Free Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life by Susan Hertog Page B

wasteland, he asked Marcos and his ministers to pass protective legislation. Emmanuel Elizalde, Marcos’s minister of minority rights, a wealthy, Harvard-educated dilettante and playboy, was immediately intrigued by Charles’s efforts. Hoping to use Charles’s celebrity to advance his political ambitions, he granted Charles access to the interior jungles. After a survey flight of the islands in 1970, on which he was accompanied by
New York Times
reporter Alden Whitman, 20 Charles and a group of hand-picked journalists, photographers, and anthropologists, were air-lifted to the rainforests of Mindanao, at the southernmost tip of the Philippines. There he would live among a lost and isolated Paleolithic tribe discovered by Elizalde several months before.
    As the helicopter hovered, Charles dropped to the jungle floor, greeted by an orchid-leaf-clad member of the Tasaday tribe. 21 After being guided six-hundred feet up to the stream-rippled mountain of this Stone Age, cave-dwelling society, Charles spent eleven days living and observing them. Convinced that they were pure specimens of “primitive man,” he returned to Manila to consult with Marcos. 22
    Within days of Charles’s return to Darien, Marcos had enacted legislation that transferred ownership of fifty thousand acres to the twenty-five-member Tasaday tribe. Refusing to heed the experts who thoughtElizalde’s discovery a political hoax, Charles reveled in his victory. But after the November elections in the Philippines, and the decline of Elizalde’s political fortune, it became clear to Charles that the passionate exponent was less than honest. For the next fifteen years, martial law thwarted the efforts of scholars to study the Tasaday tribe. In the 1980s, however, it became clear that they were modern-day forest dwellers who, having been bribed by Elizalde with guns, clothes, and golf carts, had masqueraded for the international press. Later seen in jeans and T-shirts, cavorting around Elizalde’s Manila estate, they were understood to be pawns of his ambitions. 23 Once again, Charles was duped by smooth-talking politicians eager to harness his popularity to their ends. The Stone Age tribesmen were hired actors, and the Paleolithic tribe did not exist.
    After his return from the Philippine expedition, Charles was ill. During the winter of 1971–1972 he lost twenty pounds and was plagued by colds, coughs, and fevers, as well as a case of shingles. Weak and fatigued, he curtailed his traveling and remained home. Anne, though she worried about his weakness and infections, enjoyed his uninterrupted presence. Throughout 1971 and 1972, they worked together in Maui and in Switzerland, editing, rewriting, and shaping Anne’s diaries. As in the old days, Charles was both protective and strict. He would straighten up the kitchen and wash the dishes after sending her off to work. In the afternoon, when Anne was done, they corrected the details, the facts, and the presentation. They had published
Bring Me a Unicorn
and
Diaries and Letters 1922–1928
in 1971; in 1973 they completed the second volume,
Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead 1929–1932
.
    By the summer of 1973, Charles knew that he was dying. He was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer, and told that the lesions had already spread to his lungs. Between the sessions of chemotherapy and radiation, he spent his time writing his memoirs, visiting his children and grandchildren, now numbering ten, and supporting efforts in behalf of land and wildlife preservation. In August 1973, he returned to his boyhood home, in Little Falls, to dedicate the family land as a state museum and park. In his speech he said, “If I had to choose between airplanes and birds, I would choose birds.”
    Charles had mellowed through the years. After his transatlantic flight, he was certain that aviation was the wave of the future; that technology would bring enlightened perspective. But after the devastation of Europe, Charles no longer believed in