The Zimmermann Telegram

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  On December 9, a month after the election, while Wilson was still hesitating, Bernstorff received a warning from the Foreign Office: “We cannot wait any longer.” He tried to convey the urgency but was handicapped because the President trusted “neither his accuracy nor his sincerity” and considered him an “astute and unscrupulous man.” House, on the other hand, admired Bernstorff as the only envoy in Washington with a sense of proportion. Lansing detested him. He suspected Bernstorff of planting rumors against him in the newspapers in an effort to have him supplanted. Washington diplomatic circles, on the whole, were not characterized by mutual high regard. Jean Jules Jusserand, the polished and scholarly French Ambassador, was eyed warily because he had been an intimate member of Theodore Roosevelt’s tennis cabinet. Boris Bakmetieff, the Russian Ambassador, was regarded as “a reactionary of the worst type and a little less than mad,” while Spring-Rice of Britain was considered a super-sensitive individual too emotional for his job who would be much better off recalled. Wilson paid no attention to any of them, any more than he did to his own ambassadors. He preferred to rely for his information upon Colonel House, and that individual was not always as well-informed as he thought he was.

  Bernstorff could not get Wilson to hurry and he could not get his own government to wait. With Jagow gone and Bethmann weakening fast, his influence at home had waned. And just at this moment the celebrated Bathing Beauty episode depleted it further.

  During a weekend in the Adirondacks at the home of a lady who often entertained him, Bernstorff had been photographed in a bathing suit with his arms intimately encircling two ladies similarly outfitted. One of his fellow guests obtained a copy of the snapshot and showed it at a subsequent weekend party on Long Island where a member of the group was a British agent. After dinner the agent felt the picture being slipped surreptitiously into his hand. Taking the hint, he sent it off by chauffeur to New York, where it was copied, and the original was returned before daybreak. Shortly afterward an enlarged copy was delivered to the Russian Ambassador, Count Bakmetieff, who “seemed very happy about it.” He displayed it, elegantly framed, upon his mantelpiece where all the diplomatic corps of Washington could see it and whence it soon made its way into the newspapers.

  The effect was to undermine Bernstorff’s influence in Germany at a crucial time. The Kaiser, who was only amused when his Chief of Military Cabinet, General Count von Hülsen-Haeseler, dressed as a ballerina in short tulle skirt and rose wreath, danced for his entertainment,* was deeply offended in his delicate sense of decorum by Bernstorff’s peccadillo. The U-boat warriors, who hated Bernstorff because of his efforts to prevent the use of their cherished weapon, seized upon it to show that his gallantries somehow proved the unreliability of his political judgments.

  Even though they had succeeded, to their own satisfaction, in discounting Bernstorff’s advice, Germany’s rulers were not yet ready to risk the submarine without a demonstration to the German public and the world at large that they had no other recourse. They wanted to hear no more of that long-awaited peace offer from Mr. Wilson, who, they were now convinced, was deliberately procrastinating in the interests of the Allies. By now it was clear enough to them that no peace he could arrange would be acceptable to them. The only peace that the Allies would accept—a peace of renunciation and indemnity by the Germans—would mean the end of the Hohenzollerns and the governing class. Conquest was necessary to them—they had to make someone else pay for the war, or go bankrupt. A compromise peace bringing no aggrandizement to Germany would require enormous taxes after the war to pay for years of fighting that had proven profitless. It would mean revolution. “The German people wish no peace of renunciation,” stormed Ludendorff when the faltering Austrians were urging peace, “and I do not intend to end being pelted by stones. The dynasty would never survive such a peace.” The longer the war lasted, the clearer it became to the court and its cohorts, the land-owning Junkers, the industrialists, and the military, that only a war ending in gains offered any hope of their survival in power. This might have been clear to Wilson had he been a little less concerned with his own motives and a little more concerned with the nature of the regime he was dealing with. Zimmermann had once stated the case quite frankly to Colonel House when he said that if peace parleys were begun “on any terms that had a chance of acceptance,” it would mean the overthrow of the government and the Kaiser. In such a peace, an “American” peace, the German rulers had no interest. All they had wanted of Mr. Wilson was for him to make the Allies stop fighting, not to arbitrate issues. For the sake of world opinion, as well as to eliminate Mr. Wilson as mediator, they now determined upon a dramatic gesture of their own.

  The Reichstag was suddenly convened for December 12, no one knew why. Berlin buzzed with speculation. On the twelfth, all the neutral diplomats were summoned to the Chancellor’s office, to which they were admitted one by one. As Grew, still American chargé d’affaires in Gerard’s absence, waited in the anteroom, the Swiss Minister on his way out whispered, “Friedens Antrag”—“Peace offer”—and the Danish Minister, following after, muttered, “If it fails, look out for our ships.”

  At the same hour Secretary Zimmermann was holding an off-the-record press conference in which he remarked jovially that, as Germany was “threatened by a peace move by Mr. Wilson, we would fix it so this person would not have his finger in the pie.”

  The startling news that the Central Powers were proposing peace was somewhat dampened by their carelessness in omitting to mention terms. The offer was, of course, designed to fail, as its phraseology made certain. It opened with a harangue upon Germany’s “invincible power” and closed with the threat that if it was rejected Germany would carry on the war to a victorious conclusion but would “solemnly decline all responsibility therefore before Humanity and History.” Explaining the offer to his troops, the Kaiser tactfully added that he was proposing to negotiate with the enemy “in the conviction that we are the absolute conquerors.” He couldn’t help the German swagger from showing through the dove’s clothing.

  As expected, Allied scorn poured down. Wilson, robbed of his thunder, did not know whether to be more annoyed or encouraged by the German move, but one thing was certain: there was no use waiting any longer for the psychologically right moment to make his own peace proposal; it was now or not at all.

  On December 18, a week before Christmas, announcing himself “the friend of all nations engaged in the present struggle,” he asked them for a declaration of their war aims from which a settlement of issues could proceed and, ultimately, peace be guaranteed through “the intelligent organization of the common interest of mankind.” The document was Wilson at his best, eloquent in sincerity, incontrovertible in logic, and welcomed by none to whom it was addressed. One phrase, equating the objectives of both sides as “virtually the same,” caused King George to weep and Georges Clemenceau to remark that the war aim of France was victory.

  Nevertheless it was out at last. The German reply arrived first and proved to be a rebuff. Still Wilson refused to give up until the Allies’ answer too should come through. They might slam the door shut or they might offer a toehold for negotiation, but until they replied he felt bound to keep the opportunity for parley open. No one else in any of the governments retained a shred of hope in the possibility of bringing the belligerents together on any terms. Only Bernstorff was still trying. He had abandoned the luxury of hope but not the eleventh-hour fight to keep his country from the suicide’s plunge. To him as to Wilson the vital thing was to keep the talk going with Berlin, in the belief that as long as some groping toward peace was in progress Germany would not release the submarine. Pressing ahead in that effort, the President and the Ambassador used a channel that was to prove a trap for war. Its architect was Colonel House.

  On the morning of December 27, 1916, Bernstorff visited House to discuss a new offer from the President: if Germany would submit her basic terms to him confidentially, he would limit himself to bringing the
enemies together around a peace table and would not insist on taking part himself except for final shaping of a league of nations. House had talked over the idea with Wilson on the telephone that morning. When Bernstorff came in he was anxious to carry it out but told House he did not think his government would be willing to submit confidential terms through the State Department “because there were so many leaks there.” This was Bernstorff’s way of saying that he did not want to go through Lansing, who, he knew, had no sympathy with the President’s peace scheme. If some means could be arranged, he said, of permitting his government to communicate directly with Wilson through House, there would be greater opportunity for a full and frank discussion. House agreed. Privately he had no faith in the peace plan, which, like Lansing, he regarded as a disservice to the Allies, but he reasoned, as he told the President, that “the more we talk with Germany just now the less danger there will be of a break because of submarine activity.”

  The method House had in mind for helping Bernstorff had already been in use before with the President’s consent. Depending on the President’s answer, House told the Ambassador, he would let him know whether or not to go ahead. The next day, December 28, the President’s sixtieth birthday, on receiving a code message from Wilson, House informed Bernstorff that the answer was yes.

  What he had arranged and what the President authorized was permission for the German government to send messages in its own cipher between Bernstorff and Berlin, in both directions, over the State Department cable. It was an American version of the Swedish Roundabout, but quicker, for the Swedish route took a week for message and reply. Accepted neutral practice would have required a belligerent’s messages to be submitted in clear for transmission in American code. In fact House, with the President’s consent, committed the American government to the irregular, not to say simple-minded, arrangement of transmitting a belligerent’s message in a code not known to itself.

  Secretary Lansing, who had to be informed because his department would be required to play the role of post office, was shocked to the cell of his legal soul, even to rebellion, and each time the method was used he had to be personally ordered by the President, who was conscious only of the rectitude of his goal and careless of his methods, to comply. Wilson was perhaps less sensitive to a neutral’s duties than to a neutral’s rights. He considered himself justified in ignoring the obligations of neutrality because his mind was fixed on stopping the war. Aware that this object was noble, he did not imagine that anyone in Germany might make ignoble use of the channel he had opened up for them. Lansing’s objections to the procedure as unneutral he brushed aside as petty and legalistic. Besides, he had exacted Bernstorff’s promise to confine the messages strictly to the issue of peace terms. Sharing the general impression of Bernstorff’s new chief, Zimmermann, as a great liberal, honest broker, and friend of America, he apparently assumed that Bernstorff’s pledge would cover Zimmermann’s replies. In this impression he was strengthened by Colonel House, who assured him that the German government was at this moment “completely in the hands of the liberals.” To err may be human, but to be that deep in error was dangerous.

  House had conceived the method as far back as September 1914. In an early effort toward negotiating a settlement, he had then proposed to invite the German and English Ambassadors, Bernstorff and Spring-Rice, to an intimate dinner meeting at his home and, on his own authority and according to his own diary, had promised Bernstorff, if anything came of the conversation, “permission from our government for him to use code messages direct to his government.” Nothing did come of it because Spring-Rice refused to meet Bernstorff, but the offer was characteristic of the colonel’s illusion that he could manipulate history by an exchange of personal civilities. He was an aficionado of backstairs diplomacy with front-office people. Twice before the war he had toured the European capitals to propose disarmament and promote a relaxing of tension among the powers. The centuries of rivalry, the plethora of issues, the ancient bitternesses intricately rooted in Balkan wars, Moroccan crises, Pan-Slavism, naval expansion, reinsurance treaties, balance of power, dual alliances, and triple ententes, in the Black Hand of Serbia and in the black-draped statues of Alsace and Lorraine on the Place de la Concorde—all this Colonel House proposed to oil away by intimate chats with statesmen in front of fireplaces. Though regarded as a shrewd man of the world, a complement of Wilson the idealist, he was, if anything, more unrealistic about Europe than the President. On July 3, 1914, a week after the assassination at Sarajevo, House, writing from Europe to Wilson of his encouraging talks with sovereigns and ministers, concluded, “So you see things are moving in the right direction as rapidly as we could hope.”

  Such misjudgments left him unembarrassed. He lived as in a moving picture of himself reflecting a trim, panama-hatted figure flitting suavely from smoke-filled room to White House sanctum, equally at home lunching with the Kaiser in what Gerard called “the ugliest room in Europe” or dining with King George or cosily closeted with Sir Edward Grey—and always, daily, in personal touch with the most important man in the world, whom he unfailingly addressed as “Dear Governor,” an affectation designed to show his intimacy as one of the original Wilson-before-Baltimore men. He looked, acted, and fancied the role of gray eminence, indeed in character and performance fitted the role so neatly as to deserve to become its modern prototype. He mistook fraternization with rulers for influence upon them and quite overestimated the amount he exerted. He supposed because Sir Edward Grey gave up hours to chatting privily with him that he was carrying his point with England’s Foreign Secretary and never understood that he was being stalled. Why the President listened to and depended upon this self-conceived, if naïve, Machiavelli for so long is an enigma. But the lonely eminence of power requires a confidant, and House played the role expertly, telling Wilson he would be able to do the “most important world’s work within sight” because “God has given you the power to see things as they are,” telling him that each speech would “live” as if his every utterance were a Gettysburg Address, purveying worldly advice and undertaking as confidential emissary all those unofficial contacts the President could not make and had no taste for.

  Superficially it would seem that Wilson, who dealt in principles and disliked details, was perfectly seconded by such a man as House, who loved the minutiae of deals and personalities. But this was not so. If Wilson had too much contempt for men, House had too little respect for principles. He became so immersed in his wire-pulling, in playing one personality against another, in keeping everyone conciliated and all wheels turning that this became an end in itself. The goal of negotiation became lost in the procedure.*

  House’s maneuver of giving the Germans access to the State Department cable grew out of his penchant for personal diplomacy. During a mission to Europe in 1915, he had arranged to have reports in cipher from the embassies cabled directly to him, bypassing the State Department. The arrangement, begun on his own behalf, was merely extended, when the moment seemed to call for it, to Bernstorff. The privilege was first given to the German Ambassador in midsummer 1915, during the Lusitania crisis, when war was gaping between the United States and Germany. According to Bernstorff’s version in his memoirs, “From that day forward, the American government agreed to allow me to send dispatches in cipher to my government in Berlin through the State Department and the American embassy,” but this may be an overstatement of what was probably an intermittent arrangement.

  The reverse process made equal use of American good offices; telegrams for Bernstorff were handed in by the German Foreign Office to the American embassy and forwarded by it, without knowledge of their contents, to the State Department, which in turn delivered them, however reluctantly, to Bernstorff. Grew, two months before the peace offer, mentions a long telegram in code sent by the Germans “through us.” And Bethmann-Hollweg in postwar testimony confirmed that the American government “permitted us to make use of their embassy here for the purpose of corresponden
ce in cipher.” Zimmermann on the same occasion added that the privilege was used sparingly for fear of attracting British attention. That was a wasted precaution, for British attention, needless to say, once caught by the appearance of the German code on the American cable, was focused upon the exercise with fascinated interest. Although entitled to protest against a neutral’s transmission of belligerent messages in code, the British forbore, preferring to eavesdrop upon the enemy rather than to stand upon their rights.

  Before December 1916, Colonel House’s diary is judiciously silent on the whole procedure. Each night, with a careful eye upon posterity, he dictated a diary of the day’s doings to his secretary, corrected her copy, and returned it for retyping. Omission of the cable privilege given to the Germans could not have been accidental. But he did not reckon with another diarist who was giving posterity equally careful attention. Each day in Washington, Secretary Lansing was recording neat, almost hourly entries in his desk diary every time his door closed upon a visitor. Twice in 1916, once in January and once in May, appears the notation, “W.W.S. [initials of the code clerk] with cipher message for the German Ambassador,” and on the second occasion he adds his private rebellion: “Directed him to refuse to deliver it.” These entries are the evidence that defeated House’s careful silence.

  Pretending to disapprove, House once recorded a story going around Washington:

  “Do you know the new spelling of Lansing?”

  “No. What is it?”

  “H-O-U-S-E.”

  Methodically recording the appearances of W.W.S., Secretary Lansing unconsciously had his revenge.

  But at the time, House prevailed, for there was validity in the joke about the spelling of the Secretary of State’s name. During those last days of the peace effort, while history’s bloodiest year was dying out and no one knew what the new year or even the next morning would bring, House insisted that the Germans be allowed uncensored use of the American cable. Each time a message came through, Lansing balked, until the colonel became really quite exasperated. On December 30, Bernstorff reported to House that Lansing had refused to transmit his cipher message. Some days later Lansing refused again, provoking Bernstorff to lament that he was really at a loss to comply with the President’s peace suggestions “if the State Department takes this attitude.” Lansing, he complained, would never accept his messages routinely but only when each carried instructions from the President. Lansing had no way of knowing what might be the gist of all this German loquacity; he was simply objecting on principle and because he privately believed it was in America’s interest to join the Allies in a war for democracy against autocracy rather than make a peace that would leave the German Empire unbeaten.