The Zimmermann Telegram – Barbara Tuchman, 1958 ★★★

A Man, a Plan, a Telegram

The plan seemed perfect in its simplicity: Take out a prospective enemy in the middle of a global war without moving a single soldier or ship. What could go wrong?

For Imperial Germany in 1916, quite a lot. For the prospective enemy was the United States, the conflict World War I, and the plan used would prove just the lever to move a peace-loving American president to join in the carnage as an ally of Germany’s foes.

Seldom has a single piece of paper had the effect of the 155 code blocs written on what became known as the Zimmermann Telegram.

“In itself the Zimmermann telegram was only a pebble on the long road of history,” writes popular historian Barbara Tuchman. “But a pebble can kill a Goliath, and this one killed the American illusion that we could go about our business happily separate from other nations.”

Published four years before Tuchman’s breakthrough The Guns Of August yet reading like a sequel, The Zimmermann Telegram presents something of a divergent view. Whereas Guns Of August is about a mindless rush to war, Zimmermann Telegram presents an occasion when, in the face of clear German aggression, war was a necessity.

Author Barbara Tuchman, in her dust-jacket portrait from a later edition of The Zimmermann Telegram. Photo by The New York Times.

The Zimmermann Telegram is also a much shorter work, about a third of the length of Guns Of August. But otherwise, Tuchman’s approach to the material is very much the same: wise, sardonic, with a zest for detail and the telling line. If you like Guns Of August, you will enjoy this, too.

Just not as much.

As Tuchman explains, the telegram served as the World War I equivalent of Pearl Harbor, an overture by Imperial Germany intercepted by England offering to fund Mexico if they were to attack the United States. Germany wanted to prevent U. S. munitions, and ultimately troops if German unrestricted submarine warfare on American shipping had the expected effect, from refreshing the Allied cause in Europe.

The man behind the telegram was Arthur Zimmermann, a German diplomat perceived as a liberal among hardliners. His appointment to a top post in the German Foreign Office in late 1916 was seen by many, including U. S. President Woodrow Wilson, as auguring a peaceful resolution of World War I.

The man behind the Telegram, Arthur Zimmermann. As Tuchman notes, Zimmermann followed up his message to Mexico with another urging the same overture be made even if the U. S. did not declare war over unrestricted submarine warfare. But this was not revealed until long after the war's end.

As Tuchman notes, they could not have been more wrong:

Perhaps Zimmermann’s initial reluctance [to his appointment] was due to his being an outsider, a self-made man in the aristocratic ranks of the Foreign Office. This very attribute predisposed every American, bred to the automatic assumption that to be self-made is simultaneously to be virtuous, in his favor. In Imperial Germany it merely had the effect, as so often happens to the self-made in a society of exaggerated class distinctions, of making Zimmermann more Hohenzollern than the Kaiser.

Passages like that one reveal both Tuchman’s artful writing style and the sharp hatchet she bore towards Germans. It came up frequently in Guns Of August and even more often here.

To be fair, this is a story of German overreach and mule-headedness. Even if you believe Germany was in a fight for its survival and had no choice but practice a brutal form of realpolitik to emerge victorious, elements of this story lend themselves naturally to an anti-German view.

Before the Zimmermann Telegram, German intelligence was responsible for several acts of sabotage in the U. S., like bombing this train depot in Black Tom, New Jersey, where shipments of munitions and other supplies were collected for transport to New York Harbor. Image from https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2016/winter/zimmermann-telegram

To transmit their offer to Mexico, a country not reachable by telegram, Zimmermann employed a transmission line provided by the United States itself, meant for peace negotiations and ending the war:

The idiotic Yankees, as [German diplomat Franz von] Papen called them, had given it to him to use for peace, but that was simply more of Mr. Wilson’s humbug. Germany was not to be fooled by such cant. If Wilson chose to hand them a key it would serve him justly – and struck Zimmermann as entirely fitting – to use the Yankee key to rob the Yankee roost.

The Germans were also guilty here of extreme overconfidence, not imagining their code could be broken. In fact, Tuchman’s book opens with an account of the telegram reaching a British decoding office, Room 40, its message soon deciphered. British intelligence was so well-equipped by then, Tuchman notes, that they had German radio traffic decoded even before the German recipients had read it.

But even after the telegram’s contents spilled out over American front pages, Germans did not believe their code was cracked.

The Zimmermann Telegram, before its decryption...

...and after. Images from (left) https://www.historyguy.com/zimmerman_telegram.htm and (right) https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/zimmermann

Tuchman labels this a failing of the German “character.” “It did not permit them even to consider the possibility that a code devised by Germans could be solved by lesser minds,” she writes.

One thing Tuchman can’t accuse the Germans of in this tale is dishonesty. Once the telegram was exposed, Zimmermann chose not to claim it a forgery, as many peace advocates and German sympathizers in the U. S. alleged. “I cannot deny it,” he told a reporter. “It is true.”

Did the Zimmermann Telegram move the needle irrevocably in the direction of U. S. involvement in World War I? Tuchman says so. German provocations before it had involved the sinking of U. S. merchant shipping, or of passenger ships like the British Lusitania where 128 Americans died. That had happened in May 1915, however; almost two years later, the United States was still neutral.

East Coast Americans were sympathetic to the Allies. In other parts of the country, there was strong resistance to taking a side. That was until the Zimmermann Telegram exposed Germany’s plan to return Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona to Mexican control, as well as bring Japan to the doorstep of the American West Coast, Baja California:

“Zimmermann’s admission [that the telegram was genuine] shattered the indifference with which three-quarters of the United States had regarded the war until that moment,” Tuchman writes.

When the Scheisse hit the fan: One of the many front pages announcing news of the Zimmermann Telegram's explosive contents, on March 2, 1917. Image from pininterest.com. 

Tuchman doesn’t so much nail down this point as repeat it. There was a delay of several weeks between the telegram’s exposure and the U. S. declaration of war, and that declaration did cite other factors, including increased ship sinkings that followed the German declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare. The book ends abruptly with a quick summary of America entering the war.

What Tuchman does better is fill out her canvas with some vivid characterizations:

British intelligence chief William Reginald “Blinker” Hall has a distinct facial tic that goes into overdrive while pondering how to reveal the Zimmermann Telegram without exposing his operation.

Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, “a swaggering rooster who would far more readily shoot a man than shake hands with him,” interrupts an interview to casually shoot one of his more drunken soldiers.

Count von Bernstorff, a smooth operator in diplomacy and in the bedroom, is atypically amiable for a German. “The secret of his success, it was said, was his willingness to be bored,” Tuchman writes.

Most vivid of all is her depiction of Wilson, a stubborn idealist who couldn’t get out of his own way. She writes:

Had all the world been a school and Wilson its principal, he would have been the greatest statesman in history. But the world’s governments and peoples were not children obliged to obey him.

President Woodrow Wilson. In Tuchman's telling, his passion for reform and democracy was only exceeded by his self-righteousness. “I am going to teach the Latin American republics to elect good men!” she quotes him saying. Image from https://fee.org/articles/woodrow-wilson-made-the-world-unsafe-for-democracy/.

Wilson, like the German Kaiser Wilhelm, had a habit of tuning out when hearing ideas he did not like. When outlining peace-plan ideas to his ambassador to Germany, the president was direct: “I don’t want you merely to support my view; I want you to agree with it.”

Wilson’s ambassador to the U. K., Walter Hines Page, wrote of Wilson in his diary: “He engaged in what he called ‘thought’ and the air currents of the world never ventilated his mind.”

Wilson’s attempt to unseat a Mexican leader he deemed insufficiently democratic led to much of the friction the Zimmermann Telegram was designed to capitalize upon. If one wonders how such a man of peace could have gotten his country involved in the worst war to date an ocean away, Tuchman’s book suggests an answer.

“He does not mean to go to war but I think he is in the grip of events,” is how Henry Cabot Lodge, a senator from Massachusetts, described Wilson’s situation.

Tuchman’s The Guns Of August tells a complex story of many moving parts in an engaging, comprehensible fashion. Her Zimmermann Telegram tells a simpler story less well, but it offers the same distinctive voice and colorful narrative.

If you don’t mind her open antipathy to the Germans, which doesn’t really interfere with anything as the facts of the case do put the Kaiser and his government in a bad light, this offers readers a solid, short history of a footnote moment in world history with resonances echoing across time to the present day.