at Hauptmann was indeed the kidnapper, citing ''a veritable mountain of undisputed evidence.''
The first writer granted full access to Lindbergh's archives and to the equally voluminous papers of his widow, 91-year-old Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Berg for the most part makes artful use of his treasure trove. Only occasionally does he lapse into travelogue mode--no small achievement in itself considering how peripatetic Lindbergh remained throughout his life--and Berg's richly detailed accounts of the flight of the Spirit of St. Louis and the equally harrowing search for ''the Lindbergh baby'' are riveting.
But the reader would have been better served if Berg had interrupted his compelling narrative from time to time to allow for more trenchant analysis of his often confounding subject. It would have been helpful, for example, had the author not waited until page 192 to make a first, cursory stab at explaining why it was that Lindbergh showed absolutely no interest in the opposite sex until he was 27 years old. But the lightness of Berg's touch is especially problematic in his account of the aviator's behavior in the years leading up to America's entry into World War II.
Lindbergh was hardly alone in vehemently opposing U.S. entry into Europe's war, nor in underestimating Adolf Hitler's capacity for barbarity. But in his many speeches and broadcasts, Lindbergh came across as altogether too admiring of German air power and too forgiving of Nazi aggression on the one hand, and essentially indifferent to the horrific plight of Europe's Jews on the other. He also complained that the leaders of ''the Jewish race'' were conspiring to push America into the war and declared that the ''greatest danger'' the Jews posed ''lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.''
Berg is persuasive in arguing that the resulting vilification of Lindbergh as an Axis sympathizer and traitor went much too far. Indeed, when the Roosevelt Administration blocked his attempts at enlisting in the Air Force after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Lindbergh arranged a posting as an Air Force test pilot in the South Pacific, where he unofficially flew 50 combat missions. But the book suffers in the end from Berg's failure to confront Lindbergh's anti-Semitism head-on, or to explain why it was that he ''buried his head in the sand when confronted with the crimes of inhumanity that repelled so many others.'' The impression one comes away with is that Lindbergh's views were rooted not in hatred but in ignorance and a lack of human empathy--that he was, in short, a celebrity hopelessly out of his depth.
BY ANTHONY BIANCO
Updated Oct. 29, 1998 by bwwebmaster
Copyright 1998, Bloomberg L.P.