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Last year when that peace was broken, Lindbergh again blamed the U. S. press. After the Munich agreement, a radical mimeograph published in London the charge that a semiofficial report made by Lindbergh at a banquet of the Cliveden Set influenced Britain's decision to assent to the CzechoSlovak grab. The story got more attention in the U. S. than in Europe. Liberals denounced him.
Actually, Lindbergh, who has seen many a Russian military airplane, is convinced that their performance is inferior, their construction too involved for mass production. He has also had a good look at the German Air Force, and is convinced that Germany has the air supremacy in Europe, will hold it for some years to come. He expressed his opinions privately to friends, including Lord and Lady Astor, and some in the U. S. (like Dr. Joseph Sweetman Ames of NACA), But there was never any banquet of the Cliveden Set, and Lindbergh does not think it likely that British foreign policy was shaped by one man's casual conversation.
A second storm blew up in the U. S. press when Lindbergh went to Germany after the Munich agreement and was decorated by Field Marshal Hermann Göring with the Order of the German Eagle. Friends tried to explain that the decoration was forced on him and he could not gracefully refuse. But that was not the case. He knew that he was to receive some honor, requested that there be no ceremony. At a dinner party one evening, Marshal Göring, the last guest to arrive, gave Lindbergh the medal in a case, saying simply, "By order of the Führer I give 'you this." Lindbergh frankly says he was as glad to get it as the decorations of other nations. Ideologies in international politics are not his meat.
The newest chapter in Lindbergh's history began this April when he returned to the U. S., and went on two weeks' active duty with the Air Corps to explore the U. S. aeronautical research facilities. He is still working daily in Washington, without pay, as an Air Corps technical adviser. As luck would have it his ship docked on the night of the newspaper photographers' annual ball and the ball was at a standstill while cameramen fumed on the dock for an hour and a half until Lindbergh, his face frozen in the glum glower into which it falls when he sees a news camera, showed himself. The photographers were naturally resentful, but Lindbergh did not know about the ball, did not know the ship had docked because he was talking to his friend, Dr. Carrel.
There have been two recent incidents of another kind:
>In St. Louis Lindbergh found himself facing a news cameraman he knew and liked—Edward J. Burkhardt of the Post-Dispatch, who is a captain in Lindbergh's old National Guard. The result: the old, smiling, agreeable Lindbergh (see cover).
> When Mrs. Lindbergh returned last month to the U. S. on the Champlain, during the voyage an International News photographer aboard, unobserved, took pictures of Jon and Land Lindbergh (born in England). He took to his office a series of shots worth $5,000 to any big U. S. newspaper. Because the Hearst press had been most criticized for its part in harrying Lindbergh out of the country, the pictures were suppressed. Clients were told they would be released only if Lindbergh okayed them for publication.