Wild Bill Donovan

by Douglas Waller

  Truman was hardly naive to future threats. He realized he needed a worldwide intelligence service—he just did not want Donovan or his OSS to be a part of it. Donovan’s bureaucratic enemies in Washington, as determined as his admirers, saw him as a power grabber as dangerous as Adolf Hitler. The sleaziest attack came from J. Edgar Hoover, whose Federal Bureau of Investigation had spied on Donovan and his OSS as if they were Nazi agents. Hoover, whose hatred of Donovan was matched only by the OSS director’s hatred of him, had an FBI agent pass along to Truman a vicious rumor that Donovan was sleeping with his daughter-in-law Mary. There was no evidence that was the case. Mary had been devoted to Donovan, filling in as hostess for many of his social functions, and Donovan had been as close to her as he would be to a daughter—but only as a daughter. Even so, the story had been given credence among gossips by the fact that Donovan had cheated on his wife, Ruth, many times.

  The ugly rumor was not the final straw for Truman, who signed the order closing the OSS on September 20. Piled on his desk were other derogatory reports about the spy service that disturbed him as much. A White House military aide, collaborating with intelligence operatives in the U.S. Army, had slipped the president the most scathing memo—fifty-nine pages accusing Donovan of running what amounted to a rogue operation, plagued throughout the war by intelligence failures and all manner of hidden scandal. It all built an animosity in Truman toward Donovan that never diminished over time. Three years later, an aide sent him the draft of a speech he was to deliver for a Sons of St. Patrick Society dinner, which listed Donovan among the country’s Irish American heroes. Truman crossed out his name.

  Closing down a spy operation as large as Donovan’s and parceling out what remained to other agencies became a complicated job. Snitches on the payroll and foreign officials who had been bribed for information now came forward with promises of cash and special favors they claimed OSS officers had made in the heat of war, but no way to vouch for them. Tens of thousands of spy gadgets and sabotage weapons—code pads, submachine guns, pistols with silencers, bomb detonators, limpet mines, pocket incendiaries, suicide capsules, knockout pills, lock-picking sets, matchbox cameras, stilettos—all had to be rounded up and trucked to responsible agencies in the Pentagon. Donovan worried about the hardware falling into the wrong hands, particularly the more dangerous items such as chemical and biological agents the OSS had been developing for assassination weapons. Millions of pages of intelligence documents, spy reports, and secret cables had to be inventoried, boxed up, and shipped to classified storage facilities. Donovan passed the word quietly to selected officers in the field: Destroy any embarrassing documents, such as currency transactions in fast-moving operations where corners had to be cut. “They’ll come back to haunt you.”

  The day after the Riverside ceremony, Donovan turned his government car over to the White House, which agreed to hire James Freeman, his African American chauffeur who had loyally driven him around Washington the previous four years, many times to rendezvous with secret sources. He later dropped by an OSS studio to record a propaganda record promoting a future CIA, which his agents hoped to entice radio stations in the United States to broadcast. “The national policy of the United States in the postwar world will be shaped by our knowledge or ignorance of our fellow nations,” Donovan spoke into the microphone wearily. “America cannot afford to resume its prewar indifference. And here’s a fact we must face. Today there’s not a single permanent agency to take over in peacetime certain of the functions which the OSS has performed in wartime.”

  Donovan also spent every spare moment he could find locked in his office with a few trusted aides and a technician from the OSS photo unit, who set up a tripod and camera on his conference table. Day and night, they frantically photographed tens of thousands of classified documents from Donovan’s personal files before trucks carted the papers to the Pentagon. He had the photos—many of them grainy or out of focus because of the rush—transferred to microfilm and driven to his law office in New York. Harry Truman would not be in the White House forever. Perhaps the next president would be friendlier toward him and appoint him director of a central intelligence service. He would have copies of his sensitive files to jump-start the organization.

  Donovan also wanted the microfilm as a historical record to tell his and the OSS story the way he thought it should be told. A publisher had approached him during the war about writing his autobiography. Donovan was intrigued with the idea but never followed up. He was, however, intensely interested in how his OSS would be portrayed in the future. He carefully edited official histories of the organization that were written later. Eager to cash in on the OSS story, Hollywood put into production three movies extolling the agency: Cloak and Dagger starring Gary Cooper, OSS with Alan Ladd, and 13 Rue Madeleine with James Cagney. Donovan and his aides screened their scripts. They found Cloak and Dagger and OSS tolerable, but 13 Rue Madeleine so technically inaccurate and its plot so far-fetched (Cagney wins the war single-handedly as a spy) that Donovan threatened to organize a boycott of the film if studio executives did not change the script. To shut him up, 20th Century-Fox just removed references to the OSS in the film. All three movies were hits at the box office.

  Hollywood could be expected to hype history. Donovan’s own story was far more nuanced. Friends and enemies tended to paint him in broad strokes, white or black. His real life, however, had far more shades of gray.

  PART I

  PRELUDE

  Chapter 1

  First Ward

  SKIBBEREEN, a coastal town on the southern tip of Ireland in County Cork, had a reputation for producing cultured people, or so went the lore among county folk. Timothy O’Donovan, who had been born in 1828, fit that stereotype. Raised by his uncle, a parish priest, Timothy had become a church schoolmaster. It was too humble an occupation, however, for the Mahoney family, who owned a large tract of land in the northern part of Cork and who took a dim view of their daughter, Mary, spending so much time with a lowly teacher eight years her senior. But the Mahoneys could not stop Timothy and Mary from falling in love. Attending the wedding of another couple they decided they would do the same—immediately. They eloped that day.

  Growing poverty in Ireland and the promise of opportunity in America were powerful lures for the O’Donovan newlyweds, as they were for millions of young Irish men and women. They landed in Canada in the late 1840s with money Mary’s father grudgingly had given them to resettle and made their way across the southern border to Buffalo in western New York.

  A boomtown, Buffalo was fast becoming a major transshipment point in the country for Midwest grain, lumber, livestock, and other raw materials dropped off at its Lake Erie port, then moved east on the Erie Canal to Albany and on to the Eastern Seaboard. The O’Donovans, who soon dropped the “O” from their name, settled in southwest Buffalo’s First Ward, a rough, noisy, polluted, and clannish neighborhood cut off from the rest of the city by the Buffalo River, where several thousand Irish families packed into clapboard shanties along narrow unpaved streets. Timothy could walk to the grain mills along the river, where he found employment as a scooper shoveling grain out of the holds of ships for the mills. Scooping was considered a good job, which made Timothy enough money to feed Mary and the ten children she eventually bore. He became a teetotaling layman in one of First Ward’s Catholic churches and allowed his home to be used by local Fenians, a secret society dedicated to independence for the Irish Republic.

  The Donovans’ fourth child, Timothy Jr., who was born in 1858, proved to be a rebellious son who often played hooky from school and defied his father’s pleas that he attend college and make something of himself. Instead, “Young Tim,” as he had been called at home, went to work for the railroad, becoming a respected superintendent at the yard near Michigan Avenue. At one point the Catholic bishop of Buffalo called on him to calm labor unrest at the docks, which Young Tim succeeded in doing. He continued to display an independent streak, becoming an active Republ
ican in his ward, a rarity for Irish Americans of his day, who voted practically lockstep with the Democratic Party.

  In 1882, Young Tim married Anna Letitia Lennon, a brown-haired Irish beauty the same age as he (twenty-four), who had been orphaned when she was ten. Her father, a watchman for a grain elevator, had fallen off a wharf and drowned in the Buffalo River. Her mother had died the year before from an epidemic sweeping through First Ward. Anna had gone to live with cousins in Kansas City, but returned to Buffalo by the time she was eighteen, now a mature young woman with a love for fine literature.

  To save money, the newlyweds went to live with the older Donovans at their 74 Michigan Avenue home; “Big Tim” (as the father was called) lived on the first floor with his family. Young Tim’s family took the second floor and the house’s enormous attic that had been converted into a dormitory. By then, Young Tim had come to regret profoundly that he had not studied in school and gone to college. He began to read widely, stocking hundreds of books in the library of the nicer two-story brick home he and Anna later bought outside of First Ward on Prospect Avenue. Tim also eventually left the rail yard to take a better job as secretary for the Holy Cross Cemetery. He and Anna became “lace curtain Irish,” the term the jealous “shanty Irish” of First Ward used for families that moved up and out. By the time he was middle-aged, Tim and his family were even listed in the Buffalo Blue Book for the city’s prominent—no small feat considering that as a young man looking for work he saw signs hanging from many businesses that read “No Irish Need Apply.”

  It was while they were living with his father that Tim and Anna had their first child, whom they named William Donovan. He was born on New Year’s Day, 1883, at the Michigan Avenue home, delivered by a doctor who made a house call. Mary chose “William,” which was not a family name. The young boy picked his own middle name, “Joseph,” later at his confirmation. His parents called him “Will.”

  Anna had another boy, Timothy, the next year and Mary was born in 1886. Disease killed the next four children shortly after birth or in the case of one, James, when he was four months shy of his fourth birthday. Vincent arrived by the time Will was eight and Loretta (her siblings called her “Loret”) came when the family had moved to Prospect Avenue and Will was fifteen.

  From Anna’s side of the family came style and etiquette and the dreams of poets. From Tim came toughness and duty and honor to country and clan. At night the parents would read to Will and the other children from their books—Will’s favorites were the rich, nationalistic verses of Irish poet James Mangan. Saturday nights, when the workweek was done, Tim would often take the three boys with him to the corner saloon (practically every corner of First Ward had a saloon) to listen to the men argue about the Old Country and sing Irish ballads. Fights often broke out; a young man who walked into a First Ward pub always looked for the exit in case he had to get out fast. Tim, who like his father abstained from alcohol and also tobacco, sipped a ginger ale while Will and his brothers snitched sandwiches piled high on the bar.

  Will adored his mother and tried to control his violent temper for her sake. But there was an intensity to the oldest Donovan son; he rarely smiled and fought often with other boys in the neighborhood (who could never make him cry) or with his brothers, who tended to be milder mannered. Tim, who could be hotheaded at times himself, finally bought boxing gloves and set up a ring in the backyard to let the three boys punch until they wore themselves out.

  Both parents were stern disciplinarians and insisted that their children have proper schooling. When he was old enough to start, Will awoke early each morning and spent an hour taking the streetcar and walking to Saint Mary’s Academy and Industrial Female School on Cleveland Avenue north of First Ward. The school, which became known as “Miss Nardin’s Academy” after its founder, Ernestine Nardin, offered classes for working women in the evening; during the day, boys and girls attended for free. Will, who attended the academy until he was twelve, proved to be an erratic student. His spelling grades were poor. He earned barely a C in geography. But the nuns who taught him found him unusually well read for a child his age with an almost insatiable appetite for books. He also was not shy about standing in front of the class and reading stories or orations.

  At thirteen, Will enrolled at Saint Joseph’s Collegiate Institute, a Catholic high school downtown run by the Christian Brothers. Saint Joseph’s charged tuition but James Quigley, the six-foot-tall bishop of Buffalo, who knew the Donovan family well, paid Will’s fee from a diocese fund. The school stressed public speaking, debating, and athletic competition. Will Donovan thrived. He acted in school plays, won the Quigley Gold Medal one year for his oration titled “Independence Forever,” and improved his grades. He also played football for Saint Joseph’s and was scrappy and ferocious on the field.

  In Irish Catholic families, it was assumed that one of the boys would enter the priesthood. Tim and Anna never even hinted at the notion with their sons, but Will expected he would be the one when he graduated from Saint Joseph’s in 1899. To make up his mind he enrolled in Niagara University, a Catholic college and seminary on the New York bank of the Niagara River separating the United States from Canada. The school was founded to “prepare young men for the fight against secularism and . . . indifference to religion,” as one university history put it.

  Donovan, however, soon disabused himself of a religious calling as he plunged into his studies at Niagara. Father William Egan, a professor at the university who became another of Donovan’s religious mentors, gently advised him that he did not seem cut out for the cloth. Donovan also concluded “he wasn’t good enough to be a priest,” Vincent recalled. But for someone who had decided to take the secular road, Donovan still had a lot of fire and brimstone left in him. He won one oratorical contest with a speech titled “Religion—The Need of the Hour.” In florid prose he condemned anti-Christian forces corrupting the nation—a theme pleasing to the ears of the Vincentian fathers judging him. “We stand in the presence of these evils which threaten to overwhelm the world and hurl it into the abyss of moral degradation,” Donovan railed.

  After three years of what amounted to prep school at Niagara, Father Egan convinced Donovan that the legal profession might be his calling (he certainly had the windpipes for the courtroom) and wrote him a glowing recommendation for Columbia College in New York City—which helped get him admitted in 1903 despite mediocre grades.

  He continued to be an average student at Columbia, but the college gave him the opportunity to widen his intellectual horizon and explore ideas beyond Catholic dogma (though like Donovan, a large majority of his classmates professed to be conservative Republicans). At one point Donovan even questioned whether he wanted to remain in the Catholic Church and started attending services for other denominations and religions, including the Jewish faith, to check them out. He finally decided to stick with Catholicism.

  Donovan soaked up campus life. He won the Silver Medal in a college oratory contest, rowed on the varsity crew squad, ran cross-country, and was the substitute quarterback for the college football team. Football elevated him to near campus-hero status by his senior year, when the coach let him in the game more often. (His gridiron career ended abruptly during the sixth game of the 1905 season when a Princeton lineman hobbled him with a tackle.) In the senior yearbook his classmates voted him the “most modest” and one of the “handsomest.”

  Donovan was handsome, his dark brown hair brushed neatly to the side, his face angular but with soft features that showed manliness yet gentleness, and those captivating blue eyes. Young women found him irresistible and at Columbia Donovan began going out with them, gravitating toward girls with highbrow pedigrees. He dated Mary Harriman, a free spirit who attended nearby Barnard College and whose father was railroad tycoon Edward Henry Harriman. His most serious romance developed with Blanche Lopez, the stunningly beautiful daughter of Spanish aristocrats resettled in New York City, whom Donovan had met at a Catholic church near Columbia.
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  Donovan graduated with Columbia’s Class of 1905, earning a bachelor of arts degree. He immediately enrolled in Columbia Law School, which took him two years to complete. Donovan became a serious student. He caught the eye of Harlan Stone, a highly respected New York lawyer and academic who taught him equity law. Stone, who never looked at notes or raised his voice at students during class, was impressed by the kid from a rough Irish neighborhood, who asked and answered questions in such a thoughtful, measured tone. Stone was Donovan’s favorite professor—and over the years, a close friend.

  One of Donovan’s classmates was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The two never mingled, however, because they had absolutely nothing in common. Roosevelt came from a wealthy New York family, he had attended the country’s best schools (Groton, then Harvard), he was never particularly good at sports, he was not too serious a law student, and he was already married. Roosevelt saw Donovan on campus frequently but paid him no attention. Donovan, for his part, had no interest in the dandy from Hyde Park.