One Summer: America, 1927

was in his mind,’ the Register wrote, ‘but it was so lacking in appreciation for consequences – putting the best interpretation on it – that it disqualifies him for any pretensions of leadership in this republic in policy-making.’
    Later that day came news that Germany had torpedoed the 1,700-ton freighter Montana off Greenland. All over America, people disowned Charles Lindbergh. Wendell Willkie, soon to be the Republican Party’s choice for president, called Lindbergh’s speech ‘the most un-American talk made in my time by any person of national repute’. Lindbergh’s name came off streets and schools and airports. Lindbergh Peak became Lone Eagle Peak. In Chicago, the Lindbergh Beacon became the Palmolive Beacon. TWA stopped calling itself ‘the Lindbergh Line’. Even Little Falls, his home town, painted out Lindbergh’s name on its water tower. President Roosevelt said privately: ‘I am absolutely convinced that Lindbergh is a Nazi.’ Three months later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and America was at war.
    Once America entered the war, Lindbergh supported the Allied cause wholeheartedly, but it was too late. His reputation would never recover. After the war, he became a devoted conservationist and did huge amounts of good work all over the planet, but withoutregaining the public’s affection. A 1957 movie about his flight to Paris, starring Jimmy Stewart, was a failure at the box office. As the years passed, Lindbergh largely withdrew from public life. He died of cancer at his home on Maui in Hawaii at the age of seventy-two in 1974. He was so organized that he even had his own death certificate filled out in readiness. Only the time of death was left blank. He never retracted any part of the Des Moines speech.
    Almost thirty years after his death, in 2003, it emerged that Lindbergh had had a far more complicated private life than previously thought. Between 1957 and his death, he had conducted a secret long-distance relationship with a German milliner, Brigitte Hesshaimer of Munich, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. The children told reporters that Lindbergh had been ‘a mystery visitor who would turn up once or twice a year’. They knew he was their father, but thought his name was Careu Kent.
    According to further reports, Lindbergh also had simultaneous relationships with Brigitte Hesshaimer’s sister, Marietta, by whom he had two more children, and with a German secretary, identified only as Valeska, with whom he had yet two more children. All this extraordinary bonding was managed with such remarkable discretion that neither Lindbergh’s American family nor his biographer A. Scott Berg had the least notion of it. Quite how Lindbergh managed it all is a story waiting to be told.
    What can be said in the meantime is that the greatest hero of the twentieth century was infinitely more of an enigma and considerably less of a hero than anyone had ever supposed.
     
    All this makes the subsequent lives of the other main figures in this story seem a little tame and anticlimactic, but here, in necessarily compressed form and approximately chronological order, is what became of them after the long summer of 1927.
    Charles Nungesser and François Coli , the French airmen who started it all, were never seen again, but they were by no meansforgotten. In November 1927 it was reported with some embarrassment that $30,000 that New York Mayor Jimmy Walker was supposed to present to Madame Nungesser in Paris had disappeared and could not be found. This was the Roxy Fund – the money that had been collected at the benefit concert at the Roxy Theatre that Lindbergh had briefly attended in June. Some $70,000 collected from elsewhere in America did turn up, but the New York City portion seems to have gone permanently astray.
    Today, on a windy clifftop above the small and pleasant coastal resort of Étretat, in Normandy, there stands a white concrete memorial that looks rather like a giant pen nib thrust into the earth. Pointing towards America, it marks the spot where the heroic French airmen took their leave of their native soil for the last time. It is the only memorial anywhere to that summer of remarkable flights.
    A few miles to the west lies the village of Ver-sur-Mer, where Commander Richard Byrd and his team ditched in the sea. A small municipal museum contains the few surviving relics of that night, including a little piece of the aeroplane’s fabric covering – all that