Anne M. Lindbergh, Writer and Widow of Aviator, Dies

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who blazed air routes with her husband, Charles, at the dawn of commercial aviation and was one of the past century’s most important and popular American women writers and diarists, died Wednesday at her home in Passumpsic, Vt. She was 94.

“Mother died quietly in her second home in Vermont with her family around her,” her daughter, Reeve Lindbergh, said in a statement released by the Charles A. and Anne Morrow Lindbergh Foundation in Minneapolis.

In frail health since suffering the first in a series of strokes in 1991, she is also survived by sons Jon, Land and Scott.

At various times in a remarkable life, Lindbergh was the most envied, pitied and hated woman in America.

She married Lindbergh at the peak of his fame, two years after his solo, nonstop flight across the Atlantic in 1927 captured the heart and imagination of the world.

Under his tutelage, she became an accomplished co-pilot, navigator and radio operator and the first American woman licensed to fly a glider. Accompanying her husband on 40,000 miles of exploratory flights around the world in the early 1930s, often while she was pregnant, Anne Lindbergh eased public fears about flying and helped map routes still used by commercial airlines today.

A few years after her marriage, she became a universal object of sympathy when her first child was kidnapped and murdered, a sensational crime that the Lindberghs always blamed on the extraordinary fame that made them, in Anne’s words, “celebrities set apart from the human race.”

Her long fall from grace was caused by her 1940 book “The Wave of the Future,” which argued against American involvement in World War II. Like her husband, whose isolationist views she mirrored, Anne Lindbergh was condemned as a pro-Nazi traitor, a reputation that took years to fade.

Search for Identity

“I have had three big things to fight against in my life,” Lindbergh wrote once. “The first was just sorrow (the Case), the second was fear (the flights) and the third is bitterness (this whole war struggle). And the third is the hardest.”

Yet out of this crucible came 13 books, several of which were bestsellers. The most enduring was “Gift From the Sea,” originally published in 1955. A meditation on the often conflicting roles of women that anticipated the contemporary feminist movement by more than a decade, it was inspired by Lindbergh’s own struggle for identity in a marriage dominated by her charismatic yet sternly controlling spouse.

Charles Lindbergh “scourged his wife into becoming an independent woman,” said A. Scott Berg, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1998 biography “Lindbergh,” “and, in so doing, he helped create an important feminist voice--a popular diarist who also wrote one of the most beloved volumes of the century, and another that was one of the most despised.”

Anne Spencer Morrow was born June 22, 1906, in Englewood, N.J. Her father was Dwight Whitney Morrow, a U.S. senator, diplomat, lawyer and partner in New York’s J.P. Morgan & Co. Her mother, Elizabeth, was a poet and educator who was the first woman to be chairman of the board of Smith College.

After attending Miss Chapin’s, a finishing school in New York, she followed her mother’s path to Smith in 1924 as an English major. During Christmas break in 1927, she journeyed to Mexico, where her father was the American ambassador. Charles Lindbergh, who just seven months earlier had made his triumphant flight from New York to Paris, was to be the Morrows’ guest.

His visit sent Anne Morrow spinning. A shy, self-conscious young woman with sparkling blue eyes, she had once written that her life ambition was “to marry a hero.” That week in Mexico, she met him and fell in love.

A year later, unable to forget the dinner companion whose tongue-tied silence he had appreciated, Charles Augustus Lindbergh began their courtship in a plane over Long Island. After their second date, he asked her to marry him. Knowing her desire for a quiet intellectual life would be thwarted by marriage to an international superstar, Anne took weeks to say yes.

Under a cloak of secrecy that succeeded in stymieing the swarm of reporters ever on Lindbergh’s trail, the former Minnesota farm boy and the ambassador’s daughter were wed on the Morrows’ New Jersey estate on May 27, 1929.

They managed to elude reporters by boat and began married life in privacy. But within a week, the honeymoon, at least from the rabid press, was over. Anne Lindbergh’s arduous education on life under an unrelenting spotlight had begun.

“Fame separated them from the rest of the world,” Julie Nixon Eisenhower observed in her 1977 book “Special People,” “and they became each other’s confidants and best friends.”

The only place the Lindberghs could escape the prying eyes of the public was in the air. So for the first few years, they made it their home, conducting survey flights for what later became Trans World Airlines.

On Easter morning in 1930, Anne Lindbergh helped her husband break the transcontinental speed record, flying from Los Angeles to New York in less than 15 hours. Although she was seven months pregnant with their first child, she was loath to complain about the discomforts of flight, even when leaking fuel made her sick. “I couldn’t complain,” she later recalled. “It would prove I’m a weak woman.”

She earned her glider pilot’s license that year, and her private pilot’s license the next year.

Stalked by Reporters

On June 22, 1930, Anne’s 24th birthday, their baby was born. The fiercely protective parents let 16 days pass before they released the child’s name--Charles Augustus Jr.--and photograph.

Over the next 20 months, Anne Lindbergh would write later, she and Charles were caught in a “war” against the public. Reporters mercilessly stalked them. Strangers demanded to see the baby; one intruder careened into their frontyard in a car, killing the family dog.

As the Lindberghs were readying the new home they had built on an isolated property in Hopewell, N.J., the toddler, whom Anne had nicknamed her “fat lamb,” was kidnapped from his crib in the second-story nursery. The date was March 1, 1932.

For 10 weeks the couple lived between hope and despair. Their house was taken over by police and detectives pursuing countless leads. In “Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead,” her second volume of diaries and letters, Lindbergh cataloged the 38,000 pieces of mail that poured in during the first month: 11,500 were messages of sympathy, 9,500 were suggestions, 5,000 came from cranks, 12,000 came from people who wrote about their dreams. Charging $2.50 a ticket, a canny local operator gave the curious an aerial tour of the Lindbergh estate.

In her diary, a careful economy of words covered the pain of that period. “The climax of our struggle to live as ordinary citizens came when our first baby was kidnapped from our newly built house on March 1, 1932,” she wrote. “After months of fruitless negotiation and search, his dead body was found several miles from our place. The ‘hour of gold’ was suddenly turned into an ‘hour of lead.’ ”

Little Charles’ body was discovered on May 12, 1932, in a shallow grave. Although a ransom note had cruelly kept hope alive, authorities surmised that the boy had died instantly from a blow to the head, sustained as the kidnapper carried him down a ladder from his upstairs bedroom. Bruno Richard Hauptmann, an unemployed Bronx carpenter, was arrested for the crime in 1934. He was tried and convicted in 1935 and executed the next year. Decades later, books written about the case raised doubts about his guilt, but Anne Lindbergh maintained silence on the matter, saying only that it happened “a long time ago.”

The kidnapping and Hauptmann’s trial intensified public curiosity about the Lindberghs. Although Charles Lindbergh pleaded with the press to let their second son, Jon, live a normal life, one day in 1935 overzealous reporters sideswiped the Lindbergh car, forcing it to the curb, then yanking open the doors to take Jon’s picture. Within hours, the Lindberghs decided to leave the country. For the next four years, they lived peacefully in England and France.

Anne Lindbergh ultimately blamed the press for indelibly marring their lives.

“I don’t think the kidnapping would have happened without the enormous spotlight on us,” she told the New York Times many years later. “That was very terrible and led to many changes. That was the great break in our lives. . . . “

Their second child was born five months after the kidnapping, an event Anne described as “the most healing and nourishing element in my life” at the time. But the murder of her firstborn, followed by the death of her sister Elisabeth from a heart ailment, left her in a depressed state. She had nightmares and cried silently at night, sharing her desperation and feelings of failure with no one, especially not with her mother or her husband, both of whom, she noted, followed the “stoic tradition of hiding grief.”

What saved her was writing.

“If I could write out moods which could be admitted to no one, they became more manageable, as though neatly stacked on a high shelf,” she wrote many years after the searing loss of Charles Jr. “Brought to the aseptic light of the diary’s white page, the giant toadstools withered.”

She began to emerge from the shadows when her first book, “North to the Orient,” was published in 1935. An account of the Lindberghs’ 1931 flight to China via Canada and Alaska to chart a new commercial air route, it was an instant bestseller.

Her next book, “Listen! the Wind,” told the story of their 1933 survey flight to Europe. Her books, “quite apart from their value as aeronautical history, are small works of art,” Clifton Fadiman wrote in the New Yorker in 1938.

By this time, however, America’s disenchantment with its top aviator had begun. Charles Lindbergh had made favorable statements about German air power and received a medal from the German government. In late 1939, he gave his first speech against American involvement in the war. Despite rising attacks on their patriotism and calls for Charles to return the Nazi medal, the Lindberghs even considered moving to Berlin, but chose Paris instead.

The majority of Americans had long felt resentment toward Germany and castigated Lindbergh for his apparent coziness with the leaders of the Third Reich. In their eyes, the living legend had become the anti-patriot, the most prominent burr in the side of the Roosevelt administration. Harold Ickes, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s secretary of the Interior, branded him the “No. 1 Nazi fellow traveler.” After a speech before a huge rally in Des Moines organized by the isolationist America First Committee, Charles Lindbergh accused “the Jewish race” of clamoring for war and became a symbol of anti-Semitism at home.

The world’s most illustrious aviator was denied a commission in the Army Air Corps after Pearl Harbor was attacked. His name was booed during movie theater newsreels, and TWA stopped calling itself “the Lindbergh line.”

While Charles favored military action if it became necessary, Anne Lindbergh was a pacifist. But she shared his opinion that the war would diminish the United States’ power and destroy most of Western civilization. Her book, “The Wave of the Future,” was a muddled attempt to explain her position.

It condemned Nazi tyranny, but it also seemed to portray Nazism as unstoppable, the “wave of the future,” and argued the futility of American involvement in the European conflict. To her critics, who were legion, the 41-page essay was a pro-Nazi polemic.

The book was a bestseller and received many prominent reviews, most of them hugely negative. Overnight, Lindbergh biographer Berg noted, “The Wave of the Future” became the book people loved to hate. “Surpassed in modern literary history perhaps only by ‘Mein Kampf,’ ” Berg wrote, “it was one of the most despised books of its day.”

Blaming her naivete, Lindbergh later recanted much of the book.

One critic, E.B. White, wrote in the New Yorker that Lindbergh’s chief crime was not her political views but poor writing. Lindbergh eventually agreed. Although she published a novel, “The Steep Ascent,” in 1944, it had been written before “Wave of the Future.” She was so crushed by the denunciations that she would let 15 years pass before she dared to write again.

Meditations on Womanhood

Trying to address the balancing act of wife, mother and writer, she began to write a series of essays, each one a meditation on a seashell that symbolized an aspect of women’s struggle for meaning. The result was her 1955 book,”Gift From the Sea,” in which Lindbergh urged women to occasionally put aside their traditional obligations and seek spiritual nourishment. That was an astonishing concept in mid-1950s America.

Expressing exasperation with the conflicting pressures women face daily, she wrote: “This is not the life of simplicity but the life of multiplicity that the wise men warn us of. It leads not to unification but to fragmentation. It does not bring grace; it destroys the soul. And this is not only true of my life, I am forced to conclude; it is the life of millions of women in America.”

This was eight years before Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique,” the 1963 manifesto that launched the contemporary women’s movement.

“Gift From the Sea” dominated the bestseller list for a year, selling a phenomenal 600,000 copies in hardback and 2 million in paperback. It catapulted Lindbergh’s small publishing house, Pantheon, from obscurity to international renown. Still in print 45 years later and popular on spiritual bestseller lists, it remains her most enduring and successful work. More important, it restored her to the ranks of the country’s most beloved authors.

In 1972, Lindbergh began to publish her diaries and letters. The first volume, “Bring Me a Unicorn,” covered the years 1922 to 1928. It was followed over the next eight years by “Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead: Diaries and Letters, 1929-1932,” “Locked Rooms and Open Doors: Diaries and Letters, 1933-1935,” “The Flower and the Nettle: Diaries and Letters, 1936-1939” and “War Within and Without: Diaries and Letters, 1939-1944.”

She helped her husband in the writing of his autobiographical “The Spirit of St. Louis,” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1954. She also wrote many poems, articles and reviews, but never her autobiography, hoping to have the last word through extensive publication of her personal papers.

She was, however, the subject of two full-scale biographies in the 1990s, Dorothy Herrmann’s “Anne Morrow Lindbergh: A Gift for Life” and Susan Hartog’s “Anne Morrow Lindbergh: A Life.”

Series of Strokes

After her husband’s death from lymphatic cancer in 1974, Lindbergh divided her time between a chalet in Vevey, Switzerland, and the family home in Darien, Conn., where the five Lindbergh children were raised. After the death of her eldest daughter, Anne, of cancer in 1993, she moved to Vermont to be close to her other children.

In 1991 she suffered the first in a series of strokes that were not only physically debilitating but also brought on dementia.

Although she had plans for other books after her husband’s death, she stopped publishing in 1980 with the final volume of diaries and letters. “Whether consciously or unconsciously,” Reeve Lindbergh wrote, “she was hampered by the feeling that she couldn’t complete a book without him.”

The one role she would not relinquish was guardian of Charles Lindbergh’s legacy.

In one of her last interviews in 1980, Lindbergh told CBS’ Morley Safer about her dismay at her husband’s anti-Jewish remarks four decades earlier. “It was terribly stupid. . . . I was horrified, horrified,” she said. Yet, “I couldn’t bear it that people saw someone that I didn’t see, that I didn’t think was there.”

His fame had brought them misery. But it also had led to their union, a fact she embraced during an interview a few years after his death.

“I am grateful,” she said then, “that fame gave us the chance to meet and to fall in love.”

There were no plans for a public memorial service. The family has requested that cards and memorials be sent to the Charles A. and Anne Morrow Lindbergh Foundation at 2150 3rd Ave. North, Suite 310, Anoka, Minn., 55303-2200.