Lindbergh Nightmare

"I am going to write you this first afternoon all that I know and some you may discover in the newspapers. . . I will write everything as I would like it told me and as I cannot tell you on the telephone. . . At 7:30 Betty [the nurse] and I were putting the baby to bed. We closed and bolted all the shutters except on one window where the shutters are warped and won't close. . . At ten Betty went in to the baby, shut the window first, then lit the electric stove, then turned to the bed. It was empty and the sides still up. No blankets taken. . . Evidently they got about one and a half hours' start. You know the rest . . ."

So, 41 years ago, on March 1, 1932, began one of the great dramas of this century, the kidnaping of 20-month-old Charles Lindbergh Jr., only son of the young pilot who had captivated the world by making the first nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic. During this period, Lindbergh and his wife were virtual prisoners in their home in Hopewell, N.J., never answering the prying questions of reporters. In the second volume of her diaries and letters, Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead, soon to be published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Anne Morrow Lindbergh finally tells her version of the tragedy through the daily letters she wrote her mother-in-law.

"How could I have written those letters which I have only recently recovered?"* Mrs. Lindbergh asks in her preface. "How could I have been so self-controlled, so calm, so factual, in the midst of horror and suspense? And, above all, how could I have been so hopeful? Ten weeks of faithfully recorded details have the emotional unreality of hallucination. It was, of course, a nightmare. . . "

The first letter continues with a precise recording of the details of the kidnaping, the ladder at the window, the ransom note. "I was afraid of a lunatic. But the well-made plan knocks that out." Again and again throughout the letters, Mrs. Lindbergh assures her correspondent--and herself--that professional kidnapers would not kill the baby. March 9th: "We rest on our assurances that the baby is safe. . . C. slept late this morning and went out for a walk. Our colds have vanished." March 16th: "They keep assuring me they are certain the baby will be returned. . . we must play a game of patience."

Finality. March 18th: "I realize nothing emotionally except when some other small immediate annoyance sets off the blaze. It is possible to live here [at Hopewell] and realize nothing about the baby. This is so removed from him. Does that sound hard and unfeeling? I feel that I am willing to barter anything for my self-control right now."

On May 12, Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote in her diary: "The baby's body found and identified by skull, hair, teeth, etc., in woods on Hope-well-Mount Rose road. Killed by a blow on head. . . I feel strangely a sense of peace--not peace, but an end to restlessness, a finality, as though I were sleeping in a grave."

In analyzing her own climb out of that year of death and birth (a second son was born in August), Mrs. Lindbergh says: "I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to remain vulnerable."

* Evangeline Lodge Land Lindbergh kept Anne Morrow Lindbergh's letters among her papers. They were discovered after her death in 1954.

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