When I was younger I read up of all three of these men. They were truly great.
Indeed!
I always felt bad for the situation with Lindbergh. I know that as he got older, he drifted far to the left to the point where people thought he was nuts, but when he was younger, he weighed things very carefully.
The slander against him was that he was a Nazi sympathizer. Part of it was due to a trip he took to Germany in the pre-war years, and had a firsthand look at the Luftwaffe, where they wined and dined him, taking him on tours of the airfields.
He was astonished at the Advanced German air forces, and he fully knew the condition of our air forces, and publicly said that if we got into war, we were going to be in trouble.
What he did not know was that as he was taken from airfield to airfield by the Germans, they were taking their state of the Art bombers, their Henkel 111’s and other more advanced planes, and flying them from one field to the other and parking them wingtip to wingtip.
He had a completely unrealistic view of their air forces based on what they showed him, and that was done deliberately by them. He had no idea they were performing that kind of deception.
And then, when he went to some dinner, they gave him some kind of Nazi award.
He was crossways with the putrid Roosevelt administration at the time, and they made a political enemy out of him and smeared him as a Nazi sympathizer.
When war came, they refused to allow him to join the military services, even though he maintained the rank of Colonel From his prior military service.