Troubles of Biographers: L is for Letdown Lindbergh

Trouble: What if the subject starts out amazing and ends up...not so much? 

Michelangelo is easy. He started out sort of obscure, rose to greatness (acknowledged in his time period) by age 27 with David, capped it (one would think) with the Sistine Chapel and then went on being great until he died in his 80s after having redesigned the constantly redesigned St. Peter's--his was the only design to stay the course. St. Peter's dome is his vision. 

Piece of cake to write about Michelangelo! 

Charles Lindbergh is harder. 

As an exciting subject, he doesn't disappoint, from his famous plane ride to Paris to his kidnapped son to his distasteful isolationist phase to his secret love affairs that have since been conclusively proven with DNA tests...he's like his own soap opera!

In truth, I chose Lindbergh more for a recent book on him than for the man himself. I never cared much whether he said hateful and stupid things in the 40s or, like so many political figures who say hateful and stupid things, tried to retrieve his image by focusing on environmentalism (American environmentalism is a religion that promises instant salvation so long as one states the creed). 

But the problem for the biographer interested me. 

Fleming, Candace. The Rise and Fall of Charles Lindbergh. Schwartz, 2020.  

I discovered that Candace Fleming did too good a job with Charles Lindbergh. The book rather reminded me of true-life movies I've seen where the directors, almost unintentionally, used so many correct historical details to create a story, they ended up undermining their own objectives. 

I rather expected Fleming to at least like Lindbergh. I'm not sure she does. It is likely that "rise and fall" does not refer to character but to social perception--Lindbergh's rise and fall in American society. 

Still, I expected the biography to portray a somewhat likable individual who fell from grace when he got into politics. 

The fact is, I'm not sure Charles Lindbergh was ever all that likable. I felt like I was reading a biography that should be called, Shockingly Naive Man With Unbelievably Stupid Political Beliefs and Lack of Moral Sense Who Did One Amazing Feat and Was the Victim of a Terrible Tragedy. 

The most unnerving aspect of Lindbergh was how much he resembled the Twitter version of politics--capable of enormous self-deception; susceptible to staged appearances; deeply enthralled by the idea that a bad group/ideology is trying to control/destroy everything; contemptuous of messy democracy; bolstered by empty and high-flown rhetoric, including the rhetoric that comes out of academe. 

His wife should have known better--and possibly eventually did. In the 1940s, she wrote a book in favor of isolationism that Fleming describes as "splintered and warped...grotesque...logic" (265). Fleming is characterizing Betty Morrow's shocked reaction to her own daughter's bizarre attempt, made by other intellectuals of the time, to excuse the kind of behavior found in totalitarian cultures. A similar argument can be found in Charlotte Gilman's With Her in Ourland regarding World War I. According to these intellectuals, wars were terrible but at least would get rid of the "inefficiency" of current society and leave the noble, correct-thinking people standing. 

Reactions to Lindbergh, however, illustrate the important point that the "fads" of a time period are not monolithically represented throughout that time period. Plenty of people at the time saw Lindbergh for what he was: "a somber cretin....merely a schoolboy hero but also a schoolboy," stated one trenchant observer (256). His mother-in-law was quietly unimpressed. The military basically ignored Lindbergh's erroneous "observations" of Nazi air power. And Roosevelt, who had his own failings yet was not stupid, maneuvered Lindbergh into giving up his rank as colonel in the U.S. Army. When Lindbergh wanted to fight against the Japanese, the War Department refused to reinstate him: "You can't have an officer leading men who thinks we're licked before we start. And that's that" (279).

Lindbergh did eventually help out as a civilian--and here is perhaps the fundamental sadness of the man's life. He wasn't meant to be a hero in the "world stage" sense. He was more Tom Wolfe's right stuff than guy-people-should-actually-listen-to (however much he believed people should listen to him). A tiny king of the hill. He was legitimately not only intensely courageous in his high altitude flight tests but perceptive and helpful when it came to helping other pilots get the most out of their planes. He pushed the envelope. 

If he had flown in rockets rather than planes, he would have been given the same ticker-tape parade, then pushed back into doing missions, not making grand speeches. 

But of course, Lindbergh brought the grand speechifying on himself.

Lindbergh's other kids

Lindbergh was a man who presented himself as scientific and completely bought into this self-characterization (until he decided to save himself by adopting a kind of mystical quasi-religious belief system without, Fleming points out, ever taking any responsibility for his past behavior). The truth was, he never had the heart or soul or wide-worldview or humor of, say, an Asimov or Feynman. He never was as scientific as he convinced himself he was. He was never all that.

Would he have turned out differently if the world hadn't made him a celebrity? 

I'm not sure he would have--he was constitutionally full of himself. But at least he would have had a smaller audience.