Wild Bill Donovan

by Douglas Waller

  Jackson still found uses for Donovan’s tradecraft. When Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s onetime deputy, developed a convenient case of amnesia, claiming he could not remember his Nazi past, Donovan had a team of OSS psychologists and psychiatrists try to trick him. They showed Hess newsreels of him with Hitler and Göring at a Nazi Party rally and beamed a light at his face to study his reactions. The haggard-looking Hess, who was handcuffed to a guard, continued to feign his memory loss. But tension between Donovan and Jackson soon surfaced. It had as much to do with different personalities and lawyering styles. Jackson found Donovan’s behavior often erratic, and temperamental when he didn’t get his way. Donovan, he feared, was a manipulator trying to trap him in schemes for the trial that suited his personal agenda but not what was best for the prosecution. Donovan thought Jackson was a poor administrator (even the justice’s loyalists admitted he was hopeless on that score) and weak in the courtroom. Jackson was skilled at preparing trial briefs and analyzing arguments lawyers presented to him on the High Court. But he had no experience handling witnesses and criminals before a jury and Donovan thought he should have paid more attention to someone who had actually prosecuted cases in Buffalo as a U.S. attorney.

  Jackson thought the prosecution strategy should depend heavily on the thousands of documents he had accumulated to demonstrate Nazi guilt rather than on the flashy examinations and cross-examinations Donovan envisioned. Donovan argued intensely that the case needed live Germans and Holocaust victims to testify instead of Jackson spending days reading dreary records to the judges. Sensitive to image, he feared the press would grow bored and the Nazi defendants would turn public opinion against the tribunal if a dramatic case were not presented against them. Other lawyers on the team agreed with Donovan; Germans on the stand would counter the impression among their countrymen that Nuremberg was nothing more than “victor’s justice.”

  The targets of the prosecution also divided the two men. Donovan believed that Germany’s top officers should be charged with the war crimes they actually committed. He was nervous about Jackson’s intention to prosecute the entire German High Command collectively as members of a “criminal organization,” with simply proof of membership enough to convict an officer. Under that standard Donovan could have been prosecuted for war crimes in World War I because his men had killed surrendering Germans, while senior Wehrmacht officers like Canaris, who supported the resistance, could be charged in this conflict.

  Convinced that Jackson’s approach was wrong, Donovan went off the reservation and began organizing his own prosecution strategy for the trial. He started negotiating with Walter Warlimont, whom he had known before the war, and four other senior Wehrmacht generals, hoping to have them admit their guilt and testify against two top men, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the head of the armed forces high command, and his deputy, Alfred Jodl. Donovan sounded out another Nuremberg defendant—Hjalmar Schacht, the former economics minister and Reichsbank president who financed Hitler’s arms buildup in the 1930s and was a loyal Nazi until 1943. The ambitious Schacht, who later was arrested by the Gestapo for being part of the Stauffenberg plot and sent to a prison camp, was eager to distance himself from his co-defendants and work with Donovan. Though the German economist had been the financial wizard behind Hitler’s aggression, Donovan was convinced Schacht could be a valuable witness and he sorely wanted to question him on the stand. But Göring was the biggest prize, Donovan thought. He began private negotiations with the Reichsmarschall and his lawyer to have him testify for the prosecution. Donovan prepared a lengthy pretrial questionnaire for Göring and the Reichsmarschall promised he would give truthful written answers to the questions. Schacht and Göring, Donovan told the other attorneys, would be the “big rabbits out of a hat.”

  Robert Jackson was no fool. He knew what Donovan was up to and deeply resented the challenge to his authority. Jackson eventually was persuaded he would need some witnesses on the stand, but he moved to shut down Donovan’s negotiations with defendants such as Schacht and Göring. The economist was one of the most guilty Nazis, Jackson argued, because he had financed Hitler’s war making. Striking a deal with the devious Reichsmarschall was fraught with danger, Jackson correctly worried. Neither would testify for the prosecution, he ruled.

  By early November, Jackson and Donovan were barely on speaking terms—their communication handled with testy memos back and forth—and Donovan was openly ridiculing the trial tactics in staff meetings, calling them “utterly foolish.” Other lawyers on the team began taking sides and the feuding bogged down preparations for trial. “What this organization needs is about six tickets—one way—to New York,” complained Thomas Dodd, a young attorney who had not worked for the OSS and one day would be a senator from Connecticut. Jackson began to shrink Donovan’s role in the tribunal, which infuriated Donovan. Jackson, who had depended on him so much in the prosecution team’s early days, now hoped the spymaster would take one of those tickets to New York.

  As the trial opened the third week in November and Jackson began plodding through a reading of his documents, another clash with Donovan outside the courtroom erupted that caused the final breach in their relationship.

  Mary looked glamorous in her red cocktail dress that Thursday evening November 22. Sitting across from her at the dinner table was an enemy POW, Major General Erwin Lahousen, who was enchanted with Mary, but had no idea why he was dining in Donovan’s plush quarters with her, three other OSS women also in stylish dresses, a couple of U.S. naval officers, and Paul Leverkühn, who had extended him the invitation. Leverkühn, the Berlin lawyer who had introduced Donovan to Warlimont and other German officers during the 1930s and had served as a Canaris intermediary in Istanbul, had been advising Donovan at Nuremberg on how to handle the defendants. Lahousen was an Austrian Abwehr officer who had also been close to Canaris and had crossed paths with Leverkühn in Turkey. Donovan considered them both valuable sources and had them put up in guesthouses reserved for prosecution witnesses. He did not arrive at the dinner party until later that night, stayed just for a short while, and made only small talk with the German general. Lahousen assumed this was a social affair and enjoyed the meal, the wine, and the company of Mary and three other pretty women. Clinking glasses with a top German spy thrilled Mary.

  Jackson was irritated enough with Donovan’s freelance interrogations of Germans. When he discovered that Donovan had wined and dined two of them in his quarters he was outraged. Jackson had not settled in his own mind whether Lahousen was a valuable witness or a future criminal defendant and he was not sure that Leverkühn wasn’t a hostile spy. If the press found out the prosecution team was throwing dinner parties for German suspects, it would raise a huge stink, Jackson knew. He fired off a terse note to his senior prosecutors, ordering that “no social entertaining of any prisoner of war shall be undertaken.” The memo did not mention the dinner party incident but everyone knew it was aimed at Donovan. An OSS aide put a smiley face on the copy the spymaster received and underlined the order. Jackson finally sent a letter directly to Donovan on November 26, one of the most hostile he had ever put to paper. “You and I appear to have developed certain fundamental differences,” he wrote. “Frankly, Bill, your views and mine appear to be so far apart that I do not consider it possible to assign you examination or cross-examination of witnesses.” Jackson, in effect, was firing him.

  Enraged, Donovan shot back a letter just as pointed. Indicting the entire German high command is “unbecoming” of “our country,” he bluntly wrote. Relying “exclusively on documents” is a mistake. Getting Göring, “the last sane leader of the gang,” to confess on the stand “was not intended as a ‘stunt’ or as a dramatic episode, but as a very practical means of bringing home to the German people the guilt of these men.” The case Jackson has assembled sorely lacks “central administrative control” or “intellectual direction.” Donovan, in effect, accused him of being an incompetent lawyer. He told Jackson he was leaving Nuremberg.

>   DODD SAW MARY and Donovan off at the airport on November 30, sad to see them leave. Donovan, he thought, was a skilled trial lawyer and Jackson should have paid more attention to his ideas. Donovan left Nuremberg as bitter as he had ever been. He packed up the thousands of pages of court papers and classified documents he had collected there and put them on his plane, further angering Jackson, who believed he had stolen government documents. The justice thought Donovan was a shallow, social-climbing headline grabber. He didn’t intend to get into a “pissing contest” with the “skunk,” he told Dodd, but he suspected Donovan was planting stories in the press to smear him. The Washington Times-Herald carried a piece complaining that Jackson’s “inefficient and undramatic presentation of evidence” was boring everyone silly. To preempt any damage the negative publicity might cause him with the White House, Jackson rushed a letter and thick file to Truman with an account of the Lahousen dinner party and copies of Donovan’s most pungent notes. Friends had warned him Donovan “would not work in second place with anybody,” Jackson wrote Truman, and he had found that to be the case. The package further convinced Truman he was right to be rid of the bad apple.

  Donovan’s allies on the prosecution team continued to feed him inside information on the mistakes they thought Jackson was making throughout the ten-month trial. With the plea deal fallen through, Göring took the stand defiantly unrepentant and tried to rally the other defendants against the prosecution. But Göring and twenty-one others were convicted. Three were acquitted, including Schacht. Of the six groups Jackson had targeted as criminal organizations, three were found guilty: the Nazi Party, SS, and Gestapo. Hitler’s cabinet, the SA paramilitary “brown shirts,” and the German high command were found not guilty. His suit hanging limply from him, Göring, who was found guilty of “crimes unique in their enormity,” gave his judges a cynical look when the death sentence was read and turned on his heel to follow two white-helmeted guards out of the courtroom. He managed to cheat the hangman by swallowing a potassium cyanide capsule in his cell. He claimed to the end that Donovan was one prosecutor he could trust. As Donovan had warned, the tribunal and Jackson’s prosecution were accused of dispensing victor’s justice. But though the legal basis for the proceedings may have been flawed and Jackson’s prosecution less than spectacular, the eleven ordered to the gallows and the rest who were sentenced to prison richly deserved the punishment they got.

  Chapter 32

  Recovery

  REPORTERS STAKED OUT La Guardia Airport when Donovan and Mary finally arrived from Europe in mid-December, hoping he would comment on the press stories about his feud with Jackson. Donovan disappointed them, claiming he planned all along to return by Christmas. The next month, he took the train to Washington to receive an Oak Leaf Cluster to his Distinguished Service Medal, which Truman pinned on him in a largely private and stilted ceremony. As Donovan walked out of the Oval Office, Truman let slip that he was having trouble setting up a new intelligence system and mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that it would be nice to have Donovan’s views before he finally decided on one. It lifted Donovan’s spirits. But Truman never called back. Decompressing from the last four years, Donovan soon realized he was on the periphery of that debate and other foreign policy issues. He lamented to friends about no longer being a part of major decisions for the country. “What good am I doing?” he sometimes asked plaintively.

  Donovan’s more immediate problem was recovering from four years living the lifestyle of the rich on an Army salary. He was nearly broke. Debts had piled up and he owed more than a quarter of a million dollars in back taxes to the Internal Revenue Service. He still had Ruth’s family money as a cushion, but to raise cash he sold their Georgetown home to Katharine and Phil Graham, who had just taken over the Washington Post. Chapel Hill was put into a trust and they moved out of the Beekman Place flat and into a less expensive New York apartment on Sutton Place. To make money, Donovan took on antitrust cases, his bread-and-butter work in prewar years. But he had been too long absent from the courtroom to be the major litigator he once was. Colleagues began to complain that he was overconfident with cases, did not do his homework, and tried to ad-lib at trial, which didn’t serve his clients well in high venues like the Supreme Court. The firm, which emerged from the war financially strapped as well, found Donovan’s biggest value now was as a rainmaker, bringing in clients from the intelligence and foreign contacts he had accumulated.

  But the legal work was merely a way to pay the bills so Donovan could pursue his eclectic interests. He hired a researcher who began collecting thousands of documents for a massive tome he wanted to write on the history of American intelligence since the Revolution. (The project dragged on for ten years and never resulted in a book.) He told a friend he also wanted to write children’s books—an odd admission considering he had done so little to raise his own children and, except for Patricia, had even less contact with his grandchildren. Donovan wanted to assume the role of elder statesman after the war. Often with Ruth and Mary he toured Europe and Asia for months at a time, interviewing old foreign sources on the emerging Soviet threat. Donovan chaired the American Committee for United Europe to promote the political and economic integration of the continent, an idea Truman supported that eventually resulted in the European Union decades later. Through that committee work he was able to patch up his strained relations with Churchill, who had been voted out of office in July 1945 and now was an honorary president of the European Movement, which also lobbied for integration. In exchange for a $25,000 donation to the Movement from the American Committee, Churchill agreed to speak at a kick-off fund-raising luncheon in New York for Donovan’s group. Before the event, the two men sat in the Sutton Place apartment reminiscing about the war years, Churchill bouncing Patricia on his knee.

  Donovan also could not resist another try at elective office. Within months after returning from Nuremberg, Republican Party operatives convinced him he had a shot at winning the New York Senate seat in the 1946 congressional elections. Donovan—foolishly, it turned out—mounted a late-starting campaign to secure the nomination at the party’s convention in Saratoga Springs on September 9. A few editorial writers and a sprinkling of county Republican chairmen endorsed his candidacy, but one important person did not: Thomas Dewey, New York’s progressive governor who was running for reelection and had a lock on the state GOP. New York’s labor unions, which had fought Donovan’s bid for governor in 1932, opposed him again and Dewey did not want to alienate that constituency important for his campaign by backing Donovan. He also told friends the former OSS commander was “too reactionary” for his taste. But the most important reason Dewey opposed Donovan’s nomination was because the general had snubbed him at the outset, refusing to endorse Dewey for reelection when he announced he was running for the Senate. The snub was intentional. Donovan was more conservative than Dewey and always thought the governor was trying to stab him in the back.

  By the time the Saratoga convention rolled around Donovan had the backing of young Republicans, World War I veterans groups, and the upstate county chairmen. He boasted that he had the momentum and promised to wage a spirited floor fight to win the nomination. He also reluctantly endorsed Dewey two days before the convention, hoping that would mollify him. It did not. Dewey, who kept the delegates tightly under his control, had no problem securing the nomination for his man, New York assemblyman Irving M. Ives. A loyal Republican, Donovan campaigned for Ives and Dewey, praising them and denouncing Truman as a “tragic figure of good intent but poor comprehension in the White House.”

  A MONTH AFTER Donovan returned from Nuremberg, Truman had two Navy admirals in for lunch and a bit of fun. William Leahy, who had been Roosevelt’s no-nonsense chief of staff, had stayed on in that position with Truman. Sidney Souers had achieved little distinction as a Naval Reserve officer, but he was sitting at the table with Leahy and Truman because in his day job he was a high-powered Missouri insurance executive and a campaign contributor. A
fter the plates were cleared, Truman playfully hauled out black coats, black hats, and wooden daggers and presented them to the admirals, proclaiming that the two were now officially anointed the leaders of the “Cloak and Dagger Group of Snoopers.”

  It was the only light moment Truman had enjoyed with intelligence since he disbanded the OSS and divided its functions between the War and State Departments. The parts sent to the Pentagon were renamed the Strategic Services Unit and shrunk to just a shell of their original size. Langer’s researchers had their funding slashed by Byrnes at the State Department, who proved incapable of carrying out the other assignment Truman had given him to forge a coordinated foreign intelligence program. Truman still had no such spy operation abroad, no organization to warn him of strategic threats from the Soviet Union or other enemies. He went back to the drawing board.

  After more months of cajoling and arm twisting his agencies, he managed to cobble together another plan, this one a watered-down version of the Pentagon compromise Donovan had been forced to accept before the Trohan leak blew everything out of the water in February 1945. Leahy would form a National Intelligence Authority with the Pentagon and State Department that would oversee a new Central Intelligence Group. This intelligence group, which Souers would manage as an executive secretary (not really its leader), would spy overseas with employees lent to it from the Army, Navy, and State Department.