Berg writes an excellent bio and this tome on the famous pilot does the man justice. The famous flight doesn’t even reach 200 pages, and there’s still a way to go. Fair enough: Lindy packed a lot into his life and Berg finds the pages mounting even without waffling. Lindbergh’s life falls into several natural acts: childhood, learning to fly, the flight, celebrity, kidnapping, America First, and post-America first. I was astonished at the reaction to the flight – it was a time when people were risking their lives flying all the time, but Lindberg’s really captured the public imagination: he was young, good looking, American, solo, did a thing that was easy to understand (breaking flying records seemed to fall into so many categories: first non stop flight, first solo, first single engine). They loved the romance of Lindy – and it was romantic, one man alone against the odds, in a single engine plane which he helped build himself. The flight is beautifully evoked – Lindbergh over the vast ocean, feeling God, seeing islands of fog. He was a good news story at a time when the papers were full of gloom and doom, part of America that seems to fall into the category of either absolute innocence or total corruption. That doesn’t forgive his bad behaviour during World War Two, though – helping keep the Yanks out of the war with all that misery which that caused.
The book is full of interesting info: Lindbergh’s grandfather was a Swedish politician who went to the States because of a sex scandal, Lindy crashed his planes a large number of times when an air mail pilot, the silly things America did in response to his fame (movie offers, etc).
It is impossible not to be swept away by the saga of the flight, or to feel devastated by the story of the kidnapping (Hauptmann here seems very guilty – I think there is such a big Hauptmann-is-innocent push because there is a segment of the population who think everyone charged with a crime is innocent especially if they’re an outsider, just like there’s a segment who think that everyone is guilty especially if they’re an outsider). It is also impossible not to feel fury at Lindbergh’s idiotic stance prior to the US’s entry in World War Two: his pompous ‘principled’ stands were just idiotic in my view, his refusal to see the Nazis as worse than other regimes and stance of the Jews beggars belief, even without hindsight (what about the purges of 1938, you idiot?) After reading about this, quite frankly this idiot deserved all the abuse he received. Lindbergh was a genius with planes, flying and gizmos – he was an idiot when it came to people and common sense politics. Did all that time in the air warp his brain, give him a lofty view? He forgot the world is made up of people. Lindbergh did redeem himself with his war service (which included shooting down some Japanese planes) and his environmental work after the war.
Berg’s biography enjoyed access to the Lindbergh family papers and is very thorough. Lindbergh comes across as a very real person, as does his wife Anne (she was a best selling author, and an idiot about isolationism, too, though not as part; their marriage was interspersed with long periods of separation and affairs by her and possibly him). For the most part it is enthralling – his background (grandad left Sweden due to a sex scandal, parents unhappy marriage, dad was a politician involved in shonky land deals, mum was a bit of a nutter, no friends), early flying career (lots of crashes and bailing out), the Atlantic crossing (very romantic, even now to read about it – one person in a simple plane going such a long way… no wonder the world was captivated), dealing with incredible fame (which he seemed to do very well), marriage to Anne, the kidnapping, leaving America, Europe, back in the US and America First, war service. The stuff after the war was probably the least interesting, though still quite striking. There are probably too many pages devoted to Lindbergh arranging his own funeral.
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