Quotes from Jason Fagone

Ford convinced the American public to believe in gasoline cars. And then Ford became Ford, and America became America.

It's not quite true that history is written by the winners. It's written by the best publicists on the winning team.

his mother collapsed at the news that her son had married a shiksa.

But the FBI didn't intercept the messages. It didn't monitor the Nazi circuits. It didn't break the codes. It didn't solve any Enigma machines. The coast guard did this stuff—the little codebreaking team that Elizebeth created from nothing.

Secrets staying secret is the norm. Officials only get riled up when the opposite happens—when secrets are leaked, published, disclosed.

Queene Elizabeth is my true mother and I am the lawfull heire to the throne. Finde the cypher storie my bookes containe. It tells great secrets, every one of which, if imparted openly, would forfeit my life. —F. Bacon.

In their hands The Shakespeare Ciphers Examined became a story about the drug of self-delusion and the joy of truth.

Riverbank Laboratories, an idea factory christened by wartime realities. It not only forged a new science of immense power; it also spawned a love affair that spread the science and ultimately sharpened it into an antifascist weapon.

The British knew it. The navy knew it. The FBI knew it.

But the American public never did, because Elizebeth wasn't allowed to speak.

College took Elizebeth's innate tendency to doubt and gave it a structure, a justification. At Wooster and Hillsdale she discovered poetry and philosophy, two methods of exploring the unknown, two scalpels for carving up fact and thought.

A course on philosophy introduced her to a new hero, the Renaissance scholar Erasmus, who "believed in one aristocracy—the aristocracy of intellect," she wrote in a paper. "He had one faith—faith in the power of thought, in the supremacy of ideas." Elizebeth, a smart person from a working-class family, found this concept liberating: the measure of a person was her ideas, not her wealth or her command of religious texts.

There was no path from teaching that led anywhere else she might want to go. A woman taught, had kids, retired, died.

This is the essence of codebreaking, finding patterns, and because it's such a basic human function, codebreakers have always emerged from unexpected places. They pop up from strange corners. Codebreakers tend to be oddballs, outsiders. The most important trait is not pure math skill but a deeper ability to pay attention.

Wanting something more, and ready to take a risk, Elizebeth quit her job at the Indiana high school in the spring of 1916 and moved back in with her parents to think about what was next.

understood to another person is essentially a problem of cryptology.

Her skill was the force that pulled them. There were just so few cryptologists of her ability, or William's. They were like a binary star system in a void, twin suns rotating around each other, drawing lesser bodies by their light.

For the first eight months of the war, as incredible as it sounds, William and Elizebeth, and their team at Riverbank, did all of the codebreaking for every part of the U.S.

This is how the history of the Invisible War would become distorted; these are the small decisions that erased Elizebeth from the record and later allowed J. Edgar Hoover to take credit for her achievements.

To work in this field, you have to become devious yourself. You have to think like a malicious attacker to find weaknesses in your own work. . . . Cryptographers are professional paranoids. It is important to separate your professional paranoia from your real-world life so as not to go completely crazy.

These once-secret files, located in the National Archives and finally declassified in 2000, prove that the coast guard, not the FBI, solved these Nazi radio circuits.

Building stuff was an ethical act, a way to become more fully human.

The Second World War did not begin with a gunshot or a bomb. It began with a feat of deception involving elements long familiar to Elizebeth Friedman— a code phrase, a radio station, and a murder . The men responsible were Nazis, and they belonged to the same part of the Nazi state that would soon attract Elizebeth's deep attention.

Anti-Tachyon displacement emitter AKA Flux Capacitor