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Behind the creamy buff walls of the rambling Munitions Building on Washington's Constitution Avenue he finds life as he likes it. He strides down the long halls and nobody pays attention. Officers in mufti scarcely glance at his tall, lean figure, a trifle stooped; preoccupied clerks with sheaves of papers do not even look up as he goes past. In the Air Corps section on the third floor he waves a hand at flier friends, flashes a white-toothed grin, heads for his office. Hour after hour he sits earnestly in an endless succession of technical conferences, usually breaks the day to lunch with a friend or two at the staid Army & Navy Club. There, too, nobody pays attention to him.
To Colonel Charles Augustus Lindbergh, digging into a job he knows and loves, this is pretty near heaven. But it is not heaven. In heaven there would be no autograph hunters, newspaper reporters and jumping-jack photographers lurking around the corners. There would be no cranks, columnists and newshawks to beset him from a distance. There would be no need for an armed guard around the Morrow estate in Englewood, N. J. where his wife and two sons live. And in heaven he would not have to endure his own unyielding but logical resentment against it all.
For twelve years Charles Lindbergh has been a hero, and twelve years is too much. Today, however, it is almost certain that his relationship with the world is coming to a turning point. There is the possibility that by staying in the U. S.—where he wants to live—he may get the public to stop persecuting him as a hero. Although he is willing to try it, he is grimly dubious of the result. There is no cynicism in his still boyish makeup, but with the logic of a pragmatic mind he has dovetailed his experiences of the past twelve years into a picture as discouraging to him as the sound of a missing engine to a pilot in bad weather. For the fact is that the relation of Charles Lindbergh to the U. S. people is a tragic failure chalked up against the institution of hero worship.
There has been no time when Lindbergh and the public ever fully understood each other. The supreme irony is that if they had understood, there would have been no difficulty. Lindbergh is a kind of man whom Americans instinctively appreciate and like: practical and resourceful, with a mechanical turn of mind, an extraordinary competence in his business, full of animal spirits, empty of all pretension, built around a steel-tough core of reserve and self-respect.
To most of the public Charles Lindbergh did not exist until one May day in 1927 when he was flying the North Atlantic. By the time he set foot again in the U. S. three weeks later the public had not stopped to consider what the son of a radical Congressman from Minnesota, and of a high-school chemistry teacher, was probably like. It had made up its mind that Lindbergh was a sort of automaton of modesty, a creature, boyish and noble, of heroic stature.