WOMEN: Mrs. Lindbergh Speaks Out

Anne Morrow Lindbergh endured quietly Charles Augustus Lindbergh’s fame, the tragedy of a kidnapping, her husband’s descent from his pedestal of public divinity, and the publication of two successful books (North to the Orient, Listen! the Wind).

Then ex-Hero Lindbergh took to radio-rating. He preached isolation, advised the U. S. to let Europe stew in its own poisonous juice. Protests stormed: even Mrs. Dwight Morrow, his mother-in-law, joined in them. Anne Lindbergh kept her own counsel.

Last week Anne Lindbergh made feature-story headlines. At a Manhattan hospital she bore her fourth child (see p. 67). Next day a Manhattan publisher produced her third book, The Wave of the Future (Harcourt, Brace; $1). The book did not weigh nearly so much as the baby, but it was more coherent. In it she said, gently and more gracefully, as a good wife often does, some of the things that her husband had been loudly and awkwardly trying to say.

“What thinking person,” she asked, “can survey the world tragedies today without crying out in torture of mind, ‘But why has this come? And what should one do about it?’ ”

Like many a contemporary, Anne Lindbergh saw World War II as a revolution. In her terms the “Forces of the Past” were England, France and the U. S., the “Forces of the Future” were Naziism, Fascism, Communism. “Somehow,” she wrote, “the leaders in Germany, Italy and Russia have discovered how to use new social and economic forces.. . . They have felt the wave of the future and they have leapt upon it. The evils we deplore in these systems are not in themselves the future; they are scum on the wave of the future.” To her it was futile for the U. S. to get into “a hopeless ‘crusade’ to save civilization.” The task of the U. S. was peaceful reformation at home.

Mrs. Morrow approved her daughter’s daughter but not her daughter’s thesis. She hastened from the hospital to address a meeting on the need for flying fortresses, torpedo boats, all aid for England.