The Plot Against America

by Philip Roth

The most elaborate story, the most unbelievable story—though not necessarily the least convincing—was first made known to our family by Aunt Evelyn after Rabbi Bengelsdorf’s arrest, her source none other than Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who allegedly confided the details to the rabbi just days before she was removed from the White House against her will and held prisoner in the psychiatric wing of Walter Reed. Mrs. Lindbergh, reported Rabbi Bengelsdorf, traced everything to the 1932 kidnapping of her infant son Charles, secretly plotted and financed, she maintained, by the Nazi Party shortly before Hitler came to power. According to the rabbi’s recapitulation of the First Lady’s story, the baby had been passed on for safekeeping by Bruno Hauptmann to a friend living near him in the Bronx—a fellow German immigrant who in actuality was a Nazi espionage agent—and only hours after having been lifted from the Hopewell, New Jersey, crib and carried down the makeshift ladder in Hauptmann’s arms, Charles Jr. had already been smuggled out of the country and was en route to Germany. The corpse found and identified as the Lindbergh baby ten weeks later was another child, selected by the Nazis to be murdered because of its resemblance to the Lindbergh baby and then, when the body was already decomposing, planted in the woods near the Lindbergh home to ensure Hauptmann’s conviction and execution and to keep secret the true circumstances of the kidnapping from everyone but the Lindberghs the...