The Zimmermann Telegram

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  The next day, Friday, February 23, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs formally presented the Zimmermann telegram to the American Ambassador. Balfour, on the authority of one who knew him, was “unusually excited”—a rare occasion. “Lofty” was a word people often used of him, as they did of Wilson. Like Wilson, he had a certain aloofness from the arena—Wilson because he felt superior to it, Balfour because he was casual and detached. As a thinker Balfour was Wilson’s match, with a passion for philosophy in place of Wilson’s passion for reform. Wilson was an American Gladstone who practiced politics on moral principles. Balfour was an English Jefferson who practiced politics as a gentleman’s occupation and applied himself equally to science, metaphysics, aesthetics, lawn tennis, early sports cars, and social celebrity. Philosophers read him on logic and doubt; sportsmen read him on golf; ladies found him “the most delightful of men”; Churchill found him “the most perfect of men”; and no one who met him failed to respond to his charm, to be warmed by his sympathy, to be dazzled by his conversation, to be relaxed by his ease, if occasionally irked by what a French friend called his “seraphic equanimity.”

  From the beginning of the war, first at the Admiralty, later as Foreign Secretary, Balfour had felt as deeply as Page the fundamental bond between England and America and the fundamental issue of the war as one in which “I cannot doubt that America is no less concerned than the British Empire.” The question as to when America would come to acknowledge this herself had become a matter of urgency for Britain. From his place in the War Cabinet, Balfour knew that England could not afford the luxury, which most Englishmen would have preferred, of fighting the war without the Americans. Since the day he first learned of the Zimmermann telegram, he had been waiting tensely—or as tensely as his character permitted—for the moment when it could be disclosed. His anticipation of its effect upon the United States was particularly keen because his first duty upon taking over the Foreign Office two months before had been to compose England’s own reply to accompany the joint Allied note answering Wilson’s peace offer. In it he had made plain his conviction of the error and futility of Wilson’s proposal to treat with the enemy.

  So long as Germany remains the Germany of aggressive aims and barbarous methods, he had said, so long as her aims and methods have not fallen in disrepute among her own peoples, no state could feel secure. No peace treaty made with such a Germany could prevent her from once again setting out to dominate the world. “Those who think,” he wrote, with an eye on the White House, “that for this disease international treaties and international laws may provide a cure … have ill learned the lessons so clearly taught by recent history.” Taking direct issue with Wilson’s thesis that only a peace between equals could endure, he notified America that “the people of this country do not believe that peace can be durable unless it is based on the success of the Allies.”

  Untouched, unpersuaded, Wilson gave the document no notice. Now, in the Zimmermann telegram, Balfour had another document to send to America, which this time the President could not ignore. Balfour would not have been human if he had not felt an extra zest in the opportunity. The moment when he handed Page the sheet of paper containing the decoded message was, he later confessed, “the most dramatic in all my life.”

  Page took the paper back to the embassy and sat down to draft a covering message explaining to Wilson how the telegram had been obtained. Because of the difficulty of saying just enough, but not too much, the task took him all night. Hardly able to wait till it was finished, he alerted the State Department at 2 A.M. on the twenty-fourth with a cable saying, “In about three hours I shall send a telegram of great importance to the President and Secretary of State.”

  Finally satisfied with his covering note, he telegraphed it, together with the Zimmermann text, at 1 P.M. on February 24. The explanation he gave the President was somewhat ingenuous and not entirely in conformity with the facts, either because Hall had not given him all the facts or because he had prevailed upon Page to disguise them. Wilson was told that the British government was so greatly exercised by Zimmermann’s proposal that “they have lost no time in communicating it to me to transmit to you … in view of the threatened invasion of United States territory.” Warning Wilson that what he was about to tell him was strictly confidential, Page said that the British government possessed the German code used in the message and had made it their business to secure Bernstorff’s telegrams to Mexico which had been sent back to London and deciphered there. This, he said, accounted for the delay since January 19, the date the message had reached Eckhardt. The British government earnestly requested Wilson to keep the source of his information profoundly secret but they put, added Page with marvelous gravity, “no prohibition on the publication of Zimmermann’s telegram itself.” He suggested to Wilson that “you can probably obtain a copy of the text relayed by Bernstorff from the cable office in Washington.” The British copy, he said, had not been obtained in Washington but “bought in Mexico.”

  Exhausted by the effort and emotion, Page felt more depressed than elated when his task was done and the message on its way to Washington. Though it seemed to him that such a bomb had seldom before been thrown, he was not sure that even this would budge Wilson. “This would precipitate a war between any two nations,” he wrote that night in his diary; “Heaven knows what effect it will have in Washington.”

  Eleven

  The Telegram in Washington

  AT NINE O’CLOCK SATURDAY MORNING, February 24, the State Department received Page’s first telegram, saying a message of “great importance” would follow in about three hours. What could it mean? Could the British be thinking of negotiating after all? At the end of three hours nothing further had come in. At the end of the afternoon, still nothing. The suspense was tantalizing. In the absence of Lansing, who was away for a three-day weekend, Acting Secretary Frank L. Polk felt it keenly. At last, at eight-thirty in the evening, the code room sent word that a long telegram from Page had been received. While it was being put into clear, an Assistant Secretary hovered at the door, snatched the finished copy, and hurried upstairs to deliver it to Polk. With astonishment the Acting Secretary read the revelation, and with anger, as he read on, learned that the German plot upon American territory had been launched five weeks ago while its authors were talking peace to Wilson. This could not wait for Lansing—nor for morning. Wilson must be informed at once. Polk used the private wire to ask the President to expect him and, taking Page’s telegram with him, walked across the street to the White House.

  The only record we have of what Wilson thought or said when he first saw the Zimmermann telegram is Polk’s report that he showed “much indignation.” Whatever his feelings about Page, Wilson seems not to have questioned the telegram’s authenticity for a moment. He was so aroused that, without even taking time to think, he wanted to release it right away. Polk suggested waiting until Lansing could be consulted upon his return, and on second thought the President agreed as he began to realize the potentialities of the telegram. It had come at a moment of peculiar delicacy, for, in fact, that weekend the President was facing an urgent decision.

  Ever since the German declaration of unrestricted U-boat war, American ships, unwilling to sail, had been clogging the ports. Cargoes of wheat, cotton, and all manner of supplies were piling up, and unless authority was given to put Navy gunners on merchant ships with orders to shoot on sight, the sacred right to the high seas would go by default, with serious economic consequences. The administration and the public of the Atlantic seaboard states were in a furor over the armed-ship issue. A National Pacifist Congress of five hundred people was meeting at the Biltmore in New York. The Association of German-American Pastors had named the coming Sunday a day of prayer to destroy “all evil counsel and base machinations which are at work to plunge our nation into war.” Ship owners were demanding arms. Preparedness societies were marching. The Roosevelt cohorts were railing at “the general paralysis of Wilsonism.” These
groups were of one mind, but the pacifists were divided, the majority against arming the ships but some in favor of it as a deterrent to war.

  Wilson’s position was so far his own secret. On Friday, the day before the telegram came, the Cabinet erupted in a stormy meeting during which some of the members, who denounced German methods, were accused by the President of “trying to push us into war.” That afternoon the Senate Republicans held a caucus from which the pro-war group, led by Senator Lodge, and the pacifist faction, led by Senator La Follette, emerged in unprecedented unanimity. Congress was due to adjourn automatically at noon on March 4, leaving the President free for nine months to follow his own counsel without benefit of Congressional advice. None of the Senators knew what the President planned to do, but all were agreed they were not going to let him do it alone. The Lodge group was afraid he would find a way to back out of war, and the La Follette group was afraid he would drag the country into war, so they had agreed at the caucus to prolong debate on a pending revenue bill in order to force an extra session.

  When the Senators filed back into the chamber, reporters were astonished to see Republicans who had not spoken to La Follette in years consult him on the floor, offer amendments at his nod, and demand delaying roll calls. The word “filibuster!” hissed through the halls and reached the White House that evening. These were only slowdown tactics so far, but by morning all Washington knew that if an armed-ship bill was introduced in Congress the pacifist faction was planning a true filibuster to defeat it.

  Yet Wilson now made up his mind to ask Congress for the bill, not as a step toward war but as a warning to the Germans, which he hoped might deter them from the “overt act.” He decided upon it as a last buttress of America’s crumbling neutrality. He had the executive right to arm the ships on his own authority, but the use of arms was a step of awful portent for which he wanted Congress’s seal of approval. There was nothing he wanted less than an extra session, for he would have preferred to remain “alone and unbothered,” as one of his Cabinet privately remarked. He knew the filibuster forces were gathering, but when he smelled opposition his will became steely, and in the Zimmermann telegram he believed he had a means to dissolve a filibuster. It is not the least irony of this history clogged with ironies that Wilson’s wish to force the Armed Ship Bill through Congress, as a last resort against war, led him to publish the gravest incitement to war in the history of America before Pearl Harbor.

  Wilson saw the telegram Saturday night; he spent Sunday composing a speech on the Armed Ship Bill, which he proposed to deliver to Congress in person on Monday. Polk spent Sunday trying to get Bernstorff’s telegram forwarding the Zimmermann message to Eckhardt, out of the files of Western Union. He was blocked by adamant refusal. Standing upon a federal law protecting the contents of telegrams, the company would not let its files be searched. Balked by the lower echelons, Polk set about bringing government pressure on Western Union’s president, Newcomb Carlton. By this time it was Monday, and the President was due in Congress at one o’clock. In the morning he had sent a copy of the Zimmermann telegram to Colonel House with the cryptic comment that it was “astounding.” He said nothing of what he intended to do about it nor asked for any opinion from House (unnecessary, because House always gave an opinion anyway, which he would immediately enter in his diary so that in a later entry he could impress upon posterity how the President took such and such an action “as I suggested”). Wilson let the telegram lie over Monday, probably less because he was waiting for Lansing, who was not due back until next day, than because he wished to test the mood of Congress before making it public.

  There is no evidence that he ever thought of withholding it. Indeed, when Polk that same day informed Ambassador Fletcher in Mexico of Zimmermann’s proposal, he said the American government did not believe that the telegram could properly be withheld from the public. Expecting that its publication would cause “great consternation” and “intense feeling,” he instructed Fletcher to get a statement from President Carranza of Mexico’s “disinterestedness.” Washington suspected that Carranza might well be interested in a German alliance, but was trying to give him an opportunity to declare himself out. Carranza did not take it. A telegram sent that very day, February 26, by Eckhardt to Zimmermann indicates why. “Most Secret,” it was headed. “Beginning negotiations … (indecipherable) … Could we provide munitions? Request reply.”

  At one o’clock the President, “looking well and trim in a cutaway of fashionable cut,” took his stand on the Speaker’s rostrum to ask a joint session of Congress for arms to protect American ships and people “in their legitimate and peaceful pursuits on the seas.” While he was talking, the news tickers suddenly began clacking a bulletin announcing the sinking of a small Cunard liner, the Laconia, which had been torpedoed twice without warning, with the loss of two American lives. The news passed verbally through the chamber as the President was still speaking. It hardened both parties in their already assumed positions: the pacifists against letting American ships sail to the same fate, and the pro-Allied group in favor of arming the ships to show they would not be frightened off the seas by German schrecklichkeit.

  On Tuesday morning Lansing returned and was shown Zimmermann’s “amazing message” by Assistant Secretary Phillips as soon as he reached his office. Here was the very blunder he had been hoping those blundering Germans would make. From Polk he learned that the Bernstorff copy had still not been obtained, but Western Union was weakening and early results were expected. At eleven Lansing went to the White House to see the President. He went armed with something Polk had found for him in the State Department’s own files—evidence of “an exceptionally long message of some one thousand groups” that had come through for Bernstorff over the State Department cable on January 17. It was the proof of Zimmermann’s sardonic twist of humor in using America’s good offices for his plot against America. The President, like Queen Victoria, was not amused.

  “Good Lord! Good Lord!” he exclaimed, outraged to the point of intemperate language when confronted by the full effrontery of the Germans. Conscious of his own share in having unneutrally lent the cable privilege to Germany—and of the embarrassing fact that the British must know about it—he felt peculiarly sensitive on the point. And when Wilson was touched personally, as by Madero’s murder or Huerta’s defiance, he could become very angry.

  Lansing, whom Daniels called “mousy” and Page, in one of his more disgusted moments, disparaged as a “library lawyer,” was in truth a correct and careful soul whose contribution to the flood of postwar memoirs revealed little of his feelings at dramatic moments. But a surge of I-told-you-so satisfaction must have warmed even that proper bosom when he informed Wilson how Zimmermann had sent the telegram. For once he was in the position of having to hold back the President. He cautioned against giving out the telegram officially lest it look like an attempt to influence Congress, and advised waiting at least until Polk should secure the confirmatory copy from Western Union. Angry as he was, Wilson could see the force of this argument and agreed to wait. But so deeply did he feel the German insult that he actually asked Page to thank Balfour for information of “such inestimable value” and to convey his very great appreciation of “so marked an act of friendliness on the part of the British government.” Neutrality had begun to slip.

  Lansing returned to the State Department, a happier man than he had been in months, and there found Polk in proud possession of Bernstorff’s telegram from the files of Western Union. From Mexico an answer came through from Ambassador Fletcher, saying Carranza was absent from the capital but that Foreign Minister Candido Aguilar had denied any knowledge of Zimmermann’s proposal. In fact Aguilar knew all about it, for Eckhardt had begun negotiations with him in Carranza’s absence. And Aguilar had already taken it up with the Japanese. This was reported to Zimmermann by Eckhardt in a telegram dated March 2, in which he said that, a visit to Carranza at Querétaro being inopportune, he had sounded out the Foreign Mini
ster on February 20. “He willingly took the matter into consideration and thereupon had a conversation which lasted an hour and a half with the Japanese Minister, the substance of which is unknown to me. He subsequently went away to see the President, where he was staying at the time.” This was, of course, unknown in Washington.

  Late Tuesday night it became known that La Follette had rounded up ten Senators to filibuster against the Armed Ship Bill. Wilson had precipitated a fight, and now he had got it. Next morning, Wednesday, he decided that the Zimmermann telegram must be made public and called Lansing to tell him so. He said he wanted a conference with two other members of the Cabinet, McAdoo and Burleson, to discuss the best method of releasing it. Later he called back to say they were up at the Hill and could not be reached, another way of saying he preferred to act alone, for it can hardly be supposed a Presidential summons could not reach two Cabinet members in the Senate visitors’ gallery.