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“I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.”- Thomas Jefferson
Photo: Celia Maria de Souza Murphy
History
Good Morning, Mr. President, Whoever You Are
It’s Presidents’ Day again (February 16) and Americans honor Samuel Simpson, Tom Wilson, Leslie King Jr., and William Blythe III, among others.
Presidents’ Day was invented by Congress in 1971 to make one holiday out of two, Lincoln’s Birthday and Washington’s Birthday. (They had to make room for Martin Luther King Day in January; even holidays are politics.)
A few good men (and a few not so good)
The problem with Presidents’ Day is that it seems to honor all U.S. presidents, not just Lincoln and Washington. It’s a holiday which, unintentionally, celebrates roughnecks, philanderers, bankrupts, and one bona fide secessionist.
If unwarranted universality is the problem with Presidents’ Day, mediocrity is the flaw when it comes to many of America’s chief executives.
The fact is the American political system often fails to promote the most prominent public figures of the day to the White House.
In past times, American presidents were chosen with little of the press and political vetting which occurs now. Some exceedingly bad habits slipped through (as they still do, even with modern investigative reporting).
Historians and, in some regions of the country even common citizens, still honor the Great Triumvirate of Webster, Calhoun and Clay, senators who dominated public life from the 1830s to the 1850s, far more than the men who won the presidency during the same period, men such as Harrison, Polk and Taylor. Twentieth Century reformers Robert LaFollet and George Norris incarnated the spirit of reform. Their White House contemporaries, such as William Howard Taft and Calvin Coolige, seem pallid by comparison.
One president, Ulysses S. Grant, was a downright ner-do-well. A binge drinker and chronic bankrupt, in the 1850s Grant moved his family from county to county and even state to state avoiding creditors. He sometimes used an alias, including Samuel Simpson, in business dealings. His career was saved by the Civil War.
What’s in a Name? Nothing Much
A few of our presidents changed their names legally. As a Princeton undergraduate in the 1870s, Tom Wilson thought his first name too common. So he dropped it, adopting his middle name of Woodrow.
Leslie King Jr. was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1913 but King Sr. abandoned his family soon after. Four years later, the former Mrs. King, after moving in with her parents in Grand Rapids, Michigan, remarried, wedding one Gerald Ford, a paint store salesman. The toddler from her first marriage was re-named Gerald Ford Jr. Jerry was shielded from the truth until high school. One sunny day a man walked into the store where the youngster was working and said, “I’m your father!” Jerry Ford was flabbergasted but his parents confirmed the story.
Another recent president was born William Blythe III in 1946 three months after his father’s death in an automobile accident. When young Blythe’s mother remarried years later, Bill, than 15, changed his last name to that of his stepfather, Clinton.
A number of our presidents were philanderers, some famously so. At least three, Warren G. Harding, John F. Kennedy and Clinton, were flagrant womanizers even during their White House years. It may have also been true of Lyndon Johnson.
Rumors of infidelity dogged James A. Garfield early in his married life and he freely admitted to a certain “moral weakness,” but his marriage to Lucrecia Rudolf, a fellow educator, strengthened into an enduring bond during his later political career.
Wilson was rumored to have maintained a long-running relationship with a divorcée named Mary Ellen Peck, whom he accompanied on ostensibly solo vacations in Bermuda.
Jefferson was famous for keeping a black slave mistress, Sally Hemmings, with whom he may have had a number of illegitimate children.
During the 1884 campaign, Democrat Grover Cleveland was accused of having fathered an illegitimate child. He admitted it and went on to win the election anyway.
Our current chief executive has been accused of various modes of sexual misconduct by 27 women; the president has vehemently denied all of the allegations.
One president, James Buchanan, may have been gay. A life-long bachelor, Buchanan lived with bachelor roommate William King for a decade in Washington. Friends of the pair referred to King as Buchanan’s “wife.” Other nicknames, from less friendly sources, included Aunt Fancy for Buchanan and Miss Nancy for King. Historians are divided on the question of Buchanan’s sexual orientation, with some suggesting he may, in fact, have been asexual. Buchanan himself, in a letter written late in life, admitted to what he called “a lack of ardent or romantic affection.”
At least one president may have been manic-depressive. And he was the greatest—Abraham Lincoln. A fellow Illinois circuit lawyer, Ward Hill Lamon, described how his friend would sometimes awaken in the middle of the night at a crowded boarding house “and sit before the fire, wrapped in gloom, unable to answer when addressed by name.”
Even as president, Lincoln would roam the White House on sleepless nights or sit before a window in speechless contemplation. He would experience bizarre, unsettling dreams he insisted on recounting during Cabinet meetings.
A watchman at Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington once described the president emerging “ghost-like” from the tomb of his son William. Lincoln had spent an entire night in lonely, speechless mourning beside the youth’s coffin.
The most studied and written about president, modern scholars have concluded that Lincoln suffered, at times, from clinical depression and may, as a young man, have experienced cycles of what would be described today as manic depression or bipolar disorder. Later in life, Lincoln learned to master his moods. However, even during his presidential years, Lincoln’s secretaries, Nicolay and Hay, noticed what they called two distinct “humors;” in an expansion mood, Lincoln was “The Tycoon,” when more reflective “The Ancient.”
One president became a Confederate rebel. John Tyler, chief executive from 1841 to 1845, attempted to mediate a solution to the secession crisis in 1861. His efforts failing, he repudiated the Constitution, was elected to the Confederate Congress representing his native state of Virginia but died before taking his seat in Richmond.
Oddities and outrages
Other presidents have had checkered or unusual lives. Andrew Johnson had no formal education of any kind and was illiterate as a youth. James Madison was celibate until his early 40s. James K. Polk may have been impotent because of a rare urinary condition and botched surgery to correct it.
Andrew Jackson killed one man in a duel and injured several others before reaching the presidency in 1829. He was injured himself in a brawl with Thomas Hart Benton in 1813 but they still became steadfast political allies years later when Jackson was president and Benton a senator from Missouri. Jackson carried two bullets in his body from dueling and may have taken part in an many as 100 such face-offs during his long life.
Although 65 when he ran successfully for president in 1848, Zachary Taylor had never voted in his life.
Both Roosevelts suffered disabilities; FDR struggled with polio from age 39 until his death at 63; Teddy Roosevelt, in his last years, was blind in one eye and deaf in one ear.
Martin Van Buren was the only president not to speak English as a first language; during the first years of his life in the upstate New York village of Kinderhook, his family and neighbors spoke primarily Dutch.
Still, the Great Republic, as Winston Churchill called it, survived and prospered. Probably, by and large, its presidents have represented, if not the best in American society, then something like an average of the elite, all of which serves to remind us of the importance of John Adams’ dictum that we should aspire to become “a government of laws, not of men.”
-Thomas Murphy, 2026
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History
Searching for Lindbergh: Why it’s so hard to find monuments to the aviation hero
On May 21, 1927 Charles Lindbergh became the most famous, and admired, man in the world.
Today, you can hardly find a trace of him.
Why?
To know the answer, it helps to understand the spirit of Lindbergh’s times, which share characteristics, and even some slogans, with our own, the slippery creature known as public opinion, and the stark ambiguities of Lindbergh’s tortured, often bizarre biography.
Here was a man ready made for both Homer and Freud.
The Bashful Hero
When Lindbergh landed at Le Bourget Airport near Paris on May 21, 1927, after more than 33 hours in the air fighting fear, fatigue, and hallucinations, 150,000 people rushed the runway. He was barely able to land without plowing into the crowds.
In the succeeding weeks, he was offered every honor in the gift of man. The New York World called his flight, the first solo crossing of the Atlantic by air, “the greatest feat by a solitary man in the records of the human race.” Later, H.L. Mencken, the conscience and curmudgeon of the age and given to pointed exaggeration, said Lindbergh was “the biggest story since the Resurrection.”
There was much to recommend Lindbergh for the role of savior. He was six feet, five inches tall, ruggedly handsome with an endearing cleft to the chin, unobjectionably diplomatic and utterly devoid of earthly vanity. He was only 25 years old. Within months, streets, bridges, and babies around the world bore his name. Hundreds of marriage proposals poured in. In America, newspapers, the nascent aviation industry and the two major political parties couldn’t wait to get their hands on him. In 1929, Lindbergh merged his fortunes with one of the country’s most prominent families when he wed Anne Morrow, whose father, Dwight Morrow, was diplomat, adviser to presidents and senior partner in J.P. Morgan and Company.
He was the man of the hour; nearly a hundred years later, Lindbergh’s figure has been all but erased.
If you drive out Meadowbrook State Parkway on Long Island to East Garden City, New York you’ll come to a place called Roosevelt Field; it’s a flat, grey landscape of shopping malls and industrial parks. In the 1920s, Roosevelt Field was an airstrip. It was named after Quentin Roosevelt, President Theodore Roosevelt’s youngest son killed at age 20 while serving in the U.S. Army’s 95th Aero Squadron over France during World War I. As authentic a hero as Lindbergh, Roosevelt was felled by two machinegun bullets to the forehead during a dogfight with German fighter pilots. The Germans found young Roosevelt’s body near the wreckage of his French-built Nieuport 28 aircraft. They buried him with full military honors, calling him in a dispatch “a gallant antagonist.” It was from Roosevelt Field that Lindbergh took off for France on the wet morning of May 20, 1927. Newsreel cameras and hundreds of well-wishers accompanied the feat.
Today, if you search hard enough, you’ll find a stark, pink-stone slab behind a parking garage near one of the malls marking “the second bump” of Lindbergh’s takeoff as The Spirit of St. Louis struggled to achieve lift against the weight of nearly 3,000 pounds of fuel. The slab shows a relief of the plane against a map of the North Atlantic but not the slightest glimpse of the pilot.
On the other side of the Atlantic, at Le Bourget, Lindbergh’s arrival on May 21 is commemorated by a statue…of a soaring, bare-breasted woman symbolizing “the aspirations and daring of flight.” (The monument includes the names of two others, French aviators Charles Nungessser and François Coli, who disappeared while trying to match Lindbergh’s feat.)
Lindbergh is apparently as inscrutable to artists as he was to biographers.
There are a few other markers scattered around the globe—a comic statue in Georgia, a puzzling one in San Diego, a modest museum in Lindbergh’s hometown of Little Falls, Minnesota, The Spirit of St. Louis, Lindbergh´s single-engine plane, dangling from the rafters of the Air and Space Museum in Washington and, at the remote Palapala Ho’omau church on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands, the hero´s gravesite. A small corner of the Hunterdon County Courthouse in Flemington, New Jersey preserves macabre artifacts from the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindberghs’ two-year-old son, Charles Junior. At the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport one passenger wing is named for Lindbergh, the other for former Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey. Odd company.
And yet Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh lived in homes in New Jersey, Connecticut and Great Britain, among other places. Almost nothing is left at any of those sites to mark their presence. The Hopewell, New Jersey mansion, called Highfields, where the Lindberghs settled, and from which their son was kidnapped in 1932, was long ago converted to a juvenile detention and recovery center. The Lindbergh name has been stripped from many of the streets, bridges and parks named for him in the euphoric 1920s.
Why?
The Least Public of Public Men
One of the contradictions of Charles Lindbergh´s life is that a man so taciturn should destroy himself with words.
Through much of the 1930s, Lindbergh was seen as remote, heroic, non-political and, after the 1932 murder of his son, tragic. He was the Lone Eagle. Starting in 1936, the Eagle screeched.
In England, living in the green hills of Kent, the Lindberghs came under the spell of their neighbor, a prominent medical doctor and researcher named Alexis Carrel. Carrel was carrier of a deadly intellectual disease—racism. The strain he harbored was among the most virulent circulating at the time; and it was highly contagious in a world where immunity had been compromised by severe economic depression. Carrel, prefiguring the Holocaust by just a few years, advocated “the elimination of defective individuals with the right kind of gas.” He was a purveyor of the credo of eugenics, the “scientific” engineering of a superior strain of humankind through breeding. “Breeding” favored the white race and, as Lindbergh would say in a 1939 radio address, a policy of pushing back against “a pressing sea of yellow, black and brown.” As late as 1941, Lindbergh, in another broadcast, decried “the infiltration of inferior blood” into Europe and America.
The Lone Eagle is, in the curious way history has of repeating itself, a man of our times as much as his own. In 1940, he became the chief spokesman for a movement called…America First!
From 1936 to 1941, Lindbergh was also increasingly anti-Semitic. He wrote: “A few Jews add strength and character to a country. Too many create chaos. And we are getting too many.”
Anne Lindbergh didn’t help matters with her 1940 book The Wave of the Future. The “wave” Anne Lindbergh foresaw was totalitarianism, and Hitler, whom she called “a great man” and “a visionary,” was its harbinger and prophet.
The Lindberghs seemed especially enamored of Hitler’s Germany. They made frequent visits, met with Hitler and Hermann Goering, the drug-abusing, vainglorious Luftwaffe chief; Lindbergh received an embarrassing, and perhaps unwanted, medal from Goering at a dinner party; in 1938, Charles and Anne considered taking up residence in Wannsee, a Berlin suburb which, only four years later, would host the infamous conference decreeing and detailing “the final solution.” Back in the U.S., Lindbergh, in a series of speeches, advocated a Treaty of Non-Aggression with Germany modeled after the Hitler-Stalin Pact.
All of that changed in a few hours on December 7, 1941.
Isolationism was buried as a political creed that day and its spokesmen largely ostracized. Among those destroyed by their own words was Joseph Kennedy, the former U.S. ambassador to Britain. In a November 1940 interview with the Boston Globe that would come back to haunt him but which he never repudiated, Kennedy said “democracy is finished in England.” He transferred his ambition to be the first Catholic president to his sons.
Among others taken down by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was Montana Senator Burton K. Wheeler, a leading isolationist. In a case of “famous last words,” Wheeler told an interviewer in October 1941 that “I can’t conceive of Japan being crazy enough to want to go to war with us.” He was defeated for re-election.
Others scrambled to save their political skins, becoming zealous converts. Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg was not only an avid war supporter but turned into a full-fledged internationalist. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1947, he helped push through enabling legislation for the Marshall Plan. His 1948 Vandenberg Resolution paved the way for creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In a lesson for our time, it was Vandenberg, a Senate Republican cooperating with a Democratic State Department, who said, “Politics stops at the water’s edge.”
Charles Lindbergh’s Third Act
Despite F. Scott FitzGerald’s dictum, there are not only second acts in American life but also, sometimes, third acts and even the possibility of a peaceful denouement.
Lindbergh’s third act was tragicomedy.
After Pearl Harbor, efforts to rehabilitate his public image largely failed. President Roosevelt shrewdly declined to put Lindbergh, only 39 at the time, into uniform. Lindbergh, instead, became a test pilot for aircraft manufacturers and actually saw combat in the Pacific but as an anonymous civilian advisor.
He never, after the war, renounced any of his previous racist, anti-Semitic or isolationist positions. Anne Lindbergh, on the other hand, would admit in the 1970s that she should never have written The Wave of the Future. “I didn’t have the right to write it,” she said. “I didn’t know enough.” But Charles and Anne by then had become estranged.
The most bizarre twist in the Lone Eagle’s story was Lindbergh’s return to Germany. In the 1950s, he traveled extensively in Europe on fact-finding missions for the U.S. government and as a highly paid airline representative. In 1957, he began an affair with a disabled Munich milliner named Brigitte Hershaimer, with whom he had three children. Later, he developed a relationship with Hershaimer’s sister, an artist, fathering two more children. In between his Munich affairs, Lindbergh found time to seduce his secretary and travel companion at a Rome apartment he rented, fathering two more children.
Lindbergh may have been prolific at fathering, with a total of 11 children including his legitimate offspring with Anne Morrow, but he was negligent when it came to parenting. He and Anne took two long air tours together in the 1930s, one to the Far East and another to Europe and South America, leaving their small children behind in the care of servants. In later years, Lindbergh portrayed himself as an American writer named Careu Kent, a friend of the Hershaimer family, when visiting his German children for short spells in Bavaria once or twice a year. They did not discover he was their father until long after his death.
The Lindbergh denouement was less fraught.
In the 1960s, before it became fashionable, Lindbergh took up the cause of environmentalism. He is still remembered by some for his work in protecting endangered species and the lush natural enclave of Maui where he lived out his last years. But he didn’t have much time. Charles Lindbergh died of cancer in 1974 at age 72. Many were taken by surprise. They didn’t know he was still alive.
Then, as now, we see him only in black and white, a figure from the distant past, forever young, courageous, and naïve.
-Thomas Murphy, 2025
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