Philip Roth - The Plot Against America

"My fellow Americans, unlawfulness on the part of America's law enforcement agencies cannot and will not be allowed to prevail. In my husband's name, I ask all National Guard units to disarm and disband and for our guardsmen to return to civilian life. I ask all members of the United States armed forces to leave our cities and to regroup at their home bases under the command of their authorized senior officers. I ask the FBI to release all of those arrested on charges of conspiring to harm my husband and to restore immediately their full rights as citizens. I ask law enforcement authorities throughout the nation to do the same with those who have been detained in local and state jails. There is not a shred of evidence that a single detainee is in any way responsible for whatever befell my husband and his plane on or after Wednesday, October 7, 1942. I ask the New York City police to vacate the illegally occupied premises of government-sequestered newspapers, magazines, and radio stations and that these facilities resume their normal activities as guaranteed under the First Amendment to the Constitution. I ask the Congress of the United States to initiate proceedings to remove from office the current acting president of the United States and to appoint a new president in accordance with the Presidential Succession Act of 1886, which designates the secretary of state as next in line for the presidency should the vice presidency be vacant. The Succession Act of 1886 also states that, under the circumstances described, Congress shall decide whether to call a special presidential election, and so I ask the Congress to do just that and to authorize a presidential election that will coincide with the congressional election scheduled for the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November."

Her morning broadcast is repeated by the First Lady every half hour until, at noon, she announces that, in defiance of the acting president-whom she charges by name with having ordered her illegal abduction and confinement-she is returning to take up residence with her children at the White House. Deliberately appropriating for her peroration echoes of American democracy's most revered text, she concludes, "I will not yield to or be intimidated by the illegal representatives of a seditious administration, and I ask no more of the American people than that they follow my example and refuse to accept or support government conduct that is indefensible. The history of the present administration is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. This government has been deaf to the voice of justice and has extended over us an unwarrantable jurisdiction. Consequently, in defense of those same inalienable rights claimed in July of 1776 by Jefferson of Virginia and Franklin of Pennsylvania and Adams of Massachusetts Bay, and by the authority of the same good people of these United States, and appealing to the same supreme judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, I, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, a native of the state of New Jersey, a resident of the District of Columbia, and the spouse of the thirty-third president of the United States, declare that injurious history of usurpation to be ended. Our enemies' plot has failed, liberty and justice are restored, and those who have violated the Constitution of the United States shall now be addressed by the judicial branch of government, in strict keeping with the law of the land."

"Our Lady of the White House"-as Harold Ickes grudgingly christens Mrs. Lindbergh-returns to the presidential living quarters early that evening, and from there, marshaling the power of her mystique as sorrowing mother of the martyred infant and resolute widow of the vanished god, engineers the speedy dismantling by Congress and the courts of the unconstitutional Wheeler administration, whose criminality, in a mere eight days in office, has far exceeded that of Warren Harding's Republican administration twenty years earlier.

The restoration of orderly democratic procedures initiated by Mrs. Lindbergh culminates two and a half weeks later, on Tuesday, November 3, 1942, in a sweep by the Democrats of the House and the Senate and the landslide victory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt for a third presidential term.

The next month-following the devastating surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese and, four days later, the declaration of war on the United States by Germany and Italy-America enters the global conflict that had begun in Europe some three years earlier with the German invasion of Poland and had since expanded to encompass two-thirds of the world's population. Disgraced by their collusion with the acting president and demoralized by their colossal electoral defeat, the few Republicans remaining in Congress pledge their support to the Democratic president and his fight to the finish against the Axis powers. The House and the Senate approve America's going to war without a dissenting vote in either chamber, and the day following his inauguration, President Roosevelt issues Proclamation No. 2568, "Granting a Pardon to Burton Wheeler." In part it reads:

As a result of certain acts occurring before his removal from the Office of Acting President, Burton K. Wheeler has become liable to possible indictment and trial for offenses against the United States. To spare the country the ordeal of such a criminal prosecution against a former Acting President of the United States and to protect against the disruptive distraction of such a spectacle during a time of war, I, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Burton Wheeler for all offenses against the United States which he, Burton Wheeler, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from October 8, 1942, through October 16, 1942.

As everyone knows, President Lindbergh was not found or heard from again, though stories circulated throughout the war and for a decade afterward, along with the rumors about other prominent missing persons of that turbulent era, like Martin Bormann, Hitler's private secretary, who was thought to have eluded the Allied armies by escaping to Juan Peron's Argentina-but who more likely perished during the last days of Nazi Berlin-and Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat whose distribution of Swedish passports saved some twenty thousand Hungarian Jews from extermination by the Nazis, although he himself disappeared, probably into a Soviet jail, when the Russians occupied Budapest in 1945. Among the dwindling number of Lindbergh conspiracy scholars, reports on clues and sightings have continued to appear in intermittently published newsletters devoted to speculation on the unexplained fate of America's thirty-third president.

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 themselves. Through a Nazi spy stationed as a foreign newspaper correspondent in New York, the couple had been informed early on of Charles's arrival, healthy and unharmed, on German soil and assured that the best of care would be given him by a specially selected team of Nazi doctors, nurses, teachers, and military personnel-care merited by his status as firstborn son of the world's greatest aviator-provided that the Lindberghs cooperated fully with Berlin.