You ask “cynical”? Yes, Hitler, for example is a sincere cynic, and so is Lindbergh. His policy shamelessly declares we should withdraw aid from Britain, coolly watch her fall, and then as quickly as possible trade with Hitler and make what we can out of the defeat of civilization. Lindbergh genuinely sees nothing to be ashamed of in advocating such a policy, and that makes him deserve the title “sincere.” It is nevertheless as cynical as any Nazi could invent. We could stomach that if the cynicism were realistic. It is not. This would-be smart policy has no more chance to succeed than the would-be Machiavellian policy of Mussolini, who has given the world its least appetizing sight of the war: the avowed brute too feeble to be brutal.
Lindbergh’s personality is important to us all, since he has assumed office as a member of what they would call in England “the disloyal opposition,” and so it is not too minor a point to note that of all the qualities he was ever credited with, the quality of generosity is lacking. Witness his experience with France and England. To France and the French people he owed the beginning of the ovation which was to make his fame and fortune, and he acknowledged his debt this way in We: “The whole-hearted welcome to me—an American—touched me beyond any point that words can express. I left France with a debt of gratitude which, though I cannot repay it, I shall always remember.” That was the old Lindbergh, or rather the young one, still unspoiled.
Thirteen years later, when France stood more in need of a friend than ever in her long and troubled history; when a mere gesture of American solidarity with her cause might have put heart in her bewildered troops and kept the enemy at bay; when the word of a Lindbergh could have been effective in the awakening of American public opinion to our obligation not to let France fall, for our own sake as well as for hers; Lindbergh spoke. He spoke against America’s giving France any aid whatever. It was May 20, 1940 and the Germans stood on the Somme. Lindbergh’s broadcast summarized everything he has had to say since: “Years ago we decided to stay out of foreign wars. We based our military policy on that decision. We must not waver now that the crisis is at hand. There is no longer time for us to enter this war successfully.”
I was with the French at that time and can testify that Lindbergh’s words struck France like a blow between the eyes. The famous Lafayette Escadrille announced that it had deprived Lindbergh of his honorary membership. Lindbergh’s response to England was identical. He took his child to England after he had suffered his great family tragedy in America, and in England he received everything he desired: quiet hospitality and all the privacy he has said he wanted. But when England stood with her back to the wall, and once again the American attitude to the war became decisive; and once again the voice of a Lindbergh could have worked powerfully to shake our people into the tardy realization that this time would be the last time and that if we did not awaken now we might never be given the chance again; when our people needed to realize that the fate of America was inextricably bound up with the fate of Britain, and that if Britain fell our hopes would all become forlorn; then Lindbergh spoke.
Now, he declared, we should cease to aid Britain in any manner, because Britain was beaten, Germany had won, and we had better make the best terms we could with the conqueror. With the total lack of shame which characterizes Hitler’s and Lindbergh’s political philosophy he declaimed in the same speech of June 16, 1940 that, “Fortunately, the wide wall of the Atlantic stands between us and the shooting that is going on.” It is, of course, the strong wall of the British Navy that stands between us and the shooting that is going on, but Lindbergh has never admitted that the British Navy plays any role in keeping the Germans from crossing the Atlantic; his implication is that the water of the Atlantic constitutes the sole hindrance to German passage.
This incomprehension sometimes reaches a degree which is puzzling to an observer convinced that “at any rate Lindbergh is sincere.” Some obviously honest Americans argue that we can successfully hold aloof, but can any American really believe as Lindbergh said in his speech at the opening of the war, September 16, 1939: “These wars in Europe are not wars in which civilization is defending herself against some Asiatic intruder. There is no Genghis Khan or Xerxes marching against our Western nations. This is not a question of banding together to defend the white race against foreign invasion. This is simply one more of those age-old struggles within our family of nations.”
If Lindbergh believes this, he has failed utterly to understand what Hitlerism is, or if he understands it, then he must approve of it; and we surmised some months later with the publication of Anne Lindbergh’s The Wave of the Future, that he was indeed a convert. Surely it is not the color of Hitler’s skin and of his Nazi warriors that make the difference, nor their geographic home. Lindbergh implies that if they were yellow-skinned and came from Tibet, he would understand and perhaps not oppose our fighting them, but being white and living in Central Europe they cannot, he implies, be enemies of civilization. This and other examples of Lindbergh’s apparent naïveté, or as Raymond Clapper put it once, his childishness, are not the result of an obtuse mind, but the consequence of his having constantly to hide one element, the most important element in his political attitude, and that is his secret approval of the totalitarian idea and of the German Nazis’ right to conquer.
This is too unpopular an idea to admit publicly now, and the concealment of it leads to the most glaring discrepancies in his arguments. Only a person who approved of Hitler could deny that he is waging a war against civilization. Only Lindbergh can tell how far he approves of Hitler’s right to conquer. We can observe that in other countries, as France, men who talked before the defeat as Lindbergh does now, were elevated to power in Hitler’s puppet government.
I was in England when Lindbergh delivered the first of his broadcasts calling it “just another war,” and putting both belligerents on the same level. The British were hurt. They felt that a man whom they had considered a friend had let them down. They did not know that he had never been a friend, but beneath a serene, impenetrable demeanor had harbored an antipathy for England which has contributed to making him “the way he is.”
This antipathy he has more than once documented, as in the Collier’s article when he wrote the astounding sentence: “We in America should not be discussing whether we will enter the war that England declared in Europe.” Let those who set such store by the quality of sincerity ask themselves if anyone on earth, including a German, could sincerely define the present war as one “that England declared in Europe.”