Word: lindbergh
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...possible that from the beginning, Lindbergh was burdened with a bit more symbolism than he should have been made to carry. His flight, for all its significance, was in some ways merely a handsome stunt. It was also one of the first great media events of the century. Frenchman Raymond Orteig had offered $25,000 for the first nonstop flight between New York and France.* Through the winter and early spring of 1927, the newspapers - then in one of the most aggressively competitive eras of American journalism - had promoted the race among Admiral Richard Byrd, the polar explorer, and others...
...many ways, the papers were wrong about Lindbergh from the start. Somehow the myth was always askew; up until his death from cancer on Maui in 1974, Lindbergh remained elusive, difficult. Far from being merely a sort of hayseed genius of mechanics, he was the son of a populist Republican Minnesota Congressman and a schoolteacher, whose father, Charles Land of Detroit, was a distinguished dentist who invented porcelain caps for teeth. Lindbergh had lived in Washington, D.C., and studied at the University of Wisconsin until he dropped out midway through his sophomore year to take a course in flying...
...Lindbergh was amazed at becoming a hero. His life changed forever. After the Paris flight, people stole his laundry for souvenirs. When he wrote a check, it would be kept for his signature. Once, after a hearty lunch with some pilot friends, a group of women ran squealing to fight over the wet corncobs he had left on his plate. In 1932 came the kidnaping of the Lindberghs' child. He never forgave the mob of reporters who, he thought, had frightened the kidnaper into killing his son, or the pair of photographers who broke into the Trenton, N.J., morgue...
...Lindberghs bitterly departed for England; Lindbergh thought it too painful and dangerous to be a hero in his own country. While abroad, he began a strange flirtation with Nazi Germany. In a series of visits at the invitation of Hermann Goring, he was dined, toasted, decorated with the Service Cross of the German Eagle and led on carefully planned inspection tours of German aircraft factories. As Goring hoped, Lindbergh came away persuaded that Germany's air superiority was overwhelming...
Early in 1939, Lindbergh returned to the U.S., now as a preacher. Intervention in the European war, he said at the time, was being promoted by something like a conspiracy of "the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt Administration." Relations grew strained with friends and even his in-laws, who favored intervention. His hero's luster dulled. Novelist J.P. Marquand, a friend, explained indulgently, "You've got to remember that all heroes are horses' asses." Lindbergh became the most glamorous evangelist of "America first." Roosevelt compared him to a "copperhead." Lindbergh resigned from the Army Air Corps...