The Zimmermann Telegram

First published in 1958, this history reconstructs the German foreign ministry's 1917 telegram offering Mexico an alliance and the return of lost territory if the United States entered the First World War against Germany. Tuchman follows the drafting in Berlin, transmission through Washington and to Mexico City, interception and decryption by British naval intelligence, and the diplomatic problem of using the document without revealing how it was read. She then tracks publication in the American press and the effect on a still-divided Congress and public. The book is a narrative of one coded dispatch and its political consequences, not a general history of the war.

Bound in pages of monochrome photos. Quarter bound in dark brown buckram with pictorial covers. Dark brown slipcase. Light brown endpapers.