Joseph E. Persico (16 page)

Donovan was later to claim that he had submitted his ideas for an intelligence agency at Roosevelt's request. However, he had a penchant for making stories come out the way he wanted, ex post facto. Frank Knox was still Donovan's eager advocate and continued to bewail the failure of the administration to use his friend's talents. He told Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, “I am getting to be a little sensitive about urging him because it looks as if I were trying to find something for him to do, which is not the case.” FDR continued to perpetuate the notion that he had been close to Donovan; but Knox's failure thus far to win a substantial berth for the man stemmed from a long ago collision. In 1932, Donovan had been the unsuccessful Republican candidate to succeed FDR as governor of New York while Roosevelt was running for the presidency. Donovan had vigorously attacked FDR during the campaign and became a vocal critic of the New Deal afterward.

The Donovan memorandum reached the President's desk with exquisite timing, on June 10, the very day that Admiral Godfrey was urging FDR both to get into the intelligence game and to name Donovan America's spymaster. Sir William Wiseman had warned Admiral Godfrey about FDR's conversational ploys. Godfrey went to the White House knowing that Roosevelt “would almost certainly pull my leg and make some provocative remark about the British, or Imperialism, and that I must on no account allow myself to get cross (or ‘mad' as the Americans say).” FDR lived up to his billing. During dinner, he asked how Godfrey had traveled to the United States. When the admiral answered that he had come via Bermuda, Roosevelt retorted, “Oh yes, those West Indies Islands. We're going to show you how to look after them, and not only you but the Portuguese and Dutch. Every nigger will have his two acres and a sugar patch.” Godfrey was known to have a short fuse, but managed to ignore the taunt and “mustered up the semblance of a laugh.” Dinner was followed by what Godfrey described as “a rather creepy, crawly film” about snakes.

The admiral did get his private hour with the President. FDR began by reminiscing about his visit to London in the last war and his admiration for Blinker Hall, Godfrey's predecessor. Again the President jabbed: “Hall had a wonderful intelligence service but I don't suppose it's much good now.” Godfrey bit his tongue, and listened while Roosevelt nostalgically recalled Blinker Hall's revealing to him the exploits of British spies sneaking in and out of Germany. Godfrey was astonished to find that after nearly a quarter of a century, Roosevelt still swallowed the concoctions that Hall had fed him. When he finally had a chance to get in a word, he urged FDR to create “one intelligence security boss, not three or four.” And the person most qualified, he said, was William J. Donovan. FDR noncommittally resumed his reminiscing, and Godfrey left the White House doubtful that he had made a sale.

The President had already offered Donovan a job before Godfrey's visit, not as America's intelligence chief, but a position that had to have offended that proud, ambitious man. On June 5, while Donovan, with Ian Fleming, had been designing an American espionage agency, Henry Morgenthau Jr. and FDR discussed making Donovan the New York State chairman of the Defense Savings Program. Donovan had received a letter from Morgenthau that read, “This would be a full time job,” and FDR agreed that it presented “an unusual opportunity for public service in these critical times.” Twelve days after the offer, on June 17, an impatient Morgenthau told his secretary to get hold of Donovan on the phone. “I want to have him give me a yes or no on whether he is going to take the Chairmanship in New York State,” he fussed. “I am not going to wait any longer.” During their subsequent phone conversation, Donovan was evasive. War bond salesman was hardly the role in which he saw himself. The call ended with Morgenthau demanding Donovan's answer by sunset.

Donovan did not call Morgenthau back. Instead, he was summoned to the White House the next day, where he met the President, along with his champion, Knox, and Ben Cohen, a trusted New Deal aide who drafted much legislation for Roosevelt. By then FDR had had eight days to study Donovan's proposal for a coordinator of intelligence. Donovan was primed. He waxed eloquently and persuasively, urging that America catch up with other major powers in the intelligence field. FDR was impressed by Donovan's energy, ideas, and conviction. Here was the man who had told him that Britain would survive after Dunkirk, who had assured him that the RAF would prevail in the air war, and that the British could not only take it, but hand it out. Thus far, he had proved right.

After leaving the White House, Donovan finally got around to calling Morgenthau, who was out of the office. He left a message that he was not going to become New York chairman of the Defense Savings Program, for he had at last been offered an appointment commensurate with his ambition and talents. After the meeting with Donovan, FDR had scrawled across the bottom of the espionage agency proposal, “JBJr. Please set this up
confidentially
with Ben Cohen, military not O.E.M.,” signed “FDR.” JBJr. was John B. Blandford Jr., assistant director of the budget. What FDR meant was that this latest federal agency was to be placed under the military and its creation kept quiet by not making it part of the Office of Emergency Management. In these ten words scribbled on an interoffice memo, the President created America's first central intelligence service.

Ben Cohen went to see Blandford's boss, Harold Smith, the director of the Bureau of the Budget, in the Executive Office Building, the gloomy stone heap to the west of the White House, to figure out how to translate FDR's note into a government entity. Cohen and Smith came up with possible titles for Donovan, Coordinator of Strategic Information or Coordinator of Defense Information, and tested them with the military. The chiefs balked. They did not want “strategic” or “defense” in Donovan's title. They compromised finally on the nebulous Coordinator of Information. Since the organization would be under the military, Donovan, the President's aides suggested, should be commissioned a major general. Again the officers balked. However, they said, he could use the honorific “colonel,” his World War I rank. Donovan was not to be salaried but would be reimbursed only for “transportation, subsistence and other expenses incidental to the performance of your duties.” He himself would have to pay for the scrambler phones to be installed in his homes. The first draft of a proposed press release announcing Donovan's appointment had repeated from his proposal that he could “undertake activities helpful in securing of defense information not available to the government through existing agencies and departments.” The sentence meant that Donovan could initiate espionage. This clause was knocked out by the military.

Donovan later described to a friend his terms for taking the job: “It is sufficient to say that I told the President that I did not want to do it and that I would only do it on three conditions: 1. That I would report only to him. 2. That his secret funds would be available. 3. That all the Departments of the government would be instructed to give me what I wanted.” Donovan, unconvincingly, wanted it understood that he had not reached out for the job; the President had reached out to him.

On July 14, nearly a month after FDR had picked Donovan as his intelligence chief, word went out to relevant federal agencies, announcing fuzzily, that Colonel William J. Donovan, as coordinator of information, would be “assembling and correlating information which may be useful in the formulation of basic plans for the defense of the nation.” The Office of the Coordinator of Information became the latest of 136 emergency agencies that FDR had created. News of Donovan's appointment earned a third of a column on page 5 of
The New York Times.
Guesses by journalists as to what the coordinator's duties actually meant ranged from espionage to controlling the gasoline supply. It seemed a thin start for a spy service, but as a colleague observed of Donovan, he had the “power to visualize an oak where he saw an acorn.” Despite their past political differences, the new coordinator fit a profile visible in many of the people surrounding FDR. Like Roosevelt, Donovan was a magnetic personality, full of charm, brimming with ideas and energy, possessed of an irrepressible optimism. Both men had faced acid tests of courage and prevailed—Roosevelt overcoming the crippling effects of polio, and Donovan displaying a bravery in combat that scoffed at death. The two men differed in politics, not in character. Bill Donovan was FDR's kind of man.

On June 18, William Stephenson, the BSC chief, cabled London, “Donovan saw President today and after long discussion where in all points were agreed, he accepted appointment. He will be coordinator of all forms [of] intelligence including offensive operations . . . you can imagine how relieved I am after three months of battle and jockeying for position in Washington that our man is in such a position of importance to our efforts.” The jubilation reached even higher and prompted an astonishing claim. Major Desmond Morton, Churchill's liaison officer with the British secret service, wrote after Donovan's COI had been in existence for two months, “[A] most secret fact of which the Prime Minister is aware but not all other persons concerned, is that to all intents and purposes U.S. Security is being run for them at the President's request by the British. A British officer [Stephenson] sits in Washington with Mr. Edgar Hoover and General [
sic
] Bill Donovan for this purpose and reports regularly to the President. It is of course essential that this fact should not be known in view of the furious uproar it would cause if known to the Isolationists.”

Who was this “Wild Bill” whom Roosevelt had made the country's first spymaster? He had been born to first-generation Irish Catholic parents on New Year's Day 1883 in Buffalo, New York, the first of nine children, of whom five survived to adulthood. Young Donovan was a natural athlete with a bookish bent. He began keeping notebooks, in one of which he copied a revealing passage attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson: “He had read the inscription on the gates of Busyrane—‘Be bold'; and on the second gate—‘Be bold, be bold, and evermore be bold'; and then again had paused well at the third gate—‘But not too bold.'”

Donovan first enrolled in Niagara University because it was affiliated with a diocesan seminary, and he wanted to become a Dominican priest. At the end of his third year, after quarterbacking the football team, he decided that he lacked the calling for the priesthood and transferred to Columbia University to study law. He did not cut much of an academic swath, but won campus glory as the star quarterback for the Columbia Lions. Donovan scraped through law school with nary an A or a B. His single distinction outside sports was as a debater. He won the George William Curtis Medal for Public Speaking with a talk prophetically entitled “The Awakening of Japan.” Franklin Roosevelt had indeed been a law school classmate, but he and Donovan moved in separate social orbits.

After Columbia, Donovan returned to Buffalo and was soon asked to join one of the city's leading firms, followed by an invitation to the exclusive Saturn Club. In 1912, hungry for adventure beyond the decorous walls of a law office, he organized a cavalry troop of forty-two socially prominent Buffalonians. The unit, christened the Silk Stocking Boys, was accepted into the National Guard, and his comrades elected Donovan their captain.

At age thirty, still a bachelor, he met Ruth Rumsey, a diminutive stunner, platinum blonde, slim, smart, and aristocratic from head to toe. They were married on July 14, 1914. The descendant of starving Irish peasants had made it. He was a leader in his profession, belonged to the best clubs, and had married into the town's Protestant elite, though he insisted that he and Ruth must marry and rear their children in the Catholic faith.

In 1916, Donovan's Silk Stocking Boys were called to active duty under General John “Black Jack” Pershing to help capture the Mexican revolutionary General Pancho Villa. The expedition never caught Villa, but Donovan had the time of his life, driving his men and himself mercilessly, sitting around the campfire at night, singing and swapping tales. The Silk Stocking Boys returned to Buffalo on March 12, 1917. Three days later, Donovan had to tell a disbelieving Ruth that he was off again. He had orders to report to the New York National Guard armory in Manhattan. Less than a month later, on April 6, the United States entered the war in Europe, and Donovan was given command of the 1st Battalion of the 69th Infantry Regiment, the fabled “Fighting Irish.”

The 69th Regiment sailed for France on October 24, 1917, and, on its arrival, went directly to the front. The bloodying of the regiment was swift. At the Battle of Ourcq, in Donovan's battalion of approximately 1,000 men, 600 were killed, wounded, or missing. Donovan appeared to lack a fear nerve, exposing himself repeatedly to enemy fire in what seemed to his men a contempt for death. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross at Ourcq, the nation's second highest medal.

The regiment's chaplain, Father Francis P. Duffy, recalled how after the battle he heard one of Donovan's men exclaim, “Wild Bill is a son of a b——, but he's a game one.” Thus, according to Father Duffy, “Wild Bill” Donovan was born. An earlier version, however, had it that while Donovan was chasing Pancho Villa, his men complained about the exhausting pace he set. “Look at me,” their commander taunted them, “I'm not even panting. If I can take it, why can't you?” From one of the tired troopers came a plaintive cry, “We ain't as wild as you are, Bill,” and the name apparently stuck.

On October 19, in the Meuse-Argonne sector, Donovan's battalion was ordered to advance against a strong German position. Wearing dress uniform, waving his pistol aloft, Donovan rose from a shell hole to lead the attack. He fell, seriously wounded, the nerves and blood vessels in his knee shattered. He refused to be taken from the field. Soon, gray-clad figures of German infantry emerged from the smoke of an artillery barrage. The American line began to sag. Donovan shouted to his men, “They can't get me and they can't get you.” Inspired, the Fighting Irish rose up and repulsed the Germans. For this performance, Wild Bill was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.