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Films >> Lindbergh Kidnapping Case, The (1976) >>

1) It is not the willingness to kill on the part of our soldiers which most concerns me. This is an inherent part of war. It is our lack of respect for even the admirable characteristics of our enemy -- for courage, for suffering, for death, for his willingness to die for his beliefs, for his companies and squadrons which go forth, one after another, to annihilation against our superior training and equipment. What is courage for us is fanaticism for him. We hold his examples of atrocity screamingly to the heavens while we cover up our own and condone them as just retribution for his acts. (Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh 880)

2) American courts have consistently ruled the public's right to know "newsworthy" information outweighs a public figure's right to privacy. It is a bulwark of the First Amendment and the notion of freedom of the press. What privacy exists is protected by laws against trespass and assault. (Christian Science Monitor 4 September 1997)

3) As our sciences demonstrate their capabilities, they proscribe their limits. At the same time that lenses probe the universe, they portray a limiting speed of light; and in studying the relatively simple cell, they encounter the body's unending complication. Our increasing knowledge of distance and time confronts us with barriers far more formidable than those encountered by previous generations.
-- Charles A. Lindbergh, Charles A. Lindbergh: Autobiography of Values (Charles A. Lindbergh, Charles A. Lindbergh: Autobiography of Values 400)

4) I know that my father was a good boy growing up in Minnesota, and that he grew into a good man. He was a man who continued to grow along with his own century, through aviation and technology and war and peace and family life, and love. When he said late in life, "If I had to choose, I'd rather have birds than airplanes," he did not believe that he really had to choose, or that the world really had to choose, but he knew that there was much work ahead for us all, if birds and airplanes were to co-exist in harmony far into the technological future.
-- Reeve Lindbergh, Under a Wing (Reeve Lindbergh, Under a Wing 203-4)

5) I have come to know as the child of famous parents: the give-and-take between public impressions and private memory, each informing, educating, correcting, and ultimately humanizing the other, over time. It is an important effort, however odd or uncomfortable it sometimes feels. I have learned that by pursuing my own history consistently, pursuing it with compassion and without fear, I will discover over and over again that the people I love best can never be lost to me, after all.
-- Reeve Lindbergh, Under a Wing (Reeve Lindbergh, Under a Wing 195)

6) ...America, the gateway through which people from the world have come in the search for liberty and freedom--- and have found it--- here today, let it be observed that the Chief Magistrate of this great city, the son of an immigrant, is here to welcome the greatest hero, another son of an immigrant.
-- Charles A. Lindbergh, We (304, Mayor Walker of New York City to Charles Lindbergh, June 13, 1927)

7) I look down at the pit of ashes ("twenty-five thousand in a year and a half"). This, I realize is not a thing confined to any nation, to any people...What is barbaric on one side of the earth is still barbaric on the other. (Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh (997-98))

8) A purely personal ambition might never have moved him into public life. Certainly he would remain his own man against every temptation of power and glory. But as the years passed, he manifested a burning commitment to justice -- and not merely justice in the settlement of differences among individual men, but justice in general, justice in the abstract, requiring, as he saw it, radical changes in the social and economic order...Labor, he was convinced, was the source of all economic value. But under the existing system, acquisitive men who made nothing and contributed nothing to the public good were enabled to take a "free ride" on other men's brains and other men's effort.... (Kenneth S. Davis, The Hero: Charles A. Lindbergh and the American Dream 38, A description of Charles Lindbergh's father)