Charles Lindbergh

His father sat in Congress for Minnesota from 1907 to 1917 and was one of the few members who fought American entry into the First World War. The parents separated when the boy was seven. He grew up between Little Falls and Washington and enrolled at the University of Wisconsin to read mechanical engineering having never been close enough to an airplane to touch one. He quit in February 1922 for a flying school in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he was never allowed to solo because he could not post the damage bond. So he spent that summer wing walking and parachuting over the plains states. In May 1923 he bought a war-surplus Jenny for 500 dollars, took half an hour of instruction, and flew it alone.

He was flying the mail between St. Louis and Chicago when he went after the Orteig Prize. He left Roosevelt Field on the morning of May 20, 1927, in a single-engine monoplane with no radio and no forward window, navigated 33 and a half hours by dead reckoning because he was not good at stars and thought radio gear too heavy, hallucinated, fell asleep and woke seconds later, and made the Irish coast under three miles off his plotted line. A crowd of 150,000 pulled him out of the cockpit at Le Bourget and carried him over their heads for half an hour. Coolidge gave him the Medal of Honor. Afterward he laid out routes for the new airlines and worked with the surgeon Alexis Carrel on a perfusion pump that kept organs alive outside the body.

On the night of March 1, 1932, someone took his 20-month-old son out of a crib at the house in East Amwell, New Jersey. A ransom of 50,000 dollars was paid on April 2. The child's body was found in nearby woods on May 12. The coverage drove the family to England in December 1935. What Lindbergh did with the exile did more damage than the exile did to him. He toured German aviation as an honored guest, took a decoration from Hermann Göring in October 1938, and came home to lead the America First Committee. At Des Moines on September 11, 1941, he named the British, the Roosevelt administration and the Jews as the three groups pushing the country into war. Roosevelt called him a defeatist and an appeaser. He resigned his commission on April 28.

He flew 50 combat missions in the Pacific in 1944 as a civilian, spent his last decades on conservation, and died of lymphoma on Maui on August 26, 1974, buried in a churchyard he had helped clear. Then the record moved again. Ten days before his death he wrote to three women in Europe asking them to keep quiet after he was gone. From 1957 he had fathered seven children by them under a false name, and DNA tests confirmed three of them in 2003. The politics are still argued: his biographer A. Scott Berg reads him as stubborn and outmaneuvered, the researcher Max Wallace as a genuine Nazi sympathizer. Philip Roth made him a fascist president in 2004.

Charles Lindbergh's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Spirit of St. Louis other
  The Ryan monoplane he specified, with a fuel tank where the windscreen should have been 1927
• WE book
  His own account of the flight, written at 25 1927
• Perfusion pump invention
  Built with Alexis Carrel to keep organs alive outside the body 1935
• The Culture of Organs book
  Written with Carrel 1938
• The Spirit of St. Louis book
  The second account, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography 1953
• The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh book
  His own diaries of the years that cost him most 1970

• February 1922 aged 19 Quits engineering school for a flying school in Lincoln, Nebraska He could not afford the damage bond, so he never soloed there.
• May 1923 aged 21 Buys a surplus Jenny at Americus, Georgia, and flies alone for the first time Half an hour of dual instruction after six months out of the air.
• March 19, 1924 aged 22 Reports to Brooks Field for a year of Army flight training
• October 1925 aged 23 Hired as chief pilot on the St. Louis to Chicago air mail route
• May 21, 1927 aged 25 Lands at Le Bourget after 33 and a half hours in the air A crowd of 150,000 pulled him from the cockpit and carried him for half an hour.
• March 1, 1932 aged 30 His 20-month-old son is taken from his crib in East Amwell, New Jersey The body was found in nearby woods on May 12. Richard Hauptmann was executed for it in 1936, and his guilt is still contested.
• October 1938 aged 36 Accepts the Order of the German Eagle from Hermann Göring in Berlin The American embassy raised no objection at the time.
• September 11, 1941 aged 39 Names the British, the Roosevelt administration and the Jews at Des Moines He had resigned his Army Air Corps commission on April 28 after Roosevelt called him a defeatist.
• May 21, 1944 aged 42 Flies his first combat mission, as a civilian, near Rabaul He flew 50 in six months and shot down a Japanese plane on July 28.

• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. rebuked by
• Henry Ford 1863–1947
  Industrialist who revolutionized manufacturing with the assembly line and made automobiles affordable. friend and fellow isolationist
• Philip Roth 1933–2018
  Novelist whose explorations of Jewish American identity and sexuality earned him a Pulitzer Prize. wrote him as a fascist president
• H.L. Mencken 1880–1956
  Satirist and cultural critic whose biting prose defined American journalism in the early 20th century. called the case the biggest story since the Resurrection
• Amelia Earhart 1897–1937
  Aviation pioneer and the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. crossed the Atlantic alone after him
• Georgia O'Keeffe 1887–1986
  Modernist painter known for her enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes. hosted him at Ghost Ranch