---

MR. DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): Why did a thirty-three-and-a-half-hour flight from New York to Paris make Lindbergh the most famous person in the history of the world? He got more adulation than anybody had ever gotten. Why was such a big deal made of something that wasn’t like going to the moon?

MR. A. SCOTT BERG (ASB): It was so much bigger than going to the moon. It represented the convergence of so many things in the world in that moment, not the least of which were advancements in communication. This was the first moment in which sound footage was attached to newsreels, in which radio reached the entire civilized world, in which photographs could be sent by wire across the ocean.

And so, in May of 1927, when Charles Lindbergh flew from New York to Paris, it was the first moment in history that could be shared instantaneously and simultaneously around the globe.

The second factor is that he was impossibly handsome. He looked like a movie star. And in that moment, he became the first modern media superstar.

Third, and perhaps most important, this was a moment in which the entire world was all on one team. Everybody in the world loved Lindbergh. Nobody had a disagreement about Charles Lindbergh in 1927. This surpassed nationality. It surpassed any beliefs anybody had about anything.

The entire human race, for the first and maybe the last time unless and until we’re attacked by Mars, was interested, was rooting for this one man. As one, people on earth looked hopefully at the sky.

DR: Five years later, he’s married, has a child, Charles Lindbergh Jr. That child is kidnapped and murdered. They caught the person they said did it—Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German immigrant—and it became the trial of the century, before the O. J. Simpson trial. What happened? Was the right man caught and executed?

ASB: Not forgetting O. J. Simpson, I think it is still the trial of the century—for several reasons. First of all, the Lindbergh baby was the most famous baby since Jesus Christ. Everybody in the world knew about the most beautiful baby of the most beautiful pilot, the most famous man alive.

Lindbergh was, in fact, the most celebrated living person who ever walked the earth. Now, his baby was kidnapped and killed, almost certainly as the kidnapper was descending the ladder [at the Lindbergh home] in Hopewell, New Jersey. The ladder broke, the baby fell two stories to the concrete and died.

The crime was solved a few years later. The trial of the century occurred, trying the man for the crime of the century.

There is no doubt in my mind that this man received an unfair trial. There is also no doubt in my mind that they got the right man—Bruno Richard Hauptmann.

DR: Lindbergh was very, very popular. But before World War II, he was seen by some as a Nazi sympathizer and an anti-Semite. Was he either of those?

“One of the greatest of crimes!” Cartoonist Clifford Kennedy Berryman pictured the scene in the Lindbergh baby’s nursery after the kidnapping.

ASB: Everyone knows two and a half things—or should know at least two and a half things—about Charles Lindbergh: the flight, the kidnapping, and his political position. In the last twenty years especially, a couple of things have been conflated.

Here’s the thing: Charles Lindbergh was not a Nazi sympathizer.

He did spend time in Nazi Germany between 1936 and 1938. What most people didn’t realize then, and what most people don’t realize now, is that he was there doing reconnaissance for the United States government.

He had been asked by the air attaché at the American Embassy in Berlin, an army colonel named Truman Smith. Colonel Smith had been there throughout the thirties, and he saw the Luftwaffe building up, and he thought, “But they’re being very secretive. We don’t know how big the German air force is, how powerful it is. If there were just some way we could learn.”

He had read that the Lindberghs were then living in England. And he thought, “If I were able to reach Charles Lindbergh and bring him over here to Germany, they would be so happy to have Charles Lindbergh, the greatest, the most celebrated living human being on the planet, the greatest pilot who ever lived. If we could get him to Germany, they will show off everything they have.”

And that’s exactly what happened. Lindbergh came, and the Germans guided him through their factories and showed him their airfields. And Lindbergh was sending detailed reports to the White House and to Whitehall in London as well. This was really the extent of his connection to Germany.

Now, that said, he had seen the entire world undergoing an incredible depression, mostly financial. He saw every country was really teetering—except Germany. They were really succeeding. And this fascinated him.

He even thought of living there for a moment—until November of 1938 and the Night of Shattered Glass, Kristallnacht [November 9–10, 1938, when the Nazi Party set off violent riots that destroyed Jewish businesses and homes in Germany].

The next morning, he said to his wife, “We’re not moving to Germany. We’re going home because there’s a problem, and I must warn Americans.” Almost like Paul Revere, he said, “I must tell the Americans that Germany is building an air force that can wipe out any country, and we’ve got to start defending America first.”

DR: He did come back, and he did defend the idea of not going to war. When war did break out, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, what did Lindbergh want to do, and why did President Roosevelt prevent him from doing it?

ASB: There’s a little backstory. Charles Lindbergh and FDR had squabbled in the earliest days of the New Deal over the U.S. Air Mail. Lindbergh lived for aviation. His first job, really, was delivering the airmail.

FDR, when he came into office, rather arbitrarily canceled all the airmail contracts with the major aviation companies. Lindbergh thought this was a huge mistake and got into a huge public fight with Roosevelt. After Roosevelt assigned airmail delivery to the army, there was one plane crash after another delivering the mail.

Once again, Lindbergh emerged a great hero in the public eye. And this made FDR crazy. So there’s been bad blood simmering on the back burner for several years.

Now, after war has broken out in Europe, FDR every day wants to get us into this war, moving us closer. And Charles Lindbergh became the leading spokesman for what became known as the America First movement. He was giving speeches on the radio and participating in large rallies. Every time Lindbergh spoke, the majority of the country embraced his point of view.

The next week FDR would give a fireside chat, trying to move the people back. But as late as September of 1941—three months before Pearl Harbor—the United States backed Charles Lindbergh most decidedly.

The day after Pearl Harbor, Charles Lindbergh volunteered. He was in his early forties at that point, so he was a little old; but he was still America’s greatest pilot. And when he asked to serve, FDR said that he could not, that he would not let him, thus keeping him from becoming a hero all over again.

DR: Let’s go back to the beginning of Lindbergh’s life. His father was a member of Congress for ten years.

ASB: Charles Lindbergh was born in 1902 in Detroit, Michigan. His mother was a schoolteacher.

Lindbergh’s father was an attorney in Little Falls, Minnesota, then Minnesota’s Sixth, now Eighth, Congressional District. He became a congressman—elected in 1906 and serving until 1917. He was a very progressive and, I would say, eccentric Republican.

So that’s Lindbergh’s background, except to say this: his parents were a badly matched pair. It was a deeply unhappy marriage.

[Lindbergh split his childhood between Little Falls and Washington, D.C., where he briefly attended the private Sidwell Friends School and worked as a congressional page. He also spent a year at Redondo Union High School when his mother briefly moved them to California.]

DR: He ultimately applies to the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He goes there to be an engineering student. Is he a good student?

ASB: He’s a terrible student. I cut him a little slack, because he’s one of the few college students I’ve ever heard of who left home, went to college… and his mother went with him. And they shared an apartment.

I once asked Anne Lindbergh about Charles’s mother, and Mrs. Lindbergh said to me, “Well, why do you think he flew to Paris? It was to get away from that mother.”

DR: So he flunks out of the University of Wisconsin and decides to get involved in flying. How did he decide to get involved in flying?

ASB: This was a lonely boy, an only child, with two half sisters from his father’s first marriage. When he flunked out of college, the dean sent a letter to his roommate—his mother—and essentially said, “Your son Charles is very immature.” He was not socialized at all.

DR: He’d never had a date.

ASB: Never had a date, not even a friend. He was moving all the time. So there was really never anybody in his life. This is a boy who lived in his thoughts, head in the clouds. He was mechanically minded, and he began to read about aviation, became intrigued, and went out to Nebraska, where he learned how to fly.

DR: He turned out to be a reasonably good flyer.

ASB: Reasonably good.

DR: But he almost killed himself four different times, is that right?

ASB: Four different times. He became a barnstormer for several years, working throughout the South and the Midwest. Then, looking for a steadier job, he became one of the first airmail pilots in this country in 1926 and 1927. He flew the airmail between St. Louis and Chicago. It’s one of the worst places to fly in the country because the weather is so changeable, so fickle. And he became a highly skilled pilot.

DR: But he was a barnstormer, which meant he would show off in flying. He would do things like stand on the wings.

ASB: He was a wing walker. He did all sorts of crazy stuff.

DR: How do they actually walk on the wings without falling off?

ASB: Well, somebody else is flying the plane while you’re walking on the wing. But even so, it’s still risky business.

While flying the mail—and performing stunts—he did jump from an airplane with a parachute four times and lived. [In addition to his barnstorming experience, Lindbergh trained as a pilot with the U.S. Army Air Service, the precursor of the U.S. Air Force, in 1924–25. When he graduated, he earned a commission as a second lieutenant in the Air Service Reserve Corps.]

DR: So he was a pretty accomplished pilot.

ASB: Accomplished, fearless, and really knew the plane. He knew the machinery.

DR: Somebody came up with the idea that if you flew across the Atlantic either way, you would get $25,000, which was a lot of money then. Whose idea was it, and how did Lindbergh decide he should be involved in that?

ASB: A Frenchman named Raymond Orteig, who owned hotels in New York City and in Paris. Now, you have to remember, this is just a few years after World War I had ended.

An experienced barnstormer and airmail pilot, Lindbergh was well acquainted with the machines he flew. In this 1927 photograph, he examines the cylinder of the Spirit of St. Louis.

Orteig was so filled with pride about Franco-American friendship, he said, “We are going to make the world a little smaller. We’re going to unite these countries. And I will offer $25,000”—$25,000, that was a lot of money—“to the first person or persons who can fly nonstop in either direction between New York and Paris.”

So here’s this prize that’s been sitting there since 1919. Several men vied for it and lost their lives.

DR: Had anybody flown across the Atlantic between lesser cities?

ASB: Some people had done the Atlantic incrementally. Famously, Alcock and Brown [British pilots John Alcock and Arthur Brown, who flew from Newfoundland to Ireland in June 1919] had flown from the northern tip of Europe to the northern tip of North America. So there were some asterisked flights of people who’d made it. But nobody had flown nonstop from New York to Paris.

DR: There were many people trying to win this $25,000 prize, but they were much better known than Lindbergh, and they were thinking of doing it as a tandem, two people in a bigger plane. What made Lindbergh think that he could do this by himself, and why would he want to do it by himself?

ASB: There were teams with big, expensive planes, big $100,000 luxury planes with leather seats and three motors. They all went down or failed for one reason or another. And they were all famous pilots. And don’t forget, Lindbergh is a twenty-five-year-old airmail pilot. He so understands the machinery, so understands the capabilities of an airplane and of himself at age twenty-five, that he came up with an idea: that the key to this is the number one. “I want a monoplane, one set of wings, one engine, one pilot. That’s the way to do it. I don’t have to worry about anybody else. I’ll be responsible for everything.”

DR: He designs this plane, gets somebody in San Diego to help build it. Where does he get the money for it, and how much did it cost?

ASB: Because he was then flying the airmail in and out of St. Louis, he went to the civic leaders of St. Louis—the half dozen men who ran the Chamber of Commerce, who ran the newspaper, who ran a bank—he went to them all and said, “I think I can win this Orteig prize. What do you think?”

And the civic leaders of St. Louis thought, “Oh, this is a wonderful commercial for our city. Yes, we can help you with that money if you put our name on the plane,” basically. And that’s what he did. And so, for $10,580, six or seven guys chipped in. Lindbergh himself put in $1,000. And then he found somebody who would build the plane for him.

There were a few people in New York who would sell him a plane, but they insisted somebody else would have to be the pilot, somebody famous and somebody with more experience. Lindbergh said, “No. One pilot… and I’m the one.” He went out and found a manufacturer in San Diego, Ryan Aircraft, and they built the plane according to the specifications he had envisioned to make the flight.

DR: He gets the plane, takes it from San Diego to St. Louis. And then from St. Louis he goes to New York. Where does he decide to take off from?

ASB: He arrives in New York after he’s done this great transcontinental flight, which was magnificent in its own right. Meantime, that very week that he’s flying to the East Coast in May 1927, two Frenchmen—Charles Nungesser and François Coli, veterans of the French air force—have left Paris. It looks as though they are going to collect the prize. Lindbergh has got to get to New York City in time to start the race.

The Spirit of St. Louis was built in San Diego to Lindbergh’s specifications. From there he flew the plane to New York, the jumping-off point for his successful solo transatlantic flight.

And Nungesser and Coli, these two Frenchmen—well, we’re still waiting to hear from them. Their plane still hasn’t come in.

Lindbergh lands, in the middle of May, in Long Island, where there are three airfields, including Roosevelt Field, all adjacent to each other. And Lindbergh and two other planes sit on the runway and wait to take off.

The two others are bigger planes with seasoned teams of pilots, and here’s our little Spirit of St. Louis. You wouldn’t enter this plane in the Soap Box Derby. This plane was built out of aluminum tubing, canvas, and piano wire.

DR: And was there any window to look out? How did Lindbergh see where he was going?

ASB: There is no forward outlook on the plane because Lindbergh realized, “What I need most of all to make it to Paris is gasoline. I need enough fuel.” So every inch that he could fill with gasoline, he did. That included a huge tank in front of the instrument panel.

The only way Charles Lindbergh could see where he was going—well, he had two options. He was sitting in a porch chair—

DR: It wasn’t an airplane seat?

ASB: It was a wicker chair from somebody’s porch. And if he wanted to see ahead, he could do two things from that chair. He could go like this out this side or he could do this out that side. That’s it.

DR: To look out, he has to have windows. Did he have glass there to look out?

ASB: It was Plexiglas, actually, a new product that was coming out of DuPont Chemical. And he could pull these windows out. He always went to the left window. And there was a sunroof.

DR: Let’s go to the night he takes off.

ASB: Bad weather descended upon New York and its environs for ten days. There was just fog that nobody could get through.

And on the night of May 19, 1927, Lindbergh and his mechanics went into the city just to kill time. They were going to see a Broadway musical called Rio Rita. I could sing its title song for you, but I won’t.

Before proceeding to the theater, Lindbergh said, “You know what? There’s the Weather Bureau. Let’s just pop in and get the latest report.”

And a guy at the Weather Bureau said, “The weather’s terrible for the next few days, except tomorrow morning between about 7 and 9 a.m. there’s going to be a break in the fog and the clouds. It’s still going to be rough flying for the first hour or two, but maybe a good airmail pilot could get through.”

Lindbergh went back to the hotel hoping to grab five or six hours of sleep before he was going to begin what would be thirty-three and a half hours in flight. But he got back and found chaos at the Garden City Hotel on Long Island, where he was staying, what with reporters’ typewriters clattering down below and people knocking on his door. He got no sleep.

And now it’s four or five in the morning and he thinks, “You know what, the window of decent weather is coming pretty soon. I’d better get down to the plane. We’d better gas this thing up. We’d better see if we can make it.”

And that’s what he did. He went out to Roosevelt Field.

DR: He gets out in the field. Is it clear that he can take off? Is the runway long enough? Is it concrete or is it grass or what?

ASB: The runway is mud because it’s been raining for ten days. It would have been grass if the summer grass had grown in yet, but it hadn’t. It’s just mud.

And it’s still foggy. It’s still wet. The plane is sweating with precipitation. There’s a mile-long runway, and at the end of that runway are some telegraph poles with wires. Lindbergh has one mile to get five thousand pounds of airplane, fully loaded with fuel, off the ground. He’s never flown the plane with that much fuel because he’s never had to go 3,500 miles. He starts the plane.

The film footage is breathtaking, because you see this plane go down this muddy runway, and it’s glue. The plane just can’t lift off. And the air is so thick. You see the plane start to get off, and it bounces down. And then it bounces down again. And it bounces down again. And Lindbergh is just pulling back on the stick, and finally he clears the telegraph wires by twenty feet.

DR: What did he take with him? Did he have a lot of food?

ASB: Lindbergh understood this flight was largely a problem about weight. First of all, he benefited from the fact that his nickname was Slim. He was six feet, two and a half inches, and he didn’t weigh 170 pounds. That helped.

He trimmed the maps he traveled with, cutting their quarter-inch borders off every map. Everything got shaved down to its minimum. He took a canteen of water and a half dozen sandwiches. And that was it.

There was no radio on the plane because the radio would have weighed too much. Somebody asked what he’d do if he found himself in trouble. He said, “If I’m in trouble over the Atlantic and I get on my radio, who am I talking to? Nobody can hear me, and nobody can rescue me. So what’s the difference?” And that was that.

DR: When he did later meet King George V of England, the king says to him, “By the way, how did you pee?” What’s the answer to that?

ASB: The regal question. Nobody knew how Lindbergh peed during the flight. It wasn’t until I went through the flight checklist, where he had checked everything three times on what he had brought on this trip, that I realized—and remember that he’s counting every half ounce—he had packed a paper cup. And I thought, “There’s only one reason for a paper cup.” It’s not as if he was pouring from his canteen into a cup—cheers! So he used the paper cup to pee in and then—shweet!—out the left side window.

DR: He takes off. He clears the telegraph lines. How does he navigate? He’s got instruments, or is he doing it just by looking at the stars?

ASB: He has rudimentary instruments. Did he have certain gifts? He certainly had a good sense of direction. He had a compass, but he did navigate by the stars.

When you consider how rudimentary all this was in 1927—you know, when he charted his trip back in San Diego in the spring of 1927, the people building the plane said, “How far is it exactly?” And he said, “I don’t know exactly. I’d better find out.” And he went to the library in San Diego, where there was a gigantic globe, and he pulled out a piece of string and he measured his route on the globe.

Then he began to chart the flight, figuring how much gasoline was required for every hundred miles. That is how he navigated.

During the flight, he encountered every obstacle a pilot could imagine, including a magnetic storm that turned the plane around, he figured, at least three times. And the compass, the needle is just spinning around. And yet he pulls through all this and, some twenty-five or twenty-six hours later, he begins to recognize where he is, because the first bits of land are starting to appear.

DR: He saw a mirage—he thought he saw land, then he didn’t see it.

ASB: Halfway across the ocean, around hour fifteen or sixteen, he started to hallucinate. He sees land where none existed. He later admitted, when he wrote his own book about the flight—The Spirit of St. Louis, a book that won the Pulitzer Prize—Lindbergh said that there was a moment where ghosts actually entered the plane. And the ghosts, he claimed, carried him through.

DR: At some point, he’s falling asleep because he’s been up for fifty-some hours. How does he keep awake?

ASB: He does everything he possibly can, including not eating, because he thought if he started to eat that would make him tired.

This is one of the most amazing things. There were times when to get over clouds and storms, he had to fly as high as ten thousand feet in this rickety plane. And there were times where he got so tired, he would fly ten feet above the Atlantic. He would pull out the window, and the spray of the ocean would come into the cockpit to wake him up. Because there were several times he really did nod off. We will never know how many times.

DR: He finally sees Ireland. He realizes he could land there and live. But he wouldn’t get the $25,000 prize, so he keeps going. How does he actually find Paris?

ASB: His sighting of Ireland is one of my favorite moments in the flight. He’s now been flying for twenty-eight to twenty-nine hours, and he starts to see porpoises, he starts to see birds, and finally he looks out the window and he sees a fishing boat, and he sees a fisherman on the deck of the boat. This isn’t a mirage. This is for real.

And now he circles the boat. He flies lower and lower and lower, pulls out the window, leans out, yells to the man on the boat, “Which way is Ireland?”

After all that, he was less than ten miles off the original course. And the next thing you know, there he is and there’s Dingle Bay, just the way the map has it. And then it’s just another hour to England and then another hour across the Channel.

And now he’s over France. The French countryside is dark, but it starts to get brighter and brighter and brighter. And suddenly the lights of Paris come up. He can see the Eiffel Tower, and he’s made it! It’s fantastic! We’re here!

Problem is he can’t find where to put the plane down. He knows where Le Bourget Field is—the airfield where he’s meant to land—but it’s now ten-thirty at night in Paris, and the lights don’t make sense. Here are all the lights of the great City of Lights, but then there’s just one string of lights and then it goes black. And he can’t figure it out.

He circles lower and lower and lower. And he realizes the one string of lights is the one road from Paris to Le Bourget Field. Every automobile that could fit on that street was out there with its headlamps on, creating a runway for Charles Lindbergh. And he landed at Le Bourget Field at ten-thirty-three that night.

He expected there might be a half dozen mechanics out there at the field. What he didn’t realize was that the minute his plane had been sighted over Ireland, word spread through France.

Lindbergh brought it down, and 150,000 people were waiting for him. They rushed past the gendarmes and ran toward him—pulling at him, pulling his plane apart.

And that’s the moment that Charles Lindbergh becomes the first modern media superstar. I have often said, “Twenty years ago now, there was an English princess who was chased through the streets of Paris and was killed. That car chase began the night Lindbergh landed in Paris.”

DR: Lindbergh lands. He’s pulled out by a number of people. The American ambassador ultimately gets possession of him and takes him to the American Embassy. Within the next day or two or three, he has a torrent of mail and calls. Could he believe what was happening to him?

ASB: Lindbergh, as I said, thought there would be six people at the airfield. He was going to spend the next couple of weeks flying around Europe, maybe go to Brussels, maybe go to Germany. He hadn’t thought it through yet. But for the next few days, the next few weeks, the next few months, he became the property of the world.

And with his new modern-media superstardom, the city of Paris and the country of France spent the next three or four days heaping every honor they could on him. Wherever he went, hundreds of thousands, if not a million, people waited for him. Everywhere.

DR: How does the Spirit of St. Louis get back to the United States, and how does he get back?

ASB: After France, he went to England, where he met the aforementioned king with his urinary interest. And then he does come home. Lindbergh was planning some flights around Europe when he got a telegram from Calvin Coolidge, then president of the United States. It said, “It’s time to come home, thank you very much.”

And he thought, “Great, I’ll fly home.” Oh, no, no, no, that is not going to happen. Calvin Coolidge sent a battleship. They took the plane apart and put it in two boxes; and with the plane, he sailed home. And then he came to Washington, D.C.

There never has been, there never will be a reception in this country like the one that fell upon Charles Lindbergh. The United States of America bestowed upon him every medal they could. They made up a new medal for him, in fact. And by the time he got to New York City a few days later, four million people turned out for the parade.

DR: Biggest crowd anybody had ever had.

ASB: Ever. They shut down the United States government. Wall Street closed that day. Every bank closed. Every school closed. Every business in the country closed—because Lindbergh came home.

He flew on a goodwill tour of the nation, at least flying over every state. He stopped in almost every state. An estimated quarter of the country saw Charles Lindbergh at some point during that tour.

Lindbergh’s dashing good looks helped cement his status as an international celebrity after his New York-to-Paris flight.

DR: On one of his trips, he goes to Mexico, and the U.S. ambassador there, Dwight Morrow, is a former senior partner at J.P. Morgan. Morrow has several daughters, whom Lindbergh meets.

ASB: One daughter was very sophisticated, very elegant, and quite wonderful. Then there was a younger daughter who was a zippy little thing—kind of a sprite, fluttering all over the place.

And then there was the middle daughter, Anne, the shyest creature who ever lived. And wouldn’t you know, the two shyest people on earth—because Lindbergh was also very shy—met and instantaneously fell in love. After the third date, he proposed marriage, and by the fourth, she accepted. They were—if I may say this in the Library of Congress—both virgins on their wedding night.

They got married in a very secret wedding ceremony. You think you understand what the press is like now—what fame is like now. Lindbergh had become its first human quarry. He and Anne were chased everywhere they went, and not by a reporter or two, but by hordes, by armies. So they really had to pull off this wedding in intense secrecy, which they did.

DR: Anne Morrow Lindbergh had an extraordinary career herself as a writer. And putting up with him was not easy, right?

ASB: It was no picnic for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes Lindbergh would say to his wife, “I’m going out for a while,” and then three weeks later a postcard would arrive, because he had gone to Samoa or someplace. He really marched to the beat of his own drum.

What was also difficult for Anne Morrow Lindbergh—who is one of the most celebrated American writers, one of the great diarists of the twentieth century, among other things, but also a novelist and an essayist—at a certain point in the late forties and early fifties, Charles decided to sit down and write a book, which he does. It became a huge best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize. [The Spirit of St. Louis won the 1954 Pulitzer Prize in Biography.]

And here’s this poet, Anne, who’s been writing beautifully all her life, and suddenly even literarily she is eclipsed by this pilot. It’s one of the sad ironies. It was tough being married to Charles Lindbergh.

DR: After he died, and after you wrote your book, it came out publicly that he had seven children with three German women that his wife apparently didn’t know about and that none of his legitimate children in the United States knew about. How did this come out and how did he hide it for so long?

ASB: None of this is in my book because the book prompted this story. It came out, and a German woman living in Paris read it and said, “I know I promised my mother I would never say a word about this, but I must now go public. I am Charles Lindbergh’s daughter. And I will not rest until I meet Scott Berg and he looks me in the eye and says, ‘Yes. You are Charles Lindbergh’s daughter.’ ”

About a month after she had this epiphany, I heard from a reporter from a newspaper in Europe who said, “This woman would like to meet you. Can you verify this story? Because we’re about to run it in the newspaper.”

And I said, “Well, I’ve met so many ‘Lindbergh babies’…”

“No, no, this isn’t a Lindbergh baby. This isn’t somebody claiming to be the dead baby.”

This woman said she had letters from Charles Lindbergh to her mother, which she faxed to me. Remember fax machines? As soon as the letters came off the fax machine, I said, “Oh my God! These are real.”

I flew over to meet her in Paris. And as she walked toward me, I said, “That’s Reeve Lindbergh, Charles Lindbergh’s youngest daughter, twenty years earlier.” I didn’t need the DNA. These were Lindberghs walking toward me. [The woman had also brought her brothers to the meeting.]

Reeve Lindbergh, Charles Lindbergh’s youngest American child, used to say, “You know, there used to be signs all over America, ‘George Washington slept here.’ Well, there should be signs all over Europe, ‘Charles Lindbergh slept here, and here, and here, oh, and there.’ ” Anne Morrow Lindbergh and the Lindbergh children in America had not a clue that any of this happened.

DR: After the famous flight and his marriage to Anne, and before World War II broke out, Lindbergh became an ardent America First person. What was that about?

ASB: This is an important subject that you should all know about—it’s very timely now—and that’s the movement called America First. It’s a much-misunderstood movement.

In 1940, before Pearl Harbor, this country was having one of the four or five great debates in its history, including what kind of constitution would we have, would there be a civil war, and Vietnam.

There was also a great debate about our entry into the Second World War. Most of this country, as late as September of ’41, was against our entering the war, and Lindbergh was the great spokesman for that point of view.

Now, when I started this book, I believed, as I’m sure many of you do who had history teachers as bad as mine, that America First was a midwestern movement started by a bunch of old Republican senators. I learned that it was, in fact, a youth movement started by a half dozen college students, mostly at Yale University in 1940.

The guys who started it were named Gerald R. Ford, Sargent Shriver, Potter Stewart, Kingman Brewster—who, of course, became president of Yale and ambassador to the United Kingdom—and a man named Bob Stuart, who ran Quaker Oats for many years, as his family had before him. And these five or six students got this movement off the ground.

Lindbergh had come back from Europe, where he had seen the Luftwaffe building up, and he came back to warn the country, giving up his privacy in order to give speeches. One day these five guys from Yale got in touch with Lindbergh and said, “Would you give speeches for our little group?” which he did.

Overnight this group mushroomed. We talk in politics about a big tent. This was a big tent. America First included the American Bund movement [the German American Bund or German American Federation] but it also included Norman Thomas, the great Socialist. It covered the entire waterfront of people who weren’t isolationists, as Lindbergh always said he was not.

He was a noninterventionist. And he felt, until Pearl Harbor, that World War II was the continuation of a European war that had been fought for a thousand years among Russia, France, and Great Britain, and they were just going to keep fighting and fighting and fighting, and it had nothing to do with us.

DR: After Pearl Harbor, he wasn’t allowed by FDR to get back into the army and to be a pilot in the war. How did he manage during World War II to be of service to the country?

ASB: The enmity that FDR felt toward Lindbergh was so intense that when on December 8, 1941, Charles Lindbergh volunteered, FDR said to Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, “I’m not going to let him become a hero again.” And that was that. He basically said, “He cannot enlist anywhere.”

So, said Lindbergh, “I can still be of use in private industry. There are a lot of aircraft companies, a lot of motor companies. I can help the war effort by working for them.”

He had meetings everywhere. Every company in America wanted to hire Charles Lindbergh. But the callbacks never came, because FDR had sent a message: “Any company that hires Lindbergh does not get a government contract.”

So nobody would hire Lindbergh. There was one exception. Henry Ford said, “Oh, Ford’s not going to get any contracts? I don’t think so.” He hired Charles Lindbergh as an advisor and a test pilot. Increasingly, Lindbergh got hired by other companies who let him work quietly on the side.

Lindbergh finally said, “I want to be where the action is.” And they all said, “But you have no uniform. You’re not a member of any of the armed services.” So Lindbergh said, “I’ll just fly there as a private citizen, as a pilot.”

Lindbergh flew to the South Pacific, where he island-hopped. He would go to airfields and he would teach pilots how to fly more efficiently. People had noticed that Lindbergh would go out on these sorties, and he would come back with much more gasoline than any of the other pilots. The brass would say, “Can you teach our pilots to fly the way you do?” And that’s what he did.

Finally Douglas MacArthur heard about this, summoned Lindbergh, and said, “Listen, you go anywhere you want. You are under my protection. And if anybody questions you, say, ‘Douglas MacArthur sent me.’ ”

Lindbergh went on fifty bombing missions without a uniform. This means if he is downed anywhere, he is a man without a country. He’s just dead meat because nobody can claim him. He did it anyway.

DR: After World War II, his reputation was restored a bit as a result. And he got involved in civil aviation, helped start a number of airlines in the United States, but he also got involved in conservation. Can you explain how that became the latest love of his life?

ASB: This became the great passion of Lindbergh’s life starting in the late fifties and really in the sixties.

Lindbergh spent his life working for aviation. He took no real money. He was offered $10 million after his solo transatlantic flight to endorse products. But he took none of those offers.

Instead, he accepted jobs working for budding aviation companies, which became TWA and Pan American. And he worked for United also. He got a lot of stock.

He spent the rest of his life flying on behalf of aviation. If any of you has ever been in an airplane and flown from one city to another in this world, chances are the person who first navigated that flight was Charles Lindbergh—not just in America, not just in the Western Hemisphere, but anywhere in the world. As late as the 1970s he was still flying on TWA, taking notes on everything—the service, the quality of the food, the service of the hostesses, of the pilot.

In making all these flights and independent flights of his own, especially in the fifties, he began to see from ten, twenty, thirty thousand feet how the physiognomy of the earth had changed. He had seen how civilization was encroaching upon wilderness, and this disturbed him, mostly because he felt responsible. He thought, “It is because I helped glamorize aviation that aviation took off as it did,” and he decided to spend the rest of his life trying to fight that.

Without saying we should fight progress, because he never wanted to do that, he spent the last decade of his life doing everything he could for the preservation of the air, the land, the water, and also indigenous peoples all over the world, whose territories were being encroached upon. He became the first really famous international figure to become a tree hugger, one who totally embraced the environment.

DR: Part of his tree-hugging was he loved to have houses in exotic places close to nature. The last house he built was a desolate place in Maui, Hawaii. Can you describe the end of his life and where he’s buried?

ASB: You’ve got to remember that he was human quarry all his life—running from people and running from the press. He just wanted to be alone. He wanted to be as isolated as he could.

When he learned that he was going to die, he selected as his burial ground a churchyard near his home in Maui, a plot at the edge of a cliff at the edge of the community of Hana. The Hawaiian Islands are as far from anywhere on earth as you can get, and here he is at the edge of a cliff. [Lindbergh died of lymphoma in August 1974, at the age of 72.]

About three weeks before he died, he had gone to a hospital in New York to have his bloodwork done. He was feeling ill. And the doctor had said, “Charles, I’m afraid this is it. It’s really the end, and we should make arrangements now for your death.”

Lindbergh said, “That’s fine, but I don’t want to die here in the hospital. I want to go home. I want to be buried in Hawaii. That’s where I want to die.”

The doctor said, “That’s impossible. Simply can’t be done. No airline will fly you there.” And Lindbergh said, “No airline will fly me? Get me a phone. Let me make a phone call.”

He called a very good friend at Pan Am, and they put him on a plane. They took the first-class section and decked it out as a hospital room. Lindbergh was able to fly with his wife and with his three sons—his three American sons, I hasten to add—and they flew to Hawaii.

I mentioned that he made checklists. That’s what got him to Paris. In a similar manner, he had a whole routine of how he wanted to be buried, in what clothes he wanted to be dressed, what he wanted the casket to look like, where it was to be. He even designed the drainage in the burial ground at the end of this churchyard where he was going to be buried.

This gets biblical at a certain point. He asked his three sons to dig the grave. And he hands everybody the checklists and says, “You must do everything exactly like this.”

And they did everything. They dug the grave. They put the rocks just the way he said he wanted them—everything done, done, and done… and not until then did he die.

Before that, he had said, “You will have a few hours. Do not wait a second. As soon as I’m gone, put me in the burial clothes, make this phone call, drive me down this road, do this—”

DR: Because he didn’t want a media circus.

ASB: They didn’t know what he was talking about. But they followed his specifications precisely. They hastily performed a short service in a little church there that seats twenty people. They buried him, they lowered the coffin, they covered him up.

The Lindbergh family is driving away from Hana, Maui; and as they are driving down the one road, three television trucks are driving up the other way. Lindbergh knew they had two hours to “clear the wires.”

DR: After all these years you spent studying him, do you admire him the way you did before you started, and do you have the view that he was a great man or a flawed man?

ASB: It’s now really twenty years since I wrote the book, and my feelings have only intensified on each side. He makes me crazier than ever in some ways. He was incredibly willful, incredibly stubborn. He was a cold, cold man and—I say this with great love for his children, but I would not have wanted to be one of his children.

As one of them said to me, “There were two ways of doing things. There was Father’s way and the wrong way.” That’s a tough thing to grow up with or around.

That said, I can’t think of another human being who has packed as much life into a single lifetime as Charles Lindbergh. And make no mistake about it, this man changed the way we all live to this very day.