According to Lindy

Charles A. Lindbergh has always been a fascinating blend of contradictions: mystic and mechanic, first hero of the machine age, world-traveling anchorite. As the aviation age that he inaugurated and helped to build fills the skies with metal and gases, he has become a passionate environmentalist, speaking round the world to promote conservation and speaking privately against production of the supersonic transport that he originally encouraged.

It is only as a historian that Lindbergh displays a persistent and bewildering consistency. In the late '30s he argued constantly against U.S. involvement in the war against Hitler, a position that provoked charges of isolationism and antiSemitism. Now he has published The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; $12.95), 1,000 pages of the diary he kept from 1937 to 1945. In a letter quoted in the introduction, Lindbergh defends his original judgment that the U.S. should have stayed out of the war.

More astonishingly, he argues that the U.S. actually lost World War II. "We won the war in a military sense." he reasons, "but in a broader sense it seems to me we lost it, for our Western civilization is less respected and secure than it was before. In order to defeat Germany and Japan, we supported the still greater menaces of Russia and China, which now confront us in a nuclear-weapon era. Much of our Western culture was destroyed." Then, in a sentence that falls somewhere between Nietzsche and incoherence, he declares: "We lost the genetic heredity formed through aeons in many million lives."

Lindbergh does not disclose what he thinks the future of Western culture might have been if the U.S. had not entered the war to destroy Nazi Germany, though it seems safe to assume that Germany would eventually have developed nuclear weapons and completed its annihilation of the Jewish people and other "inferior" races. If Lindbergh's historical judgments were not so baffling, they might be very ugly.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.