Review by New York Times Review
IN January 1940, William J. Donovan sat in a Manhattan radio studio plugging "The Fighting 69th," a Hollywood movie about the cocky, mostly Irish New York regiment whose exploits during World War I had made Donovan a national hero and earned him the Medal of Honor. The release of the film, starring James Cagney and Pat O'Brien, with George Brent as the rakishly handsome Donovan, put the then wealthy and well-connected corporate attorney back in the spotlight just at the moment President Franklin Roosevelt was looking for men who could help mobilize the country for war. Roosevelt and Donovan could not have been more different, Douglas Waller writes in this entertaining history, and it was, at best, an uneasy alliance. They came from divergent backgrounds - one the scion of an old aristocratic family, the other a poor Irish Catholic boy from Buffalo - and barely acknowledged each other while at Columbia Law School. They were also members of opposing political parties, and the fiercely Republican Donovan, during a failed bid to become governor of New York in 1932, campaigned not only against his rival for the office, Herbert Lehman, but also against Roosevelt's domestic policies, and ridiculed him as a dictator with "delusions of grandeur." But the growing military crisis in Europe gave them a common cause. In June 1940, Roosevelt tapped Donovan for a confidential mission to Britain. His assignment was to gauge the situation there, and determine the validity of Ambassador Joseph Kennedy's assertion that the British had neither the will nor the means to beat back a German attack. Donovan returned to Washington with the optimistic message that Britain could fight on, but only with American military equipment and destroyers, and lobbied hard for aid, inspiring the columnist Walter Lippmann to gush that his findings "almost singlehandedly overcame the unmitigated defeatism which was paralyzing Washington." More secret missions followed, and by July 1941, Roosevelt had become sufficiently impressed with Donovan's sense of purpose and swashbuckling style to charge him with creating a new civilian intelligence agency, soon to be known as the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.), which would carry out secret activities abroad and analyze information related to national defense. "The feuding fiefdoms" of the Army, Navy and State Department had little sympathy for Roosevelt's new spymaster, but Donovan's "most implacable foe" was J. Edgar Hoover, the ambitious director of the F.B.I., who resented the brash interloper's meddling in his bureau, and who regarded him from the outset as a threat to his power. The central villain of "Wild Bill Donovan," Hoover was a bachelor who still lived at home with his mother, obsessed over cleanliness and was sensitive about his height. Add to this that he was untalented at sports, earned his law degree at night school and got a draft exemption from the Army, and it's easy to see why he felt competitive with the macho Donovan. As the two rival intelligence chiefs aggressively expanded their empires, their run-ins grew more frequent. Waller, the author of several books on the military, writes that "it was not long before both men began keeping files on each other." Hoover was particularly incensed that Donovan was close to William Stephenson, Churchill's leading spy in the United States, who had long been an irritant to Hoover. He maintained a dossier filled with dirt about Donovan's unseemly ties to British intelligence as well as his flagrant womanizing, while the O.S.S. chief accumulated reports that the F.B.I. director was homosexual. Roosevelt, who liked playing his top advisers off one another, read Hoover's "poison-pen memos" about Donovan's unconventional, and often undiplomatic, methods, but refused to dismantle the fledgling spy agency. The president had been enamored with intrigue since his and enjoyed reading inside information and scandalous tidbits from around the world, describing Donovan favorably to friends as "my secret legs." During the war years, while Donovan traversed the globe developing his spy network and becoming an influential player in international affairs, Hoover remained in Washington plotting and scheming. It was not hard to find fault with the overreaching Donovan, who was spread way too thin, and was seemingly willing to try almost anything; even his own aides worried that he jumped "at too many jobs and offbeat ideas." Soon, as Waller demonstrates, Donovan was irritating almost everyone, running roughshod over the military, and leaving a long trail of bruised egos behind him. By late 1944, some O.S.S. intelligence failures, like a bungled operation in Italy, began to leak to the press, and there was speculation - stoked by Hoover - that Donovan and his O.S.S. were on their way out. None of this helped Donovan when it came to the most ambitious initiative he wanted Roosevelt to approve - a future central intelligence agency with himself at the helm. Usually one step ahead of his adversaries, the O.S.S. chief was caught short in early 1945 when his secret proposal was leaked to the conservative Washington Times-Herald, and savaged as a "super spy system" with plans for a powerful domestic police force on a par with the Gestapo. Donovan tried to counter the negative press with a media blitz of his own but the damage was done, and his hopes of making the O.S.S. a permanent postwar institution were dead. DONOVAN blamed Hoover for the leak and instigated a full-scale criminal investigation to find proof. He remained bitter about the incident in later years, convinced the F.B.I. director sabotaged him in order to ensure his own position as spy czar. What Donovan never wanted to admit, however, was that in his own ruthless drive for power he had alienated too many powerful constituencies, and had left himself and his agency vulnerable to attack. When Roosevelt died, he lost his protector. The newly sworn-in Harry Truman, busy downsizing the government, did not think twice about abolishing the O.S.S. and dividing its functions between the War and State Departments. After his four years of dedicated service, Donovan was dismissed with a perfunctory form letter. Yet Donovan did not have to wait long to see his dream of a central intelligence agency realized. Not two years later, with the onset of the cold war, Truman asked Congress to approve the creation of the C.I.A. Donovan hoped to be named director, but there was little chance that Truman would turn to him. He remained hopeful after Dwight Eisenhower became president. But in 1953 the job went to Donovan's protégé, Allen Dulles. Instead of being proud that one of his own men was put in charge, and that the spirit of his organization would live on, Donovan was annoyed at being passed over for an underling. This book is not the place to seek a comprehensive appraisal of the O.S.S.'s farflung intelligence operations. Its many successes and debacles are only hastily sketched here. Waller is more concerned with the politics of personality, and the legacy of Donovan's complex, larger-than-life character. As he amply shows, Donovan was a combination of bold innovator and imprudent rule bender, which made him not only a remarkable wartime leader but also an extraordinary figure in American history. It wasn't long before Donovan and J. Edgar Hoover were keeping files on each other. Jennet Conant's latest book, "A Covert Affair: Julia and Paul Child in the OSS," will be published this spring.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 13, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
Waller brings to his latest biography the high skills as a biographer that he brought to A Question of Loyalty: Gen. Billy Mitchell and the Court-Martial That Gripped the Nation (2004). Donovan, the head of WWII's Office of Strategic Services, was a New York Irishman who won the Medal of Honor in WWI. Between the wars, he became successful on Wall Street and a personal friend of FDR. When President Roosevelt was looking for someone to head an intelligence agency not controlled by either the armed forces or the FBI, he called on Donovan. Donovan was at daggers drawn with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and the service intelligence branches, and also recruited too many Ivy Leaguers, but the OSS did pull its weight in wartime intelligence. Donovan also drank too much, chased too many women, lost too many relatives at early ages, and generally did not fit into the postwar world, where the CIA replaced his OSS. Exhaustively researched but not exhaustingly written, this will probably stand as the definitive biography of a seminal figure in the history of American intelligence.--Green, Roland Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An exhaustive but never dull account of the founder of America's original intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).Former Time correspondent Waller (A Question of Loyalty: General Billy Mitchell and the Court-Martial that Gripped the Nation, 2004, etc.) has plumbed archives and newly declassified OSS files to produce a definitive life of William Joseph Donovan (18831959). The son of Irish immigrants, Donovan was already a successful lawyer when his exploits in World War I earned him the Medal of Honor. Afterward, he dabbled in Republican politics and bitterly opposed the New Deal, but travels during the 1930s convinced him of the danger of war. After Germany invaded Poland, Roosevelt began cultivating anti-isolationist Republicans. Aware that America's primitive, parochial intelligence agencies were split among feuding fiefdoms in the Army, Navy, State Department and FBI, Roosevelt persuaded Donovan to fix matters. Taking office in July 1941, he created a worldwide organization that ran espionage networks, dropped saboteurs behind enemy lines, supplied guerrillas from France to China and dispensed propaganda. Waller delivers an entertaining account of the OSS's colorful personalities, devious plots, triumphs, debacles and often nasty fireworks that occurred under Donovan's charismatic leadership. Ironically, he never united the many feuding intelligence entitiesnor has anyone since. The military fiercely guarded their agencies, and the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover detested Donovan and worked hard to undermine him. Waller concludes that OSS operations contributed only modestly to the war effort. Its successor, the CIA, has not done better, and experts still debate whether spying and covert operations do more harm than good.A wholly satisfying biography of the man whose vision continues to guide American intelligence operationsboth the daring and unconventional thinking and the delusions.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
