Lucky Lindy and the left.(Charles Lindbergh)

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IN an age when Americans were obsessed with the passing of "Great Men" and the closing of frontiers, Charles Lindbergh was more than a hero--he was a promise of greatness to come. "In the Spring of '27," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "something bright and alien flashed across the sky. A young Minnesotan who seemed to have had nothing to do with his generation did a heroic thing, and for a moment people set down their glasses in country clubs and speakeasies and thought of their old best dreams. Maybe there was a way out by flying, maybe our restless blood could find frontiers in the inimitable air."

But by the late 1930s, the brightness had dimmed. An arch-opponent of intervention in another European war--he had the vast majority of Americans on his side--Lindbergh took up with the America First Committee, a group of non-interventionists that included, or associated with, many of America's leading intellectuals. Academics such as John Dewey and Charles Beard, famed liberal journalist Oswald Garrison Villard, and the head of the American Socialist party, Norman Thomas, were America Firsters. In one 1941 speech, in Des Moines, Lindbergh argued that American Jews, the British, and capitalists were pushing America toward war. This sentiment was rife among isolationists, and not necessarily just among anti-Semites. Lindbergh's well-earned reputation as a Germany-lover made it easy for his enemies to cast him as a Nazi-sympathizer, even though his famous last trip to Germany was an effort to ameliorate the plight of German Jews.

For decades afterward, the American Left used what could fairly be called McCarthyite guilt-by-association tactics to claim that the American Right was born from the ranks of bigots, isolationists, and--scratch deep enough--Nazis.

This was always nonsense on stilts. If anything, the isolationists were predominantly liberals and progressives. Lindbergh was never ...