Still, he knew that Roosevelt was the kind of man who knew he should hear bad news when that’s what it was. He demanded to hear it—undiluted and never, ever withheld.
Donovan put out his right hand to meet Roosevelt’s.
“Mr. President,” he said, “you’re looking especially well.”
“I’m feeling especially well,” Roosevelt replied, shaking Donovan’s hand while warmly gripping his forearm with his left hand. “I wish I could tell you what it is—because I’d damn well bottle it for use on my darker days—but, with the exception of the glorious weather on this spring day, I don’t have an inkling…”
His voice trailed off.
Roosevelt sensed in Donovan’s eyes that, despite the smile, there was something troubling his old friend terribly. And FDR knew that that took something very serious indeed.
It was a matter of official record that “Wild Bill” Donovan had been one hell of a soldier in his day. In World War One, on the battlefields of France, he had earned his silver eagle and the Medal of Honor—his country’s highest honor for valor—while with the “Fighting 69th,” the National Guard regiment from New York City.
Roosevelt remembered the wording of the MOH citation being along the lines of: After then Lieutenant Colonel Donovan personally led an assault against a strongly organized enemy position, and his troops suffered heavy casualties, he moved among his men in exposed positions, reorganized the decimated platoons, then accompanied them forward in attacks. When badly wounded in the leg by machine-gun fire, he refused to be evacuated and instead continued fighting the enemy until his unit withdrew to a less-exposed position.
A determined man of great integrity—who inspired loyalty, led by example, didn’t back down—Franklin Roosevelt had known Bill Donovan since their days as classmates at Columbia Law School more than thirty years earlier.
Roosevelt recognized that Donovan shared more than a few of his own qualities. Topping the list: being one tough and shrewd sonofabitch. And an extremely smart one, of course.
An ambitious Irishman, Donovan was self-made. Between wars he had become a very successful—and very wealthy—attorney in New York City, and, with that, a power behind the political scenes, not only in New York but in Washington.
Roosevelt was neither professionally nor personally bothered by the fact that Donovan was a solid Republican who had opposed FDR’s New Deal, which conservatives termed “socialist” when they were being nice, something far less polite when they weren’t.
What mattered
to FDR was the man’s character, not his politics, and he was glad that they were pals.
He was even more grateful that whatever Donovan told FDR as being factual, FDR could take it as that.
Roosevelt, ever the savvy politician, long had used his friends with great wealth or high connections—and especially those with both, because he knew that heads of state never put themselves far from deep pockets—to serve as his eyes and ears around the world.
Donovan was no exception.
When FDR had served as assistant secretary of the Navy, he’d attached Donovan to the Office of Naval Intelligence, and, in 1920, secretly sent him to Siberia to collect intelligence. When, in 1935, the belligerent dictator of Italy, Benito Mussolini, invaded Ethiopia—dirt poor and essentially unarmed—Roosevelt, in his first term as President, had dispatched Donovan to supply him trusted information on that one-sided “war.” And, in 1940, as another Fascist—the charismatic German chancellor, Adolf Hitler—waged an unchecked war of evil across Europe, FDR twice sent Donovan across the pond.
Donovan’s first trip that year, in July, was a relatively quick one to England.
“Find out if our cousins can beat back that bastard Hitler,” Roosevelt had told Donovan.
Donovan had done so, and, in August, reported back that the Brits were not likely to be pushing the German forces anywhere anytime soon but, at least for the time being, they could protect their country—especially with the help of neutral America.
The second 1940 trip began in the middle of December and lasted for nearly three months, covering the Baltics and the Mediterranean.
Donovan reported his newest findings to the President in March 1941. Roosevelt’s fears of the spreading of Fascism and Communism—and the free world’s ability to contain them—grew faster than ever before. These threats were real, and he felt that they could not be underestimated—abroad, clearly, but also in the United States.
Thus FDR, being a shrewd, smart sonofabitch now in his third term as President, knew that despite the cries of the isolationists who wanted America to have nothing to do with another world war it was only a matter of time before the country would be forced to shed its neutral status.
And the best way to be prepared for that moment was to have the finest intelligence he could.
And the best way to get that information, to get the facts that he trusted because he trusted the messenger, was to put another shrewd, smart sonofabitch in charge—his pal Wild Bill Donovan.
The problem was not that intelligence wasn’t being collected. The United States of America had vast organizations actively engaged in it—the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Military Intelligence Division chief among them.
The problem was that the intelligence these organizations collected was, in the word of the old-school British spymasters, “coloured.” That was to say, the intel tended first to serve to promote the respective branches.
If, for example, ONI overstated the number of, say, German submarines, then the Navy brass could use that intelligence to justify its demands for more funds for sailors and ships to hunt down those U-boats. (Which, of course, played to everyone’s natural fears as the U-boats were damn effective killing machines.)
Likewise, if MID stated that it had found significantly more Axis troops amassing toward an Allied border than was previously thought, Army brass could argue that ground and/or air forces needed the money more than did the swabbies.