The Zimmermann Telegram

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  While the President was conferring with himself, the State Department wired the text obtained from Western Union to the American embassy in London for confirmation. Now word came down from the Capitol that Senator William J. Stone of Mississippi, Democratic Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and therefore the administration’s captain in charge of the Armed Ship Bill, had come out against the bill and declined to lead it through Congress. Next in seniority was Senator Gil-bert M. Hitchcock of Nebraska, who was so uniformly pacifist as to be classed as pro-German. He had in fact voted against the bill in committee.

  At 4 P.M. Wilson telephoned Lansing to say he wanted the telegram released for the morning papers and suggested that Senator Hitchcock be invited to come down and look it over first. Twenty minutes later Hitchcock arrived at the Department and listened while Lansing read him the intercepted German message. It was at this moment, about four-thirty in the afternoon of February 28, that the chemistry of the Zimmermann telegram began acting upon the American public in the person of the Senator from Nebraska. It shocked Senator Hitchcock as it was to shock the whole body of neutralist, pacifist, and pro-German sentiment into a sudden realization of German hostility to America. He confessed that it was a “dastardly plot” and would certainly cause a tremendous sensation. In answer as to whether it was authentic, Lansing replied he would vouch for it and asked Hitchcock to inform Senator Stone of its contents. Hitchcock then consented to undertake leadership of the Armed Ship Bill, which, like the President, he hoped might help to keep the country out of war.

  The next immediate problem was to release the telegram to the press as the President had directed, but the question was, who was to sponsor it? Lansing was still anxious to keep it from appearing too obviously a move to influence Congress, so it was decided to release the news unofficially through the Associated Press. At six that evening E. M. Hood of the A.P. was called to Lansing’s home, where he was given a paraphrase of the text and a briefing of the circumstances, and pledged to secrecy as to where and how he had obtained the greatest scoop of the war.

  The story broke in eight-column headlines in the morning papers of Thursday, March 1. The Times proclaimed:

  GERMANY SEEKS ALLIANCE AGAINST U.S.

  ASKS JAPAN AND MEXICO TO JOIN HER;

  FULL TEXT OF HER PROPOSAL MADE PUBLIC

  The World offered a symphony of subheads that extended halfway down the page:

  MEXICO AND JAPAN ASKED BY GERMANY

  TO ATTACK U.S. IF IT ENTERED THE WAR;

  BERNSTORFF A LEADING FIGURE IN PLOT

  President Had Note of January 19 in Which Foreign Secretary Zimmermann Told of Coming Ruthlessness and Sought Alliance with Mexico; Texas, Arizona and New Mexico to Be Reconquered. Carranza to Convey German Proposals to Japan—Bernstorff, as Chief of Diplomats Concerned, Believed to Have Directed Conspiracy—Was to Have Kept U.S. Neutral if Possible—This Plot the Culmination of German Secret Activity and Discovery of It Is Believed to Explain Peculiar Policy of Mexican Government in Seeking to Promote Embargoes. Public Will Be Amazed if All Evidence of Plots Is Made Public by Government.

  “Profound sensation,” Lansing noted, and it was nationwide. Not even Admiral Hall could have asked for more. The public might have been even more angered if it had been told by what channel Zimmermann transmitted his instructions, but that embarrassing fact never leaked out. One reporter got near enough to write that the telegram had been sent by a secret means which the government now knows, “but does not care to disclose”—an understandable reluctance.

  The A.P.’s story had given no hint how the telegram had been obtained. It began simply, “The A.P. is enabled to reveal …,” gave the facts of Zimmermann’s proposed alliance, stated that a copy was in the possession of the government, and went on to recall the history of German machinations in Mexico. It contained only one error, but one that was to cause a lot of trouble. In briefing the A.P. correspondent, Lansing inherited the difficulty that hampered Page and Hall before him—of saying enough to convince but not so much as to give away the arch-secret of the deciphered code. Either through a misunderstanding or in the hurry of putting together the story, Hood wrote that the Zimmermann telegram had been in the President’s hands since he broke off relations with Germany, that is since February 3, when, in fact, he had not learned about it until February 24.

  When Congressmen came to the Capitol on Thursday morning, newspapers screaming the German plot were in every hand. Congress “is stirred to its depths today,” reported the New York Sun. The House erupted in patriotic oratory and passed the Armed Ship Bill, 403 to 13. Not so the Senate. Debate on the bill having been postponed by a maneuver, the Senators plunged into a rhetorical orgy on the authenticity of the Zimmermann telegram. It was precipitated by one among them whose steel-trap mind instantly perceived, on reading his morning paper, that Wilson and war were delivered into his hands. This was Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, the friend and ally of Theodore Roosevelt, spokesman of preparedness and pro-Allied sentiment, despiser of Wilson, whose unrelenting goad he had been for two years.

  “As soon as I saw it,” Lodge confided to Roosevelt, “I felt it would arouse the country more than anything else that has happened.” If the President could be got to say it was authentic, at one stroke he would be “tied up.” He would have given the country a national reason to be enraged at Germany and be unable to dissociate himself from the result. He had provided, gloated Lodge, the very instrument that would be of “almost unlimited use in forcing the situation.”

  Immediately upon reaching the Senate, Lodge introduced a resolution asking for a statement by the President on the Zimmermann telegram. Then he sat back and watched the play unfold exactly as he could have wished. All the pacifist Senators promptly voiced the most sinister suspicions as to the origins of the telegram, and the more they argued the more, of course, they were forcing upon Wilson the necessity of publicly vouching for it. How had it been obtained? from whom? when? Senator Stone wanted to know. He fastened upon the one error in the A.P. story and attached the worst motives to Wilson’s supposed suppression of the telegram for four weeks and his release of it at this particular time. He darkly suggested that an interested belligerent government was behind the affair and proposed an amendment demanding to know if this in fact was the case.

  “Did this information come from London? Was it given to us by that government? … That is all I am asking at this time,” he said. His voice and manner clearly stated that, if the answer was yes, the whole Zimmermann story must be regarded as nothing but a British trick.

  Other Senators were more impressed by the German threat. “The public mind has been inflamed by this publication like a bolt,” declared Senator Thomas of Colorado, his wrath getting the better of his grammar, “and we share that excited condition.” How it was obtained is irrelevant, said Senator Williams of Mississippi; the only question should be, does the telegram exist and is it authentic? Up jumped Irish Senator James A. O’Gorman from New York to renew the charge that it could all be traced to perfidious Albion. He was supported by another Democrat, Senator Benjamin R. Tillman of Arkansas, who said the telegram was a lie. Senator Ellison Smith of Michigan said it was “a forgery and a sham born in the brain of a scoundrel and a tool.” There was no lack of senior statesmen to thus rush in who were soon to wish they hadn’t.

  While the uproar continued, down at the State Department the sophisticated gentlemen of the press, determined not to be taken in, were hurling questions at Secretary Lansing. He told them firmly that the American government was satisfied that the telegram was authentic, and hinted that their insistence on further revelations might endanger the life of the agent responsible. He left the impression that a daring spy had got hold of the telegram in Mexico or Washington or possibly even in Germany. The reporters went off happily to a carnival of cloak-and-dagger tales that burgeoned in the press for weeks, until every newspaper had its favorite story of the provenance of the telegram and readers
followed earnestly the adventures of reporters who galloped off in all directions to track down clues.

  On its first day in public, however, the telegram was getting some bad notices. When Lansing, after the press receded, learned of the Lodge Resolution, he realized that some further official statement could not be avoided. He sent off a message, hurriedly drafted in pencil by Polk, to Page in London, saying it was most urgent, in view of attempts to discredit the telegram, that Page or someone else in the embassy personally decipher the Western Union text in order “to strengthen our position and enable us to state we had secured the Zimmermann note from our own people.” Then he went to work to draw up a report for the President to sign, in readiness for the Lodge Resolution.

  It was now afternoon, and up on the Hill horrid suspicions were still flooding the Senate air. It was unfortunate that the President’s warmest defender should have been the not very savory Senator Albert Fall of New Mexico, the oil magnate of future Teapot Dome fame, who made an impassioned speech declaring he had never heard of such insinuations against a President since the impeachment proceedings against Andrew Johnson. Actually Senator Fall loathed Wilson—because of his Mexican policy—but as his one function as Senator was to bring about intervention in Mexico, he perforce welcomed the Zimmermann telegram toward that end. After him Senator Oscar Underwood of Alabama defended Zimmermann on the ground that he was merely instructing his envoy in Mexico what to do in case the United States should declare war on Germany, a perfectly proper procedure taken with no “unfriendly intention” (!) toward the United States.

  Much was to be made of this point by pacifists in America as well as by Zimmermann himself and others in Germany. The argument could have been exploded at once by publication of Zimmermann’s follow-up telegram of February 5 instructing Eckhardt not to wait for war with America but to contract the alliance “even now,” which proved that Zimmermann had not made his proposal contingent upon America’s entering the war but had asked for action while she was still neutral. But the “even now” telegram was, for some reason that is even now unclear, never made public during the war. Possibly Hall forbade mention of it because it had been sent direct to Eckhardt and its publication would have given the Germans a valuable clue in locating the point where access to their secret had been had. Possibly the American government—if it knew about the “even now” message at all—refrained from using it from a desire to give Carranza leeway to repudiate the very idea of joining Germany against the United States. If so, the hope was vain. Carranza never obliged. Whatever the reason for withholding Zimmermann’s second telegram, the fact is, its existence did not come to light until the postwar Investigating Committee of the German Republic published it in 1920.

  At six in the evening the Lodge Resolution, amended so as to ask the President for all information he could safely give instead of, as originally, asking for his opinion of the telegram’s authenticity, was voted unanimously. The change did not matter to Lodge, who was satisfied with anything that would publicly tie the President to the telegram. With adjournment only three days off, the Senate was working late, and before that night was over they were to have the President’s answer.

  Whether Wilson did not see the implications of the Lodge Resolution, or whether he was so angry at Zimmermann’s perfidy and at the opposition to his Armed Ship Bill that he did not care, is a question no one can answer. Whether Lansing understood the implications is another matter. Probably he did. He had his German blunder at last and he certainly had no wish to let the President or the country escape its effect. He did not wait for confirmation from Page and he certainly hurried the President along. He tells in his memoirs how he had to leave the Department before the reply to Lodge was completed, how he arranged to have a clerk bring it to him at the Italian embassy, where he was dining that night, how he left the table to sign it, how he arranged by telephone to have the clerk passed by the White House guards to bring it without loss of time to Wilson. For once Wilson did not retire to think. He read over the report, which stated that the government was in possession of evidence establishing the telegram as authentic, that it had been “procured by this Government during the present week,” and that no further information could be disclosed. He signed it and sent it off to the Senate, where it was received at 8 P.M. Lodge’s trap had snapped shut.

  “We have tied the German note to Wilson,” reported Lodge triumphantly to Roosevelt. “This, I think, is a great thing. One would think the note would make the whole country demand war. … We have got Wilson in a position where he cannot deny it.”

  And Lodge, his greatest enemy, added the fairest statement made then or since on Wilson’s terrible dilemma: “He does not mean to go to war but I think he is in the grip of events.”

  Next day, Friday, March 2, was Cabinet day. The Cabinet, which had not been consulted at any point in the affair up to this time, now discussed in anxiety what steps to take if Zimmermann disavowed the telegram. Stunned and incredulous at the publication of the message, Germany had up to now maintained a blanket of silence behind which frantic questioning was going on.

  In America Wilson’s statement had satisfied many minds but by no means all. It had had no effect whatever on Senators Stone and O’Gorman and the rest of the eleven willful men who, at that moment, led by La Follette and George W. Norris of Nebraska, were well into their filibuster against the Armed Ship Bill, with only forty-five hours to go. They were to succeed and provoke Wilson’s most memorable remark. Other powerful voices were equally unimpressed. Hearst instructed his editors, after the President verified the telegram, to treat it as “in all probability a fake and forgery.” George Sylvester Viereck, editor of The Fatherland, leader of pro-German sentiment and secretly a German agent, unhesitatingly pronounced it a “brazen forgery planted by British agents,” a “preposterous document, obviously faked.”

  The telegram: the Western Union copy forwarded by Bernstorff to Eckhardt (The National Archives)

  The following pages reproduce the decode of the telegram in the copy made by Edward Bell of the American Embassy and forwarded to the State Department by Ambassador Page on March 2. (The National Archives)

  The purloined snapshot: Count von Bernstorff on vacation (from The Sketch, October 25, 1916)

  Nor was it only German sympathizers and pacifists who were disinclined to believe it. On March 2 the distinguished gentlemen of the Round Table Dining Club, a gathering of the intellectual cream skimmed off the social and professional elite of New York, were discussing the Zimmermann sensation between oysters and port at the Knickerbocker Club. Elihu Root was present, and Joseph H. Choate, former Ambassador to England, former Attorney General George W. Wickersham, Nicholas Murray Butler, and assorted bishops, bankers, editors, and lawyers. Members were allowed to bring guests but only such as other members “would be glad to greet.” A guest that evening was Captain Guy Gaunt. Obviously this was no gathering of pro-Germans or neutralists. Yet, Gaunt reported to Admiral Hall, “they all went for me.” Choate, as warm an Anglophile as any in America, “openly said that the Zimmermann note was a forgery and was practically unanimously supported by the whole bunch.” When the Round Table Club wanted proofs, Captain Gaunt looked grave and asked if they really wanted details “where men’s lives were at stake.” When they asked him point-blank if he knew anything about it, he expressed surprise that “they should cross-examine me instead of accepting the word of their President.” That silenced them.

  When such a group as the Round Table was incredulous, it was no wonder the Cabinet was worried about the problem that had haunted the telegram from the beginning—how to authenticate it. Lansing had received a telegram from Page saying they were at work decoding the Western Union text and their results would follow soon. Edward Bell was indeed working without pause, with the help of de Grey and Room 40’s code book, and his decryptment, confirming the original text, came in at the end of the day. Even the expectation of this, however, was no comfort, for while it would silen
ce any remaining doubts in the government, supposing any to exist, it could not be used publicly without compromising Room 40. An unsolicited and unexpected confirmation arrived from the indefatigable Agent Cobb in El Paso, who wired that General Villa had recently left Parral with three thousand men, proclaiming that he was going “to help the Germans whip the United States and obtain Texas, Arizona, and California back for Mexico.” The coincidence of the wording with that of the Zimmermann telegram was too striking to be missed and indicated that the Germans must have made a similar proposition to Villa or that he had learned of it somehow.

  But this did not help the Cabinet in their problem of how to deal with a German denial, which they expected at any minute. Already the Mexicans, the Japanese, and Eckhardt had denied the telegram. Foreign Minister Aguilar lied flatly: “Up to today [March 2] the Mexican Government has not received from the Imperial German Government any proposition of alliance.” The Japanese chargé d’affaires, who had recently spent an hour and a half discussing it with Aguilar, expressed his utter ignorance of the matter. Eckhardt’s denial lacked a little something of the others’ firmness, perhaps because he was nervously wondering where the betrayal had taken place. “If you must say something you may say the German Minister knows nothing about all this,” he told newspapermen. Then he thought it might be a good idea to implicate Bernstorff. “You must go to Washington for your information,” he added.

  If, on top of these denials, Zimmermann challenged the United States to prove the authenticity of the telegram, the American government, restricted by its pledge of secrecy to Great Britain, would be unable to do it. The Cabinet could only agree to assert emphatically that they possessed conclusive evidence, and unhappily disperse.