Donovan

by Richard Dunlop

  In Paris, Donovan attended the peace conference as an observer. The previous year the Treaty of Versailles had been signed with Germany; the Treaty of Saint-Germain had been concluded with Austria. The Treaty of Neuilly had ended the war with Bulgaria, but the victorious Allies were still wrangling about what to do with Hungary and Turkey. Donovan had no actual role to play in the discussions, but he was on intimate terms with the members of the American delegation, and his views were taken into account. As the spring faded into summer, a feeling of boredom and frustration had seized on the conference, and Donovan was far from sanguine about the results. He had already seen firsthand the mood in Germany, in part induced by the Treaty of Versailles, and he already held the view that the peace treaties had laid the foundation for a second world war.

  Journalist Oswald Garrison Villard, who covered the tortuous negotiations, often talked with Donovan. In 1932 Villard wrote in The Nation, “I was so impressed with the man at the Peace Conference in Paris that I ventured to prophesy that he had a considerable career ahead of him.” Many others attending the conference or covering it for the press were impressed with Colonel Donovan, who had come to Paris directly from an extensive tour of both defeated Germany and the victorious Allied nations. Donovan returned to America toward the end of May. He was fascinated by what he was learning in Europe, but he had a commitment at home.

  That spring, before leaving for Europe, Donovan had been chosen as a delegate to the Republican National Convention in Chicago. Back in Buffalo he learned that the entire delegation was pledged to Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University, as a native-son candidate. It was understood that after the first ballot each of the delegates could vote his preference, and Donovan, together with most upstate New Yorkers, favored Leonard Wood. On Saturday, June 5, the New York delegation set out for Chicago on a special New York Central train. Donovan boarded in Buffalo late that evening. As the train rolled along the shores of Lake Erie, the delegates talked excitedly of Republican prospects for victory in the autumn, the qualities of the various candidates, and the platform issues. Chauncey M. Depew, 86 years old and as urbane and witty a politician as there was in America, dominated the talk. He had already attended a dozen GOP conventions. Donovan listened attentively but had little to say. There was a sense of history in the making.

  Early the next afternoon, the train passed through the smoky Indiana suburbs, pulling into Chicago’s LaSalle Street Station at 3:50 P.M. Senator James W. Wadsworth, who had taken an interest in young Donovan, had arrived in Chicago on an earlier train. Two New Yorkers, George Henry Payne and Lafayette R. Gleason, had adventurously driven west in an auto. The early arrivals met the special train, and there was a backslapping reunion on the station platform. Donovan and most of the other New Yorkers stayed at the Congress Hotel on South Michigan Avenue.

  When they arrived at the hotel, they found General Wood standing in the lobby, shaking hands with incoming delegates so that they could get a close-up look at him. Wood proved to be an exemplary handshaker, but he could not compete, at least in volume, with his rival Sen. Hiram Johnson who, according to the Chicago Tribune, that day shook hands at the rate of 65 a minute for eight minutes. The New Yorkers roamed up and down Peacock Alley in the hotel, where Chicagoans traditionally went to see and be seen, and they talked late in their rooms. They read the New York newspapers, specially flown out to them.

  Monday morning at 11:00 A.M. the delegation caucused in the hotel’s Gold Room. Then they tramped up and down Michigan Avenue, where, from the University Club at Monroe to the Auditorium, each hotel had its own presidential candidate waiting in his suite to shake hands and explain in a few well-chosen words why the delegates should support him. Donovan ended the day still impressed with Wood, whom he believed to be the most impressive of America’s soldiers-turned-politicians, with the exception of George Washington.

  Donovan was up early on Tuesday morning and rambled off to walk through Grant Park. Then he fell in with the other 1,600 delegates and 13,000 guests who converged upon the Chicago Coliseum at 15th and Wabash, where the doors opened at 9:00 A.M. Young Ben Hecht, writing for the Chicago Daily News, reported: “Republicans marched upon the Coliseum today with pink feathers tucked behind their ears, lapels alive with badges, medals and streamers, hands swarming with banners and slogans.

  “Michigan Avenue filled up. Wabash Avenue filled up. The side streets looked like little carnivals. The coppers at the door of the Coliseum began to perspire. The elegantly mannered colored gentleman assisting visitors to alight in front of the main entrance lost his gold-braided hat.”

  By 10:30 A.M. Donovan sat with the New York delegation on hard wooden kitchen chairs and listened as William Weil’s Chicago Band played patriotic music. Henry L. Stimson joined the 88-man New York delegation. In years to come, when Donovan was to guide America’s intelligence organization, Stimson, as Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of war, would be a close associate. Will H. Hays of Indiana, chairman of the Republican National Committee, called the convention to order. Donovan concentrated on the ringing speeches and on the wrangling and political infighting that were to be so much a part of his future life.

  His first national convention was one of the hardest fought and hottest in American history. Chicago’s weather turned out to be stifling. A late spring heat wave sent the thermometer into the middle 90s, and the delegates sweltered in the Coliseum. Events dragged on until, on Friday, the nominations were made. Leonard Wood led in all the early balloting, but he could not draw enough support from Governor Lowden to insure his nomination. Even on the first ballot, the New York delegation broke and gave 18.5 of its 88 votes to candidates other than Nicholas Murray Butler. To Donovan’s regret, strong sentiment arose among the New Yorkers for Governor Lowden, whose reorganization of the state administration and businesslike performance in office had made him the darling of the conservatives. Each defection from the New York delegation, supposedly pledged to Butler, seemed to help Lowden.

  With the Wood and Lowden supporters neck-and-neck in the voting, roll call after roll call droned on in the heat. At the end of the fourth ballot, Wood had 314.5 votes and Lowden had 289; Sen. Hiram Johnson had 140 votes, Pennsylvania Gov. W. E. Sproul had 79.5, and Sen. Warren G. Harding of Ohio had 61.5. Harding was far behind, but he had the advantage of a campaign manager, Harry M. Daugherty, who was a political infighter without peer at the convention. He also had the support of a coterie of U.S. senators, among which New York’s Wadsworth was prominent, who wanted a nominee who would be “of the U.S. Senate, by the U.S. Senate, and for the U.S. Senate.” They preferred a candidate who would be easy to dominate once he was in the White House, and handsome Warren Harding, who had never caused so much as a ripple in Congress, seemed ideal. Certainly both Wood and Lowden, and probably Johnson too, were far too able and headstrong.

  On Saturday morning Lowden and Wood were still locked in combat, and the perspiring delegates could well imagine that they might be in Chicago all summer. What most delegates didn’t know was that on Friday evening George Harvey, publisher of the North American Review and Harvey’s Weekly, a member of the New York delegation, and a close friend of Senator Wadsworth, had invited a number of key delegates to a meeting in his suite 408–410 at the Blackstone Hotel. The delegates arrived at 10:00 P.M. and were met by Harry Daugherty, who proposed that Harding be the “dark horse” to break the deadlock between Wood and Lowden.

  Key delegates were routed out of bed by phone calls and loud pounding on their doors and brought to the room to get their instructions for the next day’s balloting. At four o’clock in the morning the coterie of senators in the suite sent for Warren Gamaliel Harding, who was soundly sleeping at the Auditorium Hotel. When he walked into the room, he was asked if there was anything in his background that would embarrass the Republican Party if he were nominated for the presidency. Harding went into the adjoining bedroom and thought for ten minutes. He came out and said, “No.” (“Nobody thought to
ask Harry Daugherty to search his own conscience,” remarked Bill Donovan in 1952.)

  After the eighth ballot on Saturday morning, it became obvious that political lightning had struck the convention. Delegations began to defect from the leading candidates to favor Warren G. Harding. On the tenth ballot, New York and Pennsylvania, both large contingents, declared for Harding, and he won with 674.7 votes. The convention exploded into wild celebration. Donovan watched his fellow delegates with disgust at the surrender that even he in the last ballot had been forced to join.

  When the final vote was tallied, reporters asked Harding how the “deal” had been made. He grinned through his fatigue. “We were forced to stay with a pair of deuces and drew to a full house,” he honestly replied.

  Donovan rode the train back to Buffalo, where he angrily told Ruth about his first venture into Republican national politics.

  Bill Donovan stayed at home for only a few weeks. On Friday, July 9, he sailed from New York aboard the SS Olympic in the company of Grayson M. P. Murphy. He had gotten to know Murphy in the Rainbow Division when Murphy had been a lieutenant colonel in charge of Operations. Prior to his military service Murphy, a New York banker, had been the first European commissioner of the American Red Cross. Now he was one of Donovan’s intelligence friends. The two men represented a consortium in investments abroad. At the same time, they intended to learn what they could about political and economic developments in Europe.

  In the days before air transport lent a casual quality to travel, ship passengers, particularly in first class, accepted one another socially and carried on extended conversations as they lounged in deck chairs, sipped a drink at the bar, or dined in full dress in the dining salon. The shipboard situation was made to order for Donovan, who was well versed in conversational chess.

  Every day Donovan searched his fellow passengers for new insights, new viewpoints, new information. He and Murphy fell into conversation with Thomas Fortune Ryan, a New York financier, who was involved in everything from his city’s street railways to mining diamonds in the Congo and Angola. Having spent the morning chatting about international finance with Ryan, Donovan turned to Foster Kennedy, a leading New York City neurologist. Kennedy had served in the British Army in the war, and the two men spoke of the psychological factors that affect men as they go into battle.

  Some of Donovan’s time was spent preparing a memorandum of corporation laws in Holland for Murphy, who was interested in Netherlands trade with China. A group of Murphy’s associates were so impressed with Donovan during a shipboard conference that they suggested he be sent to China for two years to represent an international banking group.

  The SS Olympic was now powered by oil rather than coal. Donovan investigated the advantages of the changeover. He talked with an Antwerp ivory merchant. He explored the cotton business. He delved into the virtues of the consortium’s establishing a European headquarters. He discussed. He questioned. He listened. He watched. And he recorded conversations and observations in his diary.

  Donovan’s diaries and journals, kept on and off throughout his life, show much the same kaleidoscope of ideas and activities, the constantly searching mind, the rare combination of thinker and doer, the unusual blend of pragmatic idealism, gregarious friendship, and enlightened self-interest. Even in what was apparently casual conversation, his mind probed and dug, and he tucked ideas and facts away for future consideration.

  The man with the easygoing charm was prized by all who came to know him on the ship for the incisive qualities of his mind, but he puzzled them. Why didn’t he accept the opportunities that were offered to him to take his place among the top financiers and legal minds of the postwar period? They had not seen him on his previous trip in the spring, walking the streets of Warsaw, gazing at the pinched faces of cold and hungry children. They had not listened with him to embittered German aristocrats who refused to admit that their nation had lost the war. Nor had they watched the delegates at the Paris peace conference endlessly chattering and not understanding what dragon’s teeth they were sowing. Aboard the Olympic, Donovan talked; but he listened more than he talked, and in so doing prepared himself still further for what was to be an enigmatic role in the future events, a role that in 1920 he already anticipated. Donovan arrived in London on the evening of Thursday, July 15.

  Arthur Hamilton Lee, Lord Lee of Fareham, minister of agriculture, was married to an American woman, Ruth Moore, daughter of New York banker J. G. Moore. He had lived an adventurous life as a special correspondent for the Daily Chronicle of London during the Klondike gold rush in the Yukon, had made a military survey of the Canadian frontier, and had served as a military attaché with the U.S. Army during the Spanish-American War. Theodore Roosevelt had made him an honorary member of his Rough Riders. When Lord Lee heard that Colonel Donovan was in London, he invited him and Murphy to Chequers Court, his country estate.

  On Sunday the two Americans drove 40 miles northwest of London into the Chiltern Hills of Buckinghamshire to one of England’s most historic great houses. Donovan, with his fascination for ancient things, was intrigued to learn that the estate adjoined the Icknield Way, a road that had been constructed even before the arrival of the Romans and was most likely the oldest road in England. As Donovan was ushered into the Stone Hall, with its self-portrait of Sir Joshua Reynolds, he stepped for the first time into a great house that he was to visit often two decades later, when it was the official country residence of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Lord Lee had presented Chequers to the British nation in 1917, together with an endowment for maintenance, but he was still in residence.

  “This house, which is Tudor in style, had on its site a home as far back as 1100,” Donovan wrote in his journal. “It is most tastefully arranged. It is low, built of old red brick, and has the old English leaded windows. It is rich in its collection of paintings, there being Rubens, Reynolds, Rembrandt, among the others. They also have some very rare mementoes, including the key of the room in which Napoleon was born, a lock of his hair, and a lock of the hair of his young son, also a locket of Queen Elizabeth, the top of which raised on a small hinge, inside being a very small worked likeness of Elizabeth and her mother. There was also a watch of Lord Nelson.” Donovan, who always responded romantically to his brushes with history, also noted, “The most interesting thing was the life mask of Oliver Cromwell. Only one copy of this had been made, and that was given by Lord Lee to Roosevelt. This life mask showed Cromwell to be much fuller faced than I ever thought. He had a large nose and a wart on his right eyebrow.”

  Donovan was not impressed with Lord Lee. “He is a man of medium height, dark, rather bright looking,” he observed, “but gives the impression of narrowness and selfishness.”

  In less than a year Lord Lee was to become first lord of the Admiralty, and until his death in 1947 was to play an important role in his nation’s affairs. He was to become for Donovan a valued acquaintance during the years of World War II.

  “I talked with Lee about the League of Nations,” wrote Donovan. “He does not believe in it. I asked him if Lloyd George believes in it. This proved an embarrassing question, but I judged from the evasiveness of the answer that Lloyd George does not believe in it.” During World War I, Lord Lee had been personal military secretary to David Lloyd George, and Donovan had reason to think that Lee had discovered the British prime minister’s true feelings.

  “I suppose that England and Germany will now play ball together,” Donovan said to his host.

  “Certainly, why not?” replied Lord Lee.

  “I suppose that both of you will exploit Russia,” remarked Donovan.

  “I certainly hope so,” said Lord Lee.

  The subject changed to France. “I asked him what was the feeling towards France,” Donovan wrote in his journal, “and he allowed that any feeling that had been whipped up in England during the war had since been lost; that one could not expect the Englishmen to think anything of the French.”

  Out
of countless such conversations with political leaders, in and out of office, in every nation he visited over the next two decades, Donovan was to shape his shrewd insights into important individual and national attitudes.

  Donovan and Murphy drove back to London that evening, since they had important appointments in the morning. “As we came home the whole countryside was flooded with people who had been on their day’s outing. Every available field was crowded with those engaged in sports,” wrote Donovan. The healthy interest the British showed in recreation and sports was clearly a source of their continued national vigor. Donovan observed the well-organized, well-uniformed Salvation Army holding meetings, and in Hyde Park he paused to listen to the orators who ranged throughout the political spectrum, each haranguing his own little knot of listeners. This too was a source of continued national vigor.

  The next week was crammed with business discussions concerning potash and phosphate markets in Europe and the Far East, the Chinese market for power plants and textile machinery, and plans for the development of the Australian woolen industry. Donovan also found time to lunch on Tuesday with Lincoln Eyre, a foreign correspondent for the New York World, who had just arrived in London from a conference charting Europe’s coal and steel future. Eyre also had with him motion-picture footage showing the tragic conditions in Bolshevik Russia. That afternoon Donovan attended the British Institute of Industrial Art Exhibition to study the latest in British technology, as well as the progress the British were making in putting their disabled ex-servicemen to productive work. There was still an hour of the afternoon left when he walked out of the exhibition, so he went immediately to the National Gallery to study a current exhibition of fine art.