Charles A. Lindbergh is the greatest hero of the 20th century; perhaps - in the truly mythic sense - in world history. When his moment came, right across the world he was transmuted from membership of the human race into godliness. At that time, people needed someone to raise their own existence above the commonplace, and Lindbergh turned out to be that divine creature - and there to record and broadcast his triumphs around the world were the pioneers of radio news and news film, with, for the first time ever, synchronised Movietone sound. It is the 20th century version of Botticelli's fully adult Venus emerging from the conch.
Such a man, such a moment, will not occur again in the history of this world, because never again will such global naivety, such unquestioning credulity be confronted with such a sudden technological revolution. You can lose your virginity but once. Lindbergh's flight in 1927 reduced the size of the globe to a village for the first time - but that reduction was not caused by Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic, but by the new technology of mass communications, focusing on one perfectly photogenic, perfectly brave man, and turning him into an icon of the world popular culture which was created at that very same moment.
For Lindbergh was not the first man to fly non-stop across the Atlantic, although perhaps we and the British alone are aware of Alcock and Brown crashing into a bog in Clifden fully eight years before. Of course no cameras caught that episode. Lindbergh was not even the first American to achieve such a feat (Brown was a naturalised American citizen). Nor was his feat truly exceptional. Other flyers were almost queuing to take off when Lindbergh's Spirit of St Louis took to the air outside New York City - one rival in Lindbergh's first-choice aircraft could well have beaten him off the ground but was landbound by a lawsuit.
That very same day, two RAF pilots embarked on what was intended to be an even longer nonstop flight from England to India, like Lindbergh in a single-engined plane: and arguably (as Lindbergh certainly argued in defence of his solo flight in a one-engined machine) a second crew member was a distinct weight-disadvantage. The RAF plane was forced down by bad weather after a world record flight of 3,420 miles - which lasted a mere two hours before Lindbergh broke it by just 194 miles when he arrived in Paris.
"Everything changed for both the pilot and the planet," opines A. Scott Berg of that touch-down. If he meant the history of world events changed, it didn't. That May or June, someone or other was certainly going to fly from New York to Paris. Lindbergh's real place in world history is in the solar wind of popular culture, of which he was the founding father, ahead of Joe Louis and Jesse Owens. And he remains the godhead figure of a culture whose ephemerality is normally its defining feature.
But even had the now-forgotten RAF pilots Roderick Carr and L.E.M. Gillman made it to India non-stop with a world record flight, Lindbergh was still going to be the world hero. He was the stuff of innocent, pre-imperial America, with, unlike the British empire, no enemies. Moreover, Lindbergh was the focus of an American-dominated mass-communications technology which as we now know was to be infinitely more pervasive and enduring than Pax Britannica; who rules the commanding heights of that technology rules world popular culture.
But of course that alone does not explain the extraordinary position of Charles Lindbergh. Marketing people would declare him (unlike the greyly invisible flight lieutenants Carr and Gillman) to be perfect for the marketplace: he was handsome, young, American, virginal, decent, tee-total, and - most of all - adored by the only film industry which counted. There was a further truth - he was genuinely a good and brave man; and sometimes the public can sense that quality amid the photo-sensitive chemicals of the film industry and the busy drumbeat of rumour.
Yet that aside, Charles Lindbergh remains truly the creation of America and American legendising. Even his real family name was almost the same as his diabolical opposite within American mythology: Mansson. Merely an "s" lies between Charles Manson, the butcher of Hollywood, and Charles Mansson, the real family name of Hollywood's greatest real-life hero. But Lindbergh's grandfather had changed his name to Lindbergh after abandoning his wife and family in Sweden and fleeing to America with his young and pregnant mistress - (though when he died, the obituaries, entering into the true spirit of mythology, reported that he had come to the US to escape "religious persecution").
Charles Lindbergh was not, as is widely thought, of German blood at all - although he was one quarter Irish: his maternal grandmother was Emma Kissane. Lindbergh was genuinely fond of this country, and perhaps not just because of his ancestry. The Spirit of St Louis was made by an aircraft company called Ryan; prominent in the project was the man who was to become Wrong-Way Corrigan; the engineer who vitally fine-tuned the aircraft was Ed Mulligan; and the woman who pressed a St Christopher medal into his hand moments before take-off was Katie Butler. And after a truly gruelling transatlantic flight, haunted by the strangest phantasms, the sight of Co Kerry - of course, home of the Kissanes, though his biographer Berg appears not to know this - was the assurance of survival.
Ireland, Charles wrote to his mother during a visit here in 1936, had always had a strange attraction for him. "Possibly because I shall never forget the first sight of the hills of Kerry from the Spirit of St Louis; possibly because a love of the old country is passed on even to the distant descendants of all Irishmen." During that visit, he gave Eamon de Valera his first flight in an aircraft.
By this time, of course, celebrity and awe had engulfed him as they had no living person in history; and it is testimony to his remarkable singularity that although he had turned 25 just three months before his solo journey, he remained a remarkably phlegmatic young man. His isolated childhood in Minnesota - he was almost unremembered by his peers at school and he had had virtually no social life - had, as Berg brilliantly elucidates, uniquely prepared him for the rigours of solo flight and the greater solitudes of fame. It was as if he had been bred for the fate which befell him; and that fate was far from kind.
The year of the St Louis flight he met and then married Anne Morrow, daughter of the US ambassador to Mexico. In 1931, their baby son Charles was killed in the course of a bungled kidnap-forransom. The body was dumped. Lindbergh, not knowing his son was dead, handed over money to an alleged kidnapper. After the baby's body was discovered, a photographer broke open the coffin in the morgue and sold snapshots of it to the public for $3. Meanwhile, a hysterical fear, as consuming as the jubilation of four years earlier, gripped the US. A pathetic German immigrant was later electrocuted for the affair which, in the curious synchronicity of much the Lindbergh saga, was investigated by a man who bore the name of a later US hero: Norman Schwarzkopf.
For generations later, the fate of the Lindbergh child was a cautionary tale for American children. Twice over, Lindbergh had become legend, but a third legendary existence was in store, as through the 1930s, and true to his isolationist mid-western roots, Charles Lindbergh campaigned to keep the US out of a future world war. To want your country uninvolved in the brutal stupidity of war was surely no bad thing; yet his naive political sense permitted him to be exploited by Nazi sympathisers in the US, and even by the Nazis themselves when he visited prewar Germany.
Certainly, after the war, in which he distinguished himself even though drummed out the USAAF Reserve by orders of President Roosevelt - by flying in combat in the Pacific theatre, uniquely, as a civilian - he recognised the full evils of Nazism, though he was less than fulsome in acknowledgment of his own early failings towards it. His biographer is quite unsympathetic at this point; but it is Lindbergh's moral sophistication in response to violence which makes him the better and the nobler man.
He detailed in his diary (later published) the atrocities committed by allied troops in the Pacific - the Japanese prisoner tied to a stake and beheaded, the mounds of Japanese skulls which had been broken open by US infantry looking for gold fillings, the defiled corpses of Japanese soldiers. Later, at war's end in Germany, he reported other abominations - the heavily pregnant local women expelled by US troops from their quarters in Mannheim, the three thousand women in Stuttgart who had been so badly injured while being raped by French and Senegalese troops that they had to be hospitalised.
He detailed unsparingly German atrocities - but of course everyone was doing that. What makes him a better and a wiser man than most was that he recognised the evil of that time as being essentially human, rather than simply Japanese or German. The events of recent decades, in China, Cambodia, Africa, strengthen a moral position with which even his biographer is unsympathetic. Yet Lindbergh was surely right after the war when he observed that "the value of truth has never been so low. The ideals of justice and tolerance have practically vanished from a continent." Much of Europe had exchanged one tyranny for another, yet this totalitarian barter was being represented as some sort of victory. It was an odd kind of freedom which could anathematise a man who spoke such an obvious truth.
Lindbergh's last years were spent in the Pacific, seeking refuge in solitude on island after island, and in concern for wildlife. By the time of his death in August 1974, Charles Lindbergh still remained largely a work of other people's imaginations, rather like one of the phantasms which had accompanied him to Paris. But of course, he was a real man: and as Berg's biography makes abundantly plain, a good man - and a better hero than this vile century deserves.
Lindbergh by Scott Berg is published by Macmillan, £25 in UK. Steven Spielberg has secured a film deal based on the biography.