Donovan

by Richard Dunlop

  Lawrence Houston, CIA’s general counsel and another of Donovan’s one time aides, set out with a car and driver to bring his former chief from the hospital. When he walked into Donovan’s sickroom he found him sitting up. Donovan’s nurse had dressed him in his army uniform and had seen to it that his ribbons were in place and his thinning white hair neatly brushed.

  Supported by Houston, Donovan managed to walk to the car. He gazed around him as the auto started down 16th Street toward the city. Even in the last months of his life it sometimes seemed as if the indomitable old hero would come back, that the fog would lift from his mind, and that he would again play a critical role in the day’s events. To Houston this seemed to be one of those times. But as they drove on, it was only the children playing along the street that Donovan watched. His eyes sought them out eagerly, and if a roller-skating girl came scooting too near the curb or a boy pursuing a ball ran toward the car, he cried out. A man who had lost the power of speech for months found words to express his fear that a youngster might be hurt.

  “Look out!” he cried at the driver. “Look out!”

  “He was terrified that the car might hit a child,” remembered Houston, “all the way to headquarters.”

  Donovan walked into the South Building entrance unaided, his step almost as brisk as when he had directed his vast intelligence net. When he saw the portrait within the door, his eyes brightened. He drew himself to full attention, his still powerful torso supported by enfeebled legs trembling with the strain. Aides said that the director of intelligence was hurrying from his office to welcome the man who had already become more myth than reality. Younger men, who had never seen Donovan and never expected to do so, stared at him. Somebody started a rattle of applause, but it was cut off when Donovan turned, a confused look on his face, his knees beginning to buckle.

  “The clouds rolled in over his mind,” said Houston. “He would have fallen, except we sustained him. He could not wait for the director, and we helped him from the building to the waiting car.”

  By the time Allen Dulles reached the lobby, Donovan was gone. There was no last chance for a beneficent smile from Donovan to erase the bitter memory that Dulles carried of the quarrels that had broken their friendship on an angry day in France as Hitler’s Reich crumbled.

  On the way back to Walter Reed, Donovan seemed to awaken. He drew a folded envelope from one pocket and a pencil from the other. His face took on its old resolve as he placed the envelope on his knee and began a note to the President. The Franklin Roosevelt archives at Hyde Park, New York, contain more than 7,500 pages of once top-secret notes and memos from intelligence chief Bill Donovan. Now, more than a dozen years after Roosevelt’s death, Donovan began one more report. “Memorandum for the President,” he wrote, and then the pencil trailed off the paper and fell from his hand. Donovan sank back in his seat. The remainder of the drive back to the hospital he was silent.

  As Donovan lay ill in the hospital those last two years before his death in February 1959, men and women from the OSS came to see their onetime chief. The men clasped his hand and talked to him. He often understood and smiled at their reminiscences and jokes. Sometimes he tried to talk and with the help of his nurse, a woman devoted to him, he made his meanings clear.

  The OSS women sat on the edge of his bed, and he beamed at them with the charm that had always drawn women to him. They held back the tears for his sake and because even in his long-drawn-out illness, he remained cheerful. “There were always his blue eyes, his wonderful eyes,” said Elizabeth Heppner McIntosh, one of the scores of women who were devoted to both the OSS and its chief.

  One day when nobody was watching him, Bill Donovan got out of his bed, drew his hospital robe around his pajamas, and put on his slippers. He somehow got out the door, down the corridor, and out of the building. Perhaps in his mind he was fleeing Nazi enemies, escaping from their prison. He set off down 16th Street beside the traffic until at last a motorist, seeing the old man in hospital garb, his legs stepping along in a brisk military pace, stopped and phoned to let Walter Reed know that a patient was on the loose. When the medical orderlies came for him, Donovan was ready to return to his bed, his determination gone.

  David Crockett, old friend and OSS man, came to see Donovan in early February 1959. When Crockett had been in the OSS field headquarters at Caserta, Italy, in January 1944, Donovan had flown in from a confrontation with Soviet intelligence chiefs in their dread Lubyanka headquarters. Donovan was exhausted and sick with a virus contracted in the Moscow winter. Yet he would not go to a hospital. “I don’t trust doctors,” he told Crockett. “I don’t like doctors, and I’m too busy to be ill.”

  All that night Crockett sat by his friend’s sickbed and listened to his fevered ravings. In the morning Donovan thanked him with that special warmth he saved for OSS members who served him well.

  Now at Walter Reed General Hospital, Donovan recognized Crockett, although it had been weeks since he had apparently recognized anybody. He nodded his head and tried to speak. “He had the same expression on his face as he had that morning in Caserta,” Crockett remembered. When Crockett got up to leave, the nurse explained that the general wanted him to come back the next day. In the morning Crockett returned to Walter Reed only to be told by the nurse that Donovan was too sick to see him.

  William J. Donovan never feared death, as he had demonstrated on battlefield after battlefield in World War I; his reckless courage had helped to make him known as Wild Bill Donovan, one of America’s most famous heroes. The story is told of how, as he led a charge in France on seemingly impregnable German positions, Donovan turned to find not one of his men following him. As bullets spatted about him and shells burst nearby, he shouted, “What’s the matter with you? Do you want to live forever?”

  They had followed him then, rushing at the Germans to win a precious victory. Now it seemed that Donovan, hopelessly ill, was himself condemned to live forever. But at last, two days after David Crockett’s visit, on February 8, he died. His wife, Ruth, no longer estranged, and his son, David, were at his bedside.

  Allen Dulles sent a message to all CIA stations around the world:

  America has lost a soldier, a diplomat, an outstanding intelligence officer, a patriot dedicated to the welfare of our Nation.

  Bill Donovan was the father of “central intelligence.” To him belongs the credit for organizing and directing the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. I was proud to be associated with him then and later to have the benefit of his experience and advice in my work as head of the Central Intelligence Agency.

  Our country honored his military heroism and leadership by awarding him America’s three highest military decorations: the Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, and the Distinguished Service Medal. He also earned the National Security Medal, the highest award in the field of intelligence relating to our national security. He was a great leader.

  It is said that there are no bugles and flags for spies, but for Bill Donovan there was a funeral mass at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, and his flag-draped casket rode on a caisson drawn by six black horses to Arlington National Cemetery. There, as a bugle sounded taps, he was buried with full military honors among America’s heroes. Newspapers editorialized about Donovan’s bravery and patriotic service.

  Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, German intelligence chief during World War II, once remarked that of all the Allied leaders, he most would have liked to meet and know William J. Donovan. Adolf Hitler, who in 1923 had met and confided in Donovan, always feared and hated him more than he did any other American. As might be expected, the intelligence chiefs of friendly nations expressed their sorrow at the passing of the man acknowledged to be one of the great spymasters of the 20th century. Sir William Stephenson, Britain’s “Intrepid,” who had always been “Little Bill” to Donovan’s “Big Bill,” inseparable friend and partner in intelligence, was one of the pallbearers. Even top Soviet authorities sent word that they to
o mourned his passing. He had been a worthy enemy. It remained for Carleton S. Coon, a renowned social anthropologist and an OSS agent in the Mediterranean, to speak for OSS men and women when he wrote “On Learning of the Death of Wild Bill’ Donovan”:

  Wild, people called him, who had heard of his fame

  And wild he was in heart and in feyness.

  But more than wild was the man with the wile of Odysseus.

  Like the King of Assassins he welded together

  An army of desperate, invisible soldiers,

  Each as bold as himself in single deeds

  But none as keen as himself, the leader of all, commander of men

  Who could ask, “Jim, will you limpet that ship?”

  Knowing the answer, for none would refuse him, or

  “Carl, a free ride to Albania? Yes? Then you’re off,

  Ten minutes to Zero,” and we would all die for him.

  Die for him some of us did, but he died for us all.

  Some who are left would burn him whole, like a Viking jarl in his ship.

  Others would cover his bones with a colossal marble cross.

  Each to his taste, say I, Yankee, Irishman, Italian.

  As many tombs will he have in our hearts as the scattered remains of Osiris.

  How lucky we were that he came when he did in the long tide of history.

  Hail to Wild Bill, a hero of men and a name to hang myths on.

  As American as chowder, Crockett, and Putnam.

  A free fighter’s hero, may God give him peace.

  PART ONE

  The Making of a Hero

  1883–1918

  1

  The Boy from the Irish First Ward

  WILL DONOVAN UNDERSTOOD as a boy what a secure hiding place could mean to a hunted man. He lived much of his childhood in what he was to know later as a safehouse. He was accustomed from a very early age to finding strange men at breakfast, usually young and always pale, clothed in dark suits shiny with wear. Nobody had to caution the five Donovan children not to talk about the strangers, even to their playmates in the Irish First Ward on the Buffalo, New York, waterfront. The men stayed a few days at the most and then disappeared just as suddenly as they had come.

  In the last decades of the 19th century, many Irish refugees who had left the troubles in their homeland and immigrated to Canada crept across the border into the United States. Buffalo Irish, sympathetic to their compatriots, took them into boats at night on the Ontario shore and ferried them over the dark waters of Lake Erie or the Niagara River to the sandy lakefront. Will Donovan early realized that when his father and mother, usually so cheerful and bantering, fell silent at dinner, men were even then gathering in some secret place on the Canadian shore. The boy noticed that his good-night hug from his father and mother would be more affectionate than usual. Ever afterward the calm before a storm was a time to show love or to declare friendship, for there might never be such a chance again; things might go awry and everything might be swept away. Will would fall asleep knowing that his mother would tiptoe into the attic room where he slept with his two younger brothers, Tim and Vincent, to see that her sons were quiet in their beds.

  No matter how deeply he slept, Will would awaken to the muffled sound of the heavy brogans of the men, walking up Michigan Avenue and then pausing at the stoop of the brick house at number 74. There were five steps to climb, each step sounding in the boy’s ears, and then the secret rap on the door, not too loud. When Grandfather Donovan, who lived on the first floor, opened the door, a few soft words were spoken, the men would enter, and the door would close with a light thud. Will would fall asleep again to the sound of voices talking and to an occasional snatch of laughter, nervous with relief.

  The refugees usually slept on the first floor, where Will’s grandfather and grandmother lived, or sometimes on the second floor, where Mother and Father Donovan and Will’s sisters, Mary and the baby Loretta, had their bedrooms. Then one night a boy about Will’s age came. There was no room for him below, so Mother Donovan brought him upstairs and put him to bed next to her oldest son. Will awoke to the odor of stale sweat, which suddenly meant fear to him. The strange boy lay beside him, unwashed, exhausted, and already fast asleep. Even in his sleep, fright clung to him. Will drifted back to sleep.

  In the morning he awakened and raised up on his elbows to look at a pale face topped with carroty hair on the pillow beside him. Even a young lad could be a refugee from Ireland then. When the boy’s eyes opened, they clouded with apprehension. Will smiled to reassure him.

  “Are you from Canada?” he asked.

  The boy nodded.

  “You’re safe in America now,” said Will.

  Already his voice carried more than a boy’s conviction, and the strange boy smiled back. Will and Tim stayed indoors to play with the refugee boy for a day or two, and then he too was gone. He left behind him the sweaty smell of fear that Will was never to forget. The man at whose death the New York Times was to editorialize “No one can forget that he was always brave” became determined that he would never smell of fear.

  Donovan relatives say that William J. Donovan had his ancestry traced back to 12th-century Ireland, but if so, the genealogy has been lost. At least there is no question that Donovan’s forebears came from Cork, that southern county where people believe, like St. Augustine, that an ounce of honey attracts more flies than a gallon of vinegar. A Cork man is adept at “soothering,” the fine knack of soothing ruffled spirits with gentle words. Blarney Castle is in Cork, and the Blarney Stone casts its spell not only upon those who kiss it but upon the people of the entire county. A Cork man is lighthearted and eloquent by disposition, and Will’s grandfather Timothy, who was born in Cork at Skibbereen, was no exception.

  There is little information about Tim Donovan’s parents. He was raised not by his mother and father but by his uncle, the parish priest. Cerebral and well educated, Tim became a teacher in the parish school. In Skibbereen a teacher was expected to be as poor as the proverbial church mouse, which the better families of the community expected him to resemble in many other ways as well. When Timothy Donovan fell in love with Mary Mahoney, whose family lived in a substantial house, her parents were disturbed. They were appalled when she returned his love. Timothy and Mary stood up for another young couple at their wedding in the parish church, and swept away by the romantic occasion, they decided to get married too. When Timothy and Mary announced that they intended to emigrate to America, the Mahoneys, far from objecting, bitterly told them to be on their way. Most likely they contributed to the newlyweds’ finances. At least when Tim and Mary did set out for America, they, unlike most emigrants, did not travel penniless.

  In the middle of the 19th century Buffalo was the greatest inland immigrant port in the United States, and most of the immigrants were Irish. The Irish settled on the Flats, where Little Buffalo Creek flowed into Lake Erie. It was an area so often flooded by Lake Erie storms that its residents were said to live “down where the geese wear rubber boots.”

  As the golden flood of grain from the Midwest was carried eastward over the Great Lakes to Buffalo, it was up to the Irish workers to shovel it out of the holds of the ships and carry it ashore in bags and baskets to warehouses along the waterfront. The laborers were called scoopers because they scooped up the grain. They tied their pants legs tight to their legs to keep out the grain, and it was always easy to spot a scooper on the streets of the Irish First Ward by the way he tied his pants.

  By the time Mary and Tim Donovan arrived on the Buffalo waterfront, 2 million bushels of grain from the West were being carried ashore every day of the year. Irish labor was cheap, and when Joseph Dart, a Buffalonian, invented the world’s first steam grain elevator, he was assured that it could never compete with the Irish. “An Irishman’s back is the cheapest elevator ever built,” he was told.

  Dart persisted, and his first elevator building erected on the shore of Buffalo Creek was able to raise 2,000 bushels an ho
ur instead of the previous 2,000 bushels a day. Over the next decades elevator after elevator was built. Soon the waterfront of the Irish First Ward, which extended from the foot of Main Street to the present Elk Street and South Park Avenue, was lined with the enormous structures, each serviced by railroad tracks, along which the busy locomotives chuffed and shunted their strings of grain cars. Buffalo grew rich, and handsome mansions sprung up along Delaware Avenue. The Irish stayed poor, and they built their cottages along the streets blocked off from the lake by the grain elevators on both banks of Buffalo Creek.

  Here and there, rising above the cottages of what more fortunate Buffalonians called the shanty Irish, were a few larger brick or frame houses left from the days before the immigrants occupied the area. Tim and Mary Donovan bought such a brick house on Michigan Avenue, and there they raised their family. Their son Timothy, born in 1860, was the fourth of ten children, five boys and five girls. He found the waterfront, its lake boats, its switching locomotives and freight cars, its sailors and railroaders and their stories far more interesting than his classes at school. This disturbed his scholarly father and his mother, who fancied her son a priest-to-be, but when the boy’s absences from school became more and more regular, Timothy and Mary acquiesced in what appeared to be the inevitable. Tim dropped out of school and went to work in the railroad yards that straddled the foot of Michigan Avenue. In time he became the yardmaster.

  At 21 Tim Donovan had become a tall young man, thin but with broad shoulders that stood him in good stead in a rough-and-ready neighborhood where saloon fistfights broke out on payday, which for scoopers and railroaders alike was every Friday. When Mark Twain came to Buffalo in 1869 to edit the Buffalo Express, in which he had a one-third interest, he looked with wonder on the hard-drinking Irish of the First Ward. An Irishman, he observed, never touched beer when he could drink whiskey. “Give an Irishman lager for a month and he’s a dead man,” he noted. “An Irishman is lined with copper, and the beer corrodes it. But whiskey polishes the copper and is the saving of him.”