James Clarence Mangan wrote scores of poems fervent with his love for Ireland. His patriotic poems were the sort that a man could recite in a saloon on the Buffalo waterfront, and by the time the last stirring phrase had been uttered there would not be a dry eye in the place. Will had often heard Mangan’s ballads in the saloons of the ward and, when he competed in Nardin Academy’s annual declamation contest at age 12, he chose one of Mangan’s most stirring poems.
“‘Twas there I first beheld, drawn up in file and line, / The brilliant Irish hosts; they came, the bravest of the brave!” began the boy before the large audience of parents and friends of the schoolchildren. His blue eyes flashed with the meaning of the words; his shoulders were straight and proud. When he was finished there was silence and then tumultuous applause. Will inclined his head slightly as if he were a handsome young prince acknowledging the acclaim of his people instead of a poor boy on the waterfront. There was no question that he had won the contest, and when the last child had recited, Will stood before the crowd again as the public-speaking teacher awarded him a shiny medal in a box. The teacher held up her hand to silence the cheering crowd, and everybody waited for Will to say something. For a moment he stared dismayed at all the waiting adults, his father and mother among them, their faces flushed with pride and concern for what he might now say.
“Medals don’t mean anything,” Will at last said, his voice strong and confident for a 12-year-old, “and things don’t mean anything after they’ve passed; it’s doing the thing that matters.”
When Will was 14, with the financial aid of Bishop Quigley he entered St. Joseph’s Collegiate Institute, which had been founded by the Christian Brothers. He was by then a handsome boy of about average height who always seemed taller because of his confident manner. He appears in a picture of the St. Joseph’s junior football team, taken in 1897, as a solemn boy with a shock of unruly hair staring somewhat wistfully at the camera. He was the quarterback and the first football captain of the St. Joe Juniors, and when the team won the 115-pound championship of Buffalo, he felt a happy glow of pride. At the same time, when other boys or adults complimented him on his leadership, he would invariably smile and say something like, “Anyone could do it with the other fellows playing such fine football.” Later in life he said similar things when anybody complimented him on his extraordinary leadership of either the Fighting 69th in World War I or the OSS in World War II.
Will had always taken his studies seriously, but at St. Joseph’s he concentrated with new determination. When he was reading a Shakespeare play or a Dickens novel from his father’s library, even his mother could not get his attention. He was restless and moody now, and he would sometimes walk to the cathedral and kneel before a side altar and pray. People who came upon him took one look at his almost haunted face and went away in silence. Clearly, Tim Donovan’s oldest son was not an ordinary boy. To the devout Irish this could mean only one thing—he would be a priest and a great credit to the ward.
By now Tim was writing plays, and Will and Tim would act them out for friends and family. Everybody agreed that though Tim could write the plays, it was Will who had a flair for acting. There were also family musical evenings. Tim played the violin, Will the piano, and all the Donovans had good voices.
As teenagers, Will and Tim became good friends, but even so, Will was partial to his youngest brother, Vincent, and he was to remain so all his life. He called him the Rock because Vincent was always a dependable listener, even as a small child. When he was discouraged, Will would sit at his sleepy brother’s bed at night and pour out his heart. Vincent listened patiently and sympathized with his oldest brother, whom he idolized. Vincent, now a pupil at Nardin Academy, was thought to be the brightest of all the Donovan children. He was also judged to have the kindest and most affectionate heart, and it was believed throughout the ward that he too would be a priest. Aunt Mary Duggan remembered that he would often put on a makeshift priest’s attire and parade around the house. One day Tim went his younger brother one better and announced that he would not be just a priest; he’d be a bishop. Will informed his brothers that he would reserve judgment, but whatever the other two wound up as, he’d be the head boss.
At the age of 16 Will, tired of wearing a boy’s knickers, bought his first pair of long pants from money he had earned at odd jobs. Anna took one look at her oldest son’s purchase and laughingly threatened to cut them off at the knees. Will was growing tall. Soon he would be wanting to leave home. She looked at her son with a mixture of love and regret. That night he carefully placed the pants beneath his mattress and slept on them so that she could not slip into his room and cut off the legs. His new pants were a claim on a man’s estate.
The 20th century arrived, and Will Donovan turned 17. His father had given up his work in the railroad yards and was now the secretary of the Holy Cross Cemetery Corporation, his office in a room at the cathedral. The Donovan family moved to 74 Prospect Avenue, which was nearer to the cathedral. They still lived in the Irish First Ward, but they no longer need look down Michigan Avenue from their front window at the great grain elevators that blocked a view of the lake, nor listen at night to the switching locomotives or the Albany Express roaring by. Will Donovan gave the family even more cause for a happy beginning to the new century: He had been accepted as a student by Niagara University at Niagara Falls.
2
Donovan the Young Lawyer
ON WILLIAM J. DONOVAN’S registration form, preserved in the archives of Niagara University, the address 74 Michigan Avenue, Buffalo, New York, has been crossed out and 74 Prospect Avenue written in. The student’s bills, a note penned on the form says, were to be sent to 50 Franklin Street, which was the address of St. Joseph’s Cathedral. There they were paid in part by Will’s father and in part by Bishop Quigley, who remained interested in the schooling of his young protégé.
Will Donovan’s academic records are also preserved in the archives. They show that he was at first a mediocre student. Slow to make friends, he took long, solitary walks along the Niagara Gorge, through which the Niagara River boiled on its headlong descent from the Falls to Lake Ontario. When he had done poorly on a test or feared that he had, he stood on the brink looking down on the whirling waters of the rapids and threw stone after stone off into the void, almost as he had once thrown a football to his brother on the Lake Erie beach.
Will at least made a friend in Father Egan, a Vincentian who was the prefect of discipline at Niagara University from 1896 to 1905. Egan, an earnest man, was ten years older than Will, had been born and raised in New York City, and was popular with the students. He taught Latin, English, and Greek, as well as elocution. On March 6, 1900, his loyal students presented a program in honor of the Irish patriot Robert Emmet and “complimentary to Father Egan.” To the surprise of the other students and the delight of Father Egan, Donovan won third prize in rhetoric.
As Will became popular at school, he began to invite friends home to spend the weekend with him. Anna Donovan now would find herself preparing meals for an additional four or five college boys who were hungry for home cooking after their dormitory fare. Sometimes Will and his friends would act out parts of Shakespeare plays for the family, or guests and family would sing the popular songs of the turn of the century, as well as the old Irish and English ballads.
One of the songs bound to bring out the best in these mainly Irish youths was “My Wild Irish Rose,” written by Chauncey Olcott, a Buffalo Irish-American who had gone to New York City to make a reputation as an Irish tenor. All Buffalo loved Olcott. When he returned to his hometown and sang “My Wild Irish Rose” at the Star Theater, with his mother sitting in a front box, the Irish audience cheered and wept. Whenever they had the price of admission, Will and his friends walked over to the Star, only a few blocks away from the Donovan home, and sometimes Will thought seriously of a career in the theater. His fine tenor voice would then stand him in good stead.
That first summer of his three yea
rs at Niagara University, Will Donovan worked on a road crew. His hard muscles were put to good use, but he used his head too, and before the end of the summer he was the project surveyor. During his years at Niagara, Will Donovan made striking gains in scholarship. In subjects as diverse as algebra, music, Greek, Spanish, Latin, rhetoric, history, and elocution he won medals as either the leading student of his class or a close runner-up. At the same time he had become socially confident; there were fewer long agonized walks beside the river and more good times with other students.
When the young man who seemed destined to begin his studies in the seminary at Niagara University decided to enroll in the school of law at Columbia University, friends and family in Buffalo’s First Ward were surprised. Father Egan, however, was not, for he had come to believe that his most promising student was better suited for the law than for the priesthood. In the autumn of 1902 Will set out on the train for New York City, where he would have to complete his undergraduate degree at Columbia College before entering the law school. The train rolled through the Buffalo yards, where his father had once been the yardmaster, and out past the cottages of the Irish First Ward and the old brick house standing among them. The Donovan house, which only a few years before had sheltered Irish refugees; St. Bridget’s Parish Church, where Will and Tim had served Father Quigley as altar boys; Nardin Academy, where Will had won his first medal and been acclaimed in public; the beach with its lapping waves; the shunting trains; and the great elevators filled with grain all faded away behind the train. Will Donovan, not yet 20, was on his way to his first encounter with a city in which he was one day to be famous.
From the start, Donovan was known at Columbia as Bill, not Will. He brushed his brown hair back straight, dressed neatly, and had a ready smile and a cheerful greeting for the students and faculty members he encountered as he strode across South Field on his way to class. He pledged Phi Kappa Psi fraternity and became the house manager, for which he received his room and board. He had saved enough money from his summer employment to get by financially. Later at Columbia he worked in a baking-powder factory and tutored children to augment his funds.
John Giraud Agar, a prominent New York City attorney at the time, took a fatherly interest in young Bill Donovan, who had come to the Agar house to tutor the three oldest sons. Once Agar had taken the measure of the threadbare student, he overpaid him so that Bill would not have to go on doing the factory and road-gang work that had so far made his college career possible. John Agar’s friendship came at the right time in the life of Bill Donovan.
At the same time, Bill more than earned his pay as a tutor. The three boys, bright and personable, won his affection. He not only tutored them in the subjects at hand but shared his experiences at Columbia with them, much as he had once shared his thoughts and activities with his younger brother Vincent.
John Giraud Agar, Jr., the oldest of the Agar children, was killed in France during World War I, and Donovan always felt that with his death America lost a future leader of stature. The second son was William Macdonough Agar, who became an outstanding geologist and shared enough of his mentor Bill Donovan’s concern with the Catholic church and its place in 20th-century life to write the book Catholicism and the Progress of Science. The third son, then 9 years old, was Herbert Sebastian Agar, later a diplomat, poet, author, editor, and Pulitzer Prize winner for his history The People’s Choice.
Bill Donovan’s friendship with the Agar family and John Agar’s generosity made it possible for him to drop all his other jobs and to concentrate on his studies. Even so, he never neglected his family. He wrote long letters to his mother, whose cooking he sadly missed. For his little sister Loretta he bought what to a poor student was an expensive Christmas present—a teddy bear. Theodore Roosevelt, Donovan’s boyhood hero, had been sworn in as President of the United States on September 14, 1901, after William McKinley was assassinated in Buffalo. The new President’s vigorous good health, high idealism, and zest for living had captured the national imagination. His determined fight to create a national park system so that future generations of Americans would be able to enjoy wilderness and wildlife had struck an answering chord on college campuses. A toy bear cub, which came to be called the teddy bear after Teddy Roosevelt, symbolized the President’s dedication to the wilderness.
Tim Donovan was now studying at medical school in Buffalo. Vincent was growing up. One day Bill took the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad ferry across the Hudson River to Hoboken, New Jersey, where at the Lackawanna Station he met 14-year-old Vincent, still in a small boy’s knickers, who had come to visit his big brother in the fascinating but undoubtedly wicked city. Bill took the boy to the LaSalle Academy on 59th Street. There he spent the night, while Bill returned to Columbia. In the morning the two brothers rode the subway to Herald Square, where at the Rogers Peet store Bill bought Vincent his first pair of long pants.
The brothers went on to Coney Island, where among the rides and arcades they found a photographic concession. Bill paid the photographer to take a picture of Vincent, proudly wearing his new pants. Once he was back in his room at the Phi Kappa Psi house, Bill wrote a letter home, enclosing Vince’s picture. He remembered his own boyhood fear that his mother might shorten his long pants while he slept, and he wanted her to know in advance that her youngest son was growing up and that she might as well get accustomed to it.
Now that Bill did not have to work every spare moment, he took to running around the reservoir in Central Park each day to get into shape. He went out for the cross-country track team, he boxed and wrestled, and he joined the rowing team. Ed Hanlon, who had been the Australian sculling champion, was then coaching the crew. Donovan and the other seven men of his crew sometimes took the train up to Poughkeepsie, where they rowed on the Hudson.
In his last year at Columbia College, Bill Donovan went out for football. He became the second string quarterback and a tackle, soon known throughout the Ivy League for the power with which he hit an opposing player. Bill won his letter, but he was never able to replace another Irish-American youth as quarterback. His rival and friend was Edward Trowbridge Collins, who had enrolled at Columbia College in 1903 at the age of 16 and, although he weighed only 140 pounds, was an incomparable player.
Bill Donovan received his bachelor of arts degree in 1905. The Columbia College yearbook printed a picture of an intense young Donovan and asked, enigmatically enough, “Is he quiet or always making a fuss?” His fellow classmates voted Donovan both the “most modest” and “the second handsomest” man. Donovan also served on the debating team, and he won the George Curtis Medal for Public Speaking with the oration “The Awakening of Japan.”
In the fall of 1906 Donovan began his studies in the law school. The school might have been small enough to share a building with the department of political science, but the faculty was extraordinary, and each member helped to shape Donovan’s mind. There was Professor Harlan F. Stone, who had obtained his own Columbia Law School degree in 1898 and who later was to be dean of the law school, U.S. attorney general under President Coolidge, and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He spoke before his students entirely without notes. Stone never raised his voice and, as Donovan was quick to learn, disapproved of lawyers who did. He evidenced kindly good humor, and his personal integrity was obvious in every well-considered statement. Harlan Stone was the first of the 20th century’s major figures whom Donovan was to know, and this New England crab apple of a man whose motto was “Eat it up; wear it out; make it do; do without” impressed the young man from the Buffalo waterfront.
William O. Douglas, who studied under Stone at Columbia in the early 1920s, described the professor as standing “behind the desk and against the blackboard, twirling his tortoiseshell glasses in his hand, his casebook usually closed on the desk before him. He did not often lecture but used the Socratic method, which he had developed to a high degree of perfection. His questions seldom referred to cases, but to problems raised or suggest
ed by them.” Above all, according to Douglas, Stone believed that “there is no possible teaching without blessed friendship, which is the best conductor of ideas between man and man.” Bill Donovan basked in the warmth of his favorite professor’s friendship. At the time he had no idea how important that friendship was to prove to be in Washington, D.C., almost 20 years later.
Immensely impressive as he was, Harlan Stone was not the only great law professor at Columbia. Another was Jackson E. Reynolds. “I had some rather famous students among my classes,” he said. “General ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan was a student of mine, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The last-named was not much of a student and nothing of a lawyer afterward. He did later exert a tremendous influence on the law of the country by the hundreds of appointments he made to the federal bench, good, bad, and indifferent. General Donovan was a good student, industrious, quick and alert, his work—practical, adaptable to any problem.”
Franklin Roosevelt had entered Columbia in 1904. From the start Roosevelt, as handsome and rich a young man as there was in the school, showed little serious interest in the study of law. By the end of his first year he had failed two courses and passed others with B minuses. Nor was he friendly toward the other students on the campus. Later he maintained that he had known Bill Donovan at Columbia, but Donovan only laughed at this. “I would meet Franklin Roosevelt walking across the campus almost every day, but he never once even noticed. His eyes were always fixed on some other object.”
Donovan, who saw in a Columbia law degree freedom from the life he had known in the Buffalo First Ward, had time only for his studies, while Roosevelt was in the middle of his campaign to win the hand of his cousin Eleanor in marriage. He was far more interested in the balls and parties of upper-crust New York than he was in the dull classrooms of Columbia.
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