Thomas Fleming - The Illusion Of Victory: Americans In World War I

It was time.

At 8:20 P.M. on Monday, April 2, 1917, a grim-faced Woodrow Wilson strode down the main corridor of the White House onto the North Portico. There a black Pierce-Arrow limousine waited in the rain, its motor purring. With the president was his secretary, Joseph Tumulty, his doctor, Admiral Cary T. Grayson, and an army aide, Colonel William J. Harts. The presidents second wife, Edith Galt Wilson, his oldest daughter, Margaret, and his closest friend and adviser, diminutive Colonel Edward M. House (his title was an honorary one, bestowed by a Texas governor), had departed in another car at 8:10. Their joint destination was the U.S. Capitol, where Wilson was to give the most important speech of his life.

It had been a long, irritating day of clouds and rain, waiting for the 65th Congress to convene to receive a communication concerning grave matters of national policy from the president. Every American who read a newspaper assumed Wilsons communication would contain a request that Congress declare a state of war existed between the United States and Germany. It was a stunning reversal of course for a president who had been reelected five months before on the slogan He kept us out of war.

Soon after his victory at the polls, Wilson had made an electrifying speech, calling on the warring European powers to let him mediate a peace without victory. He had been ferociously denounced by former president Theodore Roosevelt and other leading Republicans as something close to a traitor. The warring nations had all rejected Wilsons entreaty, and Germany had added injury to this insult by announcing that on February 1, 1917, it would resume unrestricted submarine warfare in barred zones around the British Isles and the ports of its enemies in the Mediterranean.

Wilson had broken diplomatic relations with Germany, sending its suave ambassador, Count Johann von Bernstorff, back to Berlin on February 3. On March 1, alienation between the two nations had deepened drastically when Wilson authorized the State Department to release a telegram from the German foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann, to the government of Mexico, proposing an alliance if war should break out between Germany and the United States. The message had been intercepted by British cryptanalysts and discreetly leaked to the American government.

Most diplomats would have dismissed the dispatch as a forgery. But the Germans, imbued with the righteousness of their cause and profoundly disenchanted with the Americans for selling their enemies hundreds of millions of dollars worth of high explosives and weaponry, admitted every word was true, down to the proposal that a successful war would restore Mexicos lost territories of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.