One Summer: America, 1927

would never have attracted the attention it did if it had been invented by anyone else. In practice, it had few useful applications and no role at all in surgery. Although several perfusion pumps were built, it is believed that none were still in use by 1940.
    In the wider world, Lindbergh was still mobbed almost everywhere he went. In the spring of 1928, he took a plane up for a spin from Curtiss Field on a Sunday, a day when sightseers now turned out in large numbers. When news spread through the crowd that Lindbergh was coming in to land, 2,000 people swarmed on to the runway in what the Times described as a frenzied stampede. Two women were injured, several children were separated from their parents, and many people were bruised or had clothing torn. Lindbergh was trapped in his plane for fifteen minutes. This was now his life. Even when he and Carrel travelled to Copenhagen to demonstrate the perfusion pump at a scientific conference, police had to erect barricades to keep back the crowds.
    Finding privacy became an impossible quest. Lindbergh and Anne Morrow were married in May 1929, and for their honeymoon went sailing off the Maine coast on a borrowed thirty-eight-foot yacht. On their second day out, they were infuriated to find an aeroplane buzzing them while a photographer snapped pictures. Soon after that, a boat full of reporters and photographers began a relentless pursuit. ‘For eight straight hours [they] circled about our boat,’ Lindbergh recalled later with undimmed bitterness.
    The Lindberghs steadfastly tried to live as normal a life as they could. Charles took positions with Transcontinental Air Transport, a forerunner of TWA, and Pan Am, and was on course to become a leading figure in the aviation industry when his and Anne’s lives were disrupted in the most devastating manner possible. In early1932, an intruder climbed through an upstairs window in their house near Hopewell, New Jersey, and kidnapped their infant child, Charles Augustus Junior. Though they paid a $50,000 ransom, two months later the child was found murdered.
    Through all their worry and grief, the Lindberghs were immersed in the most grotesque media circus. Low-flying aeroplanes carrying sightseers at $2.50 a trip constantly flew over their house and made it impossible for them to go outside. Two photographers somehow got into the morgue in Trenton and took pictures of the dead baby. The pictures were much too horrible to be published, but they circulated privately and could be purchased for $5. When Bruno Hauptmann, a German immigrant, went on trial for the murder in the little town of Flemington, New Jersey, 100,000 people turned up on the first day. In February 1935, Hauptmann was found guilty and sent for execution. His executioner was Robert G. Elliott.
    By this time, Charles and Anne had had enough. They moved to Europe, first to Kent in England, then to a house on a tiny island off the north coast of Brittany. On a neighbouring island was the summer home of Alexis Carrel and his wife. The Lindberghs travelled around Europe a great deal, too, and developed an undisguised fondness for Germany. In 1936, Charles attended the Olympics in Berlin as a guest of the Nazis and clearly enjoyed himself immensely. Afterwards he wrote home to a friend that the Germans had ‘a sense of decency and values which is way ahead of our own’ – rather an extraordinary thing to write of Nazi Germany.
    In 1938, Lindbergh accepted a medal from Hermann Goering, which many found offensive. Anne noted bitterly, and with justification, that the presentation was made at a dinner at the US embassy in Berlin, that Goering was a guest of the American government, that Lindbergh did not know he was to be honoured and did not want to cause a scene at a formal event. All this was so. On the other hand, even after Germany and America went to war, Lindbergh never returned the medal.
    There is no evidence to suggest that Charles Lindbergh would ever have countenanced atrocities, but equally when a person speaks of the world as having too many of one kind of person, he is within hailing distance of those who do. What is certainly true is that both he and Anne were unapologetic admirers of Adolf Hitler. Anne described Hitler as ‘a visionary who really wants the best for his country’. Lindbergh thought Hitler was ‘undoubtedly a great man’. He acknowledged that the Nazis tended to be a little fanatical, but maintained, in a spirit of fairness, that