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William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan

1883–1959 · 76 years Specialist

An Irish altar boy who considered the priesthood, then chose war

Portrait of William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan — Office for Emergency Management — 1945-05-31 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Donovan grew up in Buffalo's Irish First Ward, the son of a railroad-yard superintendent who never gained the political traction he wanted and a mother from a more comfortable family; the mismatch between the two households stayed with him. He considered the priesthood before choosing football and law instead, starring at Columbia, where he studied under future Supreme Court Justice Harlan Fiske Stone alongside a classmate named Franklin Roosevelt. He built a Buffalo law practice and married Ruth Rumsey, a local heiress, in 1914, and by every visible measure was headed toward a comfortable, unremarkable career — until the war in Europe handed him a much larger one.

Donovan earned his nickname in France, outlasting soldiers half his age, and came home from the October 1918 fighting at Landres-et-Saint-Georges with the Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross and two wounds he refused to be evacuated for. He prosecuted Prohibition cases as a US Attorney, ran the Justice Department's antitrust division, and lost a 1932 run for New York governor before Roosevelt — a Democrat with no particular use for Republicans except this one — made him Coordinator of Information in 1941. That office became the Office of Strategic Services in 1942, an agency Donovan built from nothing into some 13,000 agents running sabotage, propaganda and spies from North Africa to Burma, staffed with talents as different as filmmaker John Ford and future chef Julia Child. Truman shut it down within weeks of the war's end.

The organization he built earned a second nickname, 'Oh So Social,' for how many of its recruits came from the same clubs and law firms Donovan belonged to, and its freewheeling style made a lasting enemy of J. Edgar Hoover, who spent the war blocking OSS operations in Latin America out of pure turf jealousy. At Nuremberg, where Robert Jackson brought him in to help build the case against the Nazi leadership, Donovan pushed to indict the entire German general staff as a criminal organization; Jackson disagreed hard enough to remove him from the prosecution team. Congress created the CIA in 1947 largely on arguments Donovan had spent two years making, then declined to name him its director. His last years were the cruelest turn of all: hospitalized with vascular dementia in 1957, he once fled Walter Reed in his pajamas, convinced the Red Army was crossing the 59th Street Bridge.

Donovan died at Walter Reed on February 8, 1959, and is buried at Arlington. The CIA, the agency he lobbied for but never ran, keeps a statue of him in its Langley lobby and calls him, in its own official history, more responsible than any other person for its existence. His law firm outlasted him by decades, but the OSS itself existed barely three years before Truman dissolved it. What survived was the model: a wartime intelligence service built fast, staffed eclectically and answerable directly to the president, which the CIA copied down to Donovan's own instinct for improvisation over bureaucracy.

Lifespan

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William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Action at Landres-et-Saint-Georges other
October 14-15, 1918 — earned the Medal of Honor 1918
Office of Strategic Services company
Grew to roughly 13,000 personnel by 1945 1942
Nuremberg prosecution preparation case
Brought 172 OSS officers to help build the case against Nazi leadership 1945
National Security Act advocacy law
Lobbying that helped push Congress toward creating the CIA 1947