Moving Up the American Ladder

...Brown does a good job sorting out the myriad energetic wartime exploits of the OSS...

...Drawing on reams of newly declassified information, plus interviews with surviving Donovan cronies, the General's diaries and those of his wife, Ruth, he has fashioned a portrait almost forbidding in its detail...

...What did he and Maugham have in common...

...Donovan won the Congressional Medal of Honor for leading his battalion in hand-to-hand combat against a well-fortified German division at the Ourcq River...

...This frenetic itinerary gives one a good idea of Donovan's talent for self-promotion, but Brown never bothers to inquire into the import of the relationships he lists...

...He entered public life next, accepting the position of U.S...

...Yet who he was and what motivated him is never really examined...

...Brown, perhaps thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, found fewer obstacles in his path...

...Perhaps, indeed, this book unwittingly represents one of Bill Donovan's greatest triumphs, for what more could a spy ask than to remain basically unrevealed by 891 pages of facts...

...He served in Bangkok for a short time, practiced law again, and died in 1959 before he could see how right his last hunch was...

...Morgan...

...Many of those involved in overt missions, like the playwright Robert Sherwood and the poet Archibald MacLeish, rarely left the country...

...Here his determined prosecution of criminals quickly gained him a nationwide reputation for efficiency and incorruptibility...

...However indirectly, many of our latter-day Cold War successes, disasters, and entrapments can ultimately be traced back to him...

...By 1924 Donovan reached Washington, joining the Coolidge Administration as Assistant Attorney General in charge of antitrust...

...Why did he cultivate so many prominent journalists...

...When professor Conyers Read of Harvard began a similar project in the '50s, Donovan, who was then still alive, asked him to stop for security reasons...

...Angry and humiliated, he spurned the post and returned to New York to set up yet another law practice...

...The problem was that once these means were discovered, they were difficult to put out of mind...

...A year later, the regiment did actually go overseas...

...An Englishman is not likely to be either a Democrat or Republican," he said, revealing an important truth about Donovan...

...And of course there were operations to support the Normandy invasion...

...other agents were sent to Yugoslavia to aid Tito...

...Donovan, in turn, successfully championed these ideas in Washington-thereby making, according to Brown, his greatest contribution to the War effort...

...The tour was cut short by a telegram informing Donovan, who was an officer in the National Guard, that his regiment, affectionately known as the "Silk Stocking Boys," had been mobilized to defend against the raids of Pancho Villa in Texas...

...Casey disagreed...

...On November 13, he dined with W. Somerset Maugham (novelist), Edgar Bergen (ventriloquist) and Nelson Doubleday (book publisher) and went on to see Millicent Hearst (William Randolph's wife), Herbert Bayard Swope (publicist and journalist), Martin Flavin (playwright), and Clark Gable and William Holden (film actors...

...Donovan understood long before most of his contemporaries that if war was the continuation of diplomacy by other means, his "Cloak and Dagger Club," as some referred to it, would be the continuation of war by means not previously known to be available...

...He lost little time in establishing the office of Coordinator of Information (COI), which soon metamorphosed into the OSS...

...Donovan's ascendancy might have been halted at the age of 49, had not World War II intervened...

...His prospects seemed excellent when the Republican Party selected his old friend Hoover as its Presidential nominee...

...Donovan worked as a consultant to his ex-students until 1953, when he accepted the ambassadorship to Thailand on the theory that Southeast Asia would be the next frontline...

...The covert operatives, on the other hand, seemed to be everywhere and doing everything simultaneously, always under Donovan's close supervision...

...Their union was a series of comings and goings, mostly Bill's-the first extended separation taking place in 1916, when the Rockefeller Foundation invited Donovan to tour Europe's Western Front and help with its food relief program...

...foreign policy has continued to be felt even since his death...

...Stephenson, among others, persuaded Donovan that to be adequately prepared for war, the United States needed its own bureau of central intelligence...

...For despite the fact that the General spent key parts of his career in uniform, and sought to hold the agency he formed above partisan squabbles, he is best understood as a wealthy lawyer on the make politically...

...Donovan ultimately remains a stranger to the reader...

...While several of Donovan's maneuvers between 1940-45 were half-cocked or in other ways flawed, the majority, Brown concludes, were "gallant, honourable and valuable"worth the risks in the light of the potential gains...

...was still neutral, and the British would certainly have valued his observations behind German lines...

...He never distinguished himself as a student though, and would have flunked out of law school without the intervention of Dean Harlan Fiske Stone, the first of his many good friends in high places...

...A feud that was alleged to have dated to a World War I artillery incident involving Colonel Donovan and Captain Harry S. Truman kept Wild Bill from becoming the CIA's first director...

...The CIA's unsavory machinations in Guatemala in 1954 were to a great extent the inevitable legacy of the OSS' heroics on the road to Cherbourg a decade earlier...

...Thirty-five years old and friendly with the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, he was in a perfect position to enter the political arena...

...Why was Donovan meeting with both Hearst's wife and mistress...

...Nevertheless, the Agency's tactics have borne his imprimatur, as has its hierarchy: Directors Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, William Colby and William Casey were all Donovan lieutenants at the OSS...

...Once fighting broke out on the Continent, President Roosevelt called on his former classmate to act as his liaison with British intelligence, then in its finest hour under the direction of William Stephenson, "the man called Intrepid...

...Consider this passage describing Wild Bill's life in the mid-'30s: "Donovan seems to havegoneevery-where and known everyone of the period...

...Reviewed by Matthew Stevenson Contributor, "Harper's," the Washington "Post" In completing an authoritative biography of Major General William J. Donovan, founder of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the English journalist Anthony Cave Brown has succeeded where three previous writers had failed...

...entered the European conflict...

...His men took heavy casualties in the engagement, and he himself was severely wounded, yet he carried the advance forward...

...As a history of the OSS, The Last Hero (a phrase coined by Dwight Eisenhower when he heard of Donovan's death) will stand unsurpassed until still more classified information is made public...

...During the Depression Colonel Donovan-as many persisted in calling him-prospered financially but reached a dead end politically...

...There are indications that he made his initial contacts with British intelligence during this journey (the U.S...

...After the victory, however, he was offered not the Justice Department but the governorship of the Philippines...

...At its peak in 1944, the Office had 16,000 agents...

...At the same time, Winston Churchill convinced the American envoy of the efficacy of his southern strategy-attacking the Nazis' "soft underbelly...

...First, though, he practiced law in New York for a short while, then made another voyage to Europe to scout out reconstruction investment opportunities for J.P...

...Wild Bill now had his sights set on becoming Attorney General...

...And the efforts of historian Cornelius Ryan, author of The Longest Day among other books, were foiled by bureaucratic resistance within the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which succeeded the OSS in 1947...

...He simply includes all the information he could lay his hands on, stretching his account to somewhat ponderous length...

...He won a reputation for oratory at nearby Niagara College before transferring at the age of 20 to Columbia University, where he finished his BA and went on to study law (in the same class, luckily enough, as Franklin D. Roosevelt...

...Was Gable a friend or a legal client...

...If the OSS had been a conventional division, its soldiers would have ended the War swathed in campaign ribbons...

...So, perhaps, can dubious latter-day intelligence operations carried out closer to home that produced the mentality which gave us the Watergate burglary...

...Edmund Taylor, an OSS Member, has observed that Donovan established "a precedent or a pattern for United States intervention in the revolutionary struggles of the post-war age...

...In any event, he did have what would prove to be a fortuitous meeting with Herbert Hoover, who was organizing the relief effort in Belgium...

...little use is made of the potentially telling personal information provided in his spouse's diary, and occasionally in his own...

...As a biography, the book has significant short-comings...

...As the Republican candidate for governor of New York in 1932, he gave the race his usual best...

...Born in 1883, the grandson of Irish immigrants, Donovan was raised in Buffalo's First Ward, a melting pot of shanties and ambition...

...The Donovan influence on U.S...

...Interestingly, it was the current CIA director, William J. Casey, who first urged Brown to undertake the task in 1977, after hearing the reporter deliver a lecture deploring the lack of an OSS history...

...This was not fully appreciated by the local political establishment, since he authorized a raid on a speakeasy that was a favorite haunt of the city's leading citizens, including many of his former law partners and his friends...

...And throughout the conflict he never failed to support, in word and deed, Churchill's determination to probe the enemy wherever he was weak-by methods either overt or covert...

...Donovan's influence began to be in some ways pernicious only after V-J Day, when a sort of permanent battle footing became necessary to justify the existence of a sprawling intelligence bureaucracy...

...Essentially, Brown has compiled what could be the world's longest resume...

...We become thoroughly aware of his accomplishments, of the famous and influential people he knew, and of the impact his charismatic leadership had...

...It wasn't much of a year to be on the GOP ticket, though, and he lost to Herbert Lehman...

...Donovan managed Hoover's campaign and wrote his acceptance speech at the convention...

...His diary for November 11 to December 10,1935, for example, in a partial listing shows that he lunched, took tea with, dined with, or otherwise met Marion Davies (William Randolph Hearst's mistress), Jack Wheeler (director and general manager of the North American Newspaper Alliance), John Hay Whitney (newspaper owner, industrialist, arts patron), Professor Lowell Read (mathematician and statistician), and F. Trubee Davison (president of the Museum of Natural History...

...He adjusted easily to the capital milieuhis wife often poured tea at the White House-and continued to distinguish himself by winning six consecutive cases before the Supreme Court, a record that stands to this day...

...Brown's initial response was that an Englishman would be unable to satisfactorily treat a man and organization so quintessentially American...

...The biographer seems unable, moreover, to distinguish the events that were truly important in his subject's life...

...Attorney in Buffalo...

...After the Armistice, he came back to the States as "Wild Bill," one of the nation's best-known war heroes...

...Receiving his JD in 1907, Donovan returned to Buffalo to practice with a respected local firm, and married Ruth Rumsey, the daughter of affluent Protestants...

...The mission also was calculated to give the unit experience under fire in case the U.S...

...Allen Dulles was dispatched to Switzerland to transmit information from behind enemy lines...

...His fee for several weeks of travel was rumored to be $100,000...

...Corey Ford, one of the General's associates during World War II, was the next to try, only to die with his work in progress...

...After war was declared, schemes were quickly hatched to support the Allied invasion of North Africa and to stir revolt against the Nazi puppet governments in Hungary and the Balkans...

...Even before Pearl Harbor, Donovan was planning, by means of a hefty bribe, to induce Hitler's ambassador in Washington to defect...