NEW YORK — In The Enigmatic Aviator: Charles Lindbergh, Revisited (The Partick Press; Wednesday, May 21, 2025; ISBN: 9798308673361), historian David Hamilton sets the historical record straight. Drawing on extensive research, including Lindbergh’s archive at Yale, the author offers a fresh and objective assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of a talented, complex man who was remarkably intertwined in many defining events of the 20th century.
In an interview, Hamilton can discuss the following:
- Lindbergh’s three secret families in Germany were part of his goal, which he had shared with his wife, Anne, to father a dozen children.
- Nazi smears against Lindbergh that came from FDR in 1940—including the claim that Lindbergh gave the Nazi salute when it was the patriotic Bellamy salute of the day.
- Tensions between Lindbergh and FDR, which were fueled by Lindbergh’s vocal anti-interventionism in the European conflict and FDR’s fear of Lindbergh as a credible presidential candidate.
- “The Spirit of St. Louis”—named after a group of St. Louis businessmen who financed the venture—was designed with one goal in mind: to get to Paris.
- Lindbergh’s groundbreaking research on organ preservation was conducted as a volunteer laboratory assistant for the Nobel Prize-winning transplant surgeon-scientist Alexis Carrel.
- Lindbergh worked secretly in the Cold War Air Force in the late 1940s after the FBI cleared him of disloyalty.
- Lindbergh’s work as an early conservationist in the mid-50s and his later commitment to saving whales in the southern Pacific and other declining animal species in the Philippines. Far from being a white supremacist, he also sought protection for endangered primitive peoples.