh gave himself over to Nature and to saving endangered species. He had come to the conclusion that neither aeronautics nor astronautics had been a boon to the human race. Aircraft had brought people together in peace, but in war they had been used to kill in a way that seemed ‘to have little or no relationship to evolution’s selectivity’. Missiles had become the rockets that allowed humans to explore space, but they were also the deadly weapons that had ‘made our civilization subject to extermination within hours’. He blamed himself for having ‘helped to change the environment of our lives’. Flying had brought many benefits to society, he continued to believe, but the Earth was being damaged because of it.
Lindbergh became an environmentalist before the term was in common usage. He was involved in the setting-up of the National Park Service and was active in The Nature Conservancy. He worked for the World Wildlife Fund, writing reports for its parent organization the Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. His efforts helped to bring attention to the ivory trade. He was involved in projects to save the blue whale and the great finback. When Aldabra, an island in the Indian Ocean, was being considered as an airbase, he wrote to protest. He spoke in Alaska on behalf of the Arctic wolf, and almost immediately protective legislation was passed. ‘I don’t want history to record my generation’, he said of his conservation work, ‘as being responsible for the extermination of any form of life.’ But his was a life in which every word was weighed by the press: ‘Where the hell was he,’ the journalist Max Lerner wrote in response to this declaration, ‘when Hitler was trying to exterminate an entire race of human beings?’
Thoreau’s words ‘in wilderness is the preservation of the World’ resonated with Lindbergh. ‘Real freedom,’ he wrote, ‘lies in wildness not in civilization.’ He said that he believed ‘there is wisdom in the primitive lying at greater depths than the intellect has plumbed, a wisdom from which civilized man can learn . . . It is . . . wisdom of instinct, intuition, and genetic memory, held by the subconscious rather than the conscious mind, too subtle and elusive to be more than partially comprised within limits of rationality.’ Not that he didn’t also recognize that ‘the Garden of Eden is behind us and there is no going back to innocence; we can only go forward’. He worked in Africa with the famous family of anthropologists the Leakeys. He lived for a time with the Masai, and later with the Tasaday, a cave-dwelling tribe living in the mountainous rainforests of Mindanao, one of the southern islands of the Philippines. Lindbergh had been introduced to the tribe by Manuel Elizaide, a crony of the Philippine dictator, Ferdinand Marcos. A one-time hard-drinking playboy, Elizaide seemed to have turned his life around when he first came across the Tasaday – he said by chance – and joined them in their struggle against developers. Elizaide created an organization called Panamin (Private Association for National Minorities), and Lindbergh was encouraged to join the board. The Tasaday had apparently never before seen evidence of life in the world outside. Lindbergh was one of the first outsiders to make contact with the tribe. Aged 70, he jumped from a helicopter to land among them. Anne wrote to their daughter Ansy: ‘I must say Father has really done it this time!’ After two weeks Lindbergh, along with 44 anthropologists, ran out of supplies. An air force helicopter had to be sent in to rescue them. ‘I don’t know anyone better equipped to survive in the jungle than your father,’ Anne wrote.
In midlife he had made a decision that he did not want to fly in a rocket: ‘If I had not decided against specializing in fields of missiles and space, as I did, I might have been orbiting in a satellite instead of looking up at one from the framework of a jungle. Then the cramped and weightless interior of a rocket head would be familiar to me, and the gravity-bound expanses of East Africa the strange.’ (Might he have become an astronaut if he had chosen to? It doesn’t seem very likely but perhaps someone at NASA might have said: ‘I’d like to see how the old boy does.’) Astronauts had travelled through space; living with the Tasaday, Lindbergh felt as if he had travelled through time, moving in a moment from so-called civilization to ‘a stone-age cave-dwelling culture. I felt I might have been on a visit to my ancestors a hundred thousand years ago.’ They said to him: ‘We do not know what to ask for because we do not know what we want.’ They wished to stay forever in their caves as they had since time began. Lindbergh said he had never seen a happier people. Here among these tribal peoples, he encountered ‘the juxtaposition of apparently opposed principles of nature – the importance and unimportance of the individual’. It is said that afterwards Lindbergh took to rolling naked in the mud at his home on Long Island Sound.
The Tasaday were soon drawn beyond the forest – as all human beings are, curious. By then Elizaide had fled the country with millions of dollars that had been raised by Panamin for the tribe’s protection. It also emerged that he may have bribed the tribe to say that they had had no contact with the outside world.
On a number of occasions during the 1970s Lindbergh also stayed – at Anne’s suggestion – with Benedictine nuns at the Regina Laudis Priory in Bethlehem, Connecticut. Charles wrote to one of the sisters to tell her how much he had appreciated the experience – ‘the welcome, the singing, the sense of earth, the spiritual atmosphere, and with these qualities, broadness of viewpoint and sense of humor’ were unlike any he had ‘encountered before in a religious organization’.
Lindbergh spent much of whatever spare time he had reading and writing about conservation. He wrote his first piece of popular journalism on the subject in 1972 for Reader’s Digest. In the article – ‘Is Civilization Progress?’ – he observed that ‘Life seems to me to have more validity than any other standard as a measure for the progress of mankind . . . On every continent and in almost every country, the crisis for wildlife is acute . . . Man can stop the extermination if he has the desire to do so. To what extent he has this desire will, I think, be the measure of his greatness – whether he places more value on his own material accomplishments or on God’s miracle of life.’
In his last published work, Autobiography of Values (1979), Lindbergh writes of man’s despoliation of the Earth, but in the past tense, as if from the distant perspective of an alien recalling an Earth that no longer exists: ‘Every day, increasing numbers of bulldozers and trucks tore into mountains, slashed through trees, leaving far greater scars on the Earth’s surface than those created by bombs. Gases from civil vehicles polluted our atmosphere. Waste from civil factories poisoned our rivers, lakes, and seas. Civil aircraft made every spot on Earth open to the ravages of commerce . . . What was the prospect for mankind?’ Lindbergh had come to the realization that we live ‘in a vicious circle, where the machine, which depended on modern man for its invention, has made modern man dependent on its constant improvement for his security – even for his life’. Humankind was caught in a bind of its own devising: on the one hand, ‘in worshipping science man gains power but loses the quality of life’, while on the other ‘without a highly developed science, modern man lacks the power to survive’. He believed that the damage caused by technology might only be repaired, not by blindly rushing to create new technology, but by changing our relationship to technology and to the planet; by finding a new perspective.
‘The human future,’ Lindbergh wrote, ‘depends on our ability to combine the knowledge of science with the wisdom of wildness.’ The word ‘balance’ was forever on his tongue: between science and spirituality, nature and technology, body and spirit. He had, over the years, developed a sophisticated spiritual side. His life ultimately somehow managed to embrace the reductive and the transcendental. He said that the longer he lived, the more limited he believed rationality to be, a surprising statement from someone who had created so many problems for himself out of a too-firm grasp on purely rational argument. Lindbergh remained a virtual recluse for the rest of his life, declining all public invitations to talk.
‘Your father is very busy with his many lives,’ Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote to her elder daughter in 1968. It is not clear if Anne knew quite how many lives her husband was leading by that time. Several times every year for the last decade Charles had been visiting his three other families spread several hundred miles apart across the borders of Switzerland and Germany.
In 1957, at a dinner party in Munich, his tall, beautiful research assistant, who seems only to have been known as Valeska, had introduced Charles to her friends, sisters Brigitte and Marietta Hesshaimer. Both were disabled, the result of bone tuberculosis suffered when they were girls. Lindbergh had already been having an affair with Valeska – 22 years his junior. He is rumoured to have fathered two children with her. Now he fell for Brigitte, a 30-year-old hat maker, 25 years his junior. Together they had three children: Dyrk born in 1958, Astrid in 1960 and David in 1967. He told Brigitte that if she ever told anyone their secret he would not return. To the children he was ‘Careu Kent’. They knew he visited from America. They thought he was a writer because whenever they saw him he was carrying papers, and was always writing. They said he was loving and playful, even though Charles had no German and the children very little English. At some point he also fell for and took up with Marietta, without, apparently, any acrimony between the sisters. He and Marietta reportedly had two children together, Vargo born in 1962 and Christof in 1966. Anne once said, ‘You know, my husband doesn’t think a family exists unless there are twelve children.’ Could she have known how close she had come to the truth?
Charles visited his other families several times a year. He would pick up a rental car, a pale-blue VW bug, and drive first to Montagnola, a small Swiss town overlooking Lake Lugano, where Valeska lived. From there he drove 130 miles to the Swiss town of Sierre, where Marietta lived. He bought her a house in the 1970s. Brigitte lived in Munich, a 375-mile drive from Sierre. He never stayed with any family for more than a week.
Charles and Anne’s relationship had gone through a number of transformations over the years. The first years of their marriage had been idyllic. In the years after the murder of Charlie their relationship became increasingly fraught. When Anne delivered the manuscript of her account of the second survey for Pan American that she and Charles had undertaken in the months after the birth of their second child, the publishers had had the good idea of asking Antoine de Saint-Exupéry to write a short introduction. He sent them nine insightful pages. Anne was delighted. She felt validated as a writer in a way she had never done with Charles, despite Charles’s support and encouragement. When Listen! The Wind was published in 1938 Anne won a second National Book Award. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s resonatingly titled Wind, Sand and Stars came out in America the following year. Anne thought it said everything she had wanted to say about flying and time and relationships. The author was in America to promote the book and Anne was eager to meet him. Charles and Anne invited Saint-Exupéry to dinner and to stay the night. Charles was supposed to pick him up from his hotel in New York and drive him to where they were staying in Long Island Sound. At the last moment Charles was called away and Anne went to collect him instead. Although she described him as stooped and balding, Anne was immediately drawn to him. Within moments they found themselves talking about Rilke. Summer lightning was how Anne described their meeting. She wrote afterwards in her diary that she had talked too much, but she had felt alive and full of joy. When Charles eventually returned, he and Saint-Exupéry fell into a conversation about the place of the machine in modern life. Charles spoke no French and Saint-Exupéry very little English. Anne was their conduit. Saint-Exupéry said that he was optimistic that man would ultimately get the better of his machines and use them ‘as a tool for greater spiritual ends’. He said that the modern world of machines was more foreign than America had been to the early English who had found themselves transplanted there, and it had taken them 300 years even to begin to develop a culture. He thought the signs of a spiritual revival were already evident. Charles was less optimistic.
The two pilots were similar in a number of ways: both had been close to their mothers, both were over 6 feet tall, both had flown the night mail, both were shy, both took notes and thrashed out philosophical ideas while in the air, both were interested in science. Unlike Lindbergh, Saint-Exupéry was unafraid to express emotion. It is not clear that the relationship between Anne and Saint-Exupéry was ever anything other than platonic, but Charles sensed their closeness and was jealous.
Between January 1941 and April 1942, Saint-Exupéry briefly settled in New York with his wife, doing what he could to persuade America to enter the war. Charles and Anne, meanwhile, were doing the opposite. After he left New York and returned to France, Anne never saw Saint-Exupéry again. In 1944, when she was told that he was missing presumed dead, she said she felt as she had done when she learned of the death of her first child and then a few years later of the death of her sister Elizabeth. ‘I felt incredibly alone,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘[he was] as a sun or moon or stars which light earth, which make the whole earth and life more beautiful. Now the earth is unlit and it is no longer so beautiful. I go about stumbling and without joy.’ She wondered if he had forgiven them for their stand over the war; whether he had forgiven her for The Wave of the Future. It is said that Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince was in part based on the Lindberghs’ third son, Land, born in 1937.
By the early 1950s Anne had decided that if their marriage had not improved by the time the youngest of their six children – Reeve, born in 1945 – reached the age of ten she would leave her husband. Anne longed to have time to continue writing. ‘Isn’t it possible for a woman to be a woman and yet produce something tangible beside children?’ she wrote to a friend. But whatever the complexities and complications of that relationship, neither of her parents ever felt truly alive, Reeve wrote years later, unless the other one was there. It wasn’t possible to understand Anne, she said, without a deep understanding of Charles, and vice versa.
Anne confided to her diary that she was envious of Charles’s success with The Spirit of St Louis. He was invading her territory, undermining her confidence. ‘Too much of our life – our pain – our marriage – has gone into the maw of that book . . . And it is His book no matter how much of me is in it . . . He has written HIS book & I have never written mine. I know this. And I also know that it is chiefly my own traits of character – my cowardice – my inhibitions – my laziness – my lack of centeredness & sureness – my unhappiness & gropings – that have kept me from writing it.’
It had taken Charles 14 years to complete his masterpiece. He began to write it in Paris in 1938. He finished it in 1952 at one of their homes, Scott’s Cove off Long Island Sound. The book was published in 1953 and won him a Pulitzer. When Anne read the manuscript, she said tears rushed to her eyes and throat. She tried to work out why exactly, and came to the conclusion that there was ‘something in the directness – simplicity – innocence of that boy arriving after that terrific flight – completely unaware of the world interest – the wild crowds below. The rush of the crowds to the plane is symbolic of life rushing at him – a new life – new responsibilities – he was completely unaware of & unprepared for. I feel for him – mingled excitement & apprehension – a little of what one feels when a child is born & you look at his fresh untouched . . . little face.’
Anne was tired of playing the wife of the hero. She was tired of not standing up for her own life. She had been in therapy for a couple of years, much against Charles’s wishes. She destroyed most of the diaries she wrote during that period. She was tired, too, of Charles’s rages and his sermonizing, tired of his long absences. They were together for less than half the year. One Christmas, alone with the children, they all played a game, trying to guess where Charles might be: one child suggested China, another Japan. India and Alaska were other guesses. Anne said ‘in the air’, but the children all agreed that wasn’t fair, so she guessed Germany.
Anne spent a lot of time alone in her room crying. She developed pneumonia. ‘I must accept,’ she wrote to her sister, ‘the fact that my husband is as completely different from me as he can be – gets his stimulus differently, his contacts with people differently, his refreshment differently.’ Eventually – facing the fact, even accepting the fact of their intrinsic difference – her resilience returned. She found confidantes, who may also have been lovers, and she started writing again. Her elder daughter, Anne (known as Ansy) later said that her sense was that Charles never knew, or just chose not to know, about the putative lovers: ‘he knew that mother loved him and would never leave him. And that was all he needed to know.’
At home Charles was a martinet, controlling, even when he did not mean to be. He couldn’t help it. He said he was fallible, but he didn’t behave as if he was, and rarely backed down, never apologized. There were rules and chores, and endless lists. He taught his children to take calculated risks, but could not see the contradiction between the freedom implied by risk-taking and his own iron grip on the family. He talked of things being ‘on your record’ forever. He also had a soft side; Reeve said that she only had to say, ‘Oh, father,’ and he was liable to relent. Sometimes, when he was in a particularly good mood, he gave them back-rubs, bear hugs and piggy-back rides. There were no kisses. Sometimes he teased them to tears. He read to them every night. He taught his children to fish, sail and swim. Ansy said that even during play he was controlling and sucked all the joy out if it. The house shook when he was angry. His instinct was first to say no; no to almost everything. No TV, no sweets, no comics, no church. He was against chaos, obscenity, chatter, Pop Art, Mothers’ Day and psychotherapy. He liked practical jokes. The children thought the pranks were hilarious. Anne did not. The children called him father, never anything more affectionate. They thought he was God. They did not find it surprising when a child at school told one of them that their father had discovered America. He had little to do with their friends’ parents. The Lindberghs were their own tribe, ‘close-knit, self-enclosed, and self-defining’. The children found it hard at times ‘to separate individual identity from family identity’. Each child reacted differently, either withdrawing, being deferential or rebelling. When Lindbergh left home for a long trip abroad, Reeve said that there was at first a feeling of deflation that soon turned into a feeling as if of holiday. But by the time he returned it was as if the family woke up again, and now, for a little while at least, there was ‘unbridled joy’. Anne’s mother, Betty, wrote in her diary, ‘He must control everything, every act in the household.’ She said of the children that ‘they are all apprehensive, never knowing when their father will fall upon them. The atmosphere – the tension in the house is so terrible – that when Charles goes off for a day or two – everyone sings!’
Charles used silence as a kind of tyranny. The children had each been made to swear never to talk of their eldest brother Charlie. Occasionally someone would turn up at the door claiming to be the Lindbergh baby grown up. They called them the Pretenders. No one at home ever referred to Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic. No one mentioned the anti-semitic speech he had made in Des Moines. The children were taught about ‘the critical importance of genetic inheritance’. When each of them came of age there would be numerous lectures from their father about natural selection. His sons he warned against becoming entrapped by a girl, his daughters against becoming ruled by their emotions. He was misogynistic in the casual way that many men of his generation were, in the casual way that he had also been anti-semitic. He believed women should not get involved in mechanical problems, though he also said that his wife was a better pilot than he was. When he returned from trips he shook his sons’ hands, as a king might.
Their father was always prepared for any emergency: food and water, of course, but also, Reeve wrote, ‘flashlights, extra blankets, medical equipment, rubber rafts, snakebite kits, and even a vial of morphine, which was probably illegal. We could have withstood famine, flood, plague, siege, and possibly even nuclear war.’ There was a rope ladder at the upper windows in the event of fire. That they were so well prepared for any eventuality was all thanks to their father, and he rarely let them forget it. He told them always to be on the alert for danger, but the danger went unspecified. ‘It’s the unforeseen . . .’ he would warn them, ‘it’s always the unforeseen.’
He railed against what he called punk design. Why were flashlights cylindrical and not hexagonal? If they were hexagonal they would not roll off ledges. He told them that machines were never forgiving; that though they, as their parents, would always forgive them, machines never would. He embarrassed the children by refusing to drive faster than 55 mph; he had determined that that was the speed at which a car was most efficient. He held the steering wheel with his hands permanently at the ten-to-two position. He was not interested in speed for its own sake, nor competition, never had been. He was forever pulling over to let other drivers pass. By the 1950s he preferred to travel by car or train if at all possible, not by plane. It meant that family trips often took a very long time. The only cars he praised unconditionally were the first car his parents had bought, a Model T Ford, and the Volkswagen Beetle: ‘To watch him maneuver his six-foot-two-inch frame, like one of his own folding rulers, into the driver’s seat of a VW Bug was to witness an engineering miracle in itself.’ He liked everything to be tight-fitting, as if he were climbing into the cockpit of The Spirit of St Louis. He chose to sit in the smallest armchair.
He never checked in luggage, got everything he needed into his carry-on bag, even on long trips abroad. He was an ascetic: ‘I had concluded that numerous possessions became formidable obstacles to my awareness and accomplishment, and that every unneeded article was best gotten out of the way – like clearing the decks of a battleship for action.’ He never wasted anything: toothpaste, toilet paper, soap, time and space. He made endless lists. List-making had got him safely across the Atlantic. He had invented the safety checklist, and it had saved his life many times. Now he made lists of his children’s misdemeanours. He would call them in one by one to talk about whatever was on it. Usually it was something about reading comics or chewing gum, but sometimes there was a more encompassing entry: ‘Freedom and Responsibility’, for example. If the entry read ‘Instinct and Intellect’, they were in for a lecture ‘about appreciating nature, using common sense, and not getting carried away with contemporary trends’. Nor was his wife exempt. Anne was expected to keep an account of every item of expenditure. Not because he was cheap, but because he was controlling.
With the publication in 1955 of her memoir Gift from the Sea Anne Morrow Lindbergh had one of her greatest successes. In hardback it was number one on the bestseller lists for a year. It sold over 2 million copies in paperback and put Pantheon on the map as a publishing house. But Charles was abroad and not there to witness her success. Anne said that her husband was restless and always sad because he had never properly mourned the murder of their firstborn. As a consequence he seemed to have condemned himself to wander the Earth endlessly like a Flying Dutchman of the air.
In 1968 Lindbergh visited Hana in Hawaii and fell in love with the place. ‘What a romantic C is!’, Anne wrote in a letter: ‘Imagine buying a vacation home without even trying out the climate and locale for one season!’ Charles told his wife that he intended to spend more time with her there. When they moved in he was almost immediately called away by Pan Am to an emergency meeting in New York. While Charles was away it rained unceasingly. Mud flowed into the house, and then an invasion of insects. Anne was furious to be left alone ‘in this place in this state . . . I must harden my heart,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘not because I don’t love him, but because I do.’ After a year she had resigned herself to the place and Charles began to visit with increasing frequency, which brought its own problems.
Anne once wrote of her husband that his body had ‘never said “no” to him’. But now his body did begin to say no. He looked thin and tired. She began to think that she had traded her ‘strong companion’ for yet another child. Anne felt cut off from her friends, isolated again, but now because Charles was with her nearly all the time, not because he was away so often. ‘It is impossible to maintain other relationships outside the core one at this juncture,’ she wrote in a letter, ‘and one needs others – to live, to breathe, to grow, or to bring some kind of new life and air into the central relationship.’
In 1972 Lindbergh was diagnosed with cancer of the lymph nodes. Once he knew that it was cancer that was the cause of his physical decline, Lindbergh embraced and explored his final illness as if it was an adventure. Once again, sensing danger, he needed to get closer in and take a good look at it. He assessed his odds of surviving just as he had once assessed his odds of making it across the Atlantic alone. He thought there was a small chance he might pull through, but he also wanted to be prepared in case he did not. ‘I’m not afraid,’ he told his son Land, ‘but my body is afraid.’
Lindbergh, being Lindbergh, orchestrated and managed his own death. He decided he wanted to be buried in Hawaii, even though he was currently dying in a bed in New York City. He persuaded his doctor to sign the death certificate in advance, so that he could be flown – one last flight – to die on the spot on the planet he had come to love best. He was told that there was a good chance he would die in the air. Anne said that that last flight was like his flight to Paris: ‘No one believed he could do either and survive.’ Charles had specified how the coffin was to be constructed: native wood cut by handsaw, a biodegradable lining. His sons dug their father’s grave: ‘It might seem that helping to build your father’s grave even before he died would be very strange. But in actuality it felt an intimate, very loving family project.’ There was to be a granite headstone inscribed with words from Psalm 139: ‘If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea’. There was to be a short funeral service and a memorial service two days later. No eulogy. Instead, he chose a series of readings to illustrate his belief that ‘no one culture or religion had a monopoly on truth’. Everyone from the local town was welcome but otherwise the services were to be private. Local men were to act as pall bearers dressed in their work clothes. The Maui News was to be informed of his death and no one else. He was to be buried within hours of his death, in order to thwart the press, who were closing in on him one last time. The instructions were written down to the last detail. He asked (instructed?) Anne to kiss him on the forehead the moment after he had died.
Anne asked Charles to describe what he was feeling, because, she said, ‘You’re going through an experience we all have to go through.’ He had not realized it before, but ‘death is so close all the time – it’s right there next to you’. He felt completely relaxed. He thought it might be harder for them than it was for him. He said that he had been close to death three times that week, and he didn’t feel as if he was confronting anything: ‘It’s not terrible. It’s very easy and natural. I don’t think it’s the end. I think I’ll go on, in a more generalized way, perhaps. And I may not be so far away, either.’
During a hospital visit made towards the end, Reeve noticed a sentence he had written on the notepad by his bed: ‘I know there is an infinity outside ourselves. I wonder now if there is an infinity within, as well.’ He had once wondered if the relationship between soul and body was like that between a pilot and his plane: the plane no more than an outer shell, ‘a convenient tool for material accomplishments’.
Anne wrote that for those who were there ‘it will always be one of the richest and deepest experiences of our lives’. She minded that she could ‘not give him more sympathy, more extravagant expression of love,’ but they were both barely hanging on to their self-control. Charles let his frustration out on Anne. But then, ‘choking with tears’, he said, ‘I feel so awful to have hurt you.’ Anne was reminded of a moment from years before, when her son Scott as a little boy had said to her: ‘You don’t have to say “I’m sorry” to me Mother. You don’t ever have to say “I’m sorry”. I love you so much, you don’t have to say “I’m sorry.”’
Charles Lindbergh died on 26 August 1974. Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote later that she remembered how much she had minded that her husband’s body had been rushed out before she could say a prayer: ‘I could only kiss his temple and go out, because he himself had wanted to be taken swiftly from his bed to his grave before the press could know of it and be there.’ The funeral was held on the afternoon of 27 August. The service finished at 3pm. The first TV crew to arrive on the island was only half a mile away. But they were too late.
‘There are portions of everyone’s life,’ Lindbergh wrote in his Wartime Journals, ‘that could be improved if they could be lived again in the light of later experience; but Anne and I are not ashamed of the way we have lived our lives, and there is nothing in our record that we fear to have known. I wonder how many of our accusers would be willing to turn their complete files and records over for study in the future.’
‘I believed,’ Reeve wrote, ‘he was unjust, demanding, and difficult, just as often as I believed he was the strongest, most exciting, most intelligent, and most truthful person in the world.’ With his death ‘he left behind a vast hole in our universe, as great as the death of a star’. But there was relief too, as there always had been when their father went away.
When Anne was given the will to read she was shocked to discover that Charles’s fortune had been divided between her and two other unnamed parties.
The relationship with Brigitte Hesshaimer had lasted until Lindbergh’s death, though they could not have seen much of each other during the two years of his final illness. Brigitte’s children only spoke out after their mother’s death in 2001, the same year Anne died. Charles Lindbergh’s other lovers and their children have remained silent. None of his three mistresses ever married. It is not known how many other, if any, illegitimate children Lindbergh fathered, but there was a rumour that he had fathered at least one child during one of the periods he lived with an indigenous tribe.
Sometime after Lindbergh had died a Swiss auto-dealer wrote to Anne to ask if the Charles Lindbergh who had regularly rented the same car from him was the famous aviator. Anne confirmed that it had been and asked that he destroy the car.
Lindbergh’s immediate family were at first dubious of the claims that there was another family, perhaps more than one; they had, after all, seen off many a pretender. But DNA tests determined the Hesshaimer claim conclusively. Perhaps Lindbergh would have approved that it was in the end DNA that found him out. In 2004, Reeve flew to Germany to meet Brigitte’s children, her half-sister and brothers, to welcome them to the family.
Many years after Charles Lindbergh had died, Gore Vidal wrote that Lindbergh had been ‘the best that we are apt to produce in the hero line, American style’.