Donovan listened to both the Chinese and Japanese, and he watched the Japanese Army as it swept aside futile Chinese resistance. The Chinese Army and civilian authorities were driven out of Manchuria. In 1932 Japan was to establish the puppet state of Manchukuo on Manchurian soil. China appealed to the League of Nations, but instead of withdrawing its forces, Japan withdrew from the League and occupied additional Chinese territory, in Jehol and Mongolia. Donovan returned to the United States convinced that the Japanese military jingoists, whom he had first observed at work in Siberia, were bound to bring their nation into conflict with his own. He shared his findings with other members of America’s informal intelligence network.
Donovan continued to follow events in Manchuria with apprehension while taking a leading role in finding jobs for the unemployed in New York State. In that dark year of the Great Depression there were 12 million unemployed in the United States. On February 22, 1932, he spoke to a giant Prosperity Rally at Buffalo’s Teck Theater and called the Depression “a greater disaster than war.”
“We are now up against something that we were not asked to face in war,” he told his audience, many of whom had fought in France. “Over there we could plan for certain happenings, but now we are bucking up against the great unknown—and our fighting it is handicapped to a great extent by fear that has gripped many of our citizens.”
Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York seemed very likely to be the Democratic candidate for President, and Herbert Lehman, his lieutenant governor, promised to be the Democratic candidate for governor of New York. Whenever Republican leaders met to discuss a possible candidate to oppose Lehman, Bill Donovan’s name came up. He continued to make speeches throughout the state but did not admit to being a candidate.
On June 26, Father Duffy died of an intestinal ailment that he had first suffered in France. Donovan was at the funeral in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. Six horses drew the caisson with its casket down Fifth Avenue. Captain, Father Duffy’s horse, followed in the procession with the fighting padre’s boots reversed in the stirrups. Then came Bill Donovan leading a column of veterans of the Fighting 69th. Thousands of people lined the avenue. Donovan became chairman of a committee to raise money for a memorial to Father Duffy, which was to be a statue of the priest erected in the middle of Broadway, close to Times Square.
By July Donovan had decided to run for governor, provided that strong support for his candidacy developed, but he did not underestimate the difficulty of defeating Roosevelt’s candidate, Herbert Lehman. He wrote to Edward Tracy Clark, former President Coolidge’s private secretary, for advice. Clark wrote back, “If you are ambitious to be Governor of New York, that is one thing, but I don’t believe you are. If ambition is lacking, then the only other reason for taking the nomination is your duty to your party or to your President.
“The last is a compelling motive and doubtless will determine your course. Seriously, I do not believe that this year, with everything against us, any man can be elected who does not have the driving force which comes from ambition rather than duty.”
On the Fourth of July, Melvin C. Eaton, the Republican leader of Chenango County, announced the Win with Donovan Committee. Across the state, Donovan committees sprang up. A Donovan office opened in Buffalo in the Rialto Building. His political enemies, some of whom still smarted over his Saturn Club raid, struck upon former State Supreme Court Justice Daniel J. Kenefick of Buffalo to stop Donovan. The Erie County party organization chose to portray Donovan as a supporter of the by now unpopular President Hoover and at odds with the state GOP committee. The rest of the state watched the two Buffalo candidates square off against each other.
Even while the Win with Donovan Committee boomed his candidacy, Donovan tried to slip away to Europe on a fact-finding journey to Germany, where Hitler’s Nazis were attempting to take advantage of the political chaos to seize power. On July 9 he sailed with Cornelius F. Kelly, president of the Anaconda Copper Company, aboard the Ile de France. Kelly and Donovan were chatting in a corner of the promenade deck when a platoon of reporters happened upon them.
“How did you fellows ever find me?” asked Donovan. “Just going over for business reasons, and that’s all.” He complained that he had wished to depart without publicity. He denied that he was a candidate at this time. And he admitted that Kelly and he would go directly from Le Havre to Germany.
Once he was in Germany, Donovan studied the discontent of the people and the threat of a Nazi takeover. In April Paul von Hindenburg had been reelected president, but his opponent, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, had polled more than 13 million votes. In July elections the Nazis had captured the largest number of seats in the Reichstag, and Chancellor Franz von Papen was now attempting to keep them from taking over the government. Donovan met with Papen, who explained that Germany was on the edge of civil war. The Nazi right and the Communist left, financed by Moscow, were at one another’s throats. Germany must have a strong ruler, but Papen, who had been accused in the American press of seeking to become a dictator, denied any such desire. He assured Donovan that he would be able to prevent Hitler from coming into the government. Donovan was not so sure.
“Papen was a political typhoid Mary,” Donovan later said, “who brought ruin to both his enemies and his friends.”
When Donovan landed in New York on the Hamburg American liner New York on the evening of July 29, he was glad when shipboard reporters seemed interested only in his gubernatorial candidacy. On the pier Ruth Donovan, Melvin C. Eaton, and his law partner George Leisure, backed up by a deputation of World War I veterans, greeted him.
“If they can show a real demand, and I can be of real use,” said Donovan, “I would accept the nomination, and if elected I would carry out the duties of the office to my best ability.”
“The mere nomination of Colonel Donovan means his election,” said Eaton.
“That sounds optimistic,” remarked Donovan.
Nothing was said about the grave situation in Germany At home on Beekman Place, Bill Donovan practiced French and German with his family at breakfast. He took Patricia into his book-lined study and talked to her by the hour about the crisis in Europe. In the meantime he watched the Donovan-for-governor boom grow. There did not seem to be much that an American could do about Germany, and Donovan, who had not yet won an elected office despite his great popularity, was intrigued with the idea of becoming governor.
On August 16 in Buffalo, Donovan finally announced his candidacy. The New York State Republicans met in the old Broadway Auditorium in Buffalo on October 3, and Hamilton Fish, Jr., delivered the keynote speech on the theme of “Hold on to Hoover.” The platform favored Prohibition and advocated tax reduction and retrenchment in government expenses.
Edward L. Bernays, a New York public relations counsel, went to Buffalo to advise Donovan on his campaign. He arrived the night the convention began. “I went first to the Colonel’s suite at the Statler,” he wrote, “where I fought my way through a mass of people; county chairmen were shaking both his hands and pledging their constituents’ vote to him. The receptionist finally smuggled me into an adjoining room, where the crowd was smaller. Donovan, a well set-up figure, had a broad smile and exuded sincere charm. He was enjoying this spontaneous adulation.”
“I am delighted you came up,” said Donovan. “Missy has told me so much about you. I have been looking forward to talking to you. But you see how utterly impossible it is to do anything like that here and now. These are committee and county chairmen. I have to shake their hands and talk to them. I have an idea. Won’t you and your wife come to lunch with me at my mother-in-law’s home, Mrs. Rumsey, at 12:30 tomorrow? I want to see you; I want to talk to you, I need you.”
At lunch the next day there was more of the same confusion. Donovan broke off shaking hands long enough to whisper in Bernays’s ear, “I do want you to come to see me this afternoon at the Statler at three. Please see me.”
That afternoon he was still shak
ing hands with well-wishers and asked Bernays to come and see him the next day. The next day turned out to be nomination day. Bands played, crowds cheered, and Bill Donovan put his arm around Bernays’s shoulder and whispered, “Mr. Bernays, this is really no time or place to confer on serious matters. Why don’t we postpone our meeting to my home, 1 Beekman Place, in New York?”
Amid the political hoopla Mayor Frank Roesch of Buffalo nominated Donovan, and on October 5 he won the nomination to oppose Lehman, who already had been picked by the Democrats. Assistant Secretary of War F. Trubee Davison of Nassau County, an old Donovan friend, was nominated for lieutenant governor. In his acceptance speech Donovan said, “I have stated and I do state now that I am for repeal of the 18th Amendment.” This put him in direct conflict with his party’s platform. Donovan also needled Franklin Roosevelt. “I make no pretense to being a farmer,” he said. “I run no estate on the Hudson which I pretend is a farm.”
Donovan marched through the streets of Buffalo in an old-fashioned political parade, behind men carrying red flares. Buffalo crowds gave the greatest ovation in the city’s history to the candidate who had been born in the First Ward waterfront. Delaware Avenue was also caught up in the enthusiasm for Donovan, and on the afternoon before the parade Ruth Donovan and her mother gave a tea at the Rumsey home for the convention delegates. Newspapermen came to see the “quiet, gracious woman who may be the next hostess in the Albany Executive Mansion.”
Ruth Donovan and her mother stood for two hours shaking hands with the delegates, giving each the rapt attention expected from a candidate’s wife and mother-in-law. One reporter thought Ruth’s simple remark that she was “very, very proud of him” spoke volumes when it came “from so naturally reticent a person.”
The same reporter continued, “Apparently she never wearied and she never lost a certain charm of manner that blended with her perfect poise in the midst of tremendous excitement, especially when Colonel Donovan himself appeared, and the women crowded about him to utter congratulations.”
Ruth Donovan, said the newspaper, was “naturally intensely interested in her husband’s career, and she confines her own to homemaking and the care of their two children, seventeen-year-old David and fifteen-year-old Patricia.”
The Donovan family came together in loving unity according to the best American political custom.
While Bernays was finding it impossible to advise candidate Donovan, a public relations man was counseling candidate Lehman, “Now look here. You’re going to have a terrific battle to win. You can’t overlook the fact that Donovan is a colorful figure, a very colorful figure, and you’re not.”
Lehman agreed that Donovan “was in the eyes of the public very colorful. He had made a fine war record, won the Medal of Honor, had been a colonel of a favorite regiment here in New York, the Old 69th. He was a handsome man and a good speaker.”
Both Lehman and Donovan expected that the election would be close. “There was little realization of how strong the Democratic Party was,” said Lehman many years later, “and how weak the Republican Party was that it affected my thinking about my own candidacy and my own campaign, and affected the thinking of my friends.”
Donovan decided to strike directly at New York City, the Democratic stronghold. Tammany Hall was going through one of its periodic scandals, which promised to divide the Democratic Party in the city, and Donovan was assured that he could count on the support of his fellow war veterans. Donovan went to New York to deliver his first speech, at Jamaica in Queens. The next day he spoke at a huge rally at Madison Square Garden; former President Calvin Coolidge was there to give him support. The candidate spoke in New York nationality neighborhoods, making sure to address the Italians on Columbus Day, and then headed upstate for a whistle-stop campaign.
The issues were public utilities, Prohibition, labor, agriculture, and economy in government. Donovan claimed that Lehman’s financial policies were ruinous, and Lehman said that Donovan was tied to the utility interests, lacked social imagination, and was a “semidry.”
“Everyone knows that Donovan has been a Wet since he came marching home from the war,” asserted the New York Post.
Donovan attempted to tie Lehman to Roosevelt and Al Smith. He demanded in an Albany speech whether Lehman “will report to Roosevelt if Roosevelt goes to Washington? Or will he have to call up the Empire State Building to know whether or not he can report to Roosevelt?”
Both Smith and Roosevelt joined the fray. When Roosevelt claimed to know Bill Donovan well when both were at Columbia Law School, Donovan replied, “Roosevelt said in the course of that speech, ‘I’m going to talk about Bill Donovan. He is a good friend of mine,’ which is not true. I happened to be in the same class in law school that he was, but I was a youngster earning my way through law school. He never knew me.”
Donovan’s speeches were drawing blood, and the New York Post remarked, “In Bill Donovan, Al Smith has met his match.”
When Roosevelt emissaries approached Donovan with the suggestion that if he won, Roosevelt in Washington would be happy to cooperate with Donovan in Albany, Donovan replied, “Well, if that is the kind of cooperation he wants, he is not going to get it from Donovan, and it goes back to what he said when he endorsed the candidate for governor, this gentleman whom he picked to take his place as his successor, and whom he then called his own right arm. I said several weeks ago that my arm belongs to me.”
Donovan assailed Roosevelt in a Watertown speech: “Are we going to lose our sovereignty as a state and surrender it into the lap of one man who simply wants to elect a pro-consul to govern one of the provinces of these forty-eight states? Now we begin to see a man with delusions of grandeur: that he is going to encompass a continent, and that he is going to be a new kind of red, white, and blue dictator.”
When Lehman spoke of Donovan’s great military record and suggested that this was about all there was to the man, Donovan replied, “I claim to have done no more than four million other men did. For me the war ended in 1918. I know better than anyone else that I was an ordinary guy, with a couple of lucky breaks, because I belonged to a great regiment; and I never tried to exploit the traditions of that regiment for my benefit and I am not going to do it now, and I am not going to let anyone else penalize me for belonging to that regiment.”
Strikingly, Donovan’s campaign leaflets pledged a New Deal in Albany several months before Roosevelt struck upon the concept of a New Deal in Washington.
On election day Herbert Lehman was elected in the Democratic sweep that saw Franklin Roosevelt take the presidency. “Somehow or other, Donovan’s campaign never took fire,” charitably remarked Lehman, “any more than Hoover’s campaign did.”
Edward Tracy Clark wrote to Donovan, “You made a great fight and you made it alone. Down underneath we will in later years finally find the real cause for this overwhelming defeat. I cannot bring myself to believe that it was either necessary or inevitable because of the depression.”
“I think you are right in saying that we haven’t yet learned the real cause of this defeat,” Donovan conceded.
On January 5, 1933, Calvin Coolidge died, and his death seemed to end the Republican era once and for all. President Hoover asked Donovan to meet the presidential train at Penn Station, New York, at 5:25 A.M. on January 7 for the sad trip up to New England. “I went up to Coolidge’s funeral on the President’s train, and I sat with the President, Hughes and Stimson,” wrote Donovan to diplomat Arthur Bliss Lane after the funeral. “None of them very exciting on that occasion at least.”
Donovan was depressed, not only by his defeat at the polls and the election of a Democratic administration, but also by a report he received early in January from a well-placed German source, saying that Adolf Hitler was bound to become chancellor of Germany. On January 30, Hitler did indeed become chancellor, and on March 5, 1933, Germany held its last free election until after the war, and the Nazis and their rightist allies won a majority of the seats in the
Reichstag. On March 21 the Third Reich was proclaimed, and as far as Donovan was concerned, the die was cast for World War II. He was convinced that the world was rushing toward one of history’s great crises, and he feared he would not be involved in the events to come.
16
The Unfolding Crisis
“COLONEL DONOVAN has played an active part in American political life and is one of the leading lawyers of the country, but he has a hobby and that hobby is war,” wrote Hugh R. Wilson, who represented the United States at the League of Nations in Geneva during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. “Bill is not happy if there is a war on the face of the earth, and he has not had a look at it.”
In reality Donovan’s interest in the conflicts that erupted in Asia, Africa, and Europe in the 1930s was that of an intelligence man. He had come to play the leading role in the community of American citizens who, for patriotic reasons, kept abreast of crucial developments abroad. At the same time he enjoyed the excitement and danger that a close look at war represented. Donovan’s sharpened intelligence instincts told him that the rush of events overseas sooner or later would compromise the interests of his own country, and he was determined to discover the military qualities, methods, and purposes of the opposing powers.
Several years later he wrote, “During the 1930s as a private citizen I visited Ethiopia, Spain, and other European countries to see what modern war would mean. All other nations, even the little ones, had capable secret intelligence agencies. We had only the conventional intelligence service of the Department of State, with its military and naval attachés, and the agencies attached to the War and Navy Departments, which limited themselves narrowly to items of purely military information.”
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