Publisher's Weekly Review
It's hard to recall, but going to war used to take a long time. The protracted two-year battle over F.D.R.'s gradual, hard-fought, bitter, and often necessarily devious campaign to prepare the U.S. for war and overcome powerful isolationist sentiment is the subject of this snappy, comprehensive book. At its center are Charles Lindbergh, a tin-eared, pro-German, unappealing, obtuse naif, and F.D.R., wily but hemmed in by political forces. Olson, author of numerous books on the WWII era (including Citizens of London), manages to keep her complex, character-filled story on keel as she describes the forces bearing down on F.D.R.'s administration while the world slipped into war. Familiar and unfamiliar figures-military and civilian, private and public-people the book, and delicious tales abound. Overall, the story is sobering, and it's hard to understand now how the run-up to America's greatest war was so fraught with political and cultural explosives. Olson tells the story unerringly, but the book-however lively-is largely descriptive and short on ideas, argument, and point of view. Agent: Gail Ross, Ross Yoon Literary Agency. (Mar. 26) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Olson's fourth history pivoting around the year 1940 chronicles America's debate about intervention in WWII. To recall its vituperative tone, something long since forgotten by the popular memory of wartime national unity, Olson incorporates the venomous vernacular in which advocates and opponents of intervention assailed each other into her time-line reportage of the controversy as it was affected by war news, the 1940 election, and such war preparations as the enactment of conscription and lend-lease. FDR's brawling secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, took naturally to the idiom of vitriol, labeling isolationists as Nazis and traitors. As for the isolationist organization America First, Olson recounts its campaign to sway public opinion, which was more hindered than helped by the political obtuseness of its celebrity spokesman, Charles Lindbergh. Underscoring the period's passionate animosities, Olson parallels their playing-out in mass media and their sub rosa manifestations in illegal wiretaps and British espionage. Humanizing public events with private strains, on, for example, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Olson delivers a fluid rendition of a tempestuous time.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
In July 1939, Franklin D. Roosevelt met with senators from both political parties at the White House in a final effort to persuade them to amend the Neutrality Act preventing America from aiding other countries. After drinks were poured, Roosevelt and his secretary of state, Cordell Hull, argued that the world was approaching a catastrophic war. The 74-year-old Republican senator William Borah, who had led the fight against Woodrow Wilson and American entry into the League of Nations in 1919, shook his head in disgust. "There is not going to be any war in Europe this year," he said. "All this hysteria is manufactured and artificial." Two months later Hitler invaded Poland, and England and France declared war on Germany. Now that it has become the good war fought by the greatest generation, the ferocity of the disputes over entering World War II has largely been forgotten. But the story of America's anti-interventionist lobby is not only historically fascinating, it also echoes in debates today over whether America should engage abroad or hold back. The historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. - whose memoir, Philip Roth said, inspired his novel "The Plot Against America," about an alternative reality where the isolationists, led by Charles Lindbergh, defeat Roosevelt for the presidency - recalled the dispute as the "most savage political debate in my lifetime," eclipsing those over McCarthyism and Vietnam in its intensity. The debate was largely rooted in disappointment over the outcome of World War I, when Wilson's promised crusade for democracy ended with the punitive Treaty of Versailles. Leading liberal historians like Harry Elmer Barnes and Charles Beard, both of whom had noisily championed Wilson's decision to intervene, now denounced iL The Harvard Crimson declared in an editorial, "We refuse to fight another balance-of-power war." And after Joseph Stalin signed a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany in 1939, American Communists obediently heeded Moscow and denounced Roosevelt as a warmonger. At the same time, senators like Gerald P. Nye, who had headed an investigation into the munitions manufacturers of World War I ("merchants of death"), attacked the idea of bailing out "British plutocrats." What's more, appeasers like Henry Ford, Joseph P. Kennedy and Lindbergh called for cooperation with the poor misunderstood Nazis, while The Wall Street Journal pleaded for "realism" in a June 1940 editorial, arguing that Hitler had "already determined the broad lines of our national life for at least another generation." Just as American Communists hailed the progress represented by the Soviet Union, so appeasers on the right saw Hitler's fascism as the inevitable wave of the future, even as they denounced Roosevelt's New Deal totalitarianism. "Those Angry Days," by Lynne Olson, a former White House correspondent for The Baltimore Sun and the author of several books on England and World War II, and "1940," by Susan Dunn, a professor of humanities at Williams College, powerfully recreate this tenebrous era. Olson captures in spellbinding detail the key figures in the battle between the Roosevelt administration and the isolationist movement. She maintains that the president was too timorous in challenging Congress, but the fervor and depth of isolationist sentiment suggest a more sympathetic verdict. Far from shirking the conflict, Roosevelt played his cards well, seizing upon events to nudge the country toward war and patiently waiting, as he told Winston Churchill, for the big crisis that would settle the debate. Dunn superbly depicts the 1940 election between Roosevelt, who was seeking an unprecedented third term, and his internationalist Republican opponent, Wendell Willkie. It was Willkie, more than any other Republican politician, who ended up challenging the party's embrace of isolationism, but this did not really occur until after the election, when he traveled to Britain with Roosevelt's approval and was promptly denounced as a "Republican Quisling" by Col. Robert McCormick, the rabidly isolationist publisher of The Chicago Tribune. To the consternation of mossback Republicans, Willkie had captured the nomination by riding a groundswell of enthusiasm for an outsider. As a candidate, however, he began to hedge on interventionism. So, Dunn shows, did Roosevelt. OLSON argues persuasively that Roosevelt drew a lesson from his failed Supreme Court packing scheme in 1937 (the opposition to it was spearheaded by Senator Burton K. Wheeler, the Montana Democrat) and his inability to defeat Republicans in the 1938 Congressional elections: he could never get ahead of public opinion. Olson also reports that numerous high-ranking officers in the Army, Navy and Army Air Corps sought to sabotage Roosevelt and that "just before Pearl Harbor, Hap Arnold, the Air Corps chief of staff, was implicated in the leak of one of the administration's most closely guarded military secrets - a contingency plan for all-out war against Germany." In the Senate it was none other than Wheeler who denounced Roosevelt's modest attempts to keep Britain afloat as it single-handedly battled Germany. When Roosevelt backed a bill for conscription in 1940, Wheeler was apoplectic: "If this bill passes, it will slit the throat of the last great democracy still living - it will accord to Hitler his greatest and cheapest victory." Members of right-wing groups like the Congress of American Mothers traveled to Washington dressed in black to scream and spit at recalcitrant legislators and hang an effigy of Senator Claude Pepper wearing a sash inscribed with the words CLAUDE "BENEDICT ARNOLD" PEPPER. Olson shows that the campaign against the isolationists was successfully waged by several prominent citizens' groups, including members of New York's Century Association, who called themselves "Centurions." These establishment worthies, led by the lawyer Grenville Clark, enjoyed close contacts in the Roosevelt administration. Clark persuaded the Republican statesman and interventionist Henry Stimson to join Roosevelt's cabinet in June 1940 as secretary of war. In addition, Frank Knox, a Republican and the publisher of The Chicago Daily News, joined as secretary of the Navy. Both were drummed out of the Republican Party at its national convention. The most nettlesome antagonist Roosevelt faced was Lindbergh. He presented himself as a cool and dispassionate realist, assuring his American audiences that England was doomed and that there was no choice but to cozy up to the Third Reich. But he tipped his hand at an America First rally in September 1940 in Des Moines, when he announced that the real enemy was internal and Jewish - "their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government." After World War II, the right continued to search for internal subversion. Having previously flayed Roosevelt for trying to stop Nazism, conservatives now complained that he had been too soft on Communist traitors. But as Schlesinger showed in a 1952 article in The Atlantic titled "The New Isolationism," figures like Senators Robert Taft and Joseph McCarthy were really trying to camouflage their lack of enthusiasm for military intervention abroad by endorsing witch hunts at home. Probably no historical account can match the skill with which Philip Roth evokes this isolationist witches' brew in "The Plot Against America." But as Olson and Dunn valuably remind us, Roosevelt got it right. Had he wavered, events could have turned out very differently. No less than Churchill, Roosevelt saved Western civilization from the greatest menace it has ever known. Now that it is 'the good war,' the ferocity of the disputes over entering World War II has largely been forgotten. Jacob Heilbrunn, a regular contributor to the Book Review, is editor of The National Interest.
Kirkus Review
A fully fleshed-out portrait of the battle between the interventionists and isolationists in the 18 months leading up to Pearl Harbor. Former Baltimore Sun White House correspondent Olson (Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour, 2010, etc.) looks closely at both sides of the U.S. debate about whether to support Britain against the onslaught of Nazi Germany or remain aloof from the European conflict, epitomized by the two prominent personalities of the respective camps, President Franklin Roosevelt and Charles Lindbergh. The author clarifies "those angry days," so-called by Arthur Schlesinger, and the deep, searing divisions within the country: from FDR, his hands tied to aid Britain materially by Senate Midwestern leaders like Burton Wheeler and Gerald Nye, who deeply resented the growing power of the presidency; to pro-German, frankly racist Lindbergh, whose trips to Germany and radio broadcasts helped sharpen the public outcry, gave fodder to prescient journalists like Dorothy Thompson and alienated his own long-suffering wife, Anne Morrow. Once viewed as America's great hero for his solo trans-Atlantic flight, Lindbergh spiraled into controversy with his public argument against aiding the English, his rationalization of German aggression and espousal of racial purity. Ostracized by the Europeans, who had not long before sheltered him and his wife after the kidnapping of his son, and excoriated by the press and the East Coast moneyed establishment, Lindbergh took up with the reactionary American First campaign and was increasingly regarded as traitorous. Roosevelt, in turn, warned the country about the "perils of complacency" in his State of the Union speech of 1940 as events in Europe heated up, and he was not averse to stoking fears of "Fifth column" infiltration and restricting civil liberties in garnering support for his policies. Throughout, Olson adroitly sifts through the many conflicting currents. A vivid, colorful evocation of a charged era.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Olson's (Citizens of London) most recent work captures the contentious debate over American intervention into World War II. Olson chronicles the "Great Debate" between the interventionists, led by Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the isolationists, unofficially led by Charles Lindbergh. Digging more deeply than a simple retelling of policy and events, Olson provides intimate details through a variety of sources including diary entries. Readers will appreciate Olson's fair criticism of both sides and her honest approach to the often shocking events that included death threats, vicious personal attacks, and even fistfights among politicians. Multiple award-winning narrator Robert Frass has a smooth, deliberate cadence that makes it easy to soak up the extensive coverage of the era. Verdict A must for history fans. ["Though this subject is not new, Olson's focus on the Lindberghs and the pressure groups opposing and supporting the aviator offers additional insight into the period that ended with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Its readability further recommends the book to history buffs," read the review of the New York Times best-selling Random hc, LJ 3/15/13.-Ed.]-Sean Kennedy, Cleveland State Univ. Law Lib. (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
9781400069743|excerpt Olson / THOSE ANGRY DAYS Chapter 1 "A Modern Galahad" The cab stopped in front of the Smithsonian's Arts and Industries Building and Charles Lindbergh stepped out. He stared for a moment at the Victorian-era museum, with its turrets and multicolored brick facade, then strolled around its perimeter, hoping to find a side door. Seeing none, he returned to the front entrance, considering how to slip past the tourists outside without being recognized. By now, avoiding public attention was as natural to Lindbergh as breathing. He put his head down, covered his nose with a handkerchief, blew into it--and walked into the museum unnoticed. Once inside, he ducked into the first room on the right, which featured a display of dresses worn by the nation's First Ladies, and stationed himself by the salmon-pink silk gown that once belonged to Martha Washington. From there he had a perfect view of the Spirit of St. Louis, hanging from the ceiling in the main hall. It was March 1940, and Europe was at war. Lindbergh was at the epicenter of the struggle over America's role in the conflict. But for almost an hour that day, he took time out from the frenzy of the present to find refuge in the past. Lost in reverie, the lanky blond aviator gazed at the Spirit of St. Louis, suspended by cables above the tourists staring up at it. He had long felt a mystical closeness to this tiny silver plane. When he landed in Paris on May 21, 1927, at the end of the first solo transatlantic flight in history, his first thought had been how to protect it from the hordes of frenzied Frenchmen racing across the field to greet him. To Lindbergh, the Spirit was "a living creature," with whom he had shared a transcendent experience and whose loyalty to him was unquestioned. In his mind, they were inseparably linked: he always referred to the plane and himself as "we." (Indeed, We was the title of the first of two books he wrote about the flight.) More than once in recent years, he dreamed he had crept into the Smithsonian at night, cut the Spirit down, transported it to an airstrip, and taken off. Once aloft--away from his troubled, complicated life--he experienced nothing but joy. He could ride the sky "like a god . . . I could dive at a peak; I could touch a cloud; I could climb far above them all. This hour was mine, free of the earth." A supremely rational, practical man by nature, he was unex- pectedly lyrical, even fanciful, when he later described his visit to the Smithsonian in his journal. He noted the kinship he felt with the mannequin representing Martha Washington as they studied the Spirit together: "I rather envied her the constant intimacy with the plane that I once had." But then, he wrote, he suddenly noticed two young women staring at him. He was well acquainted with that look. Not quite certain it was him, they soon would come closer to find out. Up to that point, it had been a wonderful visit: just him, Martha, and the Spirit of St. Louis. Determined to preserve the enchantment of the moment, he spun around and walked out. when the twenty-five-year-old Lindbergh touched down at Paris's Le Bourget airfield on that late spring evening in 1927, there was so much awaiting him, his wife later observed: "Fame--Opportunity--Wealth, and also tragedy & loneliness & frustration. . . . And he so innocent & unaware." Several decades after the flight, the Lindberghs' daughter Reeve mused: "Sometimes . . . I wonder whether he would have turned back if he'd known the life he was headed for." Although his flight had attracted considerable attention even before he'd taken off, Lindbergh was convinced that any fame that followed would swiftly vanish. Soon after he arrived in France, he presented letters of introduction to Myron Herrick, the U.S. ambassador, unsure whether Herrick even knew who he was. He had no inkling of the remarkable international response to what had been, in essence, a stunt flight--a stunt that the press and public, especially in America, had transformed into something infinitely more. The New York Evening World, for example, had made the aston- ishing declaration that Lindbergh had performed "the greatest feat of a solitary man in the records of the human race." The day after the flight, the usually staid New York Times, under the banner headline lindbergh does it!, devoted its entire front page and four more pages inside to stories about the young airman and his triumph. In hindsight, the reason for the extraordinary reaction was clear: America, nearing the end of a decade marked by cynicism, disillusionment, and political apathy, badly needed a hero. As one historian put it, Lindbergh became "a modern Galahad for a generation which had forsworn Galahads." The 1920s in America had been a feverish time, noted for government corruption and graft, a spectacular boom in the stock market, organized crime on an unprecedented scale, a widespread rebellion against convention, the loss of idealism, and an emphasis on enjoying oneself. All this was fodder for the country's booming mass-circulation tabloid newspapers, which specialized in prodigious coverage of the latest national sensation, be it a murder trial, a heavyweight boxing match, or a dramatic but failed attempt to rescue a man lost in a Kentucky cave. Under heavy competitive pressure, the other, more respectable newspapers more often than not followed the tabloids' lead, as did the national magazines and a mass media newcomer called radio. In early 1927, the media, insatiable as ever, had shifted their focus to the $25,000 prize offered by Raymond Orteig, a wealthy French-born businessman living in Manhattan, to whoever made the first nonstop flight from New York to Paris (or vice versa). Although several airmen had already failed--and died--in the attempt, a new crop of aviators had recently announced plans to enter the competition. Most were well known, with expensive, technologically advanced planes, considerable outside financial backing, and armies of assistants, including staffers whose sole job was to publicize their bosses' participation. And then there was Charles Lindbergh, an unknown, virtually penniless airmail pilot from Minnesota who managed to scrounge just enough funds from a group of St. Louis businessmen to finance the construction of a stripped-down little plane he named Spirit of St. Louis, in honor of his benefactors. To aviation experts, Lindbergh's plan appeared more than quixotic; it seemed suicidal. Never having flown over any large body of water before, he would now try to cross the Atlantic, steering by the stars, a method of navigation relatively unfamiliar to him. He would carry neither parachute nor radio. Even more foolhardy, he planned to make the thirty-three-plus-hour flight alone. No one had ever attempted such a hazardous journey solo; as one wit noted, not even Columbus had sailed by himself. Lloyd's of London, which issued odds on virtually any enterprise, regardless of its danger, refused to do so for Lindbergh's venture. "The underwriters believe the risk is too great," a Lloyd's spokesman declared. America has always loved an underdog, especially one as polite, unassuming, self-disciplined, and boyishly handsome as Lindbergh-- a stark contrast to the bootleggers, gangsters, playboys, arrogant bankers, dizzy flappers, and corrupt government officials who made up a sizable percentage of the era's top newsmakers. It was not surprising, then, that when he took off from Long Island's rain-slick Roosevelt Field in the early morning of May 20, 1927, the entire nation anxiously followed his progress. Newspapers throughout the country printed extra editions, and radio broadcasts issued frequent flash bulletins. During a prizefight at Yankee Stadium, forty thousand people, at the urging of the announcer, rose as one and prayed silently for the young flier. In his May 21 newspaper column, the humorist Will Rogers wrote: "No attempt at jokes today. A slim, tall, bashful, smiling American boy is somewhere over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where no lone human being has ever ventured before." When word came that Lindbergh had made it, America went mad. "We measure heroes as we do ships, by their displacement," said Charles Evans Hughes, soon to be chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. "Colonel Lindbergh has displaced everything." President Coolidge dispatched an admiral's flagship to Europe to bring Lindbergh and the Spirit home. In Washington, the president presented him with the Congressional Medal of Honor and Distinguished Flying Cross. In New York, more than four million people--75 percent of the city's population--lined its streets to honor Lindbergh in the biggest ticker-tape parade in New York's history. A few months later, Time magazine named him its first "Man of the Year." After his tumultuous homecoming, Lindbergh spent three months touring all forty-eight states in the Spirit. An estimated thirty million people flocked to see this new national idol, labeled a "demigod" by one newspaperman; wherever he appeared, huge crowds fought to get near him. Intensely uncomfortable with the adulation, Lindbergh sought to use his fame to increase public interest in commercial aviation. Instead of accepting the millions of dollars he was offered to endorse products or appear in movies, he became a technical adviser to two start-up airlines--Pan American Airways and TAT, which eventually became Transcontinental and Western Air and ultimately Trans World Airlines (TWA). Working with both to help establish passenger service, he flew all over the country and later the world, surveying possible air routes, testing planes, and playing a key role in creating the first modern airports. Try as he might, however, this intensely reserved, solitary man was unable to reclaim his privacy and restore equilibrium to his life. His engaging modesty, coupled with his refusal to capitalize financially on his celebrity, only whetted his countrymen's appetite for more information about him. "In his flight, and even more in his fame, he proved that personal heroism, decency, and dignity were yet possible in the world," wrote Kenneth S. Davis, a Lindbergh biographer. Americans were in no mood to leave such a paragon alone, and neither was the press. Wherever he went, he was besieged. Strangers came up to him to shake his hand or pat him on the back, women tried to kiss him, crowds gathered in hotel lobbies and outside restaurants, waiting for him to appear. At a picnic he attended with members of his National Guard unit in St. Louis, he watched with disgust as several young women crept under a restraining rope to grab corncobs he had just chewed on. The furor only increased when, in May 1929, he married Anne Morrow, the shy, pretty twenty-two-year-old daughter of the U.S. ambassador to Mexico. The Lindberghs were stalked everywhere by the public and press, even on their boating honeymoon off the coast of Maine, where they were followed by motor launches filled with reporters and photographers. "Like criminals or illicit lovers, we avoided being seen in the world together," Anne Lindbergh later wrote, "and had to forgo the everyday pleasures of walking along streets, shopping, sightseeing, eating out at restaurants." A loner all his life, Lindbergh was singularly unprepared for all this. The only child of a small-town Minnesota lawyer and his schoolteacher wife, he had lived an isolated, rootless existence since early childhood. When he was four, his father, a stern man with a strong populist bent, was elected to Congress, and for the next ten years, Charles shuttled back and forth between Washington and the family farm near Little Falls, Minnesota. His parents had an extremely unhappy marriage, punctuated by violent quarrels, and Charles responded by rigidly controlling his emotions and withdrawing into his own solitary world. In school, he had virtually no friends, took part in no sports or extracurricular activities, was silent in class, and did not date. After his flight to Paris, his high school classmates, when questioned by reporters, had few if any memories of him. As an acquaintance of Lindbergh's later put it, his historic achievement and its aftermath plunged him "into waters that he did not understand and could not navigate." He adamantly resisted the idea that he and his wife were public property. While he readily answered queries from reporters about his flights and aviation in general, he curtly turned aside any questions about his personal life and refused to sign autographs or pose for photos. His recalcitrance only fanned the publicity flames. "Because he kept a distance," Time noted, "the public became more hysterical." As a result, the Lindberghs lived under constant siege at their secluded home, set in several acres of woods near Hopewell, New Jersey. Tabloid reporters went through the Lindberghs' garbage, pilfered their mail, and offered bribes to their servants for tidbits about their private lives. One journalist even applied for a servant's job with the couple, presenting them with forged references. Then, on the evening of March 1, 1932, harassment gave way to tragedy: the Lindberghs' twenty-month-old son, Charles Jr.--known as Charlie--was kidnapped from his nursery while his parents were having dinner downstairs. Two months later, the toddler's body was found in the woods near the Lindberghs' home. H. L. Mencken called the kidnapping the biggest story "since the Resurrection," and the extraordinary media frenzy that followed seemed to prove his point. The grieving Lindberghs were convinced that the excesses of the press were responsible for their son's abduction and murder. "If it were not for the publicity that surrounds us, we might still have him," Anne bitterly wrote in her diary. Even before the tragedy, Lindbergh had come to hate the mass-circulation newspapers, viewing them as "a personification of malice, which deliberately urged on the crazy mob." That conviction was only strengthened when two news photographers broke into the morgue where his son's body lay, opened the casket, and took pictures of Charlie's remains. The media circus surrounding the kidnapping continued for another four years, with millions of words and photos devoted to the lengthy investigation of the crime, the arrest, trial, and conviction of a German-born carpenter named Bruno Richard Hauptmann, and Hauptmann's eventual execution in April 1936. For much of that period, the Lindberghs took refuge at the Englewood, New Jersey, estate of Anne's widowed mother, Elizabeth Morrow. Five months after Charlie's death, the couple's second son, Jon, was born. When Hauptmann was convicted, the Lindberghs received so many letters threatening Jon's life that armed guards were hired to keep a twenty-four-hour watch outside the Morrow home. Several intruders, including an escaped mental patient, were caught approaching the house at various times. A few months after the Hauptmann trial, three-year-old Jon, accompanied by a teacher, was on his way home from preschool when the car in which he was riding was forced off the road by another vehicle. Several men holding press cameras jumped out of it and ran toward the car containing Jon, taking flash photos of the terrified little boy as they came near. After this latest press outrage, Charles Lindbergh decided that he and his family had no alternative but to leave America. "Between the . . . tabloid press and the criminal, a condition exists which is intolerable for us," he wrote his mother. A few days before his departure, Lindbergh told a close friend that "we Americans are a primitive people. We do not have discipline. Our moral standards are low. . . . It shows in the newspapers, the morbid curiosity over crimes and murder trials. Americans seem to have little respect for law, or the rights of others." It was not the first time--or the last--that he would equate his personal situation with the current state of American democracy. The murder of his son, along with the disgraceful behavior of the media, left Lindbergh with a psychological wound that would never heal. Reeve Lindbergh, who was born thirteen years after the death of her eldest brother, recalled that her father never talked about him. The pain, she believed, was too overwhelming. "I can imagine how much this baby must have meant to my father, who had been raised as an only child . . . this Charles, this namesake," she wrote. "I know that the loss was immeasurable and unspeakable." One day, after piloting a small plane through a violent thunderstorm, Lindbergh turned with a smile to his shaken wife, who had been in the plane with him, and said: "You should have faith in me." Then the smile faded. "I have faith in you," he said. "I just don't have any more faith in life." Shortly before midnight on December 21, 1935, the Lindberghs were driven to a deserted dock in Manhattan and spirited aboard an American freighter bound for England. Before leaving, Lindbergh gave an interview to a reporter for The New York Times, one of the few news outlets he still respected. The day after the Lindberghs' departure, the Times, in a story that took up much of the front page, described for its readers how "the man who eight years ago was hailed as an international hero . . . is taking his wife and son to establish, if he can, a secure haven for them in a foreign land." In the English countryside, the Lindberghs did indeed find the privacy they craved. For slightly more than two years, they rented Long Barn, a rambling old half-timbered house in Kent owned by Harold Nicolson--a member of Parliament, ex-diplomat, and author, who had written a biography of Anne's father, Dwight Morrow--and Nicolson's wife, the novelist Vita Sackville-West. During that time, the Lindberghs' third son, Land, was born. In her diary, Anne observed that the years spent at Long Barn were among the happiest of her life. For the most part, the English press and public left the Lindberghs alone. Jon could play in Long Barn's extensive terraced gardens and roam the meadows beyond without an armed guard shadowing him. Anne and Charles, meanwhile, could take a drive through the countryside with "a wonderful feeling of freedom, [knowing] that we can stop anywhere, that we will not be followed or noticed." In the summer of 1938, the Lindberghs moved from Long Barn to an old stone manor house on the tiny, windswept island of Illiec, off the coast of Brittany. "I have never seen a place where I wanted to live so much," Lindbergh confided to his journal. Considerably more isolated than Kent, Illiec proved to be another refuge for him and his wife. Excerpted from Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight over World War II, 1939-1941 by Lynne Olson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.