The Lindberghs did enjoy far more privacy in Britain than they had in the United States. They moved easily in conservative political and social circles. They also traveled across the Channel to France and Germany. Lindbergh voiced admiration for the new Germany that Hitler seemed to be building, and he was impressed by Germany’s growing military power.
In 1938, at a stag dinner at the U.S. embassy in Berlin, Lindbergh was given a medal by Hermann Goering in honor of his epic 1927 flight and his contributions to aviation. Anne Lindbergh predicted, presciently, that the medal would one day be an “albatross” and urged her husband to return it.200 He declined.
The Lindberghs returned to the United States in 1939. When war erupted in Europe, Lindbergh became prominent in the America First Committee, which wanted to keep the United States out of a conflict an ocean away. In a speech in Des Moines, Iowa, on September 11, 1941, he urged his countrymen not to let “the British, the Jews and the Roosevelt administration” drag the United States into war. Later, he denied that he was anti-Semitic, asserting that he had Jewish friends. But the damage was lasting.
After the United States entered the war, Lindbergh sought to atone, sharing his deep knowledge of airplane engines and aerodynamics with the companies designing the planes that would battle the Germans and Japanese. He even flew on combat missions in the Pacific as a civilian after President Roosevelt rebuffed his entreaties to give him a military post.
Before and after the war, Lindbergh prospered as a commercial aviation consultant. In later life, he devoted himself to conservationist causes.
In 2003, a German newspaper published an article contending that on a visit to Germany in 1957, Lindbergh met and fell in love with a woman a quarter century younger than he was. The relationship produced three children, the newspaper said. But Lindbergh biographer A. Scott Berg said he doubted the veracity of the report.
Lindbergh died of cancer in Hawaii on August 26, 1974, at the age of seventy-two. President Gerald R. Ford issued a statement acknowledging the “political controversy” stirred by some of Lindbergh’s views. As for his epic flight, Ford said, “the courage and daring of his feat will never be forgotten.”
Anne Morrow Lindbergh enjoyed great literary success with her 1955 book Gift from the Sea, which, despite its title, was a philosophical meditation on the lives of women in the twentieth century. The book was on bestseller lists for weeks. She wrote numerous other books of prose and poetry and died at her home in Vermont on February 7, 2001. She was ninety-four.
During the trial of Bruno Hauptmann in 1935, there was an incident, little known at the time, that said much about the pettiness to which Hoover could descend.
Charles Lindbergh was talking with Elmer Irey, an agent of the Internal Revenue Service, whose idea it had been to include gold certificates in the ransom money in the theory—which proved correct—that gold notes would be easy to spot.
“If it had not been for you fellows being in the case, Hauptmann would not now be on trial, and your organization deserves full credit for his apprehension,” Lindbergh told Irey.201
Hoover heard about Lindbergh’s remark and never forgave him for it, probably because it reflected the truth, which was that the FBI, while involved in the Lindbergh investigation, had not played the central, all-important role that Hoover had coveted for it. What’s more, Hoover had tried to nudge the Internal Revenue Service onto the sidelines.
“Irey was a good Christian who didn’t cuss,” one of his longtime aides recalled later, “but the air would be blue when the subject of the Lindbergh kidnapping case came up.”
*Three guards were fired after an investigation into the escape debacle.
**Hoover’s “perceived reluctance” to tackle civil rights issues was in keeping with his neo-Confederate attitude toward people of color. As Curt Gentry notes in his book, in 1943, Hoover remarked in a memo to President Roosevelt that recent racial unrest in Washington, DC, was most likely caused by “the sporting type negro.”
EPILOGUE
By the late 1930s, the epidemic of kidnappings was over. Of course, there would be others in the following years, but nothing like what the country experienced in the decade before the Second World War.
What caused the plague to fade away? More effective law enforcement and the obvious willingness of the law to put people to death? The availability of factory jobs as war loomed and then came? Some combination of events and trends? No one can say.
The central figures in the sensational cases of the thirties fared differently as the years went on. I was not able to learn the fates of all of them. But I do know what happened to some of the people.
Adolphus “Buppie” Orthwein, who was kidnapped as a boy, graduated from Yale, served as an intelligence officer in the navy during World War II, tracking German submarines, and joined the family business, the Anheuser-Busch beer empire. He also had other business interests. He married twice and had five children. He died in 2013 at the age of ninety-six.
Nell Donnelly, the dressmaker with a vision, divorced her husband and married James A. Reed, who had been widowed. She lived until 1991 when she died at the age of 102. (Reed died in 1944 at eighty-two.)
David Wilentz became one of the most powerful Democratic politicians in New Jersey. He practiced law until shortly before his death in 1988 at the age of ninety-three.
John Condon, the eccentric go-between in the Lindbergh case, died on January 2, 1945, at the age of eighty-four. Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf, the first superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, died in 1958 at sixty-three. Arthur Koehler (“the man who loved trees”), to whom Schwarzkopf wisely turned over the kidnapper’s ladder for study, died in 1967 at eighty-two.
Dr. Dudley Shoenfeld, the pioneer criminal profiler who advised the police on what kind of man to look for in the kidnapping case, died in
