Reykjavík

Reykjavík serves as the setting for one of the defining diplomatic acts of Charles A. Lindbergh’s presidency: his personal meeting with Adolf Hitler and the signing of the Iceland Understanding. The city becomes more than a meeting place. Its political associations sharpen the controversy over whether a pledge of peace amounted to accommodation with Nazi power.

Setting and Political Associations

In the novel’s account, Reykjavík is the capital of Iceland, an island kingdom whose historic allegiance was to a democratic monarchy. That monarchy had been conquered by the Nazis, a national tragedy condemned by Denmark’s people and king. Against this background, choosing Reykjavík as the site of Lindbergh’s meeting carried a significance beyond geography: critics saw the visit as tacitly condoning the conquest.

The Meeting and Its Outcome

In the weeks after his inauguration, Lindbergh traveled to Reykjavík to meet Hitler in person. After two days of talks described as cordial, the two leaders signed the Iceland Understanding, guaranteeing peaceful relations between Germany and the United States. The agreement was presented as a guarantee of peace, but the place where it was made—and the authority with whom Lindbergh made it—made that assurance deeply contentious.

Protest and Narrative Significance

The agreement prompted demonstrations in a dozen American cities and impassioned condemnation by Democratic congressmen who had survived the Republican landslide. They objected to Lindbergh treating a murderous fascist tyrant as an equal and to the symbolism of meeting in Iceland after the Nazi conquest of its historic democratic counterpart. Reykjavík thus anchors a political reversal: a pledge intended to reassure the public that the country would avoid war also revealed how neutrality could be read as accommodation. The president’s return from Iceland, escorted by ten Navy patrol planes while he piloted a Lockheed Interceptor, carried the diplomatic episode back to Washington as a display of military aviation as well as a message of neutrality.