DOUBLE LIVES

Jul 31, 2025

tilt shift lens photography of LED bulb — Photo by Marissa Rodriguez on Unsplash

IT IS SUMMER in the American South, which means long, sizzling days with no cool relief. Summer sucks the life out of some of us Southerners while others thrive. Our late friend Jim Clemons ate it up. He was never happier than when it was drippingly humid and hot as fiery hell. He lived his best life in the sultriness of an Arkansas summer or at a primitive house he bought near a poor, tiny village on the coast of Mexico. Jim was a great cook and loved stirring up anything Mexican or Cajun. He built a handy and attractive outdoor kitchen and threw legendary parties in his backyard. He taught me to sprinkle water on baguettes or ciabatta before reheating them in the oven to crisp them up. That little tip has served me well.

Clemons, who was often called “Jungle Jim”—or just “Jungle” for short—was sharply smart and wickedly funny, a lover of music, and a dedicated Cuba Libre drinker. He was a giant man who could be hugely disagreeable and belligerent—and he was nothing if not a charismatic and beloved Southern character. We Southerners adore our characters. Cheers to you, Jungle. May you rest in peace.

THIS WEEK, I’M taking a brief vacation from the Trump Regime fascists who are rolling over our government and every one of us. (But we can all do a little happy dance for the trouble the late Jeffrey Epstein is causing Trump!) Meanwhile, I’m looking back at a bit of historical American fascism that you may or may not know about.

I have always been interested in double lives. How do people get into these situations—and how do they get away with it? After down-to-earth, folksy journalist Charles Kuralt died, we learned that during the 29 years he was driving across America reporting on the wholesome quirkiness of our country in his “On The Road” segments, he was also visiting his mistress and her two children in Montana.

“On The Road” was first produced for CBS News and later for CBS Sunday Morning, a program I have always loved for its focus on positivity. It’s unfortunate that Paramount Global and CBS have now shamed themselves and destroyed our trust in them, as well as continued the diminishment of our trust in legacy media by spending $16 million to settle a Trump lawsuit over the editing of CBS News’ “60 Minutes” interview of presidential candidate Kamala Harris. The Paramount/CBS capitulation amounted to Trump extorting Shari Redstone, so she could get her multi-billion-dollar sale of Paramount to Skydance Media. Skydance is a Hollywood studio run by David Ellison, son of Tech Bro Larry Ellison, who backed Mr. Trump. We know where the Tech Bros stand in this rise of authoritarianism.

But back to Charles Kuralt. Mr. Kuralt’s secret family popped up after he died, as Salon.com reported, when his mistress, Patricia Elizabeth Shannon, sued to get a Montana retreat he promised her.

Shannon estimated Kuralt sent $600,000 during the first decade, when their romance was the most intense and they saw each other often.

A Double Life, hidden in plain sight.

AND WHAT OF the men who have more than one hidden secret family? This is the case of international hero/aviator/Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh became famous in 1927 for the first nonstop flight from New York to Paris, which brought him global renown. Then he became even more famous due to the tragic kidnapping and death of his and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s first child, Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr.

But you know all this. What we didn’t learn in school, however, is that Charles Lindbergh believed in white superiority, which was apparent in his public speeches as well as in his journals and writings. He believed in the supremacy of the white race and the need to protect “Nordic” or “Western” bloodlines. He was concerned about the “degeneration” of civilization through racial mixing or immigration.

Charles A. Lindbergh standing by his plane, the "Spirit of St. Louis", circa May 31, 1927. (Photo restored by Crisco 1492 on June 24, 2013)

It's a complicated story. The Lindberghs were one of the first celebrity couples to receive intense, unrelenting media coverage. After his flight to Paris, Charles was already a global star and crowds thronged to see him everywhere he went. But especially after the kidnapping of their child, the press and public wouldn’t leave them alone. In 1935, they moved to Île Illiec, a small island off the coast of Brittany, France, where they were protected from the carnival that tended to follow them.

The Lindberghs’ time in Europe was a mix of continued—and meaningful—scientific pursuits for Charles and literary pursuits for Anne, alongside engagement with the burgeoning political and military tensions on the continent. This is when he visited Berlin for the first time.

Surprisingly, the U.S. government arranged Lindbergh’s first experience with Nazi Germany. U.S. Army Major Truman Smith wanted to collect more information about German aviation capacities and technology, and he believed that because of Lindbergh’s celebrity status, the Germans would be eager to show him their aviation accomplishments—thereby giving him access to sites that previously were inaccessible to Americans. Major Smith sent an invitation to Lindbergh in June of 1936 and the two agreed that Lindbergh would come to Berlin on 22 July 1936.

Our history concerning the Nazis and the Jews in Germany is complicated. At this point in time, the U.S. government as a whole, including the State Department, was slow to react to the growing Nazi threat and the plight of Jews in Germany. Warnings from diplomats like Raymond Geist, acting consul-general in Berlin who witnessed the persecution of Jews, were largely ignored in Washington. Jews were denied entry into the United States (including by Geist) when they needed to escape.

But back at home in 1934, Roosevelt and members of his cabinet, as well as the Secret Service and the FBI, began to be concerned about a fascist threat. In archived material from the FBI:

Each FBI field office at once formally opened an investigation to determine… only if foreign agents were working with the American Nazi groups. Then, in 1936, under new orders from President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull, the Bureau opened new and more extensive investigations of fascist groups. These were conducted under the newly passed Foreign Agents Registration Act, and with substantial results. Through close counterespionage work, we uncovered 50 Nazi spies operating in America before the U.S. ever entered the war.

Lindbergh’s political views in the late 1930s and early 1940s reflected how much he admired Nazi Germany's approach to strengthening its "racial stock." He accepted a medal from Hermann Göring, who personally awarded Lindbergh the Service Cross of the German Eagle in 1938. Göring used Lindbergh’s visits as propaganda to showcase American approval of the Third Reich.

Hermann Göring photographed by Franz Langhammer

Lindbergh spoke of the biological decline of Western society if its “superior traits” weren’t preserved. He praised Germany’s “vitality” and “racial consciousness.” He argued that Hitler had “restored Germany’s pride.”

In a 1941 speech in Des Moines, Iowa, he warned:
We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.

Lindbergh was the most famous spokesman for the America First Committee (which opposed U.S. involvement in WWII), some of whose most prominent members, like Henry Ford, were anti-Semitic and pro-fascist. Lindburgh believed in eugenics.

Eugenics: the study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable. Developed largely by Sir Francis Galton as a method of improving the human race, eugenics was increasingly discredited as unscientific and racially biased during the 20th century, especially after the adoption of its doctrines by the Nazis in order to justify their treatment of Jews, disabled people, and other minority groups.

But that’s not all. In Devex Newswire:

The Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation are among the long list of U.S.-based philanthropies that helped fund the eugenics movement during the early 20th century, Stephanie Beasley reports.
“All of the great names of legacy philanthropy are implicated in this movement,” Ford Foundation President Darren Walker said during a virtual event hosted by the Anti-Eugenics Project last week.

SO IT IS in this context of belief in increasing his own racial stock that we learn that between the 1950s and his death in 1974, Charles Lindbergh had at least seven children with three German women. Like Charles Kuralt’s widow and children, Lindbergh’s American family had absolutely no idea. Lindbergh kept these relationships hidden and used pseudonyms like Careu Kent whenever he visited his secret families. He supported them financially and visited them regularly, but covertly, imposing strict protocols to keep his identity a secret.

The children had no idea who their father was.

Two of the women—Brigitte Hesshaimer and Marietta Hesshaimer—were sisters who lived in Munich. They reportedly didn’t know about each other’s affairs and children with Lindbergh, but how can that be? The third—Valeska—lived in Baden-Baden. Lindbergh’s strict rules to keep his identity a secret from his children and to keep his European families’ secret—from one another and the world—worked. It was not until Brigitte died in the 1990’s that her children discovered letters, photos, and other documents that revealed who their father was. In 2003, DNA confirmed it.

Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh in 1929

I RAN ACROSS this story when I lived in France and had just re-read Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s meditative book Gift From The Sea. I love this book.

With meditations on youth and age, love and marriage, peace, solitude, and contentment, here is an inimitable classic that guides us to find a space for contemplation and creativity in our own lives.

Anne wrote this book in the early 1950’s on a solo trip to Captiva Island off the coast of Florida. Was this during the time her husband began creating his German families? Back in 1940, after she’d returned from France, Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote a book called The Wave of the Future: A Confession of Faith, in which she argued that humanity was in a period of profound change and that the rise of totalitarian regimes like Nazism and Communism, despite their flaws, represented an inevitable "wave of the future.” This sparked outrage and was seen by many as defeatist, an apology for fascism.

In Foreign Affairs published July 1, 1941:
The "wave of the future," as it presents itself to Mrs. Lindbergh, is totalitarian, and in her eyes there is no use in our trying, Canute-like, to stem it. The net effect of Mrs. Lindbergh's book, perhaps unintentional, is even more destructive than the mechanistic approach to life expounded by her husband because it furnishes a sort of vade mecum for the defeatists. One of the most disturbing things about this sincere, and in some respects courageous, little volume is its evasion of some of the real issues, particularly the moral ones. It carries the subtitle "A Confession of Faith," but it is precisely faith that the author seems to lack.

In Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Obituary in The New York Times: …in a letter, she wrote that she was beginning to feel that Hitler was ''a very great man, like an inspired religious leader -- and as such rather fanatical -- but not scheming, not selfish, not greedy for power.''

After WWII and the Holocaust, Anne Morrow Lindbergh distanced herself from The Wave of the Future. Mrs. Lindbergh herself later acknowledged that she and her husband had been ''both very blind, especially in the beginning, to the worst evils of the Nazi system.'' She rarely spoke about it.

Her literary career blossomed when she wrote the beautiful Gift From The Sea. American women now looked up to her. And while Charles Lindbergh’s public personae may have been rehabilitated from his fascist views, his devotion to white supremacy—racism and antisemitism—persisted.

THE LINDBERGHS’ MARRIAGE lasted 45 years, but the relationship between Charles and Anne was distant, formal, and lacked closeness or affection. Anne yearned for emotional connection and personal identity, while Charles remained aloof, authoritarian, and secretive—all while maintaining multiple hidden families abroad.

A double life x three.

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Peace. 🕊️ 🕊️🕊️ We are one.

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