Barbara Tuchman’s The Zimmermann Telegram: secrecy, memory, and history

Abstract

ABSTRACT Barbara Tuchman’s The Zimmermann Telegram, published in 1958, was the first detailed study of a key episode in the story of America’s entry into World War I. Subsequent scholarship demonstrated Tuchman’s analysis was weakened by a veil of misdirection that the British had thrown over the way in which they obtained and decrypted the infamous German diplomatic message, a veil still sufficiently opaque forty years later that she could not peer through it fully. Yet two decades earlier, in the mid-1930 s, American cryptographers William Friedman and Charles Mendelsohn had succeeded in piecing together a more accurate account of one of history’s greatest codebreaking successes. This article examines the sources to which the two gained access, the importance of their unique technical expertise when analyzing them, how the Pentagon in the 1950 s blocked the surviving member of the pair – Friedman – from telling Tuchman what he knew, and how even when accurate information was released from government archives it could fail to shake the erroneous memories of participants and the established interpretations of prominent historians.