Many of the letter writers had rallied behind aviator Charles Lindbergh, who had moved to Europe after his son’s kidnapping and murder only to return to the U.S. in 1939 with a medal from Hitler and an awestruck description of German air power. In a radio broadcast three days after Roosevelt’s address to Congress, Lindbergh denounced the “hysterical chatter of calamity and invasion” behind the president’s preparedness drive. That broadcast, combined with Lindbergh’s refusal to hand back his medal from the Third Reich, led Roosevelt to conclude, “Lindbergh is a Nazi.”
