NOTHING IN THIS BOOK has been invented. All persons mentioned are real persons; everything they said or did, as reported in the following pages, is based on documentary (or, in one or two instances, on verbal) evidence, which will be found in the Notes at the end of the book.
To the many who have given me willing help I am deeply grateful. Particularly I wish to express my debt and thanks to Mrs. Julia B. Carroll of the Diplomatic Records Branch, National Archives and Records Service, in Washington, for her indispensable assistance in guiding me through the archival maze and for her warmhearted cooperation in digging up evidence in answer to many puzzled queries; to Admiral Sir William James of Churt, Surrey, for his great personal kindness in aiding my Room 40 researches, as well as for his book, The Eyes of the Navy, to which I owe so much; to Commander P. K. Kemp, Admiralty Archivist, Whitehall, for supplying the facts on the cable-cutting voyage of the Telconia; to Mrs. Ruth Hotblack of London, Admiral Hall’s secretary, for her personal reminiscences; to the late Wildon Lloyd of Washington, D.C., for making available to me his researches in the Szek case; to Mr. David C. Mearns, Chief, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, and to Mr. Howard B. Gotlieb, Librarian of Historical Manuscripts, Yale University Library, for help in locating information from the Wilson and Lansing, and the House papers respectively; to Mr. Boyd C. Shafer of the American Historical Association and Mrs. Agnes F. Peterson of the Hoover Institution and Library, Stanford University, for valuable suggestions as to sources; to the Honorable Amos J. Peaslee for information from his records; to Dr. Paul Sweet, Chief, German Documents Division, Department of State; to Miss Anne Orde, Foreign Office Archives, London; to Mr. Walter Fried of New York for clarification of certain obscurities; to Mr. Alfred Romney and Mr. Henry Sachs of New York for supplementing my inadequate German.
For permission to quote from several manuscript collections, I wish to thank Mrs. Chandler P. Anderson for the Chandler P. Anderson Diary; Miss Mabel Choate for Ambassador Choate’s letter; the Honorable Joseph C. Grew for his own papers; Mr. Arthur W. Page for the papers and diary of Ambassador Walter Hines Page; the Honorable William C. Phillips for his own papers; Houghton Library, Harvard University, custodian of the Grew, Page, and Phillips papers; and Yale University Library, custodian of the House and Polk papers.
I would like to thank the New York Society Library for books, open stacks, and newspaper microfilms, and especially for that greatest of boons, an undisturbed place to write.
To the anonymous reviewer of George F. Kennan’s book, Russia Leaves the War, who wrote in the Times Literary Supplement (London), January 4, 1957, this sentence, “We still do not know at any level that really matters, why Wilson took the fateful decision to bring the United States into the First World War,” I would like to say hello.
March, 1958