The Lindbergh Heart

By Hays Gorey

THE WARTIME JOURNALS OF CHARLES A. LINDBERGH. 1,038 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $12.95.

During a 1944 strafing mission in the Pacific, the tormented and by then tainted American hero Charles A. Lindbergh sighted a lone figure on the beach below. "At 1,000 yards, my .50-calibers are deadly . . . I cannot miss . . . My finger tightens on the trigger. A touch, and he will crumple on the coral sand." But there is something about the potential victim's bearing, stride and dignity "that has formed a bond between us . . . I realize that the life of this unknown stranger--probably an enemy--is worth a thousand times more to me than his death. I should never quite have forgiven myself if I had shot him--naked, courageous, defenseless, yet so unmistakably man."

Through 1,038 pages of this chronicle, which begins with America's drift into the war he deplored, Lindbergh has strewn fine revelatory glimpses of himself--a self often at odds with the public figure molded from his deeds and his legend.

When a dog died--one that had faithfully guarded the Lindbergh babies ever since the kidnaping and death of Charles Jr.--Lindbergh insisted on digging the grave himself. "It seemed an obligation that I, personally, must fulfill, and in which I could not let anyone else take part." Once, to ensure the arrival on deadline of a manuscript by his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, he crawled out of bed to retype it for her, finishing at 6 o'clock in the morning.

His devotion to his wife was and is complete. They share a love of the land, the ocean and particularly the sky, and an eloquence in describing their feelings about such things: "At night when I stand on the beach and look at the stars, I wonder why man describes as progress the science which screens such beauty from his life."

The Lindbergh of these journals is a man so sensitive and perceptive that he studies with understanding the eyes of caged animals in a zoo, and yet so insensitive and unperceiving that he fails to grasp that there was anything wrong in openly baiting American Jews. Herbert Hoover shared Lindbergh's view that the Roosevelt Administration, Jews and Anglophiles were deliberately leading the nation toward World War II. But when he chided Lindbergh in 1941 for saying so publicly Lindbergh was uncomprehending. He still is.

Quoted Scriptures. What the book mainly reveals is a keen and wide-ranging intelligence that is also peculiarly restricted. Not a single entry recants Lindbergh's frequently expressed overall admiration of Nazi Germany. Nor does his rigid rectitude permit him, even today, to entertain the possibility that America's involvement in World War II was the result of anything but choice. Lindbergh has often been accused of having been singularly unmoved by a postwar visit to a German concentration camp. Not so. "Here was a place," he wrote, "where men and life and death had reached the lowest form of degradation. How could any reward in national progress even faintly justify the establishment and operation of such a place?" But he felt a compulsion to link, even to equate, the Nazi horror and attempted genocide with atrocities committed by other nations, especially his own, on the field of battle.

To sustain his point, Lindbergh is drawn to Holy Scripture. "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?" he quotes. In absolute moral terms, Lindbergh was correct. Taking a human life is no less horrendous because of method, or the military or civilian status of the slain. But Lindbergh was also operating in the realm of everyday moral choice and national policy. At that level, it was both essential and humane to distinguish between Hitler's Germany and the rest of the world.

The Wartime Journals makes clear the sources of Lindbergh's increasingly jaundiced view of his own country. Even three decades ago, its cities were becoming grimy, artificial and oppressive. The press and public converted him into an object of endless and pitiless curiosity. On one occasion, as he and Anne dined in a restaurant, a noisy crowd at the next table discussed the trial of their baby's kidnaper in voices loud enough to make certain the parents would hear. Indeed, the free American press made sure that Charles Lindbergh was not free to walk, eat or even grieve alone--not just for years but for decades. When his baby lay dead in his coffin, he writes, photographers pried open the lid to take pictures. So persistent and enduring was his harassment that Lindbergh moved his family to Europe in a desperate attempt to escape. In 1938, Berlin seemed much more inviting to him than his native land. He seriously contemplated establishing his winter home there only a few months after Hitler--then at the zenith of power --occupied Austria.

Instead, Lindbergh returned to the U.S. to struggle in the arena of international politics. As one of the best-known noninterventionists of the early '40s, he traveled widely under the auspices of the America First Committee, in a public glare that he insists he abhorred, to argue that the U.S. had neither the strength nor the need to stop Hitler. His sense of personal rectitude at that moment and his intransigence continue to this day. "In general, I find that I still hold the beliefs I entered on the Journal pages," Lindbergh, now 68, writes in a letter included in the introduction. Those beliefs he supplements with a new one: that "We won the war in a military sense"; "but in a broader sense it seems to me we lost it, for our Western civilization is less respected and secure than it was before."

o Hays Gorey

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