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The Lindberghs bitterly departed for England; Lindbergh thought it too painful and dangerous to be a hero in his own country. While abroad, he began a strange flirtation with Nazi Germany. In a series of visits at the invitation of Hermann Goring, he was dined, toasted, decorated with the Service Cross of the German Eagle and led on carefully planned inspection tours of German aircraft factories. As Goring hoped, Lindbergh came away persuaded that Germany's air superiority was overwhelming.
Early in 1939, Lindbergh returned to the U.S., now as a preacher. Intervention in the European war, he said at the time, was being promoted by something like a conspiracy of "the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt Administration." Relations grew strained with friends and even his in-laws, who favored intervention. His hero's luster dulled. Novelist J.P. Marquand, a friend, explained indulgently, "You've got to remember that all heroes are horses' asses." Lindbergh became the most glamorous evangelist of "America first." Roosevelt compared him to a "copperhead." Lindbergh resigned from the Army Air Corps Reserve, and after Pearl Harbor, F.D.R. refused to take him back. Instead, Lindbergh became a technical consultant for Ford and later for United Aircraft. By 1944, he finagled his way to the Pacific as a consultant and, though a civilian, managed to fly 50 combat missions. On one of them, he shot down a Japanese plane.
Within a decade after the war, Lindbergh's reputation was rehabilitated. Eisenhower reinstated him in the Air Force Reserve and promoted him to brigadier general. He had become a millionaire through his association with, among others, TWA and Pan Am. Lindbergh wandered the earth for Pan Am, trying out its planes, advising on air routes. But his spirit had changed. He felt far closer to nature than to machines. He wanted not so much his old exhilarations of flight as peace for the blue whales and the primitive Tasaday of the Philippines.
Lindbergh was a thorough professional, but he seemed to suggest a wonderful elan, a sense that anything is possible. That deep urge for individual adventure remains. Sometimes it merely involves robust hobbies — banging down white-water canyons in rubber rafts, hang gliding on the thermal currents, roping up the faces of cliffs. But beyond weekend diversion, there remains a vast array of exploration and adventure. It ranges, says Apollo 9 Astronaut Russell ("Rusty") Schweickart, "from the massive NASA kind of exploration to some intermediary type, such as Jacques Cousteau's efforts, where there is no question that the driving force is a single individual, all the way to individual exploration."