The Sky Lover

By R. Z. Sheppard

LINDBERGH

by LEONARD MOSLEY 446 pages. Doubleday. $12.95.

On the afternoon of March 1, 1940, Charles A. Lindbergh ducked into the Smithsonian Institution to look at the Spirit of St. Louis. Holding a handkerchief over his nose like a man with a late-winter cold, he passed by the entrance guards and turned unrecognized into the room of the Presidents' wives and dresses. From behind a dummy of Martha Washington, Lindbergh peered into the adjoining hall where the world's most celebrated aircraft hung like a child's model from the ceiling. That evening he wrote in his journal: "I felt I could take it down from its cables, carry it to some flying field, and feel perfectly at home in that cockpit again."

After his own books, those of his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and of his earlier biographers, the question remains: was Lindbergh ever truly at home anywhere but in a plane? Aloft, he was Lucky Lindy, the lanky youth who thrilled the county-fair set in his battered Jenny, the daredevil airmail pilot and, of course, that shy all-American who put the world into a barrel roll with his 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic.

Life on the ground was more trying and complex--as if Herman Melville had written Tom Swift. The press made a mockery of his quest for privacy. Today, no self-respecting journalist can read the lurid coverage of the Lindbergh kidnaping case without feeling embarrassment for his craft. "Experiencing a kind of publicity hitherto known only by royal families, Presidents, or movie stars, we had none of the official protection on public figures," recalls Mrs. Lindbergh in the latest installment of her diaries and letters (The Flower and the Nettle; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). Her recollection is the main theme of the crucial years retold in Leonard Mosley's new biography of Lindbergh.

Racial Fantasies. During the late thirties, the hero and his wife sought privacy in England and France. While Europe slid toward war, Mrs. Lindbergh enjoyed "the happiest years of my life." There was an idyllic English country cottage leased from English Critic and Diarist Harold Nicolson where she began her writing career, raised a second son and prepared for the arrival of her third. Later, the family sojourned on a remote island off the French coast.

Lindbergh pursued his technical and scientific studies. He also kept an admiring eye on Hitler's new Germany, and was not too shy to express the opinion that white Western civilization was threatened by Asians and non-Nordic bolsheviks. Neither Lindbergh nor his wife was a fascist. Their German sympathies were based on the highest idealism and hopes for peace. Unfortunately, this idealism was so high that the Lindberghs had difficulty focusing the ugly realities of earth-bound Nazism. One has only to read the airy rationalizations in Mrs. Lindbergh's The Wave of the Future (1940) or the racial fantasies and simplifications in her husband's wartime journals to realize the latent dangers in their naivete.

Leonard Mosley, whose many books include biographies of Haile Selassie, Hirohito and Hermann Goring, believes that the dangers were not so latent. He goes so far as to suggest that Lindbergh was partly responsible for the Munich Pact and, by implication, the start of World War II. In 1936, the flier was asked by the U.S. military attache in Berlin to visit Germany and assess the Nazis' growing air power. Luftwaffe Chief Hermann Goring was delighted. What better way to bluff France and England into bowing to Hitler's demands than by impressing the world's leading aviation expert with Germany's military strength?

Lindbergh examined some formidable hardware. His royal treatment included a medal pinned on by Goring himself. He was also stuffed with propaganda and lies, including grossly exaggerated production figures. Lindbergh swallowed them whole. He was, said a former employee years later, "the most honest man I have ever met. He just had to tell the truth and he expected other people to tell the truth to him."

On his return to England, he convinced a number of high officials that Germany would be invincible in war. When war did come, Lindbergh returned to the U.S. where he was associated with America Firsters urging noninvolvement. It did not sit well with F.D.R., and after Pearl Harbor he thwarted Lindbergh's efforts to get into uniform.

Yet this "tarnished hero," as Har old Ickes called him, could not be kept from making significant wartime contributions: he was a valuable technical adviser to Henry Ford's bomber-building program. Later, still a civilian, he quietly slipped off to the Pacific where he taught fighter pilots how to get more miles to the gallon. He also flew some unauthorized combat missions with his students and was credited with shooting down at least one Japanese Zero.

The years before his death in 1974 at the age of 72 were largely spent jetting around the globe as an airline executive and conservationist who opposed building commercial supersonic jets like the Concorde. Having been disappointed and exhausted by the world of men, he spent his last years trying to save the blue and humpbacked whales and the Philippine monkey-eating eagle.

As Lindbergh's third biographer, Mosley wisely puddle-jumps through the more popular chapters of the hero's life. He concentrates his best energies on the controversial pre-war period. Although the book lacks some of the detail of the previous biographies, it is by far the most readable. In addition, it is a balanced portrait of a man who was a victim of his own stubborn sense of honor, his limited vision and, of course, his fame. In a painful irony, Mrs. Lindbergh quotes Rilke's tart definition of fame: "The sum of the misunderstanding that gathers around a new name." Lindbergh was hardly a new name when he showed the world plenty to misunderstand.

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