A Fictional Interview with Anne Morrow Lindbergh at the Hunterdon County Courthouse
TRAVEL IN TIME WITH DAN | Flemington, New Jersey — January 1935
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The following is a fictional historical interview. Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906–2001) was an author, aviator, and the wife of Charles Lindbergh, whose infant son Charles Jr. was kidnapped and killed in 1932. In January 1935, she attended the Hunterdon County Courthouse for the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann. Anne was intensely private about her grief during this period and did not publish her diaries and letters from these years until 1973, in a book titled Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead. The reflections attributed to her here draw on the themes she actually wrote about… the numbness of grief, the difficulty of the “long uphill climb” after tragedy, and writing as a way of staying conscious of her own life… but the specific words, and the composure to speak this openly to a stranger in a courthouse hallway in 1935, are imagined for this piece. It is unlikely the real Anne Morrow Lindbergh would have spoken this candidly to anyone at the time.
SETTING: A quiet corridor outside the courtroom, during a recess. Reporters mill at the far end of the hall, kept back by a court officer. Anne sits with a small notebook closed in her lap.
Dan: Mrs. Lindbergh, thank you for a moment of your time. I have to imagine sitting through this trial, hearing it all discussed again in public, is its own kind of ordeal.
Anne: It is not the moment itself that requires the most courage, I have come to learn. It is the long climb back afterward… the ordinary Tuesday two years later, sitting in a hallway like this one, hearing it all laid out again as evidence. The first shock passes. What people don’t tell you is that grief has its own long geography, and you keep discovering new rooms in it.
Dan: You’ve kept notebooks and letters through all of this. Has writing been part of how you’ve managed?
Anne: I don’t know that “managed” is the right word… I’m not sure anyone manages grief so much as they carry it differently on different days. But yes, I write. I have found that if I do not put a thing into words, it simply sits in me undigested, repeating itself. Writing forces me to look directly at what happened rather than only feeling the weight of it sideways, glancing off it. I must write it all out, at any cost. It is the only method I have found for turning something that happened to me into something I can actually hold and examine.
Dan: Do you write for anyone besides yourself?
Anne: At this point, only myself, and I’m honestly not certain that will always be true. There is a strange privacy in grief that makes you want to hide it, and an equally strange pull toward wanting it witnessed, so that the child who caused it is not reduced to a headline. I don’t know yet which pull will win. I only know that the writing itself is where I am most myself right now… more than in any room with reporters in it, certainly more than in this hallway.
Dan: The country has watched your family’s tragedy as a kind of public spectacle. How do you hold onto anything private in the middle of that?
Anne: You learn which parts of yourself the public can have and which parts you keep. They can have the facts of the case. They can have my presence in this courtroom. They cannot have what I actually think in the middle of the night, or what I write in a notebook that no one else reads. I suppose that is its own small act of authorship… deciding what gets told and on whose terms, even when you can’t control anything else about how the story is being told around you.
Dan: If you could say one thing to whoever reads about this years from now, what would it be?
Anne: That suffering by itself does not teach anyone anything. It is only suffering plus the willingness to mourn honestly, to stay open instead of hardening, that ever leads anywhere worth going. I don’t say that because I have arrived somewhere yet. I say it because writing it down is the only way I know to go looking.
Dan: Thank you, Mrs. Lindbergh. I won’t take more of your time before you’re called back in.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh would go on to become one of the twentieth century’s most widely read authors, publishing memoirs, essays, and the enduring bestseller Gift from the Sea, and would not share the full record of these years publicly until Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead appeared in 1973… more than four decades after the trial in this courthouse. The leadership lesson from Flemington today is not about strength in the moment of crisis, which is a story already well told about this case. It is about what a person does with tragedy afterward, in the long, unglamorous stretch of years with no cameras present. Anne Morrow Lindbergh did not simply endure her loss… she eventually turned it into a voice, and that voice went on to help countless readers name their own griefs. Leadership, and legacy are sometimes built less in the crisis itself than in what a person chooses to make of it once the cameras have gone home.
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