Lindbergh Read online

  The main source of information remained the front gate to the Lindbergh property, where troopers allowed journalists to overhear them when they chatted with one another. Many of the eavesdropping correspondents began to suspect they were being intentionally misled or lied to. Others realized a news blackout was being imposed. Most reporters, in a fierce competition for any bit of information on what was already the crime story of the century, kept their grumbling to themselves, but several didn’t. Animosity between the state-police press liaison at Lindy’s estate, Major Schoeffel—Laura Vitray likened him to Napoléon—and several writers fell just short of combat. The media, which had never been overly fond of the trooper boss, Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf, found him to be as uncooperative as ever.

  If Major Schoeffel and the imperious Schwarzkopf were playing the role of bad cops with the media in the wake of the kidnapping, then tall, suave Henry Breckinridge, Lindbergh’s friend and lawyer, was the good cop. Breckinridge, like Schwarzkopf, had reached the estate early in the morning of March 2, and Henry had taken an immediate interest in the reporters. Whether by design or chance, he became a popular visitor with the news folk waiting at the front gate. In Laura Vitray’s estimation, he showed an evident desire to keep reporters happy. “We always looked at Breckinridge as one who had our interests at heart. He seemed to keep in mind that what keeps a story on the front page is something happening.”3

  When Vitray had passed through Hopewell at 1:00 A.M. the morning of March 2, it had been a sleepy little backwater town with nothing open but the hotel. When she returned from the Lindbergh estate many hours later, Hopewell had been transformed into a Forty-second Street that overflowed with motion picture news crews, newspaper reporters, photographers, radio reporters and technicians, motorcycle police, and sightseers. Gebhart’s Hotel, opposite the railroad tracks, was the hub of the activity. Vitray’s paper had taken an office there, and sitting in the hotel’s dinette, reporters were able to compare notes.

  Despite the news blackout, journalists had acquired quite a bit of information that first night and early morning: A ransom message had definitely been left; the Lindberghs only used the Hopewell house on weekends; mud was left on the floor of the nursery between the crib and an open window; ladder marks were found outside in the mud below the window to the nursery; impressions—not shoe or footprints—were also found outside in the mud, which led investigators to conclude that the kidnappers had worn socks or moccasins; a second set of footprints joined the first set near the edge of the woods; all the impressions had been destroyed because of the state police’s failure to control the crowd and preserve the area; a ladder had been discovered sixty feet away from the house. It was also reported that Anne was six months pregnant with her second child.

  One of the first official press releases distributed to reporters had contained a copy of the special diet that Anne Lindbergh wrote out in hopes that the kidnappers who read it would be merciful enough to feed it to her sick baby. In a letter to her mother-in-law the next day, Anne would reveal that even thought the papers were saying the baby was sick, he wasn’t—that the infant was just over a cold and had been dressed extra-warmly that night. Was it true that the infant was not ailing, which meant the story of the illness had been concocted, or was it simply a daughter’s attempt to try to pacify an already-distraught grandmother? The letter also answered a question the press was yet to learn of and raise: why the family dog, Wahgoosh, who usually slept outside the door to the nursery, hadn’t barked during the kidnapping. Anne explained in the letter to the baby’s paternal grandmother that Wahgoosh was in the opposite wing of the house that night and couldn’t have heard anything through the howling winds from such a distance.4

  Laura Vitray didn’t have access to Anne’s correspondence, but she did have a copy of the diet, which was already appearing on front pages around the country:

  One quart of milk during the day.

  Three tablespoons of cooked cereal morning and night.

  Two tablespoons of cooked vegetables once a day.

  One yolk of egg daily.

  One baked potato or rice once a day.

  Two tablespoons of stewed fruit daily.

  Half cup of orange juice on waking.

  Half a cup of prune juice after the afternoon nap.

  14 drops of a medicine called Viosterol during the day.

  Vitray wondered if a simpler diet wouldn’t have been more practical and more to the baby’s interest. “Or did the Lindberghs believe,” she wrote, “that their child was being cared for by persons of intellect with whom their complicated instructions for feeding would register?”5

  Even though Lindbergh had moved the news corps off his property, there seemed to be more media people in the area than ever. They had rented every available house, farm, room, barn, or plot of land in the vicinity of the estate. Portable photo labs and improvised city desks rushed thousands of photographs and tens of thousands of printed words to a flotilla of dispatch cars and motorcycle messengers waiting to express the material by chartered airplanes or race it directly to New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. This wasn’t what the Lone Eagle had in mind.

  On the afternoon of March 2, in a ground-floor bedroom of the Sorrel Hill house, Lindbergh again allowed himself to be interviewed by a small, select delegation of newsmen he considered as friendly and trustworthy as people of that profession could be. His face appeared tense, and his eyes were heavy lidded. He was nervous and shifted his weight from one foot to another.6 Speaking off the record, he would neither affirm nor deny the report that a fifty-thousand-dollar ransom had been demanded by the kidnappers. He pretended not to hear other pointed queries and asked his visitors to be kind enough not to ask him embarrassing questions. He then surprised the delegation by abruptly proposing that the media not only withdraw from around the estate but also from Hopewell. The reason he offered for this was that “the local telephone exchange has been swamped with calls, impairing the function of the officials who are seeking the return of the child. As a substitute it has been arranged with Captain J. J. Lamb of the state police and Governor A. Harry Moore for a trooper to be stationed at the office of the Governor’s secretary in Trenton from where all other information will be given out.”7

  When the group consented, Lindy “smiled with pleasure” and, with a wave of the hand, dismissed them. State troopers were summoned to “speed the parting pressmen to the state road half a mile east.”8 Some of the delegates lingered at the front gate; others rushed to the telegraph office in Hopewell. Regardless of the agreement by the delegation, Hopewell was where most of the media would remain, in force. It was the first major rebuff of a Lindbergh dictate since the kidnapping was announced, but it didn’t affect the ultimate game plan all that much. Henry Breckinridge, Lindbergh’s confidant and aide-de-camp, went right on providing the newsmen with information at the front gate of Sorrel Hill—information he and the Lone Eagle wanted disseminated.

  When Vitray and her peers compared notes on what they had seen and been told, the New Jersey State Police were not spoken of kindly. The bad blood between troopers, who in the main were from small towns or rural areas, and the predominantly big-city journalists had gotten worse. The power to deny the media access to the Lindbergh estate and to critical news lay with the troopers, and they had often used this advantage without tact. The power the media possessed was in their pens, many of which were depicting the state police as being a quasi-military force with little experience in crime detection, as attested to by their inability to find a single fingerprint in the nursery or on the ladder sections or preserve the footprints. Older scribes couldn’t resist mentioning the state-police involvement in perhaps the greatest debacle of modern-day crime fighting, the investigation of the still-unsolved Hall-Mills murders ten years before in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

  A particularly fetching target for the more acrimonious reporters was the thirty-seven-year-old superintendent of the trooper organi
zation, Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf, a ramrod-stiff crew cut fellow with a blond Charlie Chaplinesque mustache who was a West Point graduate and World War I veteran. Schwarzie, as he was known, had once worked as a floorwalker at Bamberger’s Department Store, a fact writers were gleefully making the most of. Their main attack was on his ineptness at directing the investigation.

  Schwarzkopf wasn’t in charge of the investigation. Lindbergh and Henry Breckinridge were. To a degree, so was a man named Donovan.

  6

  Colonels

  Three men who would assist Lindbergh with implementing the strategy regarding the public and press reached Sorrel Hill during the late evening and early morning of March 1 and 2. Like Lindbergh they each held the rank of colonel. The most important of the trio was forty-six-year-old Henry S. Breckinridge, a friend of the Morrow family who had become Lindy’s lawyer and one of his closest friends and confidants.

  Henry was the dashing stripe of fellow that reporters cottoned to, a third-generation Kentuckian whose father was a major general in the army and whose forebears boasted Thomas Jefferson’s attorney general, many a Confederate hero, and a pre-Civil War vice-president of the United States. Born in Chicago, Henry had graduated from Princeton University and the Harvard Law School. In 1913, at the age of twenty-seven, he became assistant secretary of war under President Woodrow Wilson and later resigned in protest over Wilson’s refusal to enlarge the army. During World War I he served as an army intelligence officer and received honors for combat in the Meuse-Argonne offensive. Henry left the military with the rank of lieutenant colonel, moved his law practice to New York City, became a member of the United States Olympic fencing team that competed in the 1920 Olympics at Antwerp, and captained the Olympic team that went to the 1928 Amsterdam games.

  Henry Breckinridge had a way with words and ladies, which made him popular on the social and speaking-engagement circuit and in newspaper columns. His first marriage broke up in 1920, and it took another five years before he found an ideal mate in the wealthy New York City socialite Aida de Acosta, the ex-wife of Oren Root, who was the president of several railroad companies and the nephew of former senator Elihu Root. Both Henry and Aida were gregarious, social, and industrious. Her passion was philanthropic and charitable causes, and over the previous few years she had served as an executive for the American Child Health Association. Politically she leaned toward the Republicans. Henry was a staunch and active conservative Democrat who reveled in factional debates and had gained the reputation of being “an antagonist with words as sharp as a meat-axe.” In the presence of the press, he was sweetness and tact, and reporters respected him.

  Henry harbored political ambitions, and he understood the importance of good public relations. So did Aida, whose position at the Child Health Association was director of publicity and promotion. When they were married, on August 5, 1927, two years after having issued a joint statement saying they didn’t intend to wed, Henry and Aida Breckinridge became one of the first modern media couples. She was forty-three, he forty-one, which gave gossips of that day a little more to cluck about. Three months later Henry crossed party lines and voted for the Republican candidate for president, Herbert Hoover, because of his admiration for the Great Engineer’s performance as secretary of commerce under President Warren G. Harding. In 1929, President Hoover appointed Aida assistant director in charge of public relations to the White House Conference on Child Health and Protection

  Following the celebrated 1927 New York-to-Paris flight, Henry Breckinridge became Charles Lindbergh’s lawyer. They were soon close friends, and in the case of Lindy’s marriage to Anne, Henry helped orchestrate the plan that kept the wedding and beginning of the honeymoon a secret from the press. After the ceremony at the Morrow home, when the bride and groom drove past the reporters who camped outside the gate without rousing suspicions, then descended the hill, rounded a corner, and vanished, it was Henry who helped with the vanishing. The newlyweds turned into a back street, where Henry was waiting for them with Lindy’s Franklin. Now in 1932, if Lindbergh was planning yet another hoax, Henry Breckinridge would still be his prime ally.

  In the early hours of March 2, 1932, Henry again came to the aid of the Lindberghs, this time bringing his wife. The Breckinridges, who had spent that weekend at Sorrel Hill, returned and took charge of an area with which they had done so well in the past: public relations. Aida manned the solitary phone in the Lindbergh house, screened calls, and became a spokesperson for Anne. Henry acted as Lindy’s chief of staff and, among other things, handled the press.

  There is a likelihood that Henry never left Sorrel Hill over that weekend of February 27, as he and Aida claimed. They had been the Lindbergh’s weekend guests who ostensibly went back to New York on Sunday night. It is just as possible that Henry arrived on Saturday to help advise Lindbergh over the death of the Eaglet that same day. A lingering question remains regarding Henry’s conversation with the Waldorf-Astoria banquet sponsors trying to locate Lindbergh on March 1. With eighteen hundred guests waiting for dinner, many of them close friends of both Lindy and Henry, why didn’t Breckinridge just give them the unlisted number at Sorrel Hill? Could it be that the Lindbergh scenario was about to begin?

  Another colonel was to make an appearance at Sorrel Hill, a hero who in military circles was nearly as well known as Sergeant Alvin York: William J. Donovan.

  Colonel William Joseph Donovan had limited time. A Republican, he was planning to run in New York State’s upcoming gubernatorial election, particularly if the incumbent governor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, became the Democrats’ presidential candidate. Whether or not Donovan actually went to Sorrel Hill is debatable, but no less an authority than the BBC’s Ludovic Kennedy places him at the Lindbergh estate early in the morning of March 2.1

  A winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor and personal friend of such New York gangster overlords as Owney Madden, Bill Donovan had served as a special assistant attorney general of the United States. If he didn’t personally possess the expertise to advise Lindbergh and Breckinridge in the fine points of staging a bogus kidnapping, he knew who did, assuming he was asked.

  Born in Buffalo, New York, to working-class second-generation Irish-Catholic parents, Will grew up in the First Ward, a rough-and-tumble waterfront section of the city known as the Irish Quarter. Endowed with awesome aggressiveness, natural good looks, a fetching personality and wonderful singing voice, and an innate sense of how the social system operated, he worked his way up through parochial schools, and in 1903, to better his chances of being admitted to a top-flight law school, transferred to Columbia University, where he dropped Will in favor of Bill and won an award for public speaking. His prowess as quarterback on the Lions football team led to him being dubbed Wild Bill.

  Upon receiving his law degree, Donovan returned to Buffalo and was taken on by a small legal firm, where his ability to speed-read amazed co-workers. In 1911, he opened his own office with the scion of one of Buffalo’s leading families. Less than a year later they merged their practice with the town’s most prestigious law firm. A strong oarsman, Bill switched from the Celtic Rowing Club, where his father had once rowed, to the aristocratic Buffalo Canoe Club, for which he became captain of the crew as he had been with the Celtics. In 1912, he helped recruit Canoe Club members and other patrician young men for an elite National Guard cavalry unit called Troop One. Bill, who had never been on a horse in his life, was voted the unit’s first captain. He embraced the GOP, the preferred party of the privileged class, and gave many rousing political speeches. His long-time flirtation with acting stood him in good stead when he became a member of the Studio Club, where well-to-do Buffalonians put on amateur theatricals for charity. It was here that he met Ruth Rumsey, whose late father had been the city’s first and wealthiest citizen—and leading Presbyterian. Their wedding took place on July 15, 1914, in the Rumsey mansion and was performed by the Donovan family priest. Bill was thirty-one.

  By 1916, no finer
National Guard cavalry unit existed than that of the elite young riders of Troop One under the command of Galloping Bill Donovan. They were ordered to the Mexican border for combat with the marauding forces of Pancho Villa. Pancho never appeared. When Troop One was not allowed to participate as a unit in World War I, Bill accepted command of a battalion known as the Fighting Sixty-ninth. Major Donovan led the Sixty-ninth in some of the fiercest battles of World War I, was wounded three times, and became one of two American fighting men to win his country’s three highest military honors: the Congressional Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, and the Distinguished Service Medal, not to mention France’s Legion of Honor and Croix de Guerre and Italy’s Croci di Guerre.

  Following the war Donovan returned to Buffalo and the practice of law. During 1920, his firm landed a major client, J. P. Morgan, one of whose partners was Dwight Morrow. In 1922, Bill was appointed U.S. district attorney for the Western District of New York and energetically set about enforcing the Volsted Act, even though he wasn’t a Prohibitionist. That same year he accepted the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor of New York and was soundly defeated. Between 1925 and 1929, Donovan served as assistant attorney general of the United States and gained a reputation as being a tough, trust-busting prosecutor. One of the earliest enemies he made in Washington was J. Edgar Hoover, who in 1924 was insisting on being named director of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation.2 Bill was against it. Their mutual dislike would last a lifetime. He was far friendlier with another Hoover: Herbert.

  Bill Donovan was one of the few New York Republicans to support Herbert Hoover, and during the campaign he became a top adviser to the candidate. After the election he expected to be named attorney general despite the fact that the Ku Klux Klan and other anti-Catholic factions were lobbying against him. When he was passed over in favor of the solicitor general of the United States, William D. Mitchell, a Democrat who had also supported Hoover, Bill made no secret of his bitterness, turned down the president-elect’s offer to become either governor general of the Phillipines or secretary of war, and returned to private life.