The Once Favored Son

By LANCE MORROW

Lloyd's of London refused to offer odds; the trip was too dangerous. Then ships in the Atlantic radioed sightings, and after 28 hours of flight, the Spirit of St. Louis crossed Dingle Bay on the southwest coast of Ireland; Lloyd's finally quoted 10-3 against Charles Lindbergh's making Paris. Six hours more, and he touched down at Le Bourget. A crowd of 150,000 engulfed the little plane like a tidal wave.

By May 1927, as A. Scott Berg writes in his superb biography, Lindbergh (G.P. Putnam's Sons; 640 pages; $30), "radio, telephones, radiographs and the Bartlane Cable Process could transmit images and voices around the world within seconds...For the first time, all of civilization could share as one the sights and sounds of an event--almost instantaneously and simultaneously."

The boyish aviator from Minnesota--shy, courteous, photogenic and self-contained--was instantly installed as the brightest god in what would become the new polytheism of global celebrity--now perhaps the world's dominant religion. But for Charles Lindbergh, the New York-to-Paris flight, the first solo transatlantic crossing by air, was only the first hop in a more complicated and sometimes less heroic journey.

First came the launch into fame and myth: the New York Times devoted its entire front page to Lindbergh and his flight. When Lindbergh visited England on the way home, King George V greeted him and said, "Now tell me, Captain Lindbergh. There is one thing I long to know. How did you pee?" New York's Patrick Joseph Cardinal Hayes welcomed him home: "I greet you as the first and finest American boy." TIME beatified Lindbergh as its first Man of the Year.

As a highly commercial and cheesy Lindbergh mania seized the country, the 25-year-old loner, disconcerted and flattered at first, began to understand the price to be paid. Anne Morrow, the deeply private daughter of Dwight Morrow, U.S. ambassador to Mexico, married Lindbergh a year after the flight; she eventually became a superb and often popular writer (Gift from the Sea), but shared the terrible price of Lindbergh's celebrity (most devastatingly exacted in the kidnap-murder of their first child in 1932)--and suffered as well from her husband's self-absorbed and cross-grained nature.

Berg had the full cooperation of the Lindbergh family and access to some 2,000 boxes of Charles and Anne Lindbergh's personal papers. His use of this rich material is masterfully judicious. Lindbergh possessed a complex character that was part genius mechanic and part mystic. All his life he demonstrated a surprising, inner-directed capacity for intellectual growth. In the last decades of his life, regretting the effects of the worldwide aviation he had pioneered ("Every year," he wrote in his journal, "transport planes seem to get more like subway trains"), he campaigned as an environmentalist, circling the world ceaselessly, traveling light, seeking out primitive peoples in an exercise of atavistic communion.

For all his earnest questing, Lindbergh was capable of a shocking naivete and obtuseness--or, many thought, something worse. He had a sinister habit of thinking in terms of racial superiorities and inferiorities. During the late '30s, he led the isolationist "America First" forces that sought to keep the U.S. out of European war. Although he undertook an essentially patriotic mission to evaluate Nazi aviation for U.S. authorities, he seemed to make excuses for Hitler, even in the face of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 and other evidence of the Nazis' murderous intentions toward the Jews. In October 1938, a month before Kristallnacht, at a dinner at the residence of the American ambassador in Berlin, Hermann Goring surprised everyone by decorating Lindbergh--"by order of der Fuhrer"--with the Service Cross of the German Eagle, a golden cross with four small swastikas. Inexplicably, Lindbergh refused, then and later, to return the medal--as if to do so would be discourteous.

So the "first and finest American boy" now seemed, to many Americans, a Nazi fellow traveler, an anti-Semite, a virtual traitor. F.D.R. kept him out of the war until 1944, when Lindbergh went to the Pacific on an aviation fact-finding tour; he contrived to fly a number of combat missions and even shot down a Japanese fighter--"in self-defense."

Over the years, some of Lindbergh's nimbus returned, partly because of his wartime service. Suffering from terminal cancer in 1973, he had himself flown to his home on Maui, where, with a strange and touching meticulousness, working from checklists, he designed his own tombstone, selected his shroud and supervised the digging of his grave--planning his own death as carefully as he had prepared for his other great flight, years earlier.