Skip to main content

No Post

March 2023
1min read


I am sorry to see American Heritage (of all magazines) repeat as fact the myth that President Franklin D. Roosevelt offered Charles A. Lindbergh “a new cabinet post as Secretary of Air” in 1940 (“The Time Machine,” April).

I am aware that Lindbergh’s diary reports a conversation (in September 1939) with his friend Col. Truman Smith, who, as military attaché in our Berlin embassy, had been responsible for Lindbergh’s three visits to Nazi Germany. According to Lindbergh, Smith told him that if he refrained from opposing American entry into the European war, “a Secretaryship for the Air would be created in the Cabinet and given to me!”

Actually, the war had only just broken out in September 1939, and no one in authority at that point was advocating American entry. As for the alleged offer of a cabinet post, I have found nothing in the Roosevelt papers at the Hyde Park library to confirm this incident or anything approaching it. Lindbergh biographers have described Secretary of War Harry H. Woodring and Gen. H. H. Arnold as intermediaries; but this quite startling offer is mentioned neither in Keith D. McFarland’s authoritative biography of Woodring nor in Hap Arnold’s autobiography.

The offer would also be startling for another reason: because it implied the creation of an independent air force. In 1939 there was no such thing as a separate air force. The Army and Navy each had their own air corps. To create an independent air force would have meant a titanic struggle with the existing services and their civilian chiefs. It would also have required legislation. The establishment of a new cabinet department would have required legislation too. FDR had other things on his mind, and the last thing he would have wished in 1939 was to get involved in bureaucratic and congressional battles over an independent air force and a cabinet department.

I might add that to this day there is no such “cabinet post” as Secretary for the Air. Neither the non-cabinet post of Secretary of the Air Force nor the independent air force came into existence until 1947.

Truman Smith had no White House entrée. One can only assume that he was trying to restrain Lindbergh by speculating that if Lindbergh did not provoke Roosevelt by attacking a proBritish policy, Roosevelt might do something for him. Or maybe he was kidding Lindbergh, who was not notable for his sense of humor. Smokeblowing speculation or kidding are very different from the allegation that Roosevelt deliberately offered Lindbergh a nonexistent cabinet job.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "September 1991"

Authored by: John Steele Gordon

H. T. Webster’s cartoons offer a warm, canny, and utterly accurate view of an era of everyday middle-class life

Authored by: The Editors

Big-Screen Epic

Authored by: The Editors

The Kid

Authored by: The Editors

The War Escalates

Authored by: Sara Lowen

For more than a century now, American homeowners have been struggling to remake their small patch of the environment into a soft, green carpet just like the neighbor’s. Who told us this was the way a lawn had to be?

Authored by: Jack Flam

The man who may be America’s greatest artist liked to fend off the curious with the statement “My life is all in my works. ” He was right, but the works and the life take on new poignance with the release and exhibition of a once-private collection of his letters, photographs, and sketchbooks.

Authored by: John Strausbaugh

A controversial recent book suggests that what we think of as good manners is a relatively new thing, a commodity manufactured to meet the needs of an industrial age. But now that the Industrial Revolution is over, we may need them more than ever—for very different reasons.

Authored by: The Editors

“Above All, Don’t Attempt to Be Too Fine”

Featured Articles

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Rarely has the full story been told how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.