On February 13th 1935 Harold Nicolson was again staying with Betty Morrow, Dwight Morrow’s widow, and Anne and Charles Lindbergh at Englewood, New Jersey. This is what he wrote to Vita the following day.
Dinner yesterday evening was rather strained. You see, that morning Judge Trenchard had summed up in the Hauptmann trial. He did it very well and his statement was one of which even an English judge need not have been ashamed. Lindbergh tells me that it reads more impartial than it sounded. The jury had been in consultation for five hours when we sat down to dinner and a verdict was expected at any moment. They knew that the first news would come over the wireless, so that there were two wirelesses turned on – one in the pantry next to the dining-room and one in the drawing-room. Thus there were jazz and jokes while we had dinner, and one ear was strained the whole time for the announcer from the courthouse. Lindbergh had a terrible cold which made it worse.
Then after dinner we went into the library and the wireless was on in the drawing-room next door. They were all rather jumpy. Mrs Morrow, with her unfailing tact, brought out a lot of photographs and we had a family council as to what illustrations to choose for the book. Then Dick Scandrett (Morrow’s nephew) came to see me. It was about 10.45. The Lindbergh’s and Morgans with Mrs Morrow left us alone. We discussed Dwight for about twenty minutes. Suddenly Betty put her head round the huge Coromandel screen. She looked very white. “Hauptmann,” she said, “has been condemned to death without mercy.”
We went into the drawing-room. The wireless had been turned on to the scene outside the court-house. One could hear the almost diabolical yelling of the crowd. They were all sitting round – Miss Morgan with embroidery, Anne looking very white and still. “You have now heard,” broke in the voice of the announcer, “the verdict in the most famous trial in all history. Bruno Hauptmann now stands guilty of the foulest … “ “Turn that off, Charles, turn that off.” Then we went into the pantry and had ginger-beer. Charles sat there on the kitchen dresser looking very pink about the nose. “I don’t know,” he said to me, “whether you have followed the case very carefully. There is no doubt at all that Hauptmann did the thing. My one dread all these years has been that they would get hold of someone as a victim about whom I wasn’t sure. I am sure about this – quite sure. It is this way … “
And then, quite quietly, while we all sat round the pantry, he went through the case, point by point. It seemed to relieve all of them. He did it very quietly, very simply. He pretended to address his remarks to me only. But I could see he was really trying to ease the agonised tension through which Betty and Anne had passed. It was very well done. It made one feel that there was no personal desire for vengeance or justification; there was the solemn process of law inexorably and impersonally punishing a culprit.
Poor Anne – she looked so white and horrified. The yells of the crowd were really terrifying. “That,” said Lindbergh, “was a lynching crowd.”
He tells me that Hauptmann was a magnificent-looking man. Splendidly built. But that his eyes were like the eyes of a wild boar. Mean, shifty, small and cruel.