IN LONDON, at four o’clock that afternoon, U.S. ambassador Walter H. Page learned for the first time that the Lusitania had been attacked and sunk, but, in an eerie echo of the Titanic disaster, initial reports also indicated that all passengers and crew had been saved. Since no lives had been lost, there seemed little reason to call off a dinner party the ambassador and his wife had scheduled for that evening to honor President Wilson’s personal emissary, Colonel House.
By the time Page got home at seven o’clock that night, the news from Queenstown had grown darker, but by then it was too late to cancel dinner. The guests arrived and spoke of nothing but the sinking. The telephone rang repeatedly. Each call brought fresh reports from Page’s staff at the embassy, which were delivered to the ambassador on small slips of yellow paper. He read each aloud to his guests. The news grew steadily more dire, until it became clear that this was a disaster of historic proportions. The guests spoke in quiet tones and debated the potential consequences.
Colonel House told the group, “We shall be at war with Germany within a month.”
THAT MORNING, in New York, where the time was far behind that in London, Jack Lawrence, the ship-news reporter for the New York Evening Mail, went to a bar on Whitehall Street in Lower Manhattan frequented by sailors, harbor pilots, and the like and ordered a gin daisy, which the bartender delivered to him in a stone mug. Daisy was a bastardization of “doozy.” Lawrence saw a harbor pilot whom he knew. The pilot, just back from docking a small freighter in Hoboken, New Jersey, suggested they move to the quiet end of the bar, where he told Lawrence something he had overheard that morning.
The pilot explained that he had docked the freighter next to the Vaterland, the big German ocean liner interned for the war. After disembarking, he went to a nearby sidewalk café that was full of the Vaterland’s crewmen, all clearly in high spirits, slapping one another on the back and speaking animated German. A woman tending the bar, who spoke English and German, told the pilot that the Vaterland had just received a message, via wireless, that the Lusitania had been torpedoed off Ireland and had sunk rapidly.
Lawrence set his drink aside and left the bar. The Cunard offices were a short walk away, on State Street. As soon as he walked in, he concluded that the pilot’s report had been false. The bureau operated just as it always had, with typewriters clacking and passengers buying tickets. A clerk who knew Lawrence commented on the weather. The reporter continued past and climbed a stairway to the next floor, where he walked unannounced into the office of Charles Sumner, Cunard’s New York manager. The heavy carpet on Sumner’s floor suppressed the sound of his entry.
Sumner was a tall man who dressed well and always wore a white carnation in his lapel. “My first glimpse of him told me that something was wrong,” Lawrence recalled. “He was slumped over his desk. He looked all caved in.” Lawrence moved closer and saw two telegrams on Sumner’s desk, one in code, the other apparently a decoded copy. Lawrence read it over Sumner’s shoulder.
Sumner looked up. “She’s gone,” he said. It was more gasp than declaration. “They’ve torpedoed the Lusitania.” The message said the ship had gone down in fifteen minutes (though this would later be revised to eighteen). Sumner had no illusions. “I doubt if they saved anybody. What in God’s name am I to do?”
Lawrence agreed to wait one hour before telephoning the news to his editor. Fifteen minutes later, he was on the phone. This news was too big to hold.
THE FIRST REPORT reached President Wilson in Washington at about one o’clock, as he was about to leave for his daily round of golf. The report bore no mention of casualties, but he canceled his game anyway. He waited in the White House, by himself, for more news to arrive. At one point he left to take a drive in the Pierce-Arrow, his tried-and-true way of easing inner tension.
The day had begun clear and warm, but by evening a light rain was falling. Wilson had dinner at home and had just finished when, at 7:55 P.M., he received a cable from Consul Frost in Queenstown warning, for the first time, that it was likely that many of the Lusitania’s passengers had lost their lives.
At this, Wilson left the White House, on his own, telling no one, and took a walk in the rain. “I was pacing the streets to get my mind in hand,” he wrote later, to Edith Galt.