William J. Donovan

A decorated veteran of World War I, Donovan is believed to be the only person to have been awarded all four of the following prestigious decorations: the Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, the Distinguished Service Medal, and the National Security Medal.^[2] He is also a recipient of the Silver Star and Purple Heart, as well as decorations from a number of other nations for his service during both World Wars.

Early life

Of Irish descent, Donovan was born in Buffalo, New York, to Anna Letitia "Tish" Donovan (née Lennon) and Timothy P. Donovan, both American-born children of Irish immigrants. The Lennons were from Ulster and the Donovans from County Cork. Donovan's grandfather, Timothy O'Donovan Sr., was from the town of Skibbereen; raised by an uncle who was a parish priest, he married Donovan's grandmother Mary Mahoney, who belonged to a propertied family of substantial means that disapproved of him. They first moved to Canada and then to Buffalo, where they dropped the "O" from their name. Donovan's father, born in 1858, worked as the superintendent of a Buffalo railroad yard, as secretary for Holy Cross Cemetery, and attempted to engage in a political career with little success.^[3]

Donovan was born on New Year's Day in 1883. (Named William, he chose his middle name, Joseph, at the time of his confirmation.) He had two younger brothers and two younger sisters who survived into adulthood and several additional younger siblings who died in infancy or childhood. "From Anna's side of the family came style and etiquette and the dreams of poets," Donovan's biographer, Douglas Waller, wrote. "From Tim came toughness and duty and honor to country and clan."^[4] Donovan attended St. Joseph's Collegiate Institute, a Catholic institution at which he played football, acted in plays, and won an award for oratory. He went on to Niagara University, a Catholic university and seminary where he undertook a pre-law major. Considering the priesthood, he ultimately decided "he wasn't good enough to be a priest," although he did win another oratorical contest, this time with a speech warning of corrupt, anti-Christian forces that threatened the United States.^[5]

With the expectation of studying law, Donovan eventually transferred to Columbia University, where he looked beyond "Catholic dogma" and attended Protestant and Jewish worship services to decide whether he wanted to change religions.^[6] He joined the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, rowed on varsity crew, again won a prize for oratory, was a campus football hero, and was voted the "most modest" and one of the "handsomest" members of the graduating class of 1905.^{[citation needed]}

After earning his bachelor of arts, Donovan spent two years at

During World War I, Major Donovan led the 1st battalion,

Donovan's remarkable level of endurance, which far exceeded that of the much younger soldiers under his command, led those men to give him the nickname "Wild Bill", which stuck with him for the rest of his life. Although he "professed annoyance with the nickname", his wife "knew that deep down he loved it".^[19]

Assigned

Following his return to the U.S., Donovan took his wife on a combined vacation, business trip, and intelligence mission to Japan, China, and Korea, then went on alone to Siberia during the Russian Civil War.^[25] He went back to work at his law firm, but also took an extensive journey to Europe, where he did business on behalf of J. P. Morgan and gathered intelligence about international Communism.^[26]

From 1922 to 1924, while maintaining his private law practice, he also served as U.S. Attorney for the Western District of New York. A high point came in 1923, when, as a result of continued pressure from Father Duffy, Donovan was finally awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroic acts in the battle at Landres-et-Saint-Georges. Presented with the medal at a New York City ceremony that was attended by about four thousand veterans, Donovan refused to keep it, saying that it belonged not to him but "to the boys who are not here, the boys who are resting under the white crosses in France or in the cemeteries of New York, also to the boys who were lucky enough to come through.^[27][8]

As US Attorney, he was becoming well known as a vigorous crime-fighter.^[28] He was especially famous (and, in some circles, notorious) for his energetic enforcement of Prohibition.^[28] There were a number of threats to assassinate him and to dynamite his home, but he was not deterred. The climax of his war on alcohol came in August 1923, when his agents raided Buffalo's upmarket Saturn Club (of which Donovan himself was a member) and confiscated large amounts of illegal liquor. The club's members, who formed much of the city's upper crust, were outraged, having assumed that Prohibition did not apply to people such as themselves. Some regarded Donovan as a traitor to their class, and recalled that Donovan had not, after all, been born to high station but was, in fact, an Irish Catholic who had married into the world of privileged, professional Protestants. Donovan's law partner, Goodyear, quit their firm in anger over the raid, and Donovan's own wife never forgave him for it. Many working class residents of Buffalo cheered the raid as an example of equal justice under the law, however.^[29]

In 1924, when President Calvin Coolidge cleaned house at the Department of Justice in the wake of the late President Warren G. Harding's Teapot Dome scandal, he appointed Donovan's former professor Harlan Stone as Attorney General and named Donovan as Stone's assistant, in charge of the criminal division. Donovan and his wife split their time between Washington and Buffalo, where he continued to run his law firm.^[30] At the Justice Department, Donovan hired women and eschewed yes-men. He and his wife became a popular Washington couple, although Donovan's relationship with the acting Director of the Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, briefly one of his underlings, was fraught with friction.^[31]

When Stone was appointed to the

Resigning from the Department of Justice in 1929, Donovan moved to New York City and formed a new law firm, Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine, in partnership with Frank Raichle. Despite the stock market crash, he made a success of handling many of the mergers and acquisitions and bankruptcies that then resulted; he also acquired celebrity clients, such as Mae West and Jane Wyman.^[33]

Donovan ran on the

Roosevelt came to place great value on Donovan's insight. Following Germany's and the USSR's invasions of Poland in September 1939 and the start of World War II in Europe, President Roosevelt began to put the United States on a war footing. This was a crisis of the sort that Donovan had predicted, and he sought out a responsible place in the wartime infrastructure. On the recommendation of Donovan's friend, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, Roosevelt gave him a number of increasingly important assignments. In 1940 and 1941, Donovan traveled as an informal emissary to Britain, where he was urged by Knox and Roosevelt to gauge Britain's ability to withstand Germany's aggression.^[41]

During these trips, Donovan met with key officials in the British war effort, including

Donovan and Stephenson, according to Thomas, "eventually became so close that they were known as 'Big Bill' and 'Little Bill'."^[22] Donovan, Waller has said, "could not have formed the OSS without the British, who provided intelligence, trainers, organizational charts and advice – all with the idea of making OSS an adjunct to British intelligence. But Donovan wanted to mount his own operations."^[44]

According to Ellis, quoted in his biography by British-Australian author Jesse Fink: ‘I was soon requested to draft a blueprint for an American intelligence agency, the equivalent of BSC [British Security Co-ordination] and based on these British wartime improvisations... detailed tables of organisation were disclosed to Washington... among these were the organisational tables that led to the birth of General William Donovan’s OSS.’^[45]

Said United States Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle: ‘The really active head of the intelligence section in [William] Donovan’s [OSS] group is [Ellis] . . . in other words, [Stephenson’s] assistant in the British intelligence [sic] is running Donovan’s intelligence service.’"^[46]

OSS

On July 11, 1941, Roosevelt signed an order naming Donovan Coordinator of Information (COI). "At the time," Thomas wrote, "the U.S. government had no formal spy agency. In 1929, the Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson, had abolished the highly effective Black Chamber, a code-breaking organization left over from World War I." In Stimson's view, "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail."^[22] The Army, Navy, FBI, State Department, and other entities all ran their own intelligence units, but they were feeble and isolated from one another. They also saw Donovan's new operation as a threat to their turfs.^[47]

Nevertheless, Donovan began to lay the groundwork for a centralized intelligence program. Working closely with Dick Ellis, it was he who organized the COI's New York headquarters in Room 3603 of

Donovan was in fact very active in virtually every theater of World War II. He spent a good deal of time in the Balkans, to which he had urged both Roosevelt and Churchill to pay more attention. He met in Europe with highly placed anti-Nazi Germans to broker an early peace that would allow for occupation by the Western Allies, establish a democratic Germany, and leave the Soviets out in the cold.^[59] In China, he struggled with Chiang Kai-shek and his underlings for permission to carry out espionage activities in their territory.^[60] He inspected OSS operations in Burma,^[61] met with Vyacheslav Molotov in Moscow to arrange for cooperation between the OSS and NKVD,^[62] and was present for MacArthur's successful April 1944 invasion of Hollandia on the northern coast of New Guinea.^[63] Overall, the OSS was most effective in the Balkans, China, Burma, and France.^[44]

By 1943, Donovan's relations with British officials were becoming increasingly strained as a result of turf wars, strategic and tactical disagreements, radical differences in style and temperament (the British accused the OSS of playing "cowboys and red Indians"), and contrasting visions of the postwar world.

A particular triumph for the OSS was the role it played in conveying intelligence from southern France in the run-up to the Allied landing on the French Riviera on August 15, 1944. Thanks to Donovan's spies, said Colonel William Wilson Quinn, the invading army "knew everything about that beach and where every German was." Donovan was present for that invasion, too, after which he returned to Rome for a secret meeting with Hitler's envoy to the Vatican, Ernst von Weizsäcker.^[70] Shortly afterwards, he met with Marshal Tito to discuss OSS operations in Yugoslavia.^[71] Also in August 1944, Donovan came into conflict with Churchill over the OSS's support for Greek anti-royalists.^[72]

In the closing days of the war in Europe, Donovan spent much of his time in London, where he worked out of a command center that took up an entire floor of

As World War II began to wind to a close in early 1945, Donovan began to focus on preserving the OSS beyond the end of the war. A February 19 article in the Washington Times-Herald revealed his plans for a postwar intelligence agency and published a secret memo he had sent to Roosevelt proposing its creation. The article compared the proposed agency to the Gestapo. Knowing that Americans wanted a smaller federal government after the war, Roosevelt was not entirely sold on Donovan's proposal, although Donovan felt reasonably confident he could talk the president into the idea. Hoover disapproved of Donovan's plan, which he saw as a direct threat to FBI authority, even though Donovan had stressed that his agency would operate only abroad, not domestically.^[75] After Roosevelt's death in April, however, Donovan's political position was substantially weakened. Although he argued forcefully for the OSS's retention, he found himself opposed by the new president, Harry S. Truman. While the OSS got "glowing reviews" from many wartime commanders, notably Eisenhower, who described its contributions as "vital", critics dismissed it as "an arm of British intelligence" and, like the Times-Herald reporter, painted dark pictures of it as an American Gestapo in the making.^[76]

Nuremberg trials

While British authorities and the US military and State Department were relatively indifferent to the question of trying war criminals after the war, Donovan was lobbying Roosevelt as early as October 1943 to arrange for such prosecutions. Roosevelt tasked Donovan with looking into the legalities and technicalities, and in the months that followed Donovan collected testimonies about war criminals and related information from a wide range of sources. In addition to seeking justice, Donovan wanted to exact retribution for the torture and killing of OSS agents. When Truman named Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson to serve as chief U.S. counsel in the prosecution of Nazi war criminals, Jackson, discovering that the OSS was the only agency that had seriously explored the issue, invited Donovan to join his trial staff.^[77]

On May 17, 1945, Donovan flew to Europe to prepare for the prosecutions, and eventually brought 172 OSS officers onto Jackson's team, interviewing

As was only revealed 60 years later, Donovan succeeded in getting the Americans to block the Soviet attempt to add the Katyn massacre to the list of German war crimes. He had been convinced by the German opponent of Hitler, Fabian von Schlabrendorff, unofficially included on his staff, that it was not the Germans but the Soviet secret service NKVD that had murdered some 4,000 Polish officers in the Katyn forest.^[80] But shortly afterwards Donovan came into conflict with Jackson.

In Nuremberg, Donovan interrogated many prisoners, including Hermann Göring, whom he spoke with ten times. But eventually Donovan fell out with Jackson. The latter wanted to indict the entire German High Command, not just men who had personally ordered or committed war crimes; Donovan considered this a violation of American principles of fairness. Donovan, a former prosecutor, also criticized Jackson's lack of skill and experience at putting together a strong case and at courtroom examination and cross-examination. Jackson removed him from the team, and Donovan returned to the U.S., where in January 1946 Truman presented him with the Distinguished Service Medal.^[81]

CIA

In 1946, Donovan resumed the practice of law and began writing a history of American intelligence since the Revolutionary War – a book he never completed. He traveled extensively in Europe and Asia and ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination for the Senate.^[82]

He also became chairman of the newly founded

Meanwhile, Truman moved forward with plans for a new intelligence agency, finally giving approval in 1946 for a watered-down interdepartmental "Central Intelligence Group." Donovan warned that it would be ineffectual – he compared it to a "debating society" – and he soon proved to be right. As the Cold War quickly intensified, Truman recognized the need for a far stronger intelligence service, and in February 1947 asked Congress to approve plans for a Central Intelligence Agency along the lines Donovan had proposed.^[84] Donovan himself lobbied Congress privately to pass the enabling legislation, the National Security Act of 1947.^[74] It was, in Waller's words, "a vindication of Donovan's vision".^[48] Among the OSS members who went on to become major CIA figures were Dulles, William Casey, William Colby, and James Jesus Angleton.^[44]

Donovan wanted to lead the CIA, and had many supporters who urged Truman to put him in charge. Instead, the president gave the job to Admiral

Donovan had begun experiencing symptoms of dementia while in Thailand, and he was hospitalized in 1957. While in the hospital, he "imagined he saw the Red Army coming over the 59th Street bridge, into Manhattan, and in one memorable last mission, fled the hospital, wandering down the street in his pajamas." Shortly before his death, he was visited by Eisenhower, who later told a friend that Donovan was "the last hero".^[22]

Donovan died at the age of 76 from complications of vascular dementia on February 8, 1959, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.^[23] Upon learning of his death, the CIA sent a cable to its station chiefs: "The man more responsible than any other for the existence of the Central Intelligence Agency has passed away."^[22] He is buried in Section 2 of Arlington National Cemetery.^[23] After his death, Donovan was awarded the Freedom Award of the International Rescue Committee.^[91] The law firm he founded, Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine, was dissolved in 1998.^[92] His home in Chapel Hill near Berryville, Virginia, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004.^[93]

In 2011, it was suggested that a new federal courthouse in Buffalo be named after Donovan, but, instead, it was named after Robert H. Jackson, his rival prosecutor at Nuremberg. In 2014, U.S. Senator

Donovan is a member of the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame.^[92] He is also known as the "Father of American Intelligence" and the "Father of Central Intelligence".^[91][95] "The Central Intelligence Agency regards Donovan as its founding father," according to Thomas in a 2011 Vanity Fair profile. The George Bush Center for Intelligence, the CIA headquarters building in Langley, Virginia, has a statue of Donovan in the lobby. Thomas observed that Donovan's "exploits are utterly improbable but by now well documented in declassified wartime records that portray a brave, noble, headlong, gleeful, sometimes outrageous pursuit of action and skulduggery."^[22]

William J. Donovan Award

The William J. Donovan Award was created by the OSS Society, which was founded by Donovan in 1947. The award is presented by the OSS Society to "someone who has exemplified the distinguishing features that characterized General Donovan's lifetime of public service to the United of States of America as a citizen and a soldier". Notable recipients include

Personal life

Donovan's son, David Rumsey Donovan, was a naval officer who served with distinction in World War II. His grandson, William James Donovan, served as an enlisted soldier in Vietnam and is also buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Awards and decorations

U.S. awards

	Medal of Honor[97][98][99]
	Distinguished Service Cross[97]
	Distinguished Service Medal with one oak leaf cluster[97][100]
	Silver Star[98]
	Purple Heart with two oak leaf clusters[100]
	National Security Medal[97][100][101]
	Mexican Border Service Medal[97][100][101]
	campaign star[97][100][101]
	Army of Occupation of Germany Medal[97][100][101]
	American Defense Service Medal[97][100][101]
	American Campaign Medal[97][100][101]
	European–African–Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with Arrowhead device, two silver and one bronze campaign stars[97][100][101]
	European–African–Middle Eastern Campaign Medal (second ribbon required for accoutrement spacing)[97][100][101]
	Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal with Arrowhead device and two bronze campaign stars[97][100][101]
	World War II Victory Medal[97][100][101]
	Army of Occupation Medal with 'Germany' clasp[97][100][101]
	hourglass device[97][100][101]

Foreign awards

	Knight, Légion d'honneur (France) (World War I)[98]
	Commander, Légion d'honneur (France) (World War II)[102]
	Croix de guerre with Palm and Silver Star (France) (World War I)[98]
	Honorary Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire[98]
	Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St. Sylvester (Vatican) (Italian: Ordine di San Silvestro Papa)[100]
	Order of the Crown (Italy) (Italian: Ordine della Corona d'Italia)[100]
	Croce al Merito di Guerra (Italy)[98]
	Commander's Cross with Star of the Order of Polonia Restituta (Poland)[98][100]
	Grand Officer of the Order of Léopold of Belgium with Palm[100]
	Czechoslovakian War Cross (1939)[100]
	Grand Officer of the Order of Orange Nassau (Netherlands)[100]
	Grand Cross of the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav (Norway)[100]
	Knight Grand Cross (First Class) of The Most Exalted Order of the White Elephant (Thailand)[100]

Medal of Honor citation

Rank and organization: Lieutenant Colonel, U.S. Army, 165th Infantry, 42d Division. Place and date: Near Landres-et-St. Georges, France, 14–15 October 1918. Entered service at: Buffalo, N.Y. Born: 1 January 1883, Buffalo, N.Y. G.O., No.: 56, W.D., 1922.

Lt. Col. Donovan personally led the assaulting wave in an attack upon a very strongly organized position, and when our troops were suffering heavy casualties he encouraged all near him by his example, moving among his men in exposed positions, reorganizing decimated platoons, and accompanying them forward in attacks. When he was wounded in the leg by machine-gun bullets, he refused to be evacuated and continued with his unit until it withdrew to a less exposed position.[103]

See also

• Dick Ellis
• List of Medal of Honor recipients for World War I
• List of members of the American Legion
• List of U.S. political appointments that crossed party lines
• Special Activities Division
• Tightrope Walker (1979), sculpture on the Columbia University campus commemorating Donovan

Notes

References

• OCLC 123143243
  .
• Waller, Douglas (2011). Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage. New York: Free Press.
  ISBN 978-1-4165-6744-8
  .

Further reading

• Alcorn, Robert (1965). No Banners, No Bands. D. McKay.
• Chalou, George C. ed. The Secrets War: The Office of Strategic Services in World War II (1992) 24 scholarly essays
• Clark, Blake; Clark, Nicol (1946). Into Siam. Bobbs-Merrill.
• OCLC 366081974
• Ettinger, Albert M.; Ettinger, A. Churchill (1992). A Doughboy with the Fighting 69th. White Mane Pub. Co.
  OCLC 24846119
  .
• Fink, Jesse. The Eagle in the Mirror (Edinburgh: Black & White Publishing, 2023)
  ISBN 9781785305108
• OCLC 836436423
  .
• OCLC 63692700
  .
• ISBN 978-0-00-750374-2
  .
• Hogan, Martin J. (1919). The Shamrock Battalion of the Rainbow: A Story of the Fighting Sixty-Ninth. D. Appleton.
  OCLC 1896324
  .
• Keehn, Roy D. (1910). Grand Catalogue of the Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity (7th ed.). Chicago: Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity.
  OCLC 5469453
  .
• Lovell, Stanley P (1964). Of Spies & Stratagems. Pocket Books.
  ASIN B0007ESKHE
  .
• Reilly, Henry J.; Heer, F. J. (1936). Americans All, the Rainbow at War: The Official History of the 42nd Rainbow Division in the World War.
• Smith, R. Harris (1972). OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency. University of California Press.
  OCLC 534470
  .
• Srodes, James (1999). Allen Dulles: Master of Spies. Regnery Publishing.
  OCLC 40744506
  .
• Troy, Thomas F (1981). Donovan and the CIA: A History of the Establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency, CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence.
• Willbanks, James H. (2011). America's Heroes: Medal of Honor Recipients from the Civil War to Afghanistan.
  ISBN 978-1-5988-4394-1
  .
• ISBN 978-1-4728-3863-6
  .

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to William J. Donovan.

• Willam Donovan on the German-American Bund: May, 1940.
• William J. Donovan Papers, 1913-1920: An inventory of his papers at the Buffalo History Museum, courtesy of EmpireADC.org.
• The OSS Society
• "Donovan Nuremberg Trials Collection at Cornell University". Archived from the original on July 9, 2012.
• FBI FoI Act Release: File#:77-78706 William J. Donovan
• Newspaper clippings about William J. Donovan in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW

Party political offices
Preceded by Charles H. Tuttle	Republican nominee for Governor of New York 1932	Succeeded by Robert Moses
Government offices
New office	Coordinator of Information 1941–1942	Succeeded by Himself as Director of the Office of Strategic Services
Preceded by Himself as Coordinator of Information	Director of the Office of Strategic Services 1942–1945	Succeeded by John Magruder as Director of the Strategic Services Unit
Diplomatic posts
Preceded by Edwin F. Stanton	United States Ambassador to Thailand 1953–1954	Succeeded by John Peurifoy