The Plot Against America

by Philip Roth

APRIL–AUGUST 1941. Addresses ten thousand at America First Committee rally in Chicago, another ten thousand at New York rally, prompting his bitter enemy Secretary Ickes to call him “the No. 1 United States Nazi fellow traveler.” When Lindbergh writes to President Roosevelt complaining about Ickes’s attacks on him, particularly for accepting the German medal, Ickes writes, “If Mr. Lindbergh feels like cringing when he is correctly referred to as a knight of the German Eagle, why doesn’t he send back the disgraceful decoration and be done with it?” (Earlier, Lindbergh had declined returning the medal on grounds that it would constitute “an unnecessary insult” to the Nazi leadership.) President openly questions Lindbergh’s loyalty, prompting Lindbergh to tender his resignation as Army colonel to Roosevelt’s secretary of war. Ickes notes that while Lindbergh is swift in renouncing his Army commission, he remains adamant in refusing to return the medal received from Nazi Germany.