Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (25 page)

As preparations for the trip expanded, so did Anne’s fears. Her mother, sensing Anne’s sadness, offered to keep the baby with her at their home in North Haven. Anne was grateful that the baby would be with her mother. It quelled her anxiety about leaving home. She knew he would be protected and loved.
³⁷

Twelve days later, the Lindberghs began their arduous trip with a ceremonial stop in Washington, D.C. It was a gracious nod to the State Department and to the press. Two hundred people lined the banks of the Potomac to witness their take-off, and scores of cars came to a halt on the highways. On the same day, the baby and Betty Gow took the train to Bar Harbor. Anne’s parting instructions to Betty were that she keep a diary and photograph him once a month. She asked Betty to refrain from kissing and hugging him, fearing that he might become spoiled.
³⁸
Hoping they would not be followed by the press, Anne prayed for their safe arrival. But unknown to Anne, reporters had spotted Betty and Charlie at the train station. Within days, the nation knew that the Lindbergh baby and his nurse were in North Haven.

The first official stop was to be Ottawa in Canada, but Anne and Charles detoured to Maine to say good-bye. All the Morrows were gathered for the occasion—Aunt Agnes, Aunt Alice, Aunt Hilda, Aunt Hattie, and Uncles Edwin and Jay. Their friends and neighbors throughout North Haven thronged to the pier to watch them land.
While the Morrows motored in their yacht to greet Anne and Charles, numerous motorboats, rowboats, and sailboats angled around the bay to embrace them.

After a quiet family evening at the Morrow home, riddled with anxiety as well as good spirits, Anne and Charles lifted off early the next morning. Their black-bodied ship with its scarlet wings and silver pontoons rose above the blue bay in a spray of foam. As their plane rose, higher, Anne and Charles shot their hands out of the cockpit to wave at the shrieking crowd. In a gesture of humility, almost a curtsey, Charles circled the harbor, dipped his wings, and disappeared into the sky above the Camden Hills.
³⁹

For Anne, this was a breathtaking moment, uniting the past and the future, stopping time, and holding life in a perfect family tableau.

D
wight Morrow in Lindbergh’s plane, waving to the crowd on his senatorial campaign tour, May 1930
.

(Amherst College)

S
hortly before midnight on Sunday, October 4, 1931, Dwight Morrow leaned on the arm of his waiting valet and walked slowly up the stairs of his darkened house. Morrow usually wasn’t one to lean, but he had never felt so tired. He and Banks climbed up the winding, lantern-lit stairway to the second floor and turned toward the double wooden doors of the master suite. As Morrow wished Banks a “good night,” Banks noted that Morrow looked uncommonly pale.
¹

Since his return from Maine at summer’s end, Morrow’s campaign for the senatorial seat had quickened its pace. With the election now only weeks away, even his weekends were consumed by political events. On the previous afternoon, Dwight and Betty had been hosts to six thousand Bergen County Republicans at their home, in honor of Dwight’s colleague, Senator Baird, who was seeking reelection.
²
Morrow’s hands were pained and blistered from greeting his guests. Earlier that Sunday evening, he had addressed several hundred people at a black-tie dinner of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. Praising the work of an entire generation of Jews who organized and sustained ninety-one charities with the “blood and sacrifice” it required for their “dream,” he admonished them that they “dare not fail,” not only for their own sake but for the thousands of philanthropic societies of all faiths throughout America who were seeking inspiration from their deeds. It is “tragic,” he said, when a new generation, falling on hard times, renounces the dreams and accomplishments of their fathers.
³
Again, he had courted the crowd until
his blisters oozed, but a friend noted that he didn’t look tired at all; he had spoken with the “force and fire” of a young man.

The tiredness had come on gradually during the long limousine ride home through the deserted city streets, across the Hudson by ferry, and down the hills of the Palisades. By the time he met Banks waiting at the door, the fatigue had overtaken him.

In his dressing room, he carefully placed his tuxedo, shoes, and shirt in appropriate parts of the wooden niches designed by his wife to curb his untamed sense of order; then he slipped into bed beside her. As usual, he had told Betty not to wait up. An early riser, she was planning a morning round of golf before the official luncheon they were to host the next afternoon. Dwight must have fallen swiftly to sleep, for Betty was not disturbed by his movement.

The next morning Betty rose quietly, dressed quickly, and walked softly down the stairs to have breakfast with Elisabeth. Around eleven, Morrow’s secretary, Arthur Springer, began to worry. He had planned to meet Morrow before the official business of the day, and it was unlike Morrow to be late. He spoke to Banks, who remembered the look of fatigue on his employer’s face the night before, and together they hurried up the stairs and knocked at his door. On receiving no answer, they opened the door and found Morrow unconscious on his bed, his chest heaving as he gasped for air. Banks called an ambulance and paged Betty at the club. Two and a half hours later, Dwight Morrow died at Englewood Hospital without having regained consciousness. Betty, still in her golf shoes and trousers, was dry-eyed and silent. She summoned the chauffeur to take her home, in the company of Elisabeth, Dwight’s sister Agnes Scandrett, and Agnes’s daughter, Lucien Greathouse.

In spite of her grief, Betty was in control, and her first priority was to tell the other children. She cabled Anne and Charles aboard the British aircraft carrier
Hermes
, en route to Shanghai. They had made their way through the tundra of northern Canada, through the endless nights of the Arctic Ocean, down through the Bering Strait and the enveloping fog of the Japanese islands, to Tokyo and Osaka. But on
landing in Nanking, China, they learned that millions of people were homeless and starving because of the Grand Canal and Yangtze River flood. Only their state-of-the-art amphibian plane had the range and equipment to do the survey essential to making decisions on flood relief. Anne and Charles flew rescue missions to stranded villagers in need of medicine and supplies. Then, just as they prepared to leave Hangkow for one last rescue flight, their plane capsized, and they were forced to travel by boat to Shanghai to await its repair.
⁴

Betty telegraphed Con, on her way to visit Charlie in Maine, and she telephoned Dwight Jr., now back at Amherst. Most Americans learned of Morrow’s death against the loud cheering of baseball spectators. The third game of the World Series was being played at Shibe Park in Philadelphia when the news was sent from the offices of NBC to the announcers at the field. As the fans roared, radio listeners heard the news: Dwight Morrow, distinguished lawyer, financier, and statesman, was dead at fifty-eight.
⁵

For twenty-four hours, his body lay in a simple coffin in the library of his home, beside his favorite chair, among the books he loved. Only his intimate friends and family members were admitted to the house. On October 7, at two o’clock, the coffin was draped in a blanket of lilies that had been sent by President Hoover, who could not attend, and was carried into the hearse waiting in the courtyard. Neighbors and friends lined the three-mile stretch between the Morrow home and the church, where four thousand people waited outside. The service started promptly at three—the thousand seats of the church were filled with family and friends as well as delegations from the House and the Senate, cabinet officials, Vice President Curtis, and former President Coolidge. The Reverend Carl Hopkins Elmore, minister of the Presbyterian Church and a long-time friend of the Morrow family, officiated. Dressed in black, Elisabeth, Dwight, and Con escorted Betty to her pew. Reporters noted that Charles Lindbergh, Jr., had not been brought back from Maine for his grandfather’s funeral.
⁶

That afternoon, Morrow was buried with a private graveside ceremony, almost within sight of the Morrow estate. In an odd departure
from the usual Presbyterian service, a prayer of Socrates that Plato had written in
The Phaedrus
was read. It was one Morrow had quoted often:

It was this struggle—to reconcile the irreconcilable—that had undermined Morrow’s health during his last years. Even as he rose to unanticipated heights of accomplishment, wealth, and public office, he had longed for the life he had known as a child in Pittsburgh. Scholar turned politician, humanist turned partisan, pauper turned millionaire, he could never match his simple tastes to the money and esteem he garnered. The statesman’s life was more than he had bargained for; at times he wondered whether it had been worth the price. After only three months of his Senate term, Morrow had become thoroughly demoralized. Forced to make decisions without time to study the issues, he found the work difficult and puzzling.
⁸
The hurry and chaos of Senate procedure violated his intellectual integrity. Morrow saw himself as a man of ideas, as a Philosopher King who had left academia to serve the public. Somewhere, he had made a turn that weakened his control. Perhaps Betty understood and found it more than she could bear. As the coffin was lowered into the grave, she picked up a handful of earth and let it slide through her fingers onto the lily-covered coffin. Her grief found no words.

Words of sympathy and praise, in the hundreds of letters from friends, colleagues, and associates, poured into the Morrow household.
⁹
Now that he was dead, there was no praise sufficient for the senator from New Jersey. Republicans and Democrats, dries and wets alike, lauded his skill as a negotiator founded on his erudition and honesty. The editors
of Outlook
stated it well: “It was his habit to stand aside and study a question and then, entering the discussion himself, make it seem as if it had never been discussed before.” Through the prism of Morrow’s mind the problem took on a new shape.

But Morrow’s strength was also his frailty. The logic that cut to the heart of an issue sapped him of vigor. By denying anything that smacked of the irrational, he locked up his feelings until he burst with pain. He treated his body as if it were a disposable machine, an instrument designed solely for performance. Still under his father’s influence, he deified “reason” until it overshadowed his spirit. This, too, was Morrow’s legacy—the mask of reason and virtue which destroyed him.

For months after his death, Anne could not reconcile the loss of her father. She could not imagine life without his playful smile, his fierce idealism, and his agile mind. She wondered how her mother could bear the pain. He had been the center of her life.