The Woman Who Smashed Codes by Jason Fagone ***

The WomanWho Smashed Codes or The System That Smashed Women is ostensibly a biography of the premier World War II code breaker in the U.S. She is the American version of Alan Turing and Bletchley Park. Only you’ve never heard of her: Elizebeth Smith Friedman (1892-1980). This book is the depressing story of how this brilliant woman was dominated, used, suppressed, and erased. When you ask Google for the Elizebeth Friedman movie, you get the Alan Turing movie. So little of her remains in the historical record, that much of her biography does not even mention her.

Assuming you believe that women deserve credit for their contributions, you might wonder who the culprit for her fate is. The book presents two. One explicit and the other implicit. The book makes a lengthy and direct case against J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI (1935-1977), especially for his activities during WWII and the McCarthy era directly following. His faults are well documented and Elizebeth was only one of many victims.

From the beginning of her professional life to her death, her worse enemy was herself. She consistently put her husband and everyone else ahead of herself. In their early work, she gave him the credit to assure that he wouldn’t feel bad because she was smarter or because she received more praise and attention.  This pattern continued all the way to the end of her life when she cataloged and organized the records of his life, while just taking her records and throwing them in boxes. She was raised to think of everyone before herself, and she did.

Some of her invisibility was due to circumstances. While doing essentially the same work as Alan Turing and Bletchley Park, he worked in Europe and she worked in the Americas. The war in Europe got many more headlines than the conflict in the Americas. Of course, the entire field of cryptanalysis (aka codebreaking) never received the credit it was due. Recall that Alan Turing, for all his contribution to the war effort and Computer Science, was rewarded with chemical castration for being gay, followed by his suicide.

Aside from Elizebeth’s biography, the book celebrates codebreaking from a time when clever people broke code with pencil and paper. The history covers the bootleggers during prohibition and the Nazi efforts in South America during WWII.

A depressing book of a brilliant woman born a century too early.

Check out https://amazon.com/shop/influencer-20171115075 for book recommendations.