Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (48 page)

Anne was correct. Goering was a ruthless despot.
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But on that summer afternoon, as he paraded into the hall to receive his guests, his charm was thick with honey. Unlike the English king who sought his humanity beneath his royal person, Goering enjoyed playing his role. He looked at people through veiled eyes, wrote Anne, turning to look at her only after she had already passed.

Second in command, with a breadth of influence unmatched in Hitler’s regime, Goering sought to create the drama of a medieval royal court. Anne followed the other guests through hallways hung with huge tapestries into a luminous, glass-walled dining room.
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While Truman and Charles dined at one end of the enormous table, Anne and Kay flanked the general at the other. Bored with Anne, Goering filled the silence with questions about Charles. Kay, annoyed by his impertinence, asked whether he was aware that Mrs. Lindbergh had been her husband’s radio operator on his pioneering flights. Goering broke down in hysterical laughter. “That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard,” he said. “How could such a shy and fragile woman be capable of such a thing?” Pleased with her own impudence, but appalled by his contempt, Kay did not translate his comment for Anne.
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While Charles was shuttled from factory to factory, Anne stayed with Kay. In the mornings, she would work on her transatlantic narrative, later to become
Listen! The Wind
. The women spent the afternoons lunching with officers’ wives and visiting museums and shops. At night, the Lindberghs and Smiths would be transported by limousine from one formal reception to the next. But when the time came for
them to leave, Charles wanted to stay for the entire week of the Olympics. Kay was “terrified” that he and Anne would extend their stay, because she had agreed to house the equestrian team after the Lindberghs’ departure. She was certain her staff would balk at too large a number of guests, though one housemaid was heard to say, “This is the most important house in all Berlin.”
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On August 1, the opening day of the 1936 Olympics, crowds streamed into Berlin and gathered in the new stadium. In unison, a hundred thousand spectators raised their arms to hail the Fuehrer. All the world was watching Hitler, and Charles Lindbergh had kept his promise. With Anne beside him, he was sitting only a few feet away from the leader of the German Reich.
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Charles, however, was disappointed. He had wanted to meet Adolf Hitler, but Kay and Truman had counseled against it. His momentary pleasure, they believed, would not be worth the publicity. They had worked hard to keep Charles away from politics and “in the air,” and they held their ground. Charles acquiesced. Seated so close that they could nearly touch, neither Charles nor Hitler offered the other a word of greeting.
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When Anne and Charles left Germany the next day, it was with optimism and gratitude. Hitler had kept his promise to them; he had managed to keep the press at bay and their privacy inviolate. There was something to be admired in the power of one man who could control his citizens by the weight of his word. In America, they had been stalked by the public and the press; in Germany, they had been fiercely protected. They were certain that Hitler was good for the German people and that he carried the mark of “greatness.”

It is “Puritanical,” she wrote, to view dictatorship as necessarily “evil.” Hitler was, she believed, a visionary who really wanted the best for his country. Regardless, Anne felt that the unity and spirit of the people were “thrilling.” The democracies seemed unable to produce that effect. Nonetheless, Anne did worry that Hitler’s fanaticism, potentially good, might become a weapon of “horrible destruction.” She was uncomfortable with the Nazis’ Jewish policy and their brutal denial
of national integrity and human rights. These things were so repulsive to her that they could not possibly be “worth” the price.
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In short, German life was a surging wave, as amoral and undefined as anything in the “natural” world. The question was who would govern it and how.

Charles agreed. “Hitler is undoubtedly a great man who has done much for the German people,” he wrote to his friend. But he pushed his observations one step further. Were the standards of American democracy worth saving? Were the principles by which it governed true? He wondered if it was self-delusion when “we attempt to run our government by counting the number of heads, without a thought to what lies between them.” The Germans, he wrote, had other criteria by which to judge the rights of men that were not measurable by any political system yet conceived.
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A
nne at Long Barn, Kent, England, spring 1937
.

(Lindbergh Picture Collection, Manuscripts And Archives, Yale University Library)

T
he winter of 1937 was both a sleep and an awakening. The new pregnancy made Anne tired and slow, blunting the “sharp pointed flame” of her mind.
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She could write for only two hours each morning, and even that time was less than productive. And yet her ideas had begun to coalesce—all her disparate glimpses of insight about women and family and creativity began to take form beneath her quietude. Anne knew that she could not follow Charles; he “raced ahead into new ideas, new countries, new schemes.” She had to see life within her frame—narrow and near, deep and essential. She read books with a new energy and challenged herself to formulate conclusions.

Was it possible to reconcile her need to write with the responsibilities of motherhood? She wrote to her cousin Margaret Landenberger Scandrett, that she would not choose to work if it meant denying the needs of her family. “Deep down in my heart, I don’t honestly want to be a ‘woman writer’ any more than I once wanted to be a ‘woman aviator’
… I am not prepared to sacrifice … those advantages and qualities that are truly feminine.”
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Echoing the poetry of Lao-tzu, Anne wrote that a woman must stand at the hub of a wheel that moves toward a larger goal. Creative work was merely one spoke of the wheel, a ray of insight leading to and from a unifying core, essential to the balance of the wheel, without which her life would simply stop turning. Out of this way of life, she wrote, “some very great art might spring—not much but pure gold.”
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The pattern of a woman’s life, she implied, was determined not by talent but by values. Her walls were narrow but her wells were deep, serving as reservoirs of perception for her husband and children. Anne’s theories, however, were about to be tested by a woman who had broken all the rules.

On January 15, Anne and Charles drove, for three and a half hours, north to Maidenhead to spend the night with Lady and Lord Astor at their home, Cliveden. High on a cliff overlooking the Thames, Cliveden was a huge and imperious Roman villa, built in 1850 and purchased by William Waldorf Astor
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in 1893. The estate was a wedding gift given by Astor to his eldest son, Waldorf, on his marriage, in 1906, to Nancy Langhorne.

Small and delicate, with a finely-boned face and stately carriage, the quick-witted Nancy Langhorne had made her way easily into the turn-of-the-century British society. Born in Greenwoods, Virginia, to a large farming family that had lost its money during the Civil War, she was married at the age of eighteen and divorced at twenty-four. In 1903 she went, with her son, to England, where she met Waldorf Astor. At the time of their marriage, Astor was a Conservative member of the House of Commons, but in 1918, when he succeeded to the viscountsy, he became a member of the House of Lords. His father died in 1919, and Nancy won his seat in the House of Commons, becoming the first woman to sit in the lower house of Parliament. Before her swift and unprecedented political ascent, she had spent the early years of her marriage at her husband’s side, serving an apprenticeship to public life.
This she did while raising four sons and a daughter. Her home, a grand salon, was frequented by the political and social elite. Nancy, savvy and brazen, with “volcanic” energy, had a natural flair for public speaking and an instinct for politics. Although she ran her campaign in 1919 on a platform of protective legislation for women and children, once she was seated, she earned a reputation as a right-wing spokesperson—a colonialist and an anti-communist with German sympathies. She thought of herself as a realist with a pragmatic view of foreign policy.
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By the time Anne and Charles met her, in 1936, her reputation was beginning to tarnish. Her propensity for talk had already earned her a reputation for political indiscretion. She blamed the rise of Hitler on the misjudgment of her countrymen and their allies. His strength was, she believed, an outcome of the folly of the Treaty of Versailles. If he had defects, so did English democracy, and whatever the unattractive aspects of his political philosophy, they were preferable to those of Soviet communism. But Hitler was beginning to look like a rogue, and Nancy’s pragmatism was beginning to look like ideology. While “the Cliveden Set” had not yet become synonymous with German appeasement, the seeds of pro-German support were being sown. By January 1937, Nancy was demonized by the English public, along with those who moved in her circle.
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And yet, Anne and Charles chose to dine with her.

On his return to England from Germany in August 1936, Charles hoped to convince Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin of the dimensions of German air superiority. Baldwin, however, brushed his theories aside, throwing Charles into a “cold rage.” Privately, Charles derogated England’s people and power as second-rate, and believed that its “best brains” had been killed in the Great War.
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But many American State and War Department officials were eager to listen to him. Interested, too, were private citizens in France and England, among them the Astors and their friends.

Anne loved talking to Lord Astor at dinner, she told her mother. He was kind and responsive—not stuffy at all. Best of all was the tour, after dinner, when Lady Astor took her through the rooms of the house.
Unintimidated by its tradition or its splendor, Nancy Astor had stripped it of its Roman statues and busts and replaced its gloomy tapestries and furniture with chintz curtains and slipcovers, books, and flowers. In spite of its size, Anne found it warm and comfortable. Nancy showed Anne the dining room in which she had first met Anne’s father and Elisabeth during their stay in London for the Naval Conference in 1930. With dramatic flair, she re-created the evening for Anne, and then guided her into the library. There, they sat in front of the fire, amid Dutch portraits of children, and talked of poetry, “Daddy,” and Elisabeth.

When Anne returned to Long Barn from Cliveden, she pondered not only the patterns of womanhood but the moral justification of English aristocracy. Large estates were like social microcosms, reflecting a natural human hierarchy. The quality and ethics of life at the top trickled down through the ranks, bestowing pride and purpose on the servant class. Anne felt nothing but admiration for the Astors, and she was proud to say that Charles articulated his views on Germany with a precision worthy of the distinguished couple.
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