Charles Lindbergh was a hero for his feats of aviation but ultimately lost that goodwill once he started pushing bigoted conspiracies to keep America from fighting Hitler.
Lindbergh would spend the years leading up to World War II actively campaigning to “protect the white race” and for the U.S. to maintain strict neutrality toward Nazi Germany. He even flew to Germany to receive a medal in person from Hermann Göring, the infamous commander of Nazi Germany’s Luftwaffe, on behalf of Adolph Hitler himself.
According to the unpublished galleys of American historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., some Republicans even urged Lindbergh to run for President against Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940 to keep America out of the war.
This dark night for the American soul became the subject of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel, The Plot Against America. Now an HBO series of the same name, the story explores an alternate future where Lindbergh does challenge Roosevelt and wins Presidency — with disastrous consequences.
Trauma makes people do strange things. Given what his family went through with kidnapping and murder, it’s entirely possible that he started on that road thanks to a sincere desire to never see another person’s child get killed. What emerged from there may easily have started as blaming the people in his life that he saw either trying to push young men to go and die, or that he somehow blamed for the murder of his child. I can’t bring myself to hate the man - his turn from glory to agony was so abrupt that any clear voice in the midst of madness and pain probably seemed like something worth holding onto. It’s amazing what people believe when they’re grieving or traumatized.
To me, that’s when his death started. The Nazi sympathizer was just a dead man walking, a bereft father of a kidnapped and murdered baby, not the national hero who inspired a dance craze with his aeronautic feat.
Ehhh… I’ll go with “if that’s what happened”.
And which alternative do you support?
None in particular, but there is enough known to be able to put it in question relative to the alternatives.
I will say that quite a bit of the case reminds me of current day parents who kill their kids, intentionally or not. Whether they thought it would blow over since kidnapping for ransom was more common then, or attention, whatever, I have no idea.
Given the only physical evidence tying to the crime had no fingerprints on it, or anything else to tie to the crime itself, combined with the last…
I can only think “if thats what happened”.